The Crush (47 page)

He touched her nipple with his lips, sipped at it tenderly, then tugged it into his mouth. The other was reshaped by his hand, the nipple fanned with feather-light strokes until it was stiff and flushed and even then he continued to fondle her.

She moved restlessly beneath him, but when she reached for him, he stretched her arms high above her head and traced kisses on the underside of her arm from her wrist to her armpit. By the time he returned to kissing her breasts, she was aching to have him inside her again.

But he withheld. Sliding his hand between her thighs, he found her center. He drew small circles on it with his fingertip. The lightest of touches, yet it created an exquisite pressure inside her.

Darkness closed in around her. Her limbs began to tingle. There was a quickening in her middle.

"Wick ..."

He timed it perfectly and was nestled deep inside her when she climaxed. Wave after wave of sensation pulsed through her, each more pleasurable than the one before it, until she heard, as from a great distance, her own choppy cries of ultimate release.

Eventually, when she opened her eyes, Wick was smiling down at her. He kissed her softly on the lips, whispering, "Welcome back."

Feeling him still full and firm inside her, she squeezed him from within. He winced with pleasure. "Again." And then, almost inaudibly,

"Jesus. Again."

He bridged her head with his arms. His deep blue eyes held hers as he began thrusting into her smoothly and powerfully. She ran her hands over his back, loving the feel of his skin. It emanated vitality. Her fingertips felt the currents of energy that made him unable to remain still, that made him Wick.

She was careful not to caress his incision because she didn't want to detract from his pleasure, even with an unpleasant reminder. Her hands skimmed over it to the small of his back, which dipped gracefully before swelling into his hips. She pressed his buttocks with her palms, and when he came, she held him tightly within the cradle of her thighs. Drawing his head down beside hers, she held it fast until his body relaxed.

THE RAIN HAD DECREASED TO A SPRINKLE
. They dodged puddles on their way back to the house.

"The sheriff's car is no longer there," she observed.

"When I saw you in the barn, you were crying but you were all right. I sent him away."

"Why?"

"I wanted to be alone with you."

"So you thought it might happen?"

He placed his arm across her shoulders and hugged her close. "A guy can hope."

The phone was ringing when they entered the house. It was Toby Robbins asking after Rennie. Wick assured him that she was all right. "Still upset but holding up."

"Can I speak to her?"

Wick passed her the telephone. "Hello, Toby. I'm sorry you had to be the one to find them. It must have been horrible."

Earlier she had been too traumatized to talk about it. Wick could hear only one side of the conversation now, but he knew Toby was giving her his account of finding the horses dead in their stalls when he arrived to let them into the corral.

Rennie listened for several minutes in silence, then said, "I can't thank you enough for making all the arrangements. No, the authorities haven't made an arrest. Yes," she said quietly,

"Lozada is definitely a suspect." Then Wick heard her say "Sandwiches?"

He pointed to the Tupperware container on the table and whispered, "Corinne sent them back with me."

"We were just about to sit down to them," Rennie said into the telephone. "Please thank Corinne for me."

After she hung up, Wick said, "I forgot about the sandwiches during my mad search through the house looking for you."

"I'm sorry I alarmed you."

"Alarmed me? Scared me shitless is more like it." He motioned her into a kitchen chair.

"Hungry?"

"No."

"Eat anyway."

He coaxed her into half a ham sandwich and a glass of milk. After their meal he went around the house checking doors. "A locked door won't stop him," Rennie said.

"I'm only checking out of habit. Lozada won't come back here."

"How can you be sure?"

"Criminals often return to the scene, whether to gloat or to see if they overlooked something, whatever. But as you know, Lozada isn't a common criminal. He's too smart to return to the scene. He did what he wanted to do here."

"Punish me for being away with you."

"I told you that when he struck we wouldn't see it coming."

"But my horses," she said, her voice cracking. "He knew what would hurt me most, didn't he?"

Wick nodded. "He's done the deed. If I thought he would come back, I wouldn't have left you here with only a sheriff's deputy posted at the gate."

"Then why were you so frightened when you couldn't find me in the house?"

Grimly he said, "I've been known to be wrong."

They went upstairs. He switched on the nightstand lamp. The pale light cast deep shadows on her face, emphasizing her weariness.

"How 'bout a hot shower?"

"You read my mind."

The shower was a time for leisurely exploration.

He was delighted and surprised by her lack of modesty and the access she gave him. Nor was she shy about caressing him.

He asked her if she liked hairy chests, and she showed him how much she liked his.

She apologized for one breast being slightly larger than the other, which gave him an opportunity to weigh and measure them with his hands and mouth.

She ran her tongue across his crooked front tooth and told him she really got off on that.

They kissed often, sometimes playfully with the water splashing on their faces, sometimes deeply and with feeling. They caressed each other with slick, soapy hands. And once, after she'd had her way with him, he knelt in front of her, nuzzled her thighs until they parted and then made provocative use of his tongue.

The foreplay was stimulating and left their bodies buzzing, but they didn't take it too far. It resulted only with their holding each other very close.

Afterward, they got into bed and were lying spooned together when she said, "At least they didn't suffer.

Lozada didn't torture them."

"Try not to think about it." He pushed aside a handful of her hair and kissed the back of her neck.

Lozada had killed the horses using the same efficiency, and probably the same detachment, with which he'd killed Sally Horton--a couple of bullets through the brain. Wick didn't have to wonder why Lozada hadn't dispatched him that neatly. He'd wanted him to suffer. He had probably planned to stab him more than once with that screwdriver, let him die slowly and painfully.

Lying next to Rennie like this, he was very glad to be alive, and he knew that he was alive only because Lozada had unwisely decided that for Wick Threadgill only a protracted execution would do.

"Rennie?"

"Hmm?"

"You ..." He searched for a tactful way of putting it. "You were so ..."

"It almost stopped you."

She lay facing away from him, her hands beneath her cheek. He stroked her arm. "I'm not registering a complaint." He laid a soft kiss on her shoulder. "It was like a ... a fantasy. A gift. Like you'd never--"

"I haven't been with anyone since the tragedy with Raymond Collier."

That's what he had surmised, but hearing her say it lent this moment, this day, even more significance. Had she told him before he'd made love to her, he would have been astonished.

He probably wouldn't have believed her.

"That's a hell of a long time to pay penance, Rennie."

"Not penance. It was a conscious decision. I felt that after what happened, I didn't deserve to have a normal and fulfilling sex life."

"That's nuts. Collier got what he had coming. You were a child."

She laughed dryly. "With my track record? Hardly. No way could I be called a child."

"Maybe a child in desperate need of guidance."

She gave a small shrug of concession.

"Collier was the grown-up. He had no business messing with you. If he did have this sexual obsession for you, he should have stayed away from you, got his own counseling, something. He made a conscious decision too, Rennie, and the consequences of it were his own fault. Whatever caused you to pull that trigger--"

"I didn't."

Wick's heart jumped. "What?"

"I didn't shoot him. I never even touched the pistol. Not until afterward, that is. When the police were already on their way. I held the pistol then, but it didn't make any difference because they never tested it for fingerprints. They never looked for gunpowder residue on anyone's hands. Nothing."

"Who would have had gunpowder residue, Rennie?" When she didn't say anything, he spoke the name that was blaring inside his head. "T.

Dan."

She hesitated, then gave a quick nod.

"Son of a bitch!" Wick sat up so he could look down at her, but she kept her head on the pillow, staring straight ahead, giving him nothing except her profile. "He shot Collier and let you take the blame?"

"I was a minor. T. Dan said there would be less mess if I admitted to shooting Raymond in self-defense."

"Did he try to rape you?"

"I had been avoiding him since that one time I
met him at the motel. I was disgusted with him, and more so with myself. I wouldn't agree to see him, wouldn't even talk to him on the telephone.

He showed up at the house that afternoon. I wasn't happy to see him. I don't know why I took him into T. Dan's study. Maybe subconsciously I wanted him to catch us together.

I don't know. Anyhow, when my father walked in on us, Raymond was trying to kiss me. He was crying, pleading with me not to refuse him."

"T. Dan fired and asked questions later, is that it? He walked in, read the scene wrong, and thought he was protecting you from being raped?" She didn't answer. "Rennie?"

"No, Wick, protecting me wasn't his reason for firing. Raymond was a savvy businessman. My father was in partnership with him because he was smart. He was relying on Raymond to make them a lot of money on a real estate deal. So when he came in and saw Raymond clinging to me, he was furious. He told him he was making a fool of himself by crying like a baby over
"a piece of tail."

Wick's jaw bunched with anger. "He said that?

About his sixteen-year-old daughter?"

"He said much worse than that," she said quietly. "Then he went to his desk and took the revolver from the drawer. When the smoke cleared, literally, Raymond lay dead on the floor."

"He murdered him," Wick said in disbelief

"In cold blood. And got away with it."

"T. Dan forced the gun into my hand and told me what to tell the police when they arrived. I went along because ... because at first I was too stunned to do otherwise. Later, I realized that it was, ultimately, my fault."

"No one ever contested T. Dan's story?

Your mother?"

"She never knew the truth. Or if she did, she never let on that she did. She never questioned anything T. Dan told her. No matter what happened, she kept up appearances and pretended that all was well and harmonious in our household."

"Un-fucking-believable. All this time you've assumed the blame and guilt for T. Dan's crime."

"His crime, Wick, but my blame. If not for me, Raymond wouldn't have died. I think about that every day of my life."

Wick expelled a heavy breath and lay back down. She had carried this burden just as he had borne the guilt for letting Lozada escape prosecution. Both of them had suffered severe consequences for behaving irresponsibly. Maybe they should learn to forgive themselves. Maybe they could help each other to forgive themselves.

He placed his arm around her but, unlike before, she held her body stiff and didn't adjust to the contours of his.

"Are you flattered that you're my first lover in twenty years?"

Softly he said, "I'd be lying if I said I wasn't."

"Well, you shouldn't be. There were so many others."

"It doesn't matter, Rennie."

Turning only her head, she looked at him over her shoulder. Her expression was nakedly vulnerable. He was reminded of what Toby Robbins had said about her eyes being larger than the rest of her face when she was a child.

"Doesn't it, Wick?"

He shook his head. "What matters to me," he whispered, "is that you're with me now. That you trust me enough to be here with me like this."

She turned and took his face between her hands.

"I was afraid of you. No, not of you. Of the way you made me feel."

"I know."

"I fought it."

"Like a tigress."

"I'm glad you didn't give up on me."

She touched his hair, his cheek, his chin, his chest.

They continued nuzzling until they fell asleep.