After Caroline (34 page)

She didn’t know what she would have replied to that if he’d given her the chance. But he didn’t give her the chance to say anything. His mouth came down on hers, hard without being rough, moving with the sensual heat that had so quickly and effortlessly ignited unfamiliar fires inside her, and Joanna lost interest in words.

She fumbled her arms from beneath the covers and reached for him, her fingers blindly exploring a body still foreign to her. It felt wonderful to touch him. He was harder than she had expected, the muscles underneath his smooth skin taut. Her fingers probed his shoulders and back, traced the clean line of his spine, then moved around and stroked the smooth mat of black hair covering his chest. Her fingertips almost literally tingled when she touched him, and a hollow aching inside her grew until it seemed to fill her entire being.

She had thought she was completely exhausted, limp and sated after their first joining, but tension flowed into her now as his mouth seduced her and his hands began to move over her body. She almost jerked when he touched her breast, the burning pleasure stealing her breath and making a helpless little sound of delight purr in her throat.

A silent lover? She was hardly that, not when she couldn’t stop or control these disconcertingly primitive sounds of pleasure. But wordless, yes. The way he made her feel was so intense, so overwhelming, that words were beyond her.

His mouth was on her breast now, drawing her into a blind storm of sensation, and his hand slipped down over her belly, finding her mound and the most exquisitely sensitive nerves her body possessed. Joanna knew her legs had parted for him, and she felt the most incredibly voluptuous sense of opening herself to him. It was a kind of abandon she had never known before, and it was wildly seductive.

He stroked her until she thought she’d go out of her mind, until another of those pleading sounds escaped from her throat. Then he was moving over her, and Joanna nearly sobbed in relief. Her thighs cradled him, her arms slipped around him, and she stared up at his taut face as he came inside her.

That sensation was still unfamiliar, being opened and filled by him, feeling him with an intimacy that tugged at all her deepest instincts. And then he was moving, slower this time, and the lingering strokes brought her quickly to
the very edge of her endurance. It was wonderful and terrible, what he was doing to her. It made her mindless and turned her body into a creature of nerves and need and desperation. Instinctively, her body tried to quicken his rhythm, but Griffin maintained the maddeningly leisurely pace.

He paid a price for that restraint, she realized on some level of herself. The muscles under her fingers quivered with the strain, his breathing was harsh and uneven, and his face was a mask of raw urgency. But his torment did nothing to soothe her own, and Joanna heard herself making sounds that were completely alien to her. She felt her body undulate with astonishing sexuality to meet his, and knew her nails were digging into his back as the tension inside her reached a height far beyond what she thought she could endure.

He groaned suddenly and thrust into her almost wildly, his restraint snapped. Joanna cried out in fierce elation, the ecstasy sweeping over her in waves and waves of throbbing heat. He shuddered when her body clenched rhythmically around him, and buried himself in her with a harsh sound of overwhelming pleasure as her climax triggered his.

When Joanna finally came back to herself, she was wrapped once more in a cocoon of warmth and him. Both his arms were wrapped around her, and her head was pillowed comfortably on his shoulder. This time, she was absolutely positive she lacked the strength to move, and though not sleepy, she drifted along the edge of sleep contentedly.

“Joanna?”

“Hmm?”

“Would you consider going back to Atlanta until all this is settled?”

She raised her head, then levered herself up on an elbow so that she could look down at him and see his face clearly. Before she could respond, he spoke again, his voice low.

“I’m worried about you.”

It was very difficult for her to refuse him, but Joanna had to shake her head. “I can’t leave before it’s over. Even if I wanted to. I can’t explain it, but I
know
I have to be here.”

His dark gaze searched her face for a moment, and then he nodded reluctantly. “I had a feeling you’d say that. Just for God’s sake be careful from now on, will you?”

Joanna smiled. “I’ll do my best, I promise.” She leaned over to kiss him lightly, then settled down once more at his side. It was still fairly early, but the day had been long and the evening definitely active, and this time she drifted off to sleep.

The dream began very much as usual. The sounds of ocean waves crashing and a gradually forming image of that beautiful, lonely house on the cliffs. Then the house sort of faded away into a kind of fog, and other images formed. Misty and tilted slightly, the colorful painting on an easel drifted before her mind’s eye. Dimly, far away, she could hear a child’s miserable, frightened sobs, the sounds tearing at her heart. A clock ticked softly, steadily. A paper airplane soared on coastal winds, lifting and swooping before coming to rest at last on some kind of boards. Still mistily, an image formed of beautiful pink roses in a vase, with petals scattered all around it. Then it vanished, and the brightly colored carousel horse bobbed and whirled briefly before coming to a stop. It remained there, clear and real, its surroundings vague, while the child’s sobs grew closer and more distinct, and the clock’s ticking became so loud it echoed.

Don’t let her be alone
.

The clock was booming now, drowning out everything else until it sounded like an amplified heartbeat, then quicker and quicker—

Joanna sat up with a cry, her arms reaching out for … something. She couldn’t seem to breathe, and her heart was racing so fast she felt dizzy, and the fear she felt, something akin to terror, went as deep as her marrow and clogged her
throat. She could feel wetness en her cheeks, tears shed in pain and grief and regret she could still feel. She wanted to sob with it, to release all the pent-up emotions in primitive sounds of loss.

“Joanna? Honey—”

As soon as she heard his low voice, she began to calm down. The desire to sob wildly faded until it was gone. Her breathing slowed, steadied. Her pulse dropped to normal. The terror inspired by the dream lost its grip on her, and her tense muscles relaxed. When Griffin’s arms went around her, she slumped against his hard body.

“We don’t have much time,” she whispered.

The bedroom was filled with the faint light of early morning, and the frown on Griffin’s beard-stubbled face looked more dangerous than usual. “The dream again?”

“Every night,” she told him, settling back on the pillow as he eased them down again. “That’s one reason I can’t leave—the dream won’t let me.”
Caroline won’t let me
. “It’s … it’s moving faster somehow. There’s a feeling of urgency there getting stronger every time. Something’s going to happen. I know it is. Soon.”

He touched her cheek gently, his fingers rubbing away the last traces of her tears. He was still frowning, but his voice was quiet. “If you’ve been waking up like this every morning, no wonder you feel so strongly about the dream. But it’s changing now? There’s something different about it?”

“No. Yes. Yes, there is.”

More than one thing. Had the carousel lingered longer than usual this time? The paper airplane drifted farther and landed in a different place? And what about that desperate cry—a female voice?—pleading with her not to let
her
be alone. Regan? If this connection was with Caroline, then it had to be Regan, didn’t it?
Don’t let her be alone
. Not let her be alone emotionally? Or was Regan in physical danger?

It didn’t make sense, and Joanna was too shaken to be able to think clearly about it.

“It’s virtually the same every night,” she replied at last. “The same objects forming and drifting around. But this time, there was something else. A … plea that I not let someone be alone. That I not let
bet
be alone.”

“Her?” Griffin’s frown deepened. “You think this connection is with Caroline—is the plea for her? Or from her?”

“I don’t know. I think—I
feel
—it’s Regan she wants me to help. That Regan’s in trouble somehow. But I don’t know. All I do know is that the clock is ticking louder, faster, and I know we’re running out of time.”

T
ICK. TICK TICK.

It was almost constant now, in her head, faster than it should have been, and the urgency of it wouldn’t leave Joanna alone. It prodded her to refuse to go to the station with Griffin later that morning and remain under his eye even though she wanted to be with him.

There was something she had to do. Worried about Regan despite Griffin’s reassurances that the child was certainly safe at home and not given to wandering far from her own yard, Joanna wanted to walk over to the gazebo this morning, around the time when Regan had told her she normally took a break from her studies. There was no guarantee, of course, that Regan would appear at the gazebo, but Joanna’s uneasiness demanded that she see for herself that the little girl was all right. Even if she had to knock on the front door and ask.

“I hope you can get along without your car,” Griffin
told her as they rode along Main Street. “I had it towed out of town last night instead of to the local garage.”

Joanna looked at him with a little frown, trying to think logically and resisting an urge to chew on her thumbnail. “Didn’t you tell Doc it was totaled?”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t. A big dent in front where you hit the fence post, and a few scrapes and scratches, that’s all the damage caused by the wreck. But as soon as some of my people discovered the tampering, I ordered it towed to a garage a few miles out of town to a mechanic I trust completely. He’ll keep it safe and out of sight while we go over it for evidence. However, since I don’t want it spread around that somebody tampered with the car, the official reason for the accident is that a short in the electrical system caused the throttle pulse sensor to go haywire.”

“The throttle pulse sensor,” she repeated. “I guess that’s self-explanatory?”

He sent her a little grin. “More or less. It regulates the throttle, which regulates the amount of gas fed to the engine. So if you happen to be in gear when the sensor goes haywire, the engine races wildly. Aunt Sarah didn’t teach you about cars?”

“Aunt Sarah viewed cars as things that got her from one place to the next. Which is pretty much how I view them. But I have an excellent memory, and I’ll be able to solemnly tell anyone who asks that the throttle pulse sensor in my car went haywire.”

Griffin nodded. “Good enough. Tell them also that since the car was a rental and was totaled, we had to send it back to the agency in Portland. It’s their headache, after all.”

Joanna nodded, but asked, “Didn’t anybody drive out there to see the wreck yesterday? I thought that kind of curiosity was a universal trait of humans—nosy or otherwise.”