Angel Face (23 page)

“Jordan, untie me,” she begged.

“I’m not done.”

He’s not done. Dear Lord.

“But I need to hold you, I need you to hold me,
please
.”

“God, yes,” he whispered.

She drank in the smell of him as he brought her up and cushioned her head against his shoulder. And while he worked free the ropes at her wrists, she reveled in the textures of muscle and skin. He was a big man, a good man. She let out a sob as the restraints dropped away. Her arms were so stiff she couldn’t move them without pain, and she was grateful when he draped them around his neck and gathered her close.

Emotion filled her throat.

“Just until we stop shaking,” he told her.

She curled into his shoulder. “I will never stop shaking.”

But she did eventually. He stroked her hair until she felt safe enough to shudder, probably with relief. She
could almost have fallen asleep, but there was a vibrancy inside her that wouldn’t close its eyes.

“My ankles are still tied,” she whispered.

He glanced down at her with feigned shock. “We’d better take care of that.”

“Yes, we’d better,” she agreed, “and quickly.”

To clear up any confusion, she added, “So you can make love to me.
Properly
.”

He sucked in a breath as if he’d taken a punch. But he had her untied and removed the rest of his clothing in mere moments, and even that was too long for Angela. She felt another of those half-moan, half-sigh sounds coming on, and it tugged at her deeply. She wondered if he felt the pull. His ragged breathing told her he felt something.

Within moments, the ropes were gone, and her legs fell apart quite wantonly. That was only partly her idea. They were nearly as limp and sore as her arms, but her only experience of pain was the anticipation she felt as he came down over her on all fours. God, that was thrilling. He was as fierce and predatory as the jaguar. If she’d had any thought of resisting him, it died with that one supremely deliberate act.

She saw herself in his hungry gaze and couldn’t look away. She was naked, as transparent as a newborn. But she was also a woman who ached for completion so deeply there was no way to hide it. He had already changed her, and she welcomed whatever else this wild ride brought.

Make me, make me.

It was her chant.

“Make me
yours,
” She said it with throaty need, and he responded with a powering need of his own. He cupped her face and stared at her until she felt penetrated to her innermost depths. And with a deep, drilling flex of his loins, she was. Penetrated. The fantasy was fulfilled and
so was she.
Penetrated
. It was beautiful, beauty itself. She felt as if it had always been this way, and yet it hadn’t happened all at once. When he’d come up against her, he’d felt like a blunt force, impossibly large. Only with gentle insistence and steady strength, had he found his way in.

To her innermost depths.

Done. He was in. And driving all the way to her center.

They moved together. They moved against each other. Their bodies clashed and clung, learning a new language that was inarticulate but far more expressive than words. The sensations were so bright that everything else began to blur. Angela felt as if she were in crisis, as if her fever had come back, full force. And for one split second, the chaos became clarity. She understood why she’d met this man, why she’d brought him here, the why of it all.

Everything was laid out for her in that one moment, and then she lost it to the tidal wave that engulfed her. Her vision was flung into the air and suspended there like sea spray, sparkling in the sun. When it crashed to the shore, everything she knew crashed with it. Chaos again. Beautiful, mindless chaos. From oblivion to clarity and back again, and the only thing left in its wake was a silvery stream of feeling, pouring through her open heart.

That was all she had when it was over, an opened heart. But it was more than she could ever remember having before.

Jordan lay above her, his hands buried in her hair and his chin resting on her forehead. A vibration ran through him, and because they were still joined, she vibrated, too. It didn’t seem possible that two human beings could be this close. Nothing like it had ever happened to her before, and it was so new and precious, she was afraid it might not happen again.

He rocked back to look down at her, but she was suddenly shy.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing, I’m fine, it’s just—”

His expression turned quizzical, and finally she blushed. “It’s just that we’re, that you’re—” She glanced down. “You know.”

“Inside you? Wasn’t that where you wanted me to be?”

Her body answered him. It tightened in the very area they were speaking of, and she saw what it did to him. He let out a sharp breath, and his blue eyes darkened dramatically.

“It feels like somebody wants me to be there,” he said.

Heat rolled into her cheeks, which must be glowing by now. He didn’t seem to realize how awkward this was for her, lying beneath him, still intimately joined but without the blind intensity that had brought them together. This was the moment when people took stock of each other and wondered what had possessed them. She wasn’t thinking that, but she was thinking.

“It just hit me that only moments ago we were enemies,” she explained.

He settled back and looked at her, really looked, as if he, himself, would give anything to know it all, the whole story of Angela Lowe and her various guises. He wasn’t the only one.

“What are we now?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “But I don’t think
enemies
quite tells the story.”

Lying beneath him, she wondered if he was the one. If all of her crazy dreams and fantasies were not so crazy after all. The others may have been figments of her desperate need, but it suddenly seemed possible that he was not.

That was the realization that she’d had during her vision, but she was afraid to let herself believe it now. She wanted it too much.

* * *

T
HEY’D
found a cot in the closet and set it up. Now they were cuddled on its lumpy gauze mattress with nothing but mosquito netting draped around them, but neither one of them could sleep. There was too much ground to cover and so little time. The sense of urgency Angela lived with was subtly different now. She had protected herself by holding things at bay—memories, people, anything that could threaten her existence—but that was as sterile an environment as the lab she worked in. Now she was flooding with life and feelings. She wanted to know everything there was to know about Jordan Carpenter, and together, maybe they could both risk knowing more about Angela Lowe.

Angela had done her best to answer his questions, but the one he’d just asked was more personal than he may have realized.

“Why me?” he’d wondered as he lay facing her, his expression shadowed by flickering lamplight. “Why would your company use me to set you up?”

“Because they . . . they believed I was infatuated with you, and had been since childhood.”

“That doesn’t compute, and I’ll tell you why in a minute. First things first, were they right about the infatuation?”

She shrugged, embarrassed. “Back in those days, I had a tendency to hero worship, yes. I may have read an article or two. And maybe I kept a scrapbook, but you weren’t the only doctor to grace the pages.”

“You had
other
heroes?”

“You and Dr. Ruth, yes.”

That elicited a smile, but his tone was serious. “You don’t think it’s strange that you and Angel Face could be twins? If the dossier is true, your histories are identical.”

“Our histories aren’t identical, Jordan. It’s
my
history. Someone stole my past, and they’re using it to frame me.”

“But who? Firestarter? And why would he do that if he
was really part of a conspiracy to silence you?”

That was a question that confounded her, too. Every time she thought she had an answer, it raised another question. They should have wanted her dead. As far as she knew, that was the fate of informants who became a threat. It made no sense that they would frame her for serial killings and risk giving her a voice in court. Why hadn’t they just killed her?

Unanswerable questions.

Jordan must have heard the sigh that welled because he began to smooth her tangled hair. There was more than a touch of irony in his voice when he spoke. “I hate to say it, but the lust murderer story is a lot more plausible.”

“And I hate to disappoint you, but I am not, and have never been, a lust murderer.”

“There is nothing about you that disappoints me.” He gentled her mouth with a tender touch. “Can I ask one last question?”

“Maybe . . . if you make it one I can answer.”

“Have you ever made love before?”

What made him think she could answer that one?

“Was that a yes or a no?” he prompted.

“I don’t think so,” she said, shaking her head.

“Normally, people remember that, Angela.”

“Yes, but in my case, there’s that blank spot.”

The
hmmm
he made had a reflective tone to it. He had little choice but to believe her, except that it was all so strange she could hardly fault him for wondering, especially given what had happened while he was tied up. She’d been sick out of her mind, but still she had known how to get information out of a hostage. That had come from somewhere.

“No men in your life?” he asked with some care. “
Nothing
romantic?”

She was hesitant. “Well, one, but I was very young.”

“Was it Adam?”

“Oh no, not Adam. He and I were kindred spirits but not lovers. It wasn’t like that. I never got involved in that way with any of the sources, as least as far as I can remember. It was very odd. All I had to do was talk with them, talk from the heart, and they would tell me anything.”

She still felt guilt about that. About taking advantage of people’s trust, no matter who they were or what the reason. That might be the unpardonable sin, worse even than what her foster father had done, because she had done it.

Jordan hugged her as if he could absolve her of any and all crimes, and they fell silent for a while.

Angela was just drifting off when he whispered again, “Can you tell me about the one time? Sorry—I’m sorry, I can’t seem to get it off my mind.”

“His name was Benjamin. He was the boy I ran away with in high school, the one who died on my father’s operating table. We were very much in love, or thought we were. We ran away to get married, but neither one of us had had any experience with sex and didn’t really know what we were doing.”

A sad smile surfaced. “We mostly kissed.”

The breath he let out sounded very much like a sigh. “I didn’t know that was so important to me,” he admitted.

And she was glad it was. She hadn’t been able to look at him before this. Now she did, smiling through the sudden sting of tears.

He drew her close, and for a moment she felt perfectly safe and warm in their small, protected space. It was a rare feeling, one she never wanted to forget. But suddenly, without warning, he was pulling her tighter, squeezing her possessively, and she knew something was wrong. You couldn’t hang onto anything too tightly, she’d learned, not feelings, not even the people. Life had a way of ripping everything you loved apart.

“Angela, we’re going back. You know that, don’t you? I have to take you back.”

His hands closed in her hair and clasped her to him. Buried in the warmth of his shoulder, Angela couldn’t answer him. And what would she have said, anyway?
I can’t go back. Something terrible will happen if I do.

Somewhere in the distance, a big cat roared its displeasure, and Angela shuddered. She might not have fared so well if she’d come up against a jaguar now. The cat would have smelled her fear immediately.

“D
R .
Benson, those sutures need to be done right,
not
fast. Take your time.”

Teri hesitated, the threaded suture needle in her gloved hand. Steve Lloyd had been on her case since the valve replacement procedure began four hours ago, and she was getting rattled. The chief of cardiac surgery and several prominent visiting surgeons were in the gallery, observing, and this would have been a perfect opportunity for Teri to shine if Steve hadn’t been questioning everything she did.

Bastard,
she thought. He was strutting his stuff at her expense. Not that it should have been a surprise. She’d been sandbagged before by male doctors who pretended to support her goals and then sold her out when it suited their purposes. What embittered her most was that she’d had to learn to think like a man to beat them at their own game, and generally speaking, she didn’t like the way men thought, particularly male surgeons. They were elitists at heart. Sexist pigs, every one of them, and it infuriated her that she hadn’t seen this coming.

A bead of sweat escaped her surgical cap, rolled down the side of her face, and dropped directly into the stainless steel well of the aortic valve annulus that had just been placed in the patient’s heart.

“Bull’s-eye,” someone chortled.

“Contamination!” Steve Lloyd shouted. “Irrigate with cefazolin solution!”

Teri glared at the OR nurse, who should have been mopping her brow, and mouthed the words, “You’re
so
fired.”

“Benson! Watch what you’re doing! That suture won’t hold!”

Lloyd was yelling at her again. Teri couldn’t see what he was talking about. One of the sutures might be pulling a little, but it was a simple enough matter to reinforce it. Why was he making it sound like the prosthesis was going to fall out of the patient’s chest?

“Potts scissors,” she told the nurse, holding out her hand.

Teri was so tightly focused on the suture in question that she didn’t feel the pressure of the instrument against her hand, and the nurse said nothing to alert her. The room fell silent for the space of an indrawn breath, and the next sound heard in OR Five was the clatter of the scissors hitting the floor.

It sounded like the apocalypse.

Teri looked up in confusion. Was this some kind of conspiracy against her? Were these people
trying
to screw her up?

“Benson, maybe I should finish up,” Steve Lloyd suggested.

“No! I can handle this. Look, it’s just one suture—”

Another pair of scissors was handed to her, and Teri grasped them firmly. But it took her a minute to get her bearings. Her glove had slipped and she was tugging it back on when a hand came down on her shoulder.

“You just contaminated yourself, Doctor,” Steve Lloyd said. “Get out of the way. I’m taking over.”

Teri was too dumbfounded to say anything. She should have let the nurse adjust her glove, it was true, but the likelihood that she’d contaminated anything was small. Worse, she couldn’t comprehend what was happening. There was no precedent anywhere in her head that had prepared her for this. She’d never entertained fears of failure. She’d never rehearsed for it, and she didn’t know what to do.

“I’m taking over, Benson.” Lloyd physically pushed her aside and moved into her position. “Hit the sinks and get out of those scrubs. You’re done here.”

Forced out of the circle, Teri looked up at the chief of surgery and his visiting doctors in the gallery, all males, of course. She saw in their faces an expression she personally despised: pity. That and the smug validation of their old boys’ club belief that women weren’t cut out to be surgeons. One of her goals had been to help break her gender out of the ranks of pediatrics and gynecology. She wanted to prove that they were as capable as men in any branch of medicine.

That made this failure doubly crushing.

“Hit the showers, Benson,” Lloyd ordered.

Every eye in the bleacher section was on her, and Teri felt a wave of humiliation. Fortunately, it was rage that carried her out of there. Rage and a desire for retribution that was like being reborn.

So long, Dr. Lloyd,
she thought as the doors slammed shut behind her.
It’s been good to know you, asshole.
No one was going to trash Teri Benson like that and live to gloat with the boys about it.

H
E
was completely caught up in her spell. Completely. He didn’t know dream from reality, real from surreal. He
didn’t know himself. Once he had doubted whether this woman could hurt someone. Now he knew she could do anything. The jaguar had been safe compared to her.

Jordan found himself replaying those thoughts as he watched Angela bathe in the stream not far from the hut. She’d looped a tablecloth around herself like a sarong because the towels in the hut weren’t large enough, and she was suddenly preoccupied with modesty, even after what they’d done. They had answered the insistent drumbeat pounding inside them. Jordan didn’t know how else to describe it. They had pounded back. He’d facetiously found himself thinking of it as the call of the wild, but nothing could have been more apt.

It was an irresistible call, and God, it was wild. The rain forest had elicited everything that was feral and sensual within them. Their mating dance had lasted throughout the night, and it had been as primitive and imperative as the animals’. It had also been indescribably beautiful, and in some strange way, as natural as the sea and the sun. And this morning, Jordan had awakened to a calmness he’d never felt before, a tranquillity beyond imagining. He had never thought of himself as a spiritual man, but this was what that must feel like, he thought, when it was right.

It had frightened her. He sensed that. Maybe it had frightened him, too. And now she must think the tablecloth would dampen the sensuality,
her
sensuality, but all it did was raise awareness of her long legs and full breasts to a religious experience.

She’d picked a place in the stream where the water came up to her knees, and she was kneeling down with the material bunched up around her hips. Her goal seemed to be to keep the tablecloth dry and wash herself at the same time, a tricky feat, but she was determined. She rubbed water over her face and arms and splashed herself daintily.

It was impossible not to smile. Jordan should have gone inside and given her some privacy, but he couldn’t miss this. He just couldn’t. He also couldn’t imagine what she was hiding that he hadn’t seen, touched, tasted, and intimately visited in some way. But this was different, he knew. This was afterward, and she was shy afterward. He was coming to know things about Angela Lowe, and her shyness was one of them. She was so many different things. God, she was.

She glanced over her shoulder at him, apparently checking to see if he was still there. He guessed that she wanted to shed that cloth in the worst way and sink into the stream, but she wouldn’t let herself as long as he was there. Maybe she was self-conscious about her body, and that would be a terrible shame, because she was lovely.

The things that were supposed to move on her body, did, thank God. She was a normal, flesh-and-blood woman, but in her own mind probably too heavy or too skinny or something else he couldn’t even guess. Maybe she didn’t like how her thighs weren’t body builder hard. He wished she knew how much he liked her body. She might not be toned like an Olympian, but she was more real and vulnerable and passionately tender than any model he’d seen in a magazine lately. Perfection wasn’t what men were looking for, anyway. They wanted exactly what she had, a responsiveness to life that expressed itself in everything she did.

She took the risk of opening the cloth and trying to keep it on while she splashed herself. Her back was to him, and he could see nothing except the shimmer of her long, dark hair and the hopeless struggle this was becoming for her. She knew it, too, and finally she heaved a sigh and stood.

There were some large rocks on the near side of the stream. She angled herself toward them, allowing him no more than a three-quarter view of her, and it was there
that she removed the cloth. As she tossed it onto the rocks, she glanced at him again. It was the most guileless, hopeful glance he’d ever seen. It turned him inside out, that sweet expression. She was part embarrassed, part resigned to the situation, and part surrendered to his male opinion of her beauty.

He hoped she could see it in his eyes. She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

She dipped down again and began to wash herself, splashing until she was thoroughly drenched. Before she was done, she soaked her hair and tossed it back, letting the water stream over her. But when she reached for the towel, still in a semicrouch, something apparently caught her eye, possibly her own reflection. The towel stayed where it was, and so did she, peering into the shallow depths. The water barely rippled as she stretched herself over its surface and submerged. She momentarily disappeared from sight, but he could see a pale form, floating on the bottom. Her hair flowed on the surface, becoming part of the current.

He wanted to join her. He’d never wanted anything quite that much, but it felt like that would be an intrusion. She needed time to cleanse and reconnect with herself, maybe. He didn’t know. He didn’t understand female needs any better than the next guy, but he had intruded on her enough already, just by watching.

She rose up finally, dripping, and he remembered how she’d returned to the hut last night, naked and wet and breathtakingly bold, enticing him while he was restrained. What a wild creature she’d been then. So different than this strange, shy mermaid, but both of them attracted him. His body was already hardening, despite the excesses of the night before. It was trying to get him laid again when what his mind seemed to want was to gather her up in his arms and hold her. Surely that would ease his pain,
because there was an ache in him that felt like no amount of doctoring could ever fix it.

He was under her spell, totally, hopelessly. He was completely out of his mind. Was this what she did to all men? More than once he had wondered how he was supposed to save her, and this morning was no exception. He wasn’t worried about jaguars. He could have backed one off with a look. He was worried about tonight, tomorrow, the future. They couldn’t stay here. They had to go back.

He had no idea how he was going to exonerate her, and if he was to get brutally honest with himself, he couldn’t have explained why he wanted to. Because she could reach for his soul with her eyes? Because she brought out the hero complex in him, as she apparently did all men? That poor sucker, Adam, would never have believed she could hurt him. He would have eaten straight strychnine from her fingertips.

Jordan’s mind reflected back to the moment when she’d whispered that she needed nothing less than his mortal soul to be sure he wouldn’t betray her. What was that besides a bargain with the devil? And a losing bargain, at that. Maybe he could write it off to delirium, but should he? If he was going to take her word over the CIA’s, then he had to believe that someone was trying to frame her, kill her, or both, which meant they would probably come after him, too.

Everything considered, he had a fair amount at risk—his credibility, maybe his sanity, and most likely his life—and all for a woman who couldn’t remember whether she was a serial killer or not. She swore he’d been nothing more than a study subject to her, that his name was not on a death list, that she in fact had no death list. And he believed her. Only he didn’t know how to justify his belief. He didn’t know how to justify any of it. That sounded crazy. It probably was crazy, but that realization didn’t seem to count for much at the moment.

If he made the wrong decision, he could pay for it with his life, but he didn’t give a damn. He didn’t put any value on the consequences, because it felt like there was something more important here, something he barely understood. Belief, perhaps. Believing in another human being, believing in himself and his gut. There was a part of him telling him to take this woman’s side. Was that his heart, the pump he’d made a career out of repairing?

He knew what hearts could do, they could circulate blood to nourish the body and brain, but could they tell you what was good or bad? It was like a mechanic suddenly believing the engine that ran the car was also capable of driving it. And yet he could feel a tugging in his chest that pulled him toward her, told him to help her, that she needed help more than anyone he’d ever known.