Кей Хупер - Whisper of Evil

Then sensations rushed in and pushed everything else aside. Clothing falling away, sliding against her skin. His hands on her, warm and hard and urgent. The feeling of his powerful body under her own searching fingers. Her heart hammering against her ribs and her breath coming quick and shallow. Then the bed beneath her, disconcertingly soft and not at all like a thin woolen blanket that had barely protected them from the cold spring ground.

It was a dizzying reminder that a dozen years had passed, and her own body insisted she understand that. She was no virginal girl now, shy and half terrified of what she wanted, and Max was no longer that gentle, careful young man so intent on not hurting her that it hadn't occurred to him there might be another price demanded of them for those few minutes of incredible closeness.

"Nell…"

He was a little rougher now, more direct, more insistent, his hunger for her so fierce that it was a caress all its own, touching her deepest instincts, igniting a response as involuntary as the beating of her heart.

She reached out for him blindly, needing him to be as close as he could possibly be. Her arms held him, and it wasn't close enough. Her body held him, and it wasn't close enough. She needed him closer.

Closer.

It had shocked Max, the first time it happened. Shaken him. Nothing in his life had prepared him for the incredibly intimate closeness Nell had offered. No — demanded. Passion and need had seared away everything but instinct, and in joining physically with the man she loved, Nell's instinct had driven her to mate in the deepest possible way.

This time, he was ready for it.

Max caught his breath just as she did, staring into her eyes as her senses blended with his, her thoughts, her emotions. It was something deeper than sharing, something more elemental and absolute. Their hearts beat with precisely the same rhythm, their breathing was perfectly in sync, their bodies moved with a single will.

They were one.

Ethan set aside the birth record that puzzled him and continued through the stack of copies. But as the clock on his credenza ticked away the minutes and he read record after record, he began to feel restless, uneasy. He got up once and wandered through the building, not so much checking on his people as needing the exercise in order to think.

When he finally returned to his desk, the question in his mind was no less answerable for being clear.

It couldn't be that, could it? So simple a thing?

My real mother's dead. She died when I was born.

A boy's inexplicable lie? Or something else?

It was nearly midnight when Ethan sat back, over half the birth records still unread, and picked up the one that bothered him. This late on a Saturday night, there was no way he could check this out — unless he simply asked.

A good idea, or a bad one?

Take someone with him, or go alone?

He opened his desk drawer and pulled out the schedule to see who was supposed to be working this weekend, but even as he studied it he knew from his stroll through the building that most of the deputies were either still on the clock or else were gathered here in the lounge, playing poker or just quietly talking. Some of the married ones would have gone home to their families, but most would hang around just as they had been doing for weeks.

Waiting.

Ethan put the schedule away, still undecided. He picked up the birth record again, staring at the circled name of the birth mother. Supposed birth mother.

He was cop enough to know that people found the oddest, most inexplicable reasons and rationalizations for murder, but he couldn't think of any reason why this name on a birth record could have gotten George Caldwell killed.

My real mother's dead .

Did it mean something?

Ethan briefly considered calling out to the Gallagher house, but dismissed the idea almost as soon as it occurred to him. No. Despite his reassuring words to the mayor, he was not at all happy that the FBI had been called in behind his back, and he'd be damned if he'd run along behind Nell now, touching his hat and saying yes, ma'am, and no, ma'am, while she and her invisible partners solved the case.

Besides, she seemed way too convinced the killer could be Hailey, and the more Ethan considered that possibility the less likely he thought it was. Not that Nell had yet explained what she'd meant about Adam Gallagher's death, but Ethan couldn't see any reason why that death, even if it hadn't been natural, could point to Hailey. She'd been gone by then, disinherited by an openly furious father, so why come back just long enough to put him in the ground?

No, Hailey being the killer just didn't track.

As for this birth record…

Making up his mind abruptly, Ethan folded the report and tucked it into a pocket, then got his gun out of the desk drawer and clipped it to his belt. He shrugged into his jacket and went out into the bullpen.

With several patrols out, there were only a couple of deputies in the big room, and one of them was on the phone. Ethan stopped beside the other one, who was sitting on the corner of a desk and contemplating a dartboard hanging on the wall nearby.

"Hey, Kyle. Where's Lauren?"

"Went home to take a shower. We aren't officially on the clock, but —"

"Yeah, I know." Ethan looked over to see that Steve Critcher was still on the phone, then said to Kyle, "Interested in taking a little ride with me?"

"Sure. Where we going?"

"Out to Matt Thorton's place. There's something I need to ask him about."

"You were afraid," Max said. "That was part of it, wasn't it? Part of why you kept the door closed as much as you possibly could all these years. Part of why you shut me out so fiercely when you came back here. I could hardly get through at all."

"I was afraid," Nell admitted, the lamplit peace of the bedroom allowing her to say what she might have resisted saying anywhere else.

"Because of how I reacted the first time."

She hesitated, then sighed. "I didn't blame you for that. What happened shocked me, so I knew it would be hard for you to deal with it. You were… a little freaked."

"A lot freaked. But fascinated too, Nell, you had to know that."

"I knew. I also knew it made you wary. Made you wonder if you would lose all your privacy. People need a quiet place inside them where they can be alone, and you were afraid you wouldn't have that anymore."

"That's why you shut the door so quickly, almost as soon as… as soon as we could both think again."

"It wasn't just your reaction I was afraid of, Max. The… power of it scared me. I'd never been close to anyone, really, and then to so suddenly find myself that close to you…"

Max shifted his weight so he could look down at her. "And now? The door is almost closed again. Not slammed this time, just eased to during the last few minutes."

Nell didn't have to share his thoughts to know he was disturbed by that. "Max…" She shook her head. "I'm not a telepath, and neither are you. This connection we have, this doorway — I don't think it's supposed to be wide open all the time."

"Is that a rule?"

"Don't get angry. I'm not trying to shut you out because I don't want you. You know better than that, we both do. But I… there are things I don't want to share with you, things I don't want you to see."

"The nightmares. The visions."

She managed a smile. "No reason why both of us should risk a short-circuited brain."

"So I can share the pleasure, the joy, but never the pain or fear?"

Nell reached up to touch his face, her fingertips tracing the straight line of his grim mouth, trying vainly to soften it. "Would that be so bad?"

Max caught her hand and held it. "I love you, Nell. I've loved you since you were sixteen years old. And in all the years after you ran away, the only thing that made being without you even bearable was that tiny, distant connection with you. Sometimes I couldn't sense anything for months on end, but then out of nowhere I'd know how you were feeling, if you were upset or happy or worried — or afraid. I'd catch a glimpse of a nightmare or wake from one of my own dreams certain I had felt you lying beside me, heard you breathing."