Nora Roberts - Sacred Sins

“ The Maltese Falcon ?”

“And The Big Sleep .”

She smiled, comfortably sleepy. “Okay.” When he stepped closer, she waited for him to kiss her. If the idea warmed her, she thought it only natural. The desire to be held and touched was a human one. Her eyes half closed and her heart beat just a little faster.

“You’ve got to replace this Mickey Mouse lock.”

Her lashes fluttered up again. “What?”

“Your door lock, Tess, is a joke.” He traced a finger down her nose, pleased to see confusion. “If you’re going to live in a building without security, you’d better make sure you’ve got a dead bolt on your door.”

“Dead bolt.” With a half laugh she straightened and reached for her keys. “I can’t argue with a cop.”

“Glad to hear it.” He put his hands over hers and kissed her before she’d prepared herself again. Later, when she could think straight, she’d wonder if he’d planned it that way.

It was silly to believe that a kiss as gentle, as easy as this one could send shock waves through the body. Blood didn’t really heat and the mind didn’t really swim. She knew better, but felt it anyway. Touching nothing but her hands, he took her under.

His mouth was clever, but she’d suspected as much. His lips were warm, soft, and he used his teeth to add a nip of excitement. They scraped over her lip before his tongue slid over hers. She told herself it was the late hour, the wine, the relaxation, but she gave herself to the moment without any of the caution she was prone to.

She was supposed to be cool, a little aloof. He’d expected it. He hadn’t expected the heat, the passion, or the sweetness that poured from her into him. He hadn’t expected the immediate intimacy of longtime lovers. He knew women well-or thought he had. Tess was a mystery to him that demanded solving.

Desire was familiar to him, something else he’d thought he understood well. But he couldn’t remember ever having it ram into him and take his breath away. He wanted her now, instantly, desperately. Ordinarily he’d have followed through. It was natural. For reasons he couldn’t begin to understand, he backed away from her.

For a moment they just stared at each other.

“This could be a problem,” he managed to say after a few seconds.

“Yeah.” She swallowed and concentrated on the cool metal of the keys in her hand.

“Put on the security chain, okay? I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She missed the keyhole by a quarter inch on the first try and swore as she stuck it in on the second. “Good night, Ben.”

“Good night.”

He waited until he heard the click of the lock and the rattle of chain before he turned and walked down the hall. A problem, he thought again. One hell of a problem.

He’d been walking for hours. When he let himself into his apartment he was almost too tired to stand. In the past few months he found he slept dreamlessly only if he exhausted himself first.

It wasn’t necessary to turn on a light; he knew the way. Ignoring the need to rest, he went past his bedroom. Sleep would come only after he’d completed this last duty. The room beyond was always locked. When he opened it he drew in the faint, feminine scent of the fresh flowers he put there daily. The priests robe hung by the closet door. Draped over it, the amice was a slash of white.

Striking a match, he lit the first candle, then another and another, until the shadows waved on the pristine surface of the altar cloth.

There was a picture there in a silver frame of a young woman, blond and smiling. Forever she’d been captured, young, innocent, and happy. Pink roses had been her favorite, and it was their scent that mixed with the burning candles.

In smaller frames were the carefully clipped newspaper prints of three other women. Carla Johnson, Barbara Clayton, Francie Bowers. Folding his hands, he knelt before them.

There were so many others, he thought. So many. He’d only just begun.

The boy sat across from Tess, quiet and sullen. He didn’t fidget or look out of the window. He rarely did. Instead, he sat in the chair and looked down at his own knees. His hands lay spread on his thighs, the fingers slender, the knuckles a bit enlarged from nervous cracking. The nails were bitten down below the quick. Signs of nerves, yet people often go through life well enough while cracking and snapping and chewing on themselves.

It was rare for him to look at the person he was speaking with, or more accurately in his case, the person speaking to him. Every time she managed to get him to make eye contact, she felt both a small victory and a small pang. There was so little she could see in his eyes, for he’d learned at a young age how to shield and conceal. What she did see-when she was given even that rare, quick chance to look-was not resentment, not fear, only a trace of boredom.

Life had not played fair with Joseph Higgins, Jr., and he wasn’t taking any chances on being slipped another shot below the belt. At his age, when adults called the plays, he chose isolation and noncommunication as defense against a lack of choice. Tess knew the symptoms. Lack of outward emotion, lack of motivation, lack of interest. A lack.

Somehow, some way, she had to find the trigger that would push him back to caring first about himself, then the world around him.

He was too old for her to play games with, too young for her to meet on the level of adult to adult. She had tried both, and he’d accepted neither. Joey Higgins had placed himself firmly in an in-between space. Adolescence wasn’t simply awkward for him, it was miserable.

He was wearing jeans, good, solid jeans, with the button fly raved about in the slick commercials, and a gray sweatshirt with the Maryland terrapin grinning across his chest. His leather high-top Nike’s were trendy and new. Light brown hair was cut into moderate spikes around a too thin face. Outwardly he looked like an average fourteen-year-old boy. All the trappings were there. Inside he was a maze of confusion, self-hate, and bitterness that Tess knew she hadn’t even begun to touch.

It was unfortunate that instead of being a confidante, a wailing wall, or even a blank sheet of paper to him, she was only one more authority figure in his life. If just once he’d broken out and shouted or argued with her, she would have felt the sessions were progressing. Through them all, he remained polite and unresponsive.

“How are you feeling about school, Joey?”

He didn’t shrug. It was as if even that movement might give away some of the feelings he kept locked so tightly inside. “Okay.”

“Okay? I’d guess it’s always kind of tough to switch schools.” She’d fought against that, done everything in her power to persuade his parents not to make such a dramatic move at this point in his therapy. Bad companions, they had said. They were going to get him away from the people influencing him, those who’d drawn him toward alcohol, a brief flirtation with drugs, and an equally quick but more uneasy courtship with the occult. His parents had only succeeded in alienating him, and hacking away a little more at his self-esteem.

It hadn’t been companions, bad or otherwise, who had taken Joey on any of those journeys. It was his own spiraling depression and search for an answer, one he might believe was completely and uniquely his own.

Because they no longer found joints in his dresser drawers or smelled liquor on his breath, his parents were confident he was beginning to recover. They couldn’t see, or wouldn’t, that he was still spiraling down quickly. He’d simply learned how to internalize it.

“New schools can be an adventure,” Tess went on when she received no response. “But it’s tough being the new kid.”