A Coral Kiss Part 18

Jed took one long stride away from the rail, reached down and hauled Amy to her feet. Holding her by the shoulders he said grimly, "You didn't kill him, Amy. Even if you had, it would have been self-defense."

"It's the nightmares. Why can't I shake the dreams?"

"Probably because you've been keeping this all locked up inside for months, and you're not the kind of person who knows how to deal with that kind of information. And because you've got an overactive imagination. And because that d.a.m.n box is still down in those caves."

She stared at him. "What's that got to do with it?"

Jed shook his head once. "Amy, you left everything as it was. The box is still there with everything in it.

Don't you understand? If LePage knew about that box, someone else probably knows about it, too."

"LePage said he was working for himself. Working alone."

"Where did he get his information?"

"I don't know," Amy whispered fretfully. "Jed, I've wondered about that for months. He implied he'd gotten the information from someone but he didn't seem worried about that person coming after him.

Maybe he killed whoever told him about the box. He was certainly capable of it."

"Maybe. Maybe not. There are a h.e.l.l of a lot of loose ends dangling here, Amy."

"I know," she admitted.

"We've got to get that box out of the caves, sweetheart."

Her head jerked up. "No! Absolutely not. I'm not going back into the caves and neither are you."

His mouth tightened but he didn't argue. Instead he pulled her closer, crus.h.i.+ng her into his warmth.

"All right, Amy, we'll talk about retrieving the box some other time."

"The box is safe enough where it is. No one will ever find it. Not unless I show the way."

"Amy, from what you've told me you didn't spend very long in those caves that night. You were scared and in a hurry. My guess is that box isn't very far inside the entrance, right? Anyone who's willing to spend a little time could probably find it."

Amy pulled herself free of his grasp. "Why are you so concerned about retrieving it?"

"I've told you, loose ends."

Or was it the fact that six of those loose ends were emeralds? Amy thought suddenly. No, she trusted Jed. She had to trust him; she'd gone too far.

"What's the matter, Amy?" Jed's big hands moved soothingly on her lower back. "Scared you've said too much?"

She tried to pull away and Jed reluctantly let her go. "I let those stupid guava juice c.o.c.ktails get to me last night. After eight months of keeping my secrets to myself, I got a little drunk and the first thing I know, I'm spilling the whole story."

"Because it was tearing you apart."

"You told me once, after that night when I woke up screaming, that it was usually best not to talk things out," she reminded him. "You said it made things more real to put them into words."

"I was talking about nightmares. But you haven't been having ordinary, run-of-the-mill bad dreams, have you, Amy?"

"No," she admitted. "I think I've been living in some kind of time loop. I can't forget what happened eight months ago. I keep reliving it in my dreams. Jed, there have been times when I thought I might go crazy."

"Loose ends."

She looked at him. "You keep saying that."

He shrugged, shoving his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. His eyes were fixed on her face, his expression very intent. "The loose ends are haunting you. You don't have all the answers. You don't know for certain who really killed Wyman twenty-five years ago. You wonder who else might know about the contents of that box. And you must have wondered from time to time if there are any more LePage types running around looking for you. Given an imagination such as yours, those kinds of questions could easily drive you nuts. Especially since you've been trying to handle it all alone."

Amy winced. "You sound like an authority on the subject."

"An authority on loose ends? Yeah, I guess I am. Sometimes you have to clean them up in order to go on living, Amy."

"I can't bear the thought of going back into those caves," she whispered.

"I'll be with you this time."

Amy was silent.

Jed listened to the telling silence and then breathed a deep, understanding, "I see."

"What do you see?" Amy had wandered over to the railing. She glanced around at him a little uneasily.

"I see it's occurred to you already to wonder if I'm another LePage."

"You don't seem overly concerned about it."

He shrugged. "I'm not. It's a logical consideration. But 1 think deep down you trust me. You would never have let the guava juice get to you last night otherwise."

Amy half smiled. "You don't know Rosie's c.o.c.ktails. They're potent."

Jed strolled over to stand beside her, his gaze on the sea. "What, exactly, was the point of trying to drink Rosie under the table last night?"

"I'm not sure. I started asking her questions about the past and she seemed willing to talk. So I kept asking questions."

"About your parents?"

Amy nodded. "She said Michael Wyman was a troublemaker. She implied he tried to cause trouble between my parents first by siccing his girlfriend on my father. When that failed, Rosie said he turned his charm on my mother. Judging from those letters I found in the box, the charm must have worked."

"Maybe. Up to a point. Don't try to figure out all the details yet, Amy. You don't have the facts."

"I don't want them."

"You might not want the facts about your parents, but you can't ignore the emeralds. Not now when you know someone else is aware of them."

"That someone else is dead."

"LePage got his information from someone," Jed insisted softly. He flattened his palms on the rail and leaned forward. "There are some similarities between me and LePage, aren't there?"

Amy hesitated and then said, "Yes."

"He set up a casual meeting with you shortly before you were due to come to the island. You thought he was a friend. Someone with whom you had a few things in common. When he got here he ingratiated himself with your family. He went diving with you. Asked questions about the caves. In short, he used you."

"Yes."

"And in the end he tried to kill you."

"Yes." Amy's voice was feather soft but very steady.

"When I started asking questions about him and what had happened between the two of you, you must have started wondering about me," Jed continued thoughtfully, relentlessly.

"When you said you worked for the government, I decided I could stop worrying."

"I could have been lying. It would be easy enough to do. I had to come up with some explanation after Stearn told you I hadn't been in a car accident."

"Were you lying to me, Jed?"

"No."

"What really happened to you on the last trip?" she asked.

"I made a mistake. I was forced to trust someone who wasn't exactly trustworthy. It cost me. But in the end I got lucky. It could have cost me a great deal more."

"Your life?" She turned to stare at his hard profile, her eyes full of silent anguish.

Jed's lips moved in a rueful smile. "Or a vital portion of my, uh, structural integrity. You heard what Stearn said. If that bullet had been a little higher..."

"You might have been singing soprano." Without stopping to think, Amy went into his arms, clinging to him. "Oh, G.o.d, Jed, you could have been killed."

"I think that might have been preferable to the alternative Stearn suggested. I don't sing very well. And if I'd had to spend the rest of my life wondering what it would be like to make love to you, I probably would have gone off the deep end."

"It's not funny!"

"Sorry. My sense of humor sometimes leaves something to be desired." His arms were closed firmly around her and he was cradling her head on his shoulder.

"Yes, I've noticed." Amy lifted her head, smiling tremulously. Her ringers clutched the open collar of his faded denim s.h.i.+rt. "Actually, I think we would have gotten along reasonably well, even if Stearn's hypothesis had come to pa.s.s."

Jed looked pained and skeptical. "You think our 'friends.h.i.+p' would have been enough?"

"Uh huh. Especially given the fact that you're a very resourceful man. And as Rosie mentioned, you have wonderful hands."

Jed shook with laughter and Amy buried her flushed face in his s.h.i.+rt. It was so good to hear him laugh, she thought. So very good. Warmth and rea.s.surance flowed over her, driving out some of the chill that had invaded her when Jed had first begun asking questions.

Jed's laughter broke some of the tension, but when the moment was past, Amy sensed the beginning of a subtle change in him. He grew quiet and a little withdrawn. He didn't mention the box in the caves again for the rest of the day, however, and Amy was profoundly grateful. She had told him the stark truth when she said she did not want to face the thought of retrieving the box.

The remainder of the morning went by quietly. Amy dug out the notepad she had brought with her and curled up on a veranda seat to outline another chapter of Private Demons. Jed, too, found some paper and a collection of rulers and pencils in Douglas Slater's study. He arranged everything on a table near Amy's seat and began to sketch the design of another intricate bird cage. This one, Amy noticed, was light and airy and full of graceful, curving surfaces. It amazed her somehow that a man who was so hard could produce something as whimsical as a beautiful cage for small birds.

Jed got up at one point to put some Vivaldi on Doug Slater's sophisticated stereo system. The music drifted through the open house. Amy decided it was probably the right kind of background music for Jed's designing work. She wanted to make a joke about the differences in their musical tastes, but Jed seemed too preoccupied to appreciate the punch line.

Amy felt better by lunchtime and her appet.i.te was back in full force. She and Jed ate a quiet meal in the kitchen and then went back out onto the veranda for the remainder of the afternoon. Conversation between them diminished virtually to nothing.

There was no hostility in the air, Amy told herself as she covertly glanced at Jed's intent expression. It was silly to look for problems where there weren't any. Jed wasn't pus.h.i.+ng her about the box. He must have accepted her decision regarding it.

But by dinner Amy knew that something had changed. Jed seemed more withdrawn than ever. He offered her a gla.s.s of wine which she ruefully declined and poured himself a gla.s.s of Scotch. He helped her sh.e.l.l and steam shrimp and prepare a salad, but he didn't offer a great deal of friendly conversation in the process.

Several times Amy almost asked him what he was thinking about, but she never quite worked up the nerve. She didn't want to talk about the box again and she was afraid that was what was on his mind.

It wasn't until after dinner that she began wondering if it was something other than the box that was bothering Jed.

Her vivid imagination seized the new possibility and ran with it. By ten o'clock that evening she was convinced she knew what was really wrong.

The problem was simple and straightforward, and it was based on one of her deepest fears: Jed was trying to deal with what he had learned about his lover. Amy wasn't the sweet, innocent woman of somewhat limited experience he had a.s.sumed. She had a past and that past involved one death in which she'd been involved and a possible murder by one of her parents. Furthermore, Amy had proven herself to be the kind of woman who was capable of swimming over a drowned man's body in order to hide a small fortune in emeralds.

Amy knew instinctively that it was one thing for a man to be acquainted with violence and quite another for him to accept a woman who had been involved in a questionable drowning and the disappearance of several gemstones.

Amy got very little done on Private Demons as the evening wore on. She could almost hear the questions Jed was probably asking himself.

At five minutes after ten Amy couldn't take it any longer. She quietly excused herself and went upstairs to bed. Jed looked up from his bird cage sketch, nodded politely and watched her walk up the stairs. He made no move to follow.

Why hadn't he followed? Amy wondered dismally as she paced her bedroom. Couldn't he even bear to sleep with her now that he knew her secrets?

She tortured herself with variations on that theme for almost twenty minutes. Then she started getting angry. Who the h.e.l.l did he think he was to pa.s.s judgment on her? She was the same woman he had been so determined to seduce when he came home with a bullet wound in his leg, a knife slash on his arm and a set of bruised ribs. Nothing had changed, except, of course, that now he knew the truth about her.

Maybe Jed considered her "unfeminine."

Maybe he did find nothing attractive about a woman whose past involved death and emeralds.

Maybe he'd been lying to her all along. Maybe he had only used her to get to the emeralds.

Amy felt dizzy as her imagination went wild with all the possibilities.

Jedidiah Glaze wasn't exactly Mr. Perfect, Amy told herself forcefully as she stalked out onto the veranda. He played with guns, he spoke little about his past, he showed even less interest in the future, and he probably didn't know the meaning of the word commitment.

And heaven help her, she was in love with him.

Amy halted at the veranda railing, her whole body tensing as she acknowledged the truth at last. She was in love with Jed. She'd been in love with him for weeks, perhaps a couple of months. She should have realized her true feelings when she had gone to Dr. Mullaney and gotten a prescription for birth control pills.

At the time she had told herself she was just being pragmatic and prepared. She had seen the sensual hunger in Jed's eyes once too often, and with a woman's sure instinct had known where it was bound to lead. The thought of cutting off the relations.h.i.+p had never occurred to her. She had camouflaged her love for him behind a facade of friends.h.i.+p, but deep down a part of her had known the truth.

She was in love with Jed and now that he knew the truth about her he was already backing away from the limited, uncommitted affair they had begun.

Amy's emotions took over. She turned on one bare foot and marched toward the bedroom door.

Flinging it open she stalked down the hall to the head of the stairs. She could see Jed down in the living room, still hunched over his design. He didn't look up until she spoke.

"It's not as though I was expecting marriage," she announced with cold pride.

That got his attention. Warily he raised his head to look up at her. Amy braced her hands on the banister and stared back at him with an expression of blunt challenge.