A Coral Kiss Part 5

"What sort of experiment?" Amy punctuated the question with a catlike yawn.

"Come and spend the rest of the night with me, Amy."

Her yawn was cut off. Her eyes widened. "Jed, I don't think that's a good idea."

"Let's try it and see what happens."

"I've told you, I'm a restless sleeper. It's not just a matter of an occasional nightmare. I'm a first cla.s.s insomniac. I wake up several times a night. And I toss and turn a lot. Believe me, you wouldn't get much sleep."

"I'll chance it."

She shook her head and her instant refusal to even consider the suggestion annoyed him. "No, I don't think so," she said flatly.

Jed got to his feet and reached down to catch hold of her shoulders. She was slender and light, even though she had a woman's strength. It was easy to pull her up beside him until she was standing in front of him. "Don't be silly, Amy," he said calmly. "We're going to give it a try."

"I don't..."

He hushed her with a kiss. "There is no good reason for you to sleep out here on the couch." When he lifted his head she didn't say anything, just looked up at him with an anxious, searching glance that told him nothing except that she was genuinely nervous about sleeping with him.

"For pete's sake," he muttered, turning her around and steering her toward the doorway with his hands on her shoulders, "why the h.e.l.l should sleeping with me be so upsetting after what just happened between us?"

She ignored the question. "I'm cold."

He reached down to sweep her nightgown off the couch. The downward, twisting movement put stress on his injured leg and Jed swore softly. "Here, put this on." He dropped the flannel gown over her head.

She disappeared briefly beneath the soft material and then her frowning face reappeared as she put her arms through the sleeves. "You've got a lot of nerve calling me bossy, you know that? In fact, I think you've got a lot of nerve, period."

"Fortunately, I compensate for my drawbacks by being good in bed."

"Hah."

"You got any complaints, lady?" He had her almost into the dark bedroom now. He kept his hands on her shoulders as he guided her toward the bed.

"If I did have any complaints, who am I supposed to take them to?" she demanded as she crawled under the covers and leaned back against the pillows to glare at him.

"Always go to the source of the problem, I say." He slipped in beside her, tangling his feet with hers.

"Come here and tell me exactly where I failed to meet your expectations and requirements."

"Dammit, Jed."

"Can't think of a single problem area, can you? I knew it."

She sighed. "Your ego could become a major problem."

He chuckled softly and cradled her in his arms. "If I've got an inflated ego where you're concerned, you have only yourself to blame. After the way you just responded to me, I'm bound to think I'm h.e.l.l on wheels in bed. Go to sleep, Amy."

"I don't think I can," she said very seriously.

"You will."

"What makes you so sure?"

In a dramatic singsong voice he droned, "Because you look extremely sleepy. Your eyes are getting heavy. You can barely keep yourself awake. Your body is limp, relaxed, you're pleasantly comfortable.

You want nothing more than to just close your eyes and go to sleep."

"I'm not susceptible to hypnotic suggestion."

"Sure you are. Creative minds are the most susceptible, didn't you know that? And anyone who writes science fiction for a living would have to be twice as susceptible as the average person."

She shook her head a little ruefully and finally gave in to the inevitable. "All right, but it's not going to work."

She was asleep within ten minutes.

For a long time Jed lay very still beside her, not daring to move for fear of waking her. She looked very sweet and vulnerable lying in his arms. Her golden brown hair was spread in sensual disarray over her shoulders. The old-fas.h.i.+oned nightgown added a charming, piquant touch.

Jed realized for the first time that one of the reasons he was attracted to Amy was the odd combination of emotions she elicited from him. Every time he looked at her he felt an urge to ravish her and an equally strong need to protect hen The mixture was fraught with an emotional danger he'd never before faced.

It was a relentless curiosity that finally drove him to disentangle himself from Amy's soft body. He didn't like loose ends. Carefully he eased away from her, watchful in case she started to awaken. She stirred once or twice, but her eyes stayed closed and her breathing remained even. Jed grinned to himself.

Maybe she was one of those so-called insomniacs who believed they were awake half the night when in reality they slept peacefully through most of it.

But the nightmare had been real enough, Jed reminded himself. And he knew something about nightmares.

He wanted to see what kind of writing could cause such a chilling, frightened scream. He'd read all three books in Amy's Shadow trilogy: Wizard's Eye, Lady's Bane and Shadow's Master. The last one wasn't due out for another few months, but Amy had let him read the ma.n.u.script. He'd found it different from the other two, although all three were tied together with common characters and a quest theme.

Jed knew from what Amy had told him that she'd finished Shadow's Master only a few months ago, just before he'd met her, in fact. The tone had seemed darker than the others, not as adventurous and lighthearted in its dealing with the perils faced by the hero and heroine. In a way it had been a better book, richer in detail and characterization, but there was no doubt there had been an uneasy edge to it that set it apart from the others.

He made his way haltingly out into the living room, absently scratching the healing wound on his right arm.

Amy kept her home computer in a corner of the room near the kitchen. She also kept a bottle of brandy in a kitchen cupboard. It was an expensive brand and she tended to dole it out in tiny, carefully measured quant.i.ties. Jed headed for the kitchen cupboard first. He would have preferred a gla.s.s of Scotch, but Amy didn't keep any in the house. She hadn't kept any since the evening she'd paid him a casual visit and found him well into a bottle.

She hadn't said anything that night, but her concern and disapproval had been evident. Whenever she offered him a drink after that, it was usually white wine. Instead of taking offense, Jed had found her gentle maneuvering rather sweet and amusing.

A couple of minutes later, brandy in hand, he sat down in front of the computer. Amy had shown him how to run the word processing program and load a disk before he'd left on the last a.s.signment. At the time he'd merely been curious, his engineering mentality coming to the fore, he supposed. Sometimes it still did that on occasion. He'd been a good engineer once upon a time. He frowned intently at the dark screen and began to fumble through a box of diskettes.

He was about to load the program when he spotted a pile of printed ma.n.u.script pages lying on one corner of the desk. Dropping the program disk back into the storage box, Jed hefted the stack of paper.

It was labeled Private Demons. Amy must have decided to print out what she had done so far. Jed picked up the ma.n.u.script and the brandy and ambled back to the rumpled couch. He sat down, flipped on the end table light and quickly scanned through the pages, starting from the back. He wanted to read Amy's most recent work.

The story seemed to be a straightforward sword and sorcery tale about a very normal young lady from California named Wanda Madison, who found herself transported against her will to another world to fight mysterious creatures of an even more mysterious dark power. The new world was an aquatic environment, and somehow in the transition process Wanda was endowed with the ability to live underwater.

Somebody, however, had made a serious mistake in recruiting Wanda for the dangerous task of demon fighting. Wanda spent a lot of time trying to explain the error, but it was too late. The problem was that the demons she was supposed to battle came from the darkest part of the sea. They represented a power that thrived in the deep, and any attempt to master them meant swimming into the black depths of the sunken caves where the creatures lived.

As it happened, poor Wanda had a lifelong fear of the dark. She also had claustrophobia.

It was a major disaster. Unfortunately, for Wanda and the aquatic people who had kidnapped her, there weren't going to be any second chances. She was their one and only hope for survival.

She forced herself to swim steadily on through the murk, half blinded by the silt that had been kicked up in the creature's death throes. She was certain that at any moment her lungs would suddenly revert to normal, human lungs and she would no longer be able to breathe water. Telling herself that the drowning sensation was purely her imagination, she struggled forward into the cavern.

The oppressive, watery darkness was a distilled version of all the childhood fears she had ever known.

Every instinct warned her there would be no escape. She would be trapped forever. Still, she kicked out awkwardly with her strange, webbed feet, struggling to maneuver the dead weight of her burden. She couldn't look at what she was dragging into the darkest, watery corridor. To do so would surely drive her over the edge of sanity. But she could sense its leg gliding limply alongside hers as the thick current caught it, could feel the occasional brush of the dead hand as it floated through the water beside her.

The eyes. If she looked at the eyes it would be all over. The sightless, staring eyes would be full of accusation and a curse that would follow her for as long as she lived. She must not look at the eyes.

In that moment Wanda would have sold her soul for a glimpse of clean light, fresh air and freedom. The trouble was, she wasn't at all certain she would have a soul to sell after she completed her grisly task.

Thoughtfully Jed set aside the last page, took a long swallow of the brandy and asked himself if describing such a scene was really enough to give a woman nightmares. Surely someone accustomed to such writing wouldn't have found the description unnerving. He wondered if Amy herself was afraid of the dark. There was so little he knew about her.

He did know what it was like to be afraid of the dark, he thought bleakly. He also knew what it was like to have it as an ally. During the past eight years he had learned to make it a friend, not a foe. At times his survival had depended on it.

He finished the brandy and slowly got to his feet. He switched off the light and headed back toward the bedroom. Amy was curled into an inviting lump under the quilt, still sound asleep. Her hair was a dark fan on the white pillow.

Feeling gratified, as though he had a right to take credit for her being asleep, Jed slid into bed.

As the bed gave and she was jostled, Amy started to rise from a dreamless oblivion. A rough, masculine leg touched hers. Subconscious panic formed from nothing, swirling to life as quickly as a thunderstorm.

Dark water surrounded her again, and for an instant she couldn't breathe.

This time she knew she was drowning. Then the hand lightly grazed her thigh.

It was just the movement of the water around her that had caused his hand and leg to brush against hers, she told herself. He wasn't alive. She mustn't panic. She was committed to this now. There was no choice but to go through with it.

But the panic swamped her completely when she felt the masculine foot snag hers. Amy surfaced from the depths of sleep, flailing wildly at the big hands and heavy legs that were seeking to clutch her and drown her. There was no scream on her lips this time. She didn't dare open her mouth. The water would rush in and steal what was left of her air supply. Desperately she fought to free herself, struggling violently against the restraining hold.

"Amy!"

She heard Jed's voice calling her, but there was no release. She was being pinned more tightly than ever.

Her arms were trapped at her sides, her legs were locked beneath the weight of a man's thigh. She couldn't move.

"Amy, stop it. For G.o.d's sake, wake up. Open your eyes. Look at me. Look at me!"

The harsh command penetrated her mindless panic, calling her back to reality. Amy drew a deep breath.

No water rushed into her lungs. She was in bed. Her bed. It was Jed's voice she heard. Her eyes snapped open.

His face was fierce and unrelenting in the shadows. It was the face of a man who could make her believe in h.e.l.l, Amy thought. Or perhaps it was the face of a man who would walk through h.e.l.l to save her.

Her breathing slowed to normal. She closed her eyes and opened them again. "I'm sorry, Jed. I warned you I'm a restless sleeper."

His grip eased. "So you said. Are you all right now?"

"I'm fine."

"Uh huh." He sounded distinctly skeptical. "I think I'm going to get you a medicinal gla.s.s of brandy. I'll be right back."

"It's all right, Jed, I don't need anything." But her protest was weak and she knew it. She most definitely needed something. The panic attacks were getting worse, just like the nightmares. Jed didn't bother to respond to her mild denial. He left and she soon heard him opening a cupboard in the kitchen. When he reappeared in the bedroom a few minutes later he was holding a hefty dose of brandy in one hand. She sat up, hugging her knees under the quilt.

"I can't afford to drink that much," she said as she accepted the gla.s.s. "Do you know what this stuff costs? I have to save it for special occasions."

"This is a medical emergency. Don't worry, I'll buy you a new bottle." Jed's face hadn't relaxed. The intent look in his eyes was unnerving.

"Well, I guess it is an emergency," she agreed, sipping at the brandy. There was a long moment of silence in the bedroom.

"How long has it been like this, Amy?"

She didn't pretend not to understand. Instead she gave a small shrug. "A few months."

"How many months, Amy?"

She sighed. "About eight or so."

"Maybe your Dad's right. Maybe the pressure of your writing is getting to you."

"Maybe."

"You don't want to admit that, do you?"

"Nope. It's embarra.s.sing. I've got one brother who can handle the pressure of politics, another who can handle the pressure of high tech corporate business and a sister who can deal with life and death. Heck, no, I don't want to admit that I'm coming apart just because I've had a couple of books published and want to write more."

"Everyone has his or her own internal limits. You have to learn to respect those limits if you're going to survive."

"I didn't know you were an amateur psychologist," she muttered, taking another sip.

"I'm not. I'm an engineer, remember? That means I know something about stress. Buildings and people can only take so much."

Amy considered that. "I'm sure you're right," she said politely.

He hesitated. "Amy, is it the writing or is it something else?"

Her head came up quickly. "Whatever it is, it's my problem, Jed. You don't have to worry about it."

"I'll make that decision."

She bit back an automatic protest, knowing instinctively that Jed would only see it as a challenge. "Suit yourself."

"Are you afraid to let me get involved?"

"You know as well as I do that this relations.h.i.+p has been running along very careful lines, Jed. Neither of us has gotten overly involved. I thought that was the way we both wanted it."

"Things change," he suggested casually. "Take tonight, for instance."

She didn't know what to say to that so she concentrated on the brandy. When she was finished she handed the gla.s.s back to him and tried a small smile. "Thanks. I needed that, as the old saying goes. If you're going to get any sleep tonight, I'd better move back out to the other room."

"No. You're staying here with me." He set the gla.s.s down on a nightstand and got back into bed beside her.