Before I Sleep (25 page)

“Anyway, I called a real estate agent. I'm going to sell the house. And all of that got me thinking about guilt. It's amazing what guilt makes us do. Look at you. You're risking your job.”

“I'm risking my job to try and save a man's life.”

“Come on, Carey. You know that nothing you say on your show is going to save Otis. There's no need to risk your job.”

She shook her head. “That man is not going to go to his death without somebody speaking up for him. And this society is not going to execute him without someone standing up to say it's wrong.”

“Why you?”

“Someone has to do it.”

“It's guilt, Carey. Guilt because you had a hand in it. Guilt because you feel responsible. You're destroying your life just the way I destroyed mine, and for no more reason.”

“You're one to talk.”

“I'm one who
can
talk. Just take it easy on the air. What needs to be done isn't going to be done there.”

“Unless I can get Bob from Gulfport to confess in detail and turn himself in.”

“Anything's possible, I guess. But anything else is just going to get you fired.”

“That's my problem.”

“I care, Carey. That makes it my problem.”

She didn't know how to take that. She stared at him, feeling irritated and strangely hurt. She didn't like him saying that he cared, not after all this time, but there was no reason it should hurt.

“Okay,” he said after a moment. “It's your business, not mine. But it wouldn't hurt to reconsider. That's all I'm asking.”

She wanted to stop this discussion, so she took the easy way out. “I'll think about it, okay?”

“Okay.” He rose and started clearing the dishes. “So you haven't found anything in the press.”

“I haven't finished looking.”

“Want me to help?”

They picked up the to-be-read stack of clipping copies and divided them. It was well after midnight, but neither of them especially cared if they were dragging in the morning. Some things were more important.

At some point, Carey realized the words were swimming before her eyes, and that her mind wasn't even absorbing them. “I've got to stop,” she said. “I can't see straight, and if I found something, I probably wouldn't even recognize it.”

“Me too,” he said. But he didn't move immediately.

He looked every bit as tired as she felt, but she had the distinct impression he didn't want to go. Thinking about how he said he had spent his evening, she guessed she could understand that. She felt an ache of sympathy for him, but didn't know what she could do to help.

“Time to go,” he said, appearing to shake himself out of reflection. Without looking at her, he rose, carried his mug to the sink, then headed for the door.

She followed him, feeling a mixture of things she didn't care to identify. Feeling
anything
about Seamus Rourke was like testing a tooth that ached. There was no telling when the wrong touch might cause unbearable pain to flare.

At the door he turned to say good night, but he never spoke the words. Their eyes met, and something shifted in the air, making it electric—like the calm before the storm.

He felt it, too; she could see it in the way his pupils dilated, and his face seemed to take on a drowsy expression that had nothing to do with sleep.

Her heart began to beat heavily, and her mouth opened slightly.
No,
said some sane portion of her mind. Don't do this. Don't let this happen. The pain had nearly torn her apart last time. Hell, she'd hardly even dated for fear of an involvement that could cause her that kind of pain again.

Now here she was, her entire body suddenly straining toward Seamus as if she were a flower and he the sun she so desperately needed.

But desire was spiraling deep within her, building a whirlpool that was about to draw her in. Heaviness was filling her limbs, making her feel soft and pliant, and the screaming protests of her common sense seemed far away and muffled, and unimportant.

And he hadn't done a thing except look at her with that slumberous expression she remembered all too vividly. That look had always been a promise of exquisite pleasure and complete forgetfulness, a call to join him in another world where no one and nothing existed except the two of them. It had always been a promise that for a little while she would be the center of his universe, everything else forgotten.

But only for a little while. That hard-learned lesson held her back now, hovering over the whirlpool of need that was making her throb in every cell.

Afterward, memory always returned, and she was always once again the forbidden fruit, the sin he shouldn't have committed, the pleasure he didn't deserve. How many times had she seen that transformation grip him, turning him from ardent, laughing lover into guilty widower?

She couldn't bear the pain again.

She started to turn away, to save herself. At least she thought she did. She felt the muscles tense in preparation, even though her feet, glued to the floor, didn't move at all.

But before she could escape, before she could even try to, he reached out and drew her into his arms.

She was lost then. In an instant she weakened, grew pliable, rediscovering the warm, soft place deep inside her that only he could reach. Everything else slipped away but her awareness of him and how he made her feel.

His chest was hard yet welcoming, and she fit against him with a comfort that she had felt with no one else. It was as if their bodies were matching pieces of a puzzle.

And the strength of his arms around her back answered some long-buried yearning, filling an emptiness—and making her feel safer than she had felt since the last time he had held her this way.

“Carey …” He barely whispered her name, then bent his head and covered her mouth in a deep kiss that wasted no time heading straight for her soul Her palms spread on his back, feeling his heat and strength through the thin layer of cotton, and her hips instinctively sought to press against his. And today and yesterday and tomorrow all slipped away as she spun dizzily into a maelstrom of need.

“God, I've missed you …” His words were husky, broken, as he lifted his mouth from hers and dragged air into his lungs. “Carey …”

Her name on his lips had sometimes sounded like a curse, but right now it sounded like a prayer. She dug her fingers into his back, hanging on for dear life, wondering how she could have survived for so long without this wild, heady,
warm
feeling he gave her. How could she have forgotten …

His mouth covered hers again, his tongue took possession of its hot, wet depths, driving away thought. His hands stroked her back, memorizing her slender contours, awakening nerve endings to forgotten pleasure, fueling the heavy ache between her thighs.

More … oh, she needed so much more! Impatient anticipation gripped her, causing her to hold her breath in hope that his hands would move to touch her aching breasts, or to draw her up more tightly against him. Every cell in her body was aching with the need for more and more…

And suddenly an icy tendril of fear wormed its way into her awareness, freezing her.

What was she doing?

Her hands gripped his shoulders and shoved, tearing her away from him. Breathless, aching, hunched almost as if she expected a blow, she stared at him, and said hoarsely, “No… no.”

His hands had already begun to reach for her again, but they froze in midair. He closed his eyes, drew several deep, ragged breaths, then nodded.

When he looked at her again, she could see hurt, disappointment, and yearning. But she could also see determination.

“Good night,” he said, and walked out, closing the door behind him.

She cried into her pillow before she fell asleep, probably the best reminder of why she didn't want to get involved again with Seamus Rourke. He was the only person in the world who could do that to her.

She
had
done the right thing by breaking it off. Even though her entire body, which had long since turned off any strong sexual impulses she might have felt, felt almost raw with aching need. Even the brush of the sheets on her skin seemed to have an erotic effect, reminding her of what she had just turned away, reminding her that she hadn't made love in five years, and that a young, healthy body wasn't happy being celibate.

But she knew where it would have led. For her, sex could never be divorced from emotion. If she invited Seamus into her bed, she'd be inviting him back into her heart, and the price on that was too high to bear.

So she tossed and turned restlessly, and took aspirin for the headache that crying had given her, and sucked on a lozenge to soothe a throat sore from sobbing, and wondered why life seemed to have turned into a living hell.

For a while she stared at the darkened ceiling and played a what-if game with herself. What if she'd never met Seamus? Would she be happily married to some other lawyer right now, with rugrats sleeping in the next room?

But she couldn't imagine a life wherein she'd never met Seamus Rourke. He was too large, too significant, too much a part of the person she had become. He overshadowed any possible image of a life in which he'd never played a part.

And John William Otis was beginning to shadow her in the same way. In fact, if she didn't find a way to save that man, there was going to be a blight on her life.

Men. Sometimes she wished she'd gone into a convent.

By four, Carey was out of bed again, smoking a cigarette and drinking a glass of milk in the hope that it would soothe her enough to let her sleep. Absently, she pulled the stack of clippings toward her and started scanning them again. She read four of them, found nothing she didn't already know, and decided she was probably wasting her time by reading the rest.

She was about to toss them all back into the box when she saw that there were several in the stack from an Atlanta newspaper. Otis's brother lived up there, she remembered. It would be interesting to see what spin they had put on the murder and trial.

More of the same, basically. She was beginning to yawn seriously and rub her eyes about the time she pulled the next one toward her, but the headline snapped her wide awake again.

Killer's brother committed.

The younger brother of Florida killer John William Otis was committed to Channel Mental Hospital last week, sources close to the family say. James Henry Otis, 18, of Atlanta, apparently suffered a nervous breakdown in the wake of the sentencing of his older brother to death.

The Otis brothers were involved in a previous murder trial eight years ago when John was charged with murdering their father. The older Otis was acquitted on grounds of self-defense when it became known that the two brothers had suffered years of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their father.

James Otis was adopted at the age of eleven by a Florida family who subsequently moved to Atlanta. “Jamie,” said one source, “has been torn up by his brother's trial.”

Since coming to Atlanta…

Committed.
The word seemed to swim and grow before Carey's eyes.

Committed

Unstable. And caring enough for his brother to suffer a nervous breakdown when he was sentenced.

And it had happened
after
the sentencing, when the verdict was already in, when no one would have been looking for any new information.

Her heart slammed, hard, and she stared blankly across the room. But James Otis had an
alibi.
There was a sworn affidavit in his brother's file. He had been home in Atlanta the weekend of the Kline murders. Worse, he had been just a kid. How could a kid have come all the way down here?

But who else would John Otis be so determined to protect?

And who would be more likely to lie to provide an alibi than James Otis's adoptive mother?

C
HAPTER
15

7 Days

S
eamus decided that lack of sleep had made him crazy. So crazy that he was glad to stop tossing and turning and get up and go to work. So crazy that he actually hatched a lunatic plan. He tried to tell himself it was all Carey's fault, but he knew better.
He'd
been the one who'd kissed
her.

He hadn't planned what had happened in the foyer with Carey, and he'd have been a lot happier if it hadn't occurred. He hadn't really thought about it before, but it was beginning to seem that he lacked the promiscuity that appeared to characterize the rest of the males he knew. That might have been a blessing if his marriage had survived, but it was proving to be a curse instead.

Where was the constant searching for greener pastures that most men seemed to experience? Carey was a familiar pasture to him, yet she could still light a fuse of desire in him that hadn't been lit since they split up.

For the first time he thought about the fact that he hadn't seriously dated a woman since her, or even thought of bedding a woman since her. He had thought he'd reached some plateau of maturity where he didn't respond to just anything in a skirt. Now it seemed he didn't respond to anything but Carey, and his response to her was as strong as any he had ever felt.

And he didn't like that at all.

The two of them couldn't get along for any length of time, no way, no how. Sooner or later they were at each other's throats. There was his guilt that drove her crazy, and her obsessiveness that drove him crazy, and there was no way in hell they were going to change their basic natures. They were both the types to get fixated on something and not be able to shake loose of it. That'd be okay if they got fixated on the same thing, but otherwise it could be maddening.

So, as the guy once said, the thing you most dislike in other people is the thing you most dislike in yourself.

Peas in a pod, too similar to live together, that's what he and Carey were.

But all the rationalization in the world didn't ease the need that was crawling along his nerves now, a need that only she could assuage.

He figured that little scene with her qualified him for the jerk-of-the-year award. Hadn't his dad always told him that it was best to let sleeping dogs he?