Demon Wind (4 page)

"Yes, as a matter of fact, I do." And she did. Until she’d let off a little emotional steam, Jayden had felt as if she were about to explode with the pent-up emotion that, for her grandmother’s sake, she’d been unable to express. She’d never felt so confused or alone in her life. "Dr. Cantrell, I…."

"Your grandmother was right about one thing, under the circumstances, I think polite formality is a bit redundant. My name is Tyce."

"Just say it and get it over with," her conscience demanded. Sitting up in her chair, she met his gaze before speaking. "Look, Dr. ... .Tyce," she amended. "I don’t even want imagine what you must think of me. I can’t explain what happened last night, but I assure you, I do not make love to total strangers on the beach in the middle of the night."

It wasn’t so much what she said as the way she said it that got to Tyce. There was no apology, no self reproach in her voice, just a statement of the events as she saw it. Shaken as she clearly was, by what happened between them, Jayden still had spunk. He liked that. "I’ve been too caught up in being my own judge, jury, and executioner, to make snap judgments about you," Tyce assured her. "I don’t make love to total strangers either. From the time I went to bed last night to study patient files, I’d have to say my night and today pretty much parallels yours."

"You woke up with sand in your bed too?"

"Among other things." He reached into his pocket and pulled something out. "I believe these belong to you," he said, holding out the missing bottoms of her baby dolls.

Jayden sprang to her feet and snatched the next-to-nothing garment from his hand. "You’re right, we do need to talk." The old cliche about misery loving company couldn’t apply more. If she were totally honest, she was frightened and didn’t want to deal with it alone. As an apparent victim of the same ...

dream, phenomenon, joint psychosis, or what ever it was, Tyce was the only person she could talk to about the incident. "Can I get you something to drink, glass of wine, cold beer, lemonade?"

"A beer sounds good. Don’t bother with a glass."

When Jayden returned with his beer, Tyce was sitting in the chair next to the one she’d vacated, his bare feet propped on the porch railing. Handing him the unopened can, she returned to her seat. She heard the metallic snap as he opened the beer. Okay, now what? They needed to talk, but where to start?

After taking a healthy drink from the can, Tyce asked, "Okay, so what the hell is going on? What happened last night?"

"Your guess is as good as mine. How did you feel?"

He had the audacity to chuckle.

"That’s not what I meant," Jayden insisted, irrationally pleased by his response. "During our ... well, you know ... I can’t say that I thought I was dreaming at the time, it was more like only part of me was there and the other part was a helpless bystander."

"Exactly," Tyce agreed. "I was aware of everything that happened. I certainly felt everything. It was like my body and my mind were somehow disconnected."

"Same here." Jayden took a sip of wine, not wanting to think about how comfortable she felt sitting here with Tyce, who despite last night was still a virtual stranger. If only they had met under less bizarre circumstances.

"So now we know that we were both under the influence of the same thing. Now all we have to do is figure out exactly what that was," Tyce said.

"I have one possibility, but it’s really farfetched," Jayden said hesitantly.

"At this point, short of alien abduction, I’d believe about anything. I don’t like unanswered questions."

"Before I say anything, I have a question," Jayden began. "Last night, before you saw me, before we....

What exactly do you remember?"

Tyce was quiet for a moment, trying to reconstruct last night in his mind. "I remember feeling so hot I found it hard to breathe, which didn’t make sense because my house has central air and it was comfortably cool inside. I just knew that I had to get outside to get some air. It was hotter outside than inside but instead of going back to bed, I found myself walking down the beach."

"Ditto, only my clunker of a window air conditioner bit the dust prior to my waking up. At any point, did you feel a cool wind?"

The incredible intensity of their lovemaking was so predominant in his mind that other details had faded, like the details of a dream that diminish as time passes. "It was so hot and muggy that not even the air moved. I remember thinking that the tide still rolled in so there should be a breeze from the ocean. Only there wasn’t."

‘That shoots down my only theory," Jayden said, not sure whether she was disappointed or not. The Demon Wind was a bizarre prospect but at least it was better than no prospect at all.

"Wait a minute," Tyce said as the incident became clearer in his mind. "There was a wind. I walked into it and I remember thinking how incredibly cool it felt. It also had a strange effect on me. It was almost...."

"Erotic?" Jayden supplied.

"Oh yeah," Tyce agreed, feeling the hair on his arms raise and a responding twitch in his groin as he remembered the sensation. "That was just before everything went haywire."

Figuring it best to start at the beginning, Jayden explained. "You met my grandmother. She is the most wonderful person I’ve ever known. She’s also obsessively superstitious."

"Paul Grant filled me in on her superstition quirk before I took over. She was one of his favorite patients," Tyce said, then confessed with a chuckle, "She’s such a charmer that she had me twisted around her little finger within the first five minutes."

"She has that effect on people." Loyalty wouldn’t permit Jayden to add that her grandmother was quite aware of that fact and she didn’t hesitate to use it to her advantage. "What would you say if I told you that yesterday evening, my grandmother phoned me and warned me to stay inside after dark, because it was a good night for ... a Demon Wind. I know it’s just a silly superstition. It sounds crazy. But I’ve spent the entire day trying to figure out what happened last night and that is the only explanation I can come up with."

"Can you be a little more specific about this Demon Wind?"

"Not much I’m afraid. Grams says that the Demon Wind appears on a hot, sultry night during a full moon. She claims that many a Southern belle has lost her virtue and many children were conceived on a night of the Demon Wind."

She’d actually started to look relaxed for the first time since Tyce saw her in his office today, that is, until she uttered the last sentence. The shell-shocked expression was back. It also answered the question he’d been trying to get up the nerve to ask.

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/custo...-Books/Demon%20Wind%20Kay%20Wilde%20NCP.htm (19 of 32) [8/28/2005 7:16:39 PM]

"Oh, dear Lord. I just realized that you didn’t ... we didn’t...."

Okay, more uncharacteristic behavior on his part. The possibility that Jayden could have conceived his child last night should upset him. With any other woman he’d dated it would have. Strangely with Jayden, the prospect didn’t upset him in the least, quite the opposite in fact. She was basically a stranger to him, yet she wasn’t at all.

Tyce reached over, took Jayden’s hand in his and gave it a gentle squeeze. "I’m a doctor, Jay, and I do not have indiscriminate, unprotected sex. What happened last night was somehow out of our control. If there are consequences, we’ll deal, together. Okay?"

So shaken by the possibility she hadn’t even considered, Jayden could only nod her head in response.

Doing a rapid calculation in her head, she was marginally relieved that the possibility was a small one.

That was one answer at least that she’d have in a matter of days.

"Back to this Demon Wind superstition," Tyce quickly inserted to change the subject. "What you’ve told me is all you know?"

"Fraid so," she answered once the paralysis left her vocal chords. "Not wanting to encourage her, I never asked my grandmother for details."

"You’re right about it being a farfetched theory, but it’s better than anything I’ve been able to come up with." Tyce brought the beer can to his lips, watching Jayden over the rim. She was sitting there staring into her nearly full glass of wine like it was a crystal ball which might reveal the answers if she looked deep enough. "So, we do some research," he suggested. "Most legends and superstitions have an origination point, based on some story or incident. What about your grandmother? Could she give you more information?"

"I can’t bring her into this," Jayden insisted. "She’s too shrewd by far and she knows me too well. She’d know something is wrong and worry herself sick. Nothing is worth that."

"You love her a lot, don’t you?" Tyce said more as a statement than a question. Watching the interaction between the two women in his office, the bond between them had been unmistakable.

"Yeah, I do."

"So, where do we go from here?"

What Jayden wanted to say was, "Where we go from here is that you put your arms around me and hold me," which would make her appear weak. She wasn’t a weak person and she didn’t like feeling that she was. "To tell you the truth, I’m at the point where I can barely string two coherent thoughts together, much less come up with a rational plan to research this thing."

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/custo...-Books/Demon%20Wind%20Kay%20Wilde%20NCP.htm (20 of 32) [8/28/2005 7:16:39 PM]

As reluctant as Tyce was to leave her, he didn’t miss the weariness in the voice. "I know the feeling," he said, then downed the rest of his beer. "Why don’t we sleep on it and we’ll talk tomorrow?" Tyce put his empty beer can on the table between their chairs and rose to his feet. Jayden followed suit.

Tyce reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out his business card and handed it to Jayden. "The front has the office number and the service number. I wrote my home and cell phone number on the back. If you need me or just feel the need to talk, call me, anytime, night or day."

"Thank you," she said with a shuddering sigh that went right to Tyce’s heart.

Without giving his actions conscious thought, he pulled Jayden into his arms, realizing for the first time that she was trembling. "It will be okay. We’ll figure it out."

"I’m trying to handle this thing. But I’m struggling here," Jayden confessed, admitting the weakness she hadn’t wanted him to see. Like everything else she couldn’t explain, Jayden somehow knew it wasn’t necessary to hide the real Jayden from Tyce Cantrell. From the time her father sent her to live with her grandmother after her mother’s death, fearing another rejection, she’d learned to hide her true feelings from others. Even though her grandmother had never been anything less than loving and accepting, the fear of abandonment instilled in one so young had grown roots that went too deep to destroy entirely. In every relationship Jayden ever had, those old insecurities were always there, just beneath the surface, causing her to walk away before it got too serious, before she cared too much.

Yet standing here in the light of the full moon, within the shelter of Tyce’s arms, for the first time in her life, Jayden wasn’t afraid; for the first time, she knew she was where she belonged.

"What happened between the time we were together on the beach and when we woke up in our beds?

There is a large amount of time not accounted for," she said, her cheek resting against his chest, fighting the urge to turn her head slightly so he would feel the warmth of her lips against his flesh as she spoke.

"From the accounts I read about alien abductions, the so called victims mention unaccounted for time."

Unwilling to leave the comforting shelter of his arms, Jayden leaned back slightly and looked up at him.

"If that was a joke, it wasn’t funny."

"I know. Less than admirable habit of mine. I make bad jokes when I’m out of my depths," Tyce admitted. "When things get to you, just remember that I’m going through the same thing. You are not in this alone."

"I know. I’m glad you came over, Tyce."

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/custo...-Books/Demon%20Wind%20Kay%20Wilde%20NCP.htm (21 of 32) [8/28/2005 7:16:39 PM]

"Me too. Are you going to be able to sleep?"

"Yeah, I think so."

It hadn’t been necessary for Jayden to turn her lips to Tyce’s chest for him to be affected by holding her.

Considering it prudent to make his exit before he embarrassed himself and shocked her by the soon to be unmistakable evidence of the impact she had on his libido, he released her and stepped back. "I’ll talk to you tomorrow," he told her before he turned and walked down the porch steps.

Jayden remained on the porch, watching Tyce walk down the beach in the direction of his house. Despite the circumstances of their meeting, was there a chance something good could develop as a result?

* * * *

Jayden stared at her computer monitor shaking her head in frustration. The headache she claimed to have yesterday was now a reality. She gently rubbed at her temples with the tips of her fingers. She’d slept like a baby and was up at the crack of dawn. She had a light breakfast of grapefruit, toast, and a cup of tea, then her daily morning stroll on the beach. Returning to the cottage, she hit the computer to research the Demon Wind. More than 280,000 hits and four hours later, she was still no closer to the answer. She found a movie titled Demon Wind, books, stories, legends, song lyrics, wind demons, incantations, paranormal investigators who describe cold spots where there is spirit activity as the Demon Wind, and so on, and so on, and so on, but nothing seemed to fit.

At least she felt more in control today, more like her old self, and she wasn’t a quitter. The answer was out there somewhere and she’d damn well find it. "If at first you don’t succeed," she said returning to the computer. Typing in "superstition," she hit the search key. Gee, only 196,000 hits this time.

Feeling a slight movement of her hair against the side of her face, Jayden sat back in her chair and took a deep breath. She loved a day when she could leave her windows open and let the ocean breeze circulate throughout the cottage. The curtains began to twitch and dance with more abandon. The papers on her desk began to flutter and move, forcing her to put her dictionary on top to keep them secure. If a storm was brewing, it had moved in fast. Less than an hour ago, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The forecast had predicted calm seas and clear skies for the next several days.