Whispers at Midnight (51 page)

Aware that they were being watched, covertly and not so covertly,
on all sides, Carly nodded and let him pull her to her feet. He kept her hand in his as he led her off toward the kitchen.

“So what’s going on with—?” She started to ask him about the investigation, but he cut her off with a shake of his head.

“I don’t want to talk about it right now. I’m dead beat, and I want—” He broke off to pull her through the kitchen door.

“What?” she asked as the door closed behind them.

“Guess,” he said, and backed her up against the refrigerator and kissed her. By the time he lifted his head, Carly was dizzy and breathing fast and quite ready to forgive and forget that she hadn’t had so much as a word from him in more than forty-eight hours.

“I thought you were hungry,” she said, leaning back against the refrigerator and looking up at him. From the little self-satisfied smile that curved his lips she was sure he was able to see everything she was feeling in her eyes, but there wasn’t much point in worrying about it—he could pretty much always tell what she was thinking anyway.

“I am, but not for food. Antonio and I grabbed McDonald’s on the way home.” He kissed her again, so hotly that Carly practically melted where she stood.

“Carly?” Sandra opened the door and poked her head through. Still plastered against Matt with her arms around his neck, Carly felt slightly self-conscious. But, though she turned her head to look at Sandra, she didn’t let go.

“Hm?”

Sandra was looking slightly self-conscious too. “I’m going to be spending the night out. I just wanted to let you know.”

“Oh, yeah?” Carly looked at Sandra with interest. A dozen unspoken thoughts flashed between them. With Matt present, though, the conversation was left unsaid. “Okay. Fine. See you tomorrow.”

“Have a good night,” Sandra said with the slightest of naughty twinkles, and withdrew.

“Wow,” Carly said thoughtfully, leaning against Matt but still staring at the closed door. “That worked out.”

Then as she realized all that her words had implied she looked up at Matt. He was smiling, his eyes dark and gleaming wickedly as he met her gaze.

“Why do you think I brought Antonio home with me? He needed his woman, I need my woman, and we both need a decent night’s sleep. This way it works out for everybody.”

She surveyed him a little severely. “Your woman, huh?”

“You got a problem with that?” He was nudging her back against the refrigerator as he spoke, leaning into her, rocking against her.

“It sounds a little sexist, don’t you think?” She was way too conscious of how good he felt.

“Oh, yeah?” He nudged a little harder. His hands were sliding down over her butt now, pulling her up against him.

“Yeah.” Then she gave up. “Otherwise, I have no problem with it at all.”

He smiled down into her eyes. “Let’s go to bed.”

That brought her out of it. She immediately thought of all the interested pairs of eyes in the living room.

“This is going to be embarrassing,” she said.

The kitchen door opened and Erin and Mike Toler walked in. They both stopped short, looking at Matt and Carly with undisguised interest.

“You’re right, this is embarrassing,” Matt said in her ear, then as her arms dropped from around his neck he stepped away from her and looked at Mike, who shifted uncomfortably. “I thought you were going home.”

“We’re going to have a sandwich first,” Erin said, then added with a twinkle, “How was the roast?”

“Great. I recommend it.” Matt caught Carly’s hand and pulled her out of the kitchen. To Carly’s great relief, they ran into no one else on the way to the stairs. Sandra and Antonio were apparently already gone and Dani and Lissa were nowhere in sight.

“Hurry,” she urged him, already a good two steps ahead and tugging on his hand as he climbed at his normal pace. If there was any chance to avoid another embarrassing encounter, she was ready, willing and able to take it.

“Mike’s not making a nuisance of himself, is he?” Apparently unaware of her concern, Matt was frowning over something entirely different as they reached the upstairs hall.

“With Erin, you mean?” So he’d finally noticed. Well, that prospective little pow-wow in the kitchen had been hard to miss.

“Erin?” He sounded genuinely surprised. “I meant with you.”

Carly stopped dead and looked over her shoulder at him. One glance, and she realized that he genuinely hadn’t a clue. Honestly, men.

“You,” she said, shaking her head at him, “are obtuse.”

He pushed her on into his bedroom and closed the door. Wrapping his arms around her, he kissed her, then lifted his head to say, “You want to explain that remark to me?”

“Later,” she said, and pressed her mouth to his. Annie broke them apart by scratching on the door. Matt cursed and reached around with one hand to open it, and the little dog trotted in. Behind her came Hugo, who crossed the room and leaped onto the bed with the air of one who owned it.

“Do you have to come complete with your own zoo?” He sounded mildly disgusted as he and Hugo exchanged measuring stares.

“Love me, love my—” She broke off to grin at him.

“Yeah, I know. Lucky for the furball there that I do.”

He would have kissed her again but Carly, reminded of certain urgent personal needs, pulled herself out of his arms.

“I’ll be right back,” she promised.

She went into the bathroom and closed the door. While she was in there, she took a second to brush her teeth and hair and apply a little lip gloss. By the time she was satisfied with what she saw in the mirror, her insides were melting and her heart was beating like a bunny’s.

It was unsettling and fun and
wicked
to get so hot from just thinking about sex.

Ripe with anticipation, she walked back into the bedroom and stopped dead. Matt was lying on his back in the middle of his big bed, fully dressed except for his shoes, with Hugo curled up purring near his head. His eyes were closed and he looked completely limp. As Carly drew closer, gaping at him disbelievingly, a snore issued from between those chiseled masculine lips.

Was that the way her life worked or what? Forget all dressed up
and no place to go. This was way worse: she was all revved up and no way to come.

Sandra’s rollaway bed was made up in the corner, but Carly barely spared it a glance. If she couldn’t have sex, she could at least sleep with Matt. It wasn’t quite what she’d had in mind, but it would do. Yes, it would definitely do.

Sound asleep, Matt looked sweet and boyish and endearing in addition to being his usual handsome and sexy self, of course. Grinning a little as she thought how little he would relish the first part of that description, she put on her pajamas, pulled back the covers—he was on top of the blanket, and she knew from experience that she had no hope of shifting him even if she tried with all her strength—and climbed between the sheets.

Then she turned off the bedside lamp and snuggled close, planting a kiss on his stubbled cheek. On his other side, Hugo purred like a motor.

“Catch you in the morning, sweet cheeks,” she whispered in Matt’s ear.

And she did.

Afterward, Matt showered and dressed and then went on downstairs while she finished dressing, ostensibly to let Annie out but really, Carly knew, to take the edge off the gauntlet for her if he could. It was early, but the chances that no one would be around downstairs were so slim as to be nonexistent. This was a major embarrassment opportunity, and fate wasn’t going to let her miss it, she knew. Her life just didn’t work like that.

As she headed toward the kitchen, she could hear snatches of conversation. Good God, it sounded as if all three of his sisters were in there. She almost turned tail and went back upstairs, but that would be cowardly. Anyway, the situation had to be faced sometime. Might as well get it over with.

As Carly approached the door she heard Lissa say, “So I guess that just about kills your ‘no sex under my roof’ rule, huh?”

“There’s something I forgot to tell you about that rule.” Matt sounded completely unruffled. “See, it applies to everyone in this house—but me.”

“No
fair,
” Lissa said, and then Carly walked into the kitchen. Lissa, Dani, and Erin were sitting around the table, and Matt was leaning against the counter drinking a cup of coffee. Four pairs of nearly identical coffee-brown eyes immediately focused on her, one rueful, the others amused.

“Good morning,” Carly said, and hoped like hell that her face wasn’t turning red.

“Good morning,” they answered in chorus. Lissa grinned openly at her. Erin and Dani twinkled.

“Want some coffee?” Matt said.

“Thanks.”

As he turned around to pour it for her, Erin grinned and gave her a thumbs-up.

Twenty minutes later, she and Matt were in his car. By way of pillow talk earlier, Matt had told her something of how the investigation was going. He’d told her about how Marsha had spent nearly a month in the home as a girl; he’d discovered that, according to their records, she and Carly had been there at the same time. They had been in the
infirmary
at the same time, along with two other girls: Genny Auden and Soraya Smith. He was having somebody try to track down those girls—women now, they were all four to six years older than Carly—as they spoke.

“I think something happened in that infirmary,” he’d said. “That’s the only connection I can find between you and Marsha. You were eight years old. You don’t remember consciously. But I think it’s there in your nightmares.” He had looked at her and seemed to hesitate. “How do you feel about driving out to the Home with me and looking around and seeing if anything jogs your memory?”

She had agreed. So now here they were in his car, entering the gates of the Home, having driven all the way up to the northernmost tip of the county to reach it.

Funny to think that she hadn’t been back here since the morning when her grandmother had arrived to pick her up, Carly reflected. She’d lived in Rocky Ford, a smaller town even than Benton, until the social worker had come to take her away. She and her mother had been dirt poor and her mother had had a drinking problem—all
right, she’d heard a neighbor describe her mother as a “stinking drunk”—although her mother hadn’t been raised that way. But Carly hadn’t known that then; she’d learned the facts later, when she’d been grown, from her grandmother. Apparently her mother had been wild to a fault as a teenager, capping a tumultuous few years by climbing on the back of an even wilder boy’s motorcycle and eloping with him in the teeth of being warned that if she left like that she could never come back. Subsequently, Carly had been born, the boy had run off with someone else and eventually been killed in a car accident in Tennessee, and her grandmother had, as promised, refused to take her daughter back. But when the social workers had tracked her down and notified her that Carly had been abandoned and was being kept in the County Home for Innocents, her grandmother had agreed to take Carly in. And eventually she’d grown to love Carly, and Carly had grown to love her.

But those eight days before her grandmother had come to take her away had been among the loneliest and most frightening in her life.

Looking at the low brick buildings now, as she walked toward them from the parking lot with Matt beside her, Carly thought they looked pleasant, bathed in sunshine and surrounded by acres of green grass with a playground and a basketball court off to one side. There were children outside—
poor little children
—and more children inside, most of them young teens, a few sitting around the common room watching TV, more walking the halls, one boy with a buzzed head glimpsed through an open door sitting on a twin bed in a tiny room.

Matt spoke to an older woman who came out to greet them. Carly caught fragments of the conversation:
Hello, Sheriff
and
I called
and
it’s through here.
But she wasn’t really listening; she was too busy taking it all in, absorbing it through her skin, reliving rather than just remembering it.

She’d been so scared.

“Are you okay?” Matt asked in a low voice as he took her arm to follow the woman, and for a minute she was, because he was there, his hand warm and strong against her skin, his eyes concerned for her. She nodded, and then there it was in front of her, the waiting
room with the scarred wood counter where the children who had needed medication had come for their doses, and beyond the counter a door: some kind of gray metal, with a small square glass window. It was open.

There was only one, he just had an allergic reaction. I put him in another room.

Thanks, I appreciate it.

Carly heard Matt and the woman talking as if from a long way away as she pulled free of Matt’s hand and walked into the room, which was unoccupied. It was small, with a good-sized window that looked out over—not a barn, but a shelter—a rickety-looking shelter in an area surrounded by a board fence. That pen had held a donkey once, and some chickens, and a couple of baby goats and a little pig. She had loved the animals… .

They were still there, the bunk beds. White painted iron, twinsized, one on each wall. She had slept in the top bunk on the left. Carly looked at it. It was the same: metal springs, a thin mattress made up with a blue blanket and a flat pillow. At the time it had seemed an awfully long way off the ground. It still did. Carly saw that the edge of the top mattress was even higher than the top of her head. She’d had to climb a ladder to get up there.

The ladder was still there, attached to the far end of the bunk. Carly walked around to it and climbed up. She was wearing white capris and a black linen shirt that buttoned up the front and tennis shoes, and climbing up was easy, and so was crawling out onto the bunk.

Creak. Creak.
The sound was the same.
Be careful not to fall off
—she heard the warning again in her head. There had been an older woman working here then, too, a nice woman who’d watched over them all day and warned her not to fall. She
had
been careful, sleeping with her back pressed up against the wall, scared she’d roll.