Wolf River, page 21
Tension coiled within him as he cupped her breast, caressed its smooth lush softness and felt her quiver. When he took her nipple in his mouth, she moaned and his groin ached with the urge to take her now, all of her, to bury himself in her hard and quickly. But he held back, taking his time as he pleasured her, savoring the way her body clenched with exquisite tension as he circled his tongue around the taut peak with languorous, teasing strokes.
“Stop…no, don’t stop…” she breathed, and he grinned, then kissed her neck, his mouth pressing against the soft flesh.
She tasted delicious, felt delicious. He’d never wanted any woman so much. Never felt anything like what he felt for her.
“We’re only just beginning,” he whispered in her ear.
“Oh, God, Jase.” She kissed him fiercely, twining her legs about him.
He loved each breast in turn, tormenting her nipples with his mouth and his thumbs, arousing her until she couldn’t even whisper, but just gasped and arced helplessly against him, her hands scraping down his back.
Only then did he slide his hand lower, stroking her hot lithe body as his blood coursed through him, raging like a fire.
His muscles were rigid with self-control as at last he brushed his fingers against the tangle of dark curls between her thighs and felt a shudder of anticipation run through her.
She felt like damp velvet beneath his fingertips. Slowly, watching her eyes, he slid his finger inside her. She was slick and ready, her breath coming now in gasps.
Instantly she opened her legs, her eyes shimmering like green crystals into his, nails digging into his shoulder. She wrapped her legs around him, her body straining toward his.
“Jase, now.” Her hand teased his erection, moving with firm, rhythmic pressure. His throat thickened. “Please…now…you’re driving me crazy…”
“Hell, sweetheart, that’s nothing compared to what you’re doing to me.” His voice was raw, his lust roaring as at last he moved inside her.
He filled her gently at first, then urgency swamped him. He plunged more deeply. She took him in, welcoming him with frenzied thrusts and soft cries, her body arching fiercely in rhythm as he thrust deeper and harder, faster and faster.
Their bodies fused in a mad ecstasy as sanity fled, the earth spun away, and neither knew where one ended and the other began.
Erinn only knew that Jase filled her senses, her body, her world and she would be empty without him.
Together they twisted and rocked upon the sofa, as sweat slicked their skin, and pleasure exploded again and again within them. The world outside was forgotten. Fortune’s Way, the Wheeler brothers, even Devon, were no more.
There was only the two of them in this big drafty barn, the roaring fire, and the need that sent them soaring, flying, spiraling to the clouds, racing to the moon, beyond the stars, until a splintering climax shook them to their cores and they free-fell back to earth. Floated at last down and down and down onto the cushions of the sofa, locked and sated in each other’s arms.
Dazed, Erinn lay with her head nestled upon Jase’s chest. Her breathing had slowed, and sanity was returning in small, rational trickles. Yet she didn’t want to move. The moment was perfect.
Firelight flickered gently through the barn, across the sofa. Jase’s body was warm and solid against hers. She closed her eyes and sighed with pleasure as his breath ruffled her hair and his arms tightened around her.
The peace of that drifted away suddenly as she remembered. Devon. Back at the house…the Fortunes, Ginny…
“What time is it?” she shot up to a sitting position, her throat dry.
“Time to start all over again?” Jase murmured. He tugged her back down, but she shot up again, shoving her curls from her eyes, staring at him. “How long have we been gone from the house?”
He grinned then, consulted his watch, the only thing he was still wearing. “About an hour.”
An hour. She closed her eyes, opened them quick. “They’re all…looking for us. Wondering where we are—”
He chuckled, and reached for her, pulling her back down atop him. “Should we hightail it back there naked or take a minute to put on our clothes?”
“You—” She broke off, laughing, almost seduced anew by the gleam in his eyes, the lazy, wicked smile that made her blood race.
Somehow she found her lips exploring his one more time, lingering, nipping, before she pulled away abruptly. If she didn’t, it would soon be another hour…or longer, before either of them remembered the outside world again.
What was she doing?
More to the point, what had she done?
“We have to go back,” she muttered, pulling away. “Right now.”
Jase sighed and sat up, letting her go, watching as she raced around, gathering up her clothes, tossing his shirt and jeans at him.
She was more beautiful than ever at this moment and he wanted her again. Hell, he wanted her all night.
He drank in the sight of her breasts before she snapped on that wispy pink bra and pulled her silk top over her head. Her bottom curved enticingly both with and without the pink lace thong she pulled on, and as she yanked on her pants, he figured he’d better stop looking or they’d never get out of here before dawn.
“Okay, so you’re eager to go back. I’m not insulted, not at all,” he said, tugging on his jeans. “It’s Ginny’s brownies, I figure. They’re almost as good as her pies, but—”
“What are we going to tell them? That we got lost?”
He laughed. The sound made her smile, in spite of the panic that had begun building in her chest.
“That’s as good an excuse as any, isn’t it?” Jase started buttoning his shirt. “Of course no one in my family’s going to buy it, and neither will Ginny, but maybe—” He broke off frowning.
“Erinn?”
She stood frozen, barefoot in her pants and silk top, a frozen expression in her eyes.
“Baby, what is it? Are you all right?” He reached her in a split second, but even then, her eyes were glazed and she was shivering as if she were outside coatless in a snowstorm.
“Erinn!”
Suddenly she teetered forward and he caught her up, sweeping her into his arms.
In two swift strides he reached his bed and set her down gently. Her eyes were open wide, staring, but she wasn’t seeing him. Because whatever she was seeing was terrifying.
She was trembling all over, her lips quivered, she was trying to form words.
“Erinn, can you hear me?” He bent over her, touching her face, but he already knew the answer. She couldn’t see him, or hear him. She was gone.
The darkness was terrifying. She flew down the black tunnel like a rocket, all the breath sucked out of her, and she was hollow but for the terror.
The coffin lay ahead in the darkness and the mist…everything was murky. Where was she…a cave? No…underground? She was cold, so cold. Through the wooden boards like walls enclosing her she saw the figure…still, so still…
Dead, she thought, horror filling her throat like sand crawling with bugs.
No…alive…there was still life…still beating of the heart…beat…beat…beat…
It grew fainter, weaker. Beat…beat…
“She’s going to die!”
The words echoed through her head, spinning around and around before they faded to nothingness and she was left with only the clutching horror, the fear, and the cold.
The coffin was gone, the air sucked from Erinn’s lungs. Light burned against her eyes, cutting like glass. She was blind, gasping, freezing.
Alone…
Not alone. She tore her eyes open, squinted against the light. Jase’s face slowly took form. He was bending over her, speaking.
She couldn’t hear the words.
Jase’s stomach plummeted. This had happened before, the first day he met her, when she’d collapsed beside her Jeep. But this time, the words she’d screamed were different. And she wasn’t waking up as quickly.
Fear had him pounding the keys of his cell phone for an ambulance, but at that moment she opened her eyes. Thank God. But just like the last time, he could tell she wasn’t really there with him…not yet.
“Hold on, Erinn,” he told her, tossing the phone onto the bed. “I’ll be right back.”
He grabbed a bottle of wine from the counter, sloshed some into a glass, and strode back to the bed.
Color was beginning to seep back into her ashen cheeks and as he reached her she was struggling to sit up.
“It’s okay, baby,” he said gently. Her eyes still had that glazed look, her hair was tumbled anyhow about her shoulders. She looked shaken, fragile, lost.
“Let me help you.” He propped up the pillows and eased her back against them.
“Sip this,” he told her, placing the wineglass in her trembling hands, his own closing around her fingers, steadying her grip.
Erinn’s skin felt clammy all over as she sipped greedily at the wine. It burned, comforting in its warmth and tartness as it slid down her throat. Her head ached, pounded, as slowly, the final numbing effects of the vision faded.
Another journey down the tunnel. The third in a week. Something about these was different though. The effects were even more intense, each one lasting longer. Usually they were gone in an instant; usually they came when she was asleep. Now they were closer together, and each time she was being dragged deeper. Each time it was becoming harder to wake up, to shake off the mist and the cold and the darkness.
And the fear.
“Better?”
Jase’s voice called to her again, summoning her out of the fog, and she focused on his face, clinging to the solid strength of him, to the here and now.
“Y-yes. I think so.” She took a final sip of wine, trying to think, to ignore the worry and questions in his eyes.
“So,” he said, as he set the glass down on his nightstand with a clink. “Here’s the deal. We’re already going to be facing an interrogation when we get back—that’s what comes from having a big nosy family around.”
He cupped her hand in his big one, and his gaze bored into her. “So as long as we’re already missing, we can be missing a little while longer. We can take as long as we need for you to tell me exactly what that was all about.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
Jase was waiting for an answer. He deserved one—Erinn knew that—but still the words lodged like clay in her throat. This had been her secret for so long. A secret between her and Detective McKindrick of the NYPD.
This was the one part of her life she’d never been able to take control of. And she’d never quite figured out if the visions were a weakness, a gift, or simply a burden. But they were something that continually reminded her that Erinn Winters was not and might never be the completely independent, in-control-of-her-own-life adult Tiffany Erinn Stanton had worked so hard and long to become.
Now they were getting even more out of control, not less so. Jase had been with her during two of them. And as she gazed at him now, she was uncomfortably aware of the concern in his eyes—and also the implacable determination. He wasn’t going to give up, not until she told him the truth.
She could fight against telling him, refuse, delay—but it wouldn’t be easy. And when it came right down to it, did she really want to fight him at all?
“It began the night my mother died.” Her voice was low.
He didn’t move. But his hand tightened around hers. Then he waited.
And so she told him. She’d opened up to him before about having witnessed her mother’s suicide, but this time she explained how she’d fainted in reaction to that gruesome event. And how ever since that horrible night, some eerie monstrous door seemed to have cracked open in her soul, leading to a tunnel she didn’t want to enter. It took her to places she didn’t want to go, showed her things she didn’t understand, or have any desire to see—visions of death and danger and darkness.
She told him how this prescient knowledge followed no pattern, but how it used to be infrequent, and had come to her nearly always as she slept. But now, since the day she’d decided to come to Wolf River, the visions had been coming more often, spaced closer together, and during her waking hours.
There’d been three visions in the past week.
Three visions of darkness and of fear, of what may have been a person locked in a coffin, entombed on the brink of death.
Heavy silence filled the old barn when she finished.
Jase released her hand and Erinn pushed herself upward from the pillows, trying to read his thoughts.
His voice when he spoke was level, making it hard to tell what he was thinking. “The last time—when you fainted outside Fortune’s Way, you said, ‘Is it happening now? I have to stop it.’” he studied her. “This time it was ‘She’s going to die!’ Erinn, do you remember saying those things?”
“No,” she replied grimly. “But I seem to remember thinking them as I stared at the…the figure in the coffin, willing the vision to tell me more, show me more—something that could help. What good is it to have a vision if I can’t do anything?” she asked in frustration. “I don’t even know if it’s already happened, or if it’s happening right now, or…” She swallowed. “If it’s going to happen soon…or in the future.”
Her voice trailed off dejectedly. “If I said it was a woman, then…it must be, but…” Her green eyes were dark as a river in winter. “If it’s happening now, Jase, I could save her, if I only knew where, and who.”
Jase moved to the bed, sat down bside her, and took her in his arms.
“It’s not your fault, Erinn.” He kissed the top of her head, holding her close. “You told me yourself you don’t control the visions. You have to wait it out, wait for them to show you what’s out there. It seems to me there’s going to be more coming, and maybe the next one—or the one after that—will reveal what you need to know. Then you’ll call your friend McKindrick at the NYPD. See if he can put it all together.”
She nodded against his shoulder. “Yes, you’re right. As soon as I have something worth telling. Vague images won’t help him,” she muttered. Then she sighed and drew back, gazing at him with a troubled expression.
“I’m going to have to tell Devon. Another vision might hit me anytime—and she could be with me. It would scare her to death.”
“You’re right. Did Devon know about them before, when she was a little girl? You lived in the same house until she was four, didn’t you?”
“Yes. But I don’t think she knew. The visions used to only come at night when I was asleep. Her room was down at the other end of the hall, and she never mentioned anything to me.”
She gave a start, as memory rushed back. “Speaking of Devon—”
On the words, his cell phone rang, and Erinn swore silently.
Sure enough, it was Lily.
“Forget dessert,” his sister said in Jase’s ear. “It’s almost time for breakfast, Jase. Did you and Erinn get carried off by aliens—or was it wolves?”
“Aliens, but they’ve dropped us back at my place. Is Devon okay?”
“Better than okay. She had brownies and pie and now she and Pop are playing gin rummy—in the stables. I think she’d sleep in the hayloft if we’d let her.”
Jase shot Erinn a reassuring smile at his sister’s words. “That won’t be necessary. We’re on our way.” He clipped the phone to his belt.
Erinn was already scrambling up, finger-combing her hair.
She was in her responsible, big-sister, carry-the-world-on-her shoulders mode again, he noticed. Her next words confirmed it.
“I can’t believe I completely deserted her all this time.” She hurried toward the door, muttering to herself as she yanked it open. “We never should have—”
Then she stopped herself. She didn’t mean that. Just looking at Jase made her toes curl. And that was nothing compared to what he did to the rest of her.
“Maybe we should have picked a better time,” she corrected herself as Jase threw back his head and laughed.
“We’ll have to plan it out better next time. So we don’t have to rush.” He kissed her again, a warm, lingering kiss that had her melting against him.
When the kiss ended, he took a leather jacket from a hook on the wall and draped it around her shoulders. “We can’t have you freezing to death on my account.”
There’s no chance of my freezing to death when I’m anywhere near you. Erinn thought as they went out together into the Montana night. I’m much more worried about spontaneous combustion.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Wind whipped through the craggy rocks atop Eagle Peak as Culp lay bleeding beside the rig.
It was two in the morning. The road was deserted, dark as the undercurrents of a river. If coyotes were howling, he couldn’t hear them. This high up, he could only hear the wind screaming through the trees, lashing at the branches, pounding him with merciless ferocity.
As if pummeling anew his already battered body.
Its icy breath blasted through his torn and filthy shirt as he dragged himself slowly forward, blood oozing beneath him onto the road.
He didn’t go far. Just a few feet from the open door of the truck.
Then a few more.
After that he simply lay there, his bloodied jaw resting against the pavement. Thinking about the beating. The knife slashing across his temple.
Then thinking about LeeAnn.
Regret filled him, every bit as painful as his broken ribs and as the bruises his assailants had inflicted across his body.
He was trying to accept the fact that he’d never get to see his sister again. Never have the chance to tell her good-bye.
Lying across that dark, lonely road, Culp wished this last hand had played out differently. He didn’t cotton to throwing in his cards. Never had.
But drop by bloody drop, he knew the game was over.
Don Culpepper’s lucky streak had come to an end.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Lily called the next morning as Erinn padded into the kitchen in search of coffee. She’d been hoping it would be Jase.
