He felt his groin tighten, felt the electricity between them build once more, and this time he made no attempt to postpone the climax that quickly engulfed him. Gasping, he felt himself surging into her, and as the heat in his groin poured into her body, he felt the strange electrical charge on her skin begin to fade. He drew her even closer, trying to prolong the sensation, desperate to keep her energy flowing toward him, but it was too late.
As his climax faded, so also did the tingling of her skin, and at last the urgency of his grip on her began to relax. His breath escaped him in an explosive gasp, and first one of his arms fell away from her, then the other. His breathing, which had come in great heaving pants only moments before, eased slowly into its normal rhythm, and he felt himself begin to sink into the soft gray depths of sleep.
As she heard Glen’s breathing drift into the gentle whisper of sleep, Anne lay still, part of her wishing merely not to waken him, but another part of her not wanting to move until she understood what had just happened between them.
Glen’s lovemaking today had contained an element she’d never experienced before, and though part of her had been excited by it — even thrilled by it — another part of her had been almost frightened. There was something different about him just now; a desperation. It was almost as if he were trying to reach within her, to grasp something, to draw something from her that she wasn’t giving him.
Finally leaving the bed, she moved into the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror. Faint red marks were beginning to show on her body where Glen’s fingers had dug into her flesh.
Involuntarily, she shuddered.
She took a shower, dried herself off, and began dressing.
On the bed, Glen lay naked, his arms spread, his legs akimbo, his eyes closed in sleep.
He was thinner than he’d been before he went into the hospital, and there was an unhealthy pallor to his face.
That would change. Within a week or two he would be back to his normal 180 pounds, and a few hours in the sun would bring the color back to his skin.
But what about inside?
What about that desperation she felt from him when they’d made love? Would that go away, too?
She leaned over and kissed him gently on the forehead, but he didn’t stir. Before she left the room, she covered him with a blanket, but even as she started out the door she turned to look back at him.
He was still Glen, still her husband.
But he was different.
The heart attack had not only damaged his body; it seemed to have altered his spirit as well.
As she left the house and started toward her office at the Herald, Anne told herself that as his body recovered from the trauma it had undergone, Glen’s personality would heal as well.
The next time they made love, everything would be as it had once been.
But what if nothing between them was ever quite the same again?
To that question, she had no answer.
CHAPTER 24
On the morning after his release from the hospital, Glen Jeffers came awake slowly, just for a moment feeling the same cloudy disorientation he’d experienced so often during those first few days after the heart attack, when his mind, fogged with drugs, had refused to recognize his surroundings. But this morning his mind cleared quickly, and he luxuriated in the feeling of awakening in his own pajamas, in his own bed, in his own house. And it had been his wife who had awakened him briefly a while ago to kiss him good-bye, rather than one of the nurses arriving abruptly to strap a sphygmomanometer around his arm, insert a thermometer under his tongue, or stick a clip on his finger to check his oxygen absorption.
Home.
He was home, and he was alone.
He stretched languorously, listening to the silence of the house. How long had it been since he’d enjoyed this kind of quiet?
He could barely even remember.
Of course, it had been quiet in the hospital, but it was a different kind of quiet: the hospital held the sepulchral silence of illness, rather than the peaceful quiet of home. In the hospital he had always been aware of someone coughing or moaning in the adjoining rooms. This morning he could only hear Hector muttering to himself from the perch in his cage in Kevin’s room. And from beyond the house Glen heard only the chirping of more birds, a distinct improvement over the steady drone of traffic that had laid a continual noisy siege to the hospital.
Feeling at peace, he got up, slipped into his bathrobe, shoved his feet into his comfortably dilapidated slippers, and went downstairs, following the heavenly scent of fresh-brewed coffee into the kitchen, where a note in Anne’s handwriting was propped up against the coffee maker:
You shouldn’t drink this at all, so try to hold it down to one cup.
It was at the very moment that his eyes fell on the note that he first had the strange sensation that he wasn’t alone in the house after all. It was as if he were being watched: the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, and he felt himself tensing. But when he turned around, the kitchen was empty; not even Boots was there. The odd feeling passed, and he reached into the cupboard, took out the largest mug he could find, and filled it to the rim. Moving to the kitchen table, he sat down. A moment later Kumquat, obviously assuming he held no ill will against her disinterest at his homecoming yesterday, darted in from the dining room and leapt into his lap. Stroking the cat with one hand, he pulled the front section of the morning’s Herald over and gazed at the article prominently displayed at the top of the page to which the paper had been opened.
Police Report No Progress
in Capitol Hill Slaying
Nearly a week after the discovery of the body of Shawnelle Davis in her Capitol Hill apartment, Seattle police report that there are still no suspects in the slaying of the thirty-two-year-old prostitute.
Although police investigators admit that the killing bears certain resemblances to those attributed to Richard Kraven, they are currently ruling out the possibility that this may be a copy-cat crime, despite suggestions that the execution of Kraven himself might have inspired the killing. According to Detective Mark Blakemoor …
Glen pushed the paper aside, not bothering to finish the story even though he was absolutely certain his wife had written it. Why was Anne still harping on Richard Kraven? The man was dead, for God’s sake! Picking up the sports section, he scanned the headlines, then turned to the business section. Buried in a lower corner of the second page he found a small story noting that not only had work on the Jeffers Building continued to progress during his illness, but they were actually two days ahead of schedule. He reread the short article, wondering if the implication that the work was progressing better with him out of the picture was intended or inadvertent, then decided that it wasn’t there at all, that he was just being oversensitive. Still, a call to the office after he’d had a shower couldn’t really be considered work, could it?
Abandoning both the paper and the mug of coffee, he started toward the stairs, but once again the peculiar feeling that someone else was in the house came over him. This time he went through the downstairs rooms, feeling more and more foolish as each one proved to be as empty as it should have been. Still, even when he finally went upstairs to the bathroom, he found himself glancing through the open doors to the kids’ rooms, just to be sure.