At Close Range. Tara Quinn Taylor

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      “I love you,” she said. It wasn’t the first time.

      Pressure built again—less pleasurable this time.

      “It’s okay,” she continued, lifting a finger to his lips as he tried to speak. “You don’t have to say anything. I don’t expect anything from you. I just wanted you to know.”

      He should speak anyway. She deserved more than the long kiss he gave her, so Brian caressed her in the way he knew she liked, bringing her to a second orgasm. It wasn’t enough. But it was a start. More than he’d been able to give any other woman.

      And during the aftermath, as he lay with her, there was none of the usual letdown, and not as much of the guilt. As always, an image of Cara’s face after they’d made love appeared in his mind. Her features were hazy. Quickly replaced by another sight. His wife’s face smeared with blood. His and her own.

      And then the sounds replayed themselves. Her cries as she tried to free herself from the wreckage.

      And the young man’s words as he stood outside their smashed vehicle. “Won’t do no good for them to deport me. I’ll come back.”

      The words were in his native tongue. But Brian had spoken Spanish fluently since college.

      “Let me out!” It took him a second to realize it wasn’t his panicked, dying wife he was hearing.

      Cynthia was already out of bed.

      “Let me out!” Panic filled the childish voice. “Let me out!”

      By that third call Brian was halfway down the hall to the spare bedroom where Joseph Applegate slept when he and his mother spent the night—something that had only happened on weekends. Occasionally.

      “He’s at it again.” Cynthia’s voice also held a bit of panic as Brian caught up to her. She stood back as Brian raced to the boy, grabbing him off the chair by the window where Joseph was pulling at the blinds and pounding on the glass.

      “No!” he screamed, kicking and punching, as Brian wrapped his hands around the youngster’s waist, removing him from immediate danger. “No!”

      “You’re all right now, Joseph.” Brian spoke in quiet, reassuring tones, holding on to him until, spent, the boy fell limp in his arms. He handed Joseph to Cynthia.

      “Shh, baby, it’s okay.” Cynthia’s voice was calmer now that she was with her son, holding him. Now that he was safely away from the window. Clothed in the robe she’d pulled on as she’d run from Brian’s room, she held Joseph to her, speaking softly but firmly.

      Joseph snuggled his face into his mother’s chest, breathed a ragged sigh and settled back to sleep.

      “He’s soaked,” Cynthia whispered, rocking the boy as though he weighed nothing. Once his breathing was even, she quickly laid him on the bed, changing his soiled disposable undergarment with the ease of practice. She’d been handling the boy’s sleepwalking episodes far longer than Brian had.

      Brian gave the small head a professional caress. The toddler was cool to the touch. “He’ll probably sleep fine now until morning.”

      “And as usual he won’t remember anything, so we still won’t have any idea what’s causing this.” She sounded tired, resigned, but worried. At Brian’s recommendation she’d taken Joseph to Dr. Roberta Browning, one of Arizona’s best pediatric psychiatrists; Brian had already run every medical test he could think of, and found nothing to explain Joseph’s symptoms.

      There was no sign of internal organ illness. No sign of physical or sexual abuse.

      If the lack of answers frustrated Brian, it had to be excruciating for his mother.

      “Something must have happened when he was with his father.” He repeated what he’d told her before—the same thing Roberta had said. It wasn’t much of an explanation.

      It was all they had. “It’s odd that he doesn’t mention the father he saw regularly,” Roberta had told Brian. Though Joseph’s parents had been divorced since he was a baby, Donald Applegate had had regular visitations until his death.

      Brian had asked Cynthia about it. Other than the fact that her ex-husband had had another lover while married to her, she’d said nothing negative about her son’s father. It was obvious, at least to Brian, that she still carried feelings for the man whose life had been cut short.

      That was something they had in common. Unexpectedly losing someone they loved.

      Brian took one last look at the window, wondering what would have happened if it had been open—what could happen in the future, if they didn’t get things under control.

      “Let’s bring him in with us just in case,” he said now, an arm around Cynthia’s shoulders as he led her back down the hall.

      The boy needed security. Whatever was causing the sleepwalking, whatever was causing the bed-wetting, might never be known to them, but the symptoms could still be treated. The cure, Brian was certain, especially in one so young, was a stable, two-parent home environment. An environment like the Summerses had to offer Felicia.

      An environment he could offer to Joseph and his mother.

      

      “Have you seen the Sun News?” Hannah didn’t bother with a hello when Brian finally answered his phone at four forty-five the next afternoon. She’d just come off the bench to be handed a copy of the weekly paper by her judicial assistant. Brian’s picture took up half the front page. Hannah’s name was in the second paragraph.

      “Hannah? No, I’ve had back-to-back patients since I got in this morning. To be honest, I’m not even sure what time it is. What’s up?”

      Relieved that he hadn’t been broadsided, that she could break the news to him gently, Hannah silently reread parts of the article. Her protective instincts reared all over again.

      “They’ve gone too far this time,” she said, pissed off and ready to take someone on. “It says here that you refused to comment.”

      “Only by default. I had some bad news to deliver to the parents of a three-year-old. The reporter completely slipped my mind.”

      Immediately taken back to her own experience as the parent of one of Brian’s patients, remembering the strength he’d given her when she didn’t have enough of her own, Hannah glanced away from the paper.

      Kids were supposed to be free from worry, from stress and pain. Childhood was for naiveté and laughter. Playing. No responsibility.

      Or so they said.

      “Is the three-year-old going to be okay?”

      “It doesn’t look good.”

      Holding back the tears that would fall if she’d let them, tears that she’d grown adept at fighting over the past year, she looked again at the article while questions she couldn’t ask raged through her mind.

      How long had the little girl been sick? What were her symptoms? How old were the parents? Were they a close family? Were there other kids? Did they have СКАЧАТЬ