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Don eyed the man beside Jessica with gradually diminishing suspicion. “Sure. I’ll call Vernon to take up his luggage.” Don looked around but there was none.
Zach replied, “It’s in the car and the car’s probably been hauled to someplace else. I was in a wreck.”
Only he. Only he was wrecked. The others had survived in a different way. They’d escaped from life. He was alone.
Or—had he died, too, and was he just around as a haunt? He hadn’t wanted to die, and his mind had prevented it? He would come to his ghost’s limit in time, and he’d just…leave? Why hadn’t he gone with them? Why was only he there? Was he alive?
He looked at Jessica. She was probably his imagination. She was unreal, she was so beautiful. He’d drawn her from adolescent dreamings. Hannah had been the real woman, a good friend; this one was a dream.
Jessica collected a shaving kit and a shirt from the gift shop. She found socks and underwear. She brought them back to Zach. He heard himself say, “Put it on my bill.”
And she replied, “We’ll see.”
His eyes slitted as he studied her in the half light of the fading day. Yeah. She was a dream. He was probably at the side of the road… in the wrecked car…still.
He asked the iridescent woman, “Are you real?”
And she realized he was in shock. He was working on only half a brain. She said soothingly, “We all are.”
Not all.
She said, “Come.” And she led the way to the elevator. She had the key and carried the other things she’d gathered for him.
He followed, observing her walk. She had a good walk. She barely moved but her skirts did. They swayed. He blinked and looked away from her. The evening lights were dimmed by the setting sun. The hazed atmosphere was ethereal…It was weird.
They were the only ones in the elevator. As in a dream, they were alone. Such isolation was a part of a dream. The redhead would disappear… when they got to his bed.
People weren’t going to their rooms, they were going down the elevators to the dining rooms, but it seemed a dream to Zach.
The pair reached his floor. Jessica located his room on the discreet gold rectangle with black lettering and numbers. She compared the key and told him, “From the elevator, you turn left.”
He replied, “Yeah.” And he looked at her face. He was taller than she. He was a dominant male. How strange to feel that. He’d always thought of women as equals. The wreck had thrown him back into his basic male thinking. He was dominant.
At his room, it was Jessica who unlocked his door. She opened it inward, effortlessly, and he seemed to drift beside her into the room.
She looked around. It was very neat and orderly. She checked the bath and it, too, was pristine.
The accommodations were always that way.
Jess went to the bureau and opened the drawer to put in his newly purchased underwear. She removed myriad straight pins from the new shirt. She got them all. She would. Then she hung the shirt in the closet.
She put his shaving kit in the bathroom.
Then she came back into the bedroom with a glass of water, which she handed to him. She watched as he put the pill into his mouth and drank the water down.
With care, he put the glass on the table by his bed, as she pulled the coverlet back and turned down the sheeted blanket. He was watching her as if in a trance.
She hesitated and her lips parted. He took her hand into his. They were facing each other. She almost smiled and she watched mesmerized as he took a step nearer.
He regarded her very seriously. His breathing was harsh. He carefully, gently took her into his arms and…he really kissed her!
She was thrillingly shocked and her nose drew in air as her mouth opened to his tongue. Her eyes widened in surprise as her body curled against his rigid one.
What on EARTH!
And his hunger grew. He really didn’t let go of her as he discarded his jacket and stepped on the heels of his shoes to get rid of them. He was out of his sports shirt by dragging it off over his head and his trousers were no problem. Unzipped, they were peeled down…along with his underwear.
He was going to…? She was shocked as she felt a strange fever build inside her body. Her breathing was odd. She looked at him and realized he was not in control of himself. But he was only positive. He wasn’t hurting her. He was just very determined. Yeah, he was. And she was…?
She wanted him. It wasn’t compassion for his present, awful circumstances. It was him. She wanted this man. How shocking.
Why had this never happened before now? The two times she’d been involved with some man, it hadn’t been this way. It had been rather abrupt and messy.
Why this man?
By then, he’d taken her dress off over her head and her slip straps were down her arms. Her bare chest was tightly pressed against the hair on his chest and it felt…marvelous. She gasped. But she pressed against him.
He growled in a guttural voice, “So you want me.”
And pressing her round breasts in a rubbing swirl against him, she moaned!
It was as if she was an entirely different person. How could this be? She wasn’t this kind of a woman. She barely—well, that was obvious—she was bare. But she hardly knew the—
Her back was on the bed. He moved her knees as he looked down her, and he lowered himself into her cradle.
He was very good but he was quick. It just so happened that she was triggered and it was an explosion of passion! Not of love but of body hunger. Passion.
No, it was release. Surcease.
How incredible.
And she knew she was at best a distraction. A substitute. A brief replacement. It wasn’t she who was the recipient of his frantic, denying love.
With the emotional storm past, he dragged from her limp body and fell to the side of her. And he was out cold.
Two
For such a careful woman, it was a shock to Jessica to get up from the bed and look back at the man who had escaped into deep, exhausted sleep. She looked at him. He had a beautiful body. Her hands lingered on him.
Hesitating, she gazed at him. Finally, she carefully straightened him enough so that she could gently cover his body with the sheet and blanket.
Her own body was outrageously pleased and satisfied and murmuring. How could a body be separate from the mind? Well, however that was done, she was witness to her body’s obvious greed. She wanted to get back into his bed. How shocking!
Jess’s mind could have bandled Zach’s maneuvers, but it had blinked out. Her body had just…taken over. It had gone along…for the…ride?
It had most certainly been a ride. Wow. His poor dead wife. She’d never have that lustful man again.
Ummmm. How nice it had been with Zachary Thomas! How marvelous her body felt from its coupling with his. In the several times in the last five years when she’d tried it, it had never been the same for her as it had been with Zach.
She’d thought the whole experience had been lied about. But it was all true. She’d just found that out. It really was magic! It was only an awkwardly managed coupling, but how amazing.
It had to be this one man.
She looked on him, sleeping soundly. He was really something. He was out cold and snoring, a nice, comforting little bubble of sound. Her mother had always told her that a man’s snore was something to investigate.
Her mother had never meant for Jessica to find out in just this way. And it came to Jess that this might not have been the right time of the month for her to have been so recklessly careless.
Yeah. There in a stranger’s hotel room, she rearranged her clothing and tidied her hair. She couldn’t do much for the whisker burn. Although she looked for a face salve in the kit acquired in their shop, apparently whisker burn had never been a problem for men.
Jess rubbed her abraded face with some ice from the container so carefully filled by room service.
She looked at herself in the mirror. She could get out of the hotel. She could have—she should have left at six when she was supposed to leave. But they were shorthanded, and she’d agreed to spell Vera while she had dinner. What a rash decision for her to have made.
She wondered if the ghost of Zach’s wife had watched them—and if she had understood his grief. Any woman married at least twelve years to such a man would have understood him. Jessica did and she’d known him a much too brief time.
Then she realized that if she had been known to Zach, he wouldn’t have taken her. Now, that was a curious thing to consider. How could she be sure it was so? It was.
Jess discreetly left the hotel and walked toward her little house only four blocks away. There was an old, pin oak tree, which dominated the entire yard. But the pecan trees found the shade nice.
The house was hers. She’d paid for it when her redheaded, great-grandmother had left Jess her fortune. Being the person she was, Jess had split the money with her two surviving siblings. One of her brothers had died.
Jess’s little house was wood and painted white. It was a one-story frame house with roof peaks, and it sat on a corner. It was perfect for a single woman.
The porch curled around the house so that someone in a rocker could move to sit in the sun in winter and in the shade in summer. There were roses. Winter roses. TEXAS can be counter to the rest of the country. It’s where the sun spends the winter.
Any number of women had sought to share Jessica’s house. And it would have been noisy and fun to have had housemates living with her, but Jessica liked being alone in such a small, friendly town.
As Jess went up her walk, the cat was sitting on the porch with his tail curled around him in a patient manner. He gave her a growly smothered sound just like any male who is irritated with his slave being late to get home and therefore late in fixing his supper.
But the first thing Jessica did was go to her bedroom to check her calendar. She did it even before The Grouch got his supper. He mentioned her oversight in a rude yowl.
Jessica didn’t hear him. It had been a long time since she’d needed to check on—the time of the month. She pushed up her bottom lip and considered how close she was to being vulnerable with that man. She stood a while in deep thought.
The cat’s irritated yowl finally reached into Jessica’s mind. And Jess went to find the cat food. She was thoughtful and had only tea as she sat distracted at the kitchen table.
She went to bed early. The cat got up on the bed and licked and licked and licked. She asked it, “What did you do all day that you didn’t get a bath and have to do it all now?”
The cat lifted his head and speared her with an indignant look for long enough, then he discarded her and went back to licking.
Jess went to sleep.
She wakened the next morning as if she’d run the marathon—twice. She frowned at the cat in the middle of her bed and said, “If you can’t share the bed, you’ll have to sleep outside. Do you understand?”
The cat stretched and turned over to lie on his back. That was his invitation for her to spend time rubbing his fur and talking sweetly to him.
She did neither.
So the cat got down from the bed and stretched all different ways, as if sleeping with her had cramped his space, and then he went out to the kitchen to see if the mice had left anything on his plate.
The plate was pristine. Jess had begun to clean his plate because the mice liked cat food. He blinked with slow patience and waited.
The cat’s slave hurried around and made her own breakfast and skipped the coffee after the first sip. That she couldn’t drink the coffee caused her to thoughtfully sit at the table for some long time, looking out of the window and indifferent to the charming mews the cat managed to fake.
When she continued to ignore him, he went over and yowled at her. It was not a nice expression, but he was hungry, and she wasn’t doing her duty to him.
Coldly, she looked at the cat and replied, “You could waddle around the house and catch a mouse or two.”
He stalked across the kitchen floor, out the cat door and caught a lizard in about ten minutes. He didn’t yowl the hunt cry but left the lizard’s feet and head on the porch. Then he went down the alley to see what else was available.
It was a pensive day for Jessica. She didn’t have the flu. She remembered her sister Alice throwing up the morning after her husband went to the Carolinas before going to the Middle East.
Alice’s air force husband, Phil, had flown in, and said nothing to her of the reason for the surprise visit. It was allegedly a practice takeoff and landing trip. But he’d called her. She’d met him, they’d made love in her car, on the road just outside the airport. And the next day, Alice knew she was pregnant. Everyone else had scoffed. Even Phil when Alice told him. But she was and she’d known the next day.
Jessica’s face softened. Was she?
She had a slow glass of milk and nothing else. Then she dressed in a distracted manner and walked indolently to the hotel. She wasn’t too sharp that morning.
But during that day, Jess knew exactly what Zach-ary Thomas was doing. She had a nurse she chatted with at the hospital. In the late afternoon, Jess called her. “How is Mr. Thomas?”
“He saw the boy before the harvesters took what they could. This is a tough time for Mr. Thomas. He’s at the funeral home sitting with his wife. Poor guy.”
The boy’s casket would be sealed.
Jess closed her books and told the manager, “I’m leaving early.”
And he replied, “Ummm,” without looking up.
So Jessica went over to the funeral home. And Zach was sitting in a chair near the open casket. He was deep in thought and didn’t actually hear Jessica sit down next to him.
He looked at her.
She said, “This is tough. I’m sorry you have such a burden of grief so far from home. Being alone at this time must be especially sad for you.”
His eyes were very serious. “I know what I did to you last night. I have no explanation for it. I apologize. Are you all right?”
“Of course.”
“I’ve told Hannah.”
“She’ll understand.”
“This has been such a nightmare. You gave me peace last night. I can’t understand my doing something like that to a stranger. To you.” He looked at Jessica and his eyes were troubled but clear. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
He sighed and looked away as he told her, “They’re harvesting. The minister was here for some time. I really don’t need anyone.”
She started to move to leave.
“Please stay.”
She sat back and was silent.
Then he asked her, “How will I get through all this without sealing it away in an emotional pus-like boil.”
She nodded. “That about describes grief. It could possibly help you to write it all down, how it happened, and put in your feelings and emotions. It could help you to face it all.
“A lot of people can’t communicate grief. You might sell such a sharing book. But if you never sell such a story, it’s okay. You will have dealt with the whole shebang, and it’s best to do it now.”
“She went so gently.”
So it was his wife for whom he grieved.
Thoughtfully, Zach added, “She was a good woman.”
Jessica replied, “She’ll make somebody a good guardian angel.”
“She’ll be looking after Mike.”
Jess agreed, “Probably. For a while. He may want to explore.”
Zach nodded. “Since he was taken, it is a comfort that she’ll be with him.”
That made Jess frown a little. The boy had to have been—what—eleven? Maybe twelve? Was that old enough to take care of himself? To distract her own self, Jess asked Zach, “What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a teacher.”
He should be reasonably solvent. She waited.
Then Zach told her,’ ‘We came on this trip together because I’m not at home much. This was to get me better acquainted with Mike.” Again Zach was silent before he asked, “Isn’t that ironic? Now I’ll never know him. But Hannah did. She was with him. She’s still with him.”
It was clear to Jessica that Zach was not especially good father material. If she really was pregnant with his baby, she’d go it all alone. She had no need to disrupt his life.
Well, from what he said, he hadn’t disrupted his life for a wife or child. He’d lived his life his way—and on his own.
She was somewhat surprised he was sitting next to his neglected wife so uselessly. She was dead. What good was he now? She’d needed attention from him when she was alive.
Jessica started to rise, and Zach rose with her. “Would you walk with me on the beach? Yesterday’s walk saved my sanity. I’m having a hard time assimilating the fact that I’m—alone.”
She looked at him quickly, but he was looking at the waxen face of his wife.
So he did grieve. Perhaps if he’d realized nothing in life is for sure, he might have made a better husband.
If she was pregnant with his child, she absolutely would raise it alone. He was useless.
But he was a human being. One who was in grief. Belatedly, he was aware of his loss.
She asked, “Are there any arrangements you need to make?”
“The hospital and the minister both advised and guided me on those needs. They are professionals. And they were very kind. It’s helped me.”
She thought he might be a little self-centered. Well, maybe not. Nobody could do anything to help his late wife and son. They were gone.
But the son’s contribution to the parts harvest had been allowed by the grieving father.
As if clued in by her thoughts, Zach just started in on speaking about his own thoughts. “Hannah would have loved helping others.”
Jess figured Hannah worked in charities.
Zach admitted, “I’m new to the word ‘harvest.‘ We were too late for her to help anybody. That would irritate her…not being able to help somebody else. I don’t remember ever discussing what we should do-in case.”
“Most of us feel we will live forever.”
By then, they were out of the chapel and walking along the sidewalk toward the beach.
Zach mentioned, “We’ll take the early plane home.”
“Yes.” She glanced over at him. He’d included his wife and son.
He was watching her, but as she looked at him, he looked away. He asked her, “Do you like your job?”
She grinned. “I’m brilliant with numbers.” Then she added logically, “Keeping books is very satisfying tome.”
He shook his head in rejection. “If bookkeeping is exciting for you, I’ll send you all my income tax material and you can sort it out. That would be to show my gratitude for your—company—yesterday…and today. We are to leave tomorrow morning. They suggested that. They said it would be better to fly tomorrow. We’ll be home by noon.”
“I hope your life goes well.”
He watched her. “And yours.”
“Thank you.”
How odd that Jess drove to the airport early the next morning. She just sat in her car at the parking lot. The hospital airport was a shuttle port. He’d go to Corpus or San Antone or even Houston to connect with another plane to go…home.
She would never see him again. She hadn’t even asked for his address. It had been difficult for her to refrain from doing so. A part of her wanted a link.
From where she sat in her car, she watched the airplane lift and fly away. He was gone. She would never see him again.
Jess was then aware her hands were moving gently on her stomach to comfort the half orphan. The poor little beginning embryo.
What nonsense!
But she drove slowly from the airfield’s parking lot and then drove along the highway to an isolated spot along the coast. She sat and watched the water and the sky.
There was no other place that matched the places in TEXAS. She was soothed by the panorama of subtle colors and the permanence of the Gulf.
Could she actually be pregnant? Or was her body just being difficult? Wanting a man. Wanting a child?
How could such a brief meeting make her body take up this weird conduct? It was hormones and the yearning of some strange part of her psyche. That way her orderly mind could excuse this idiocy.
But why on earth would her body want to fool her that way? Or was it she who was fooling her body?
Too many experts think humans are one entity. Their brains/bodies/subconsciouses have never debated an issue? We are more complicated than we will ever understand.
In such a time, think how Zach had turned to her with only using her body. He hadn’t even thought about her as a person. Only a part of his mind remembered he’d taken her. He hadn’t lusted for her. It had been a chance act. A really stupid one.
Why hadn’t she resisted?
At the end of that day, she went home and slept in a drooling exhaustion. How could she be exhausted? She’d not done anything to be so zapped. She was grieving for a man with whom she’d had such a chance encounter?
Fiddlesticks.
Yes. Fiddlesticks. Her grandmother had used that word. It was better than the current shocking ones used in exasperation.
What had she done to ‘exhaust’ herself?
Nothing.
Jessica did the prerequisite chores and fed the offended cat. She walked the four blocks to the hotel to throw off the doldrums of her puzzling inertia.
In the middle of the morning, instead of tea, she had a glass of milk. Her stomach refused tea and she couldn’t stand to smell the coffee. She picked at lunch. She had tomato soup for supper, with crackers and a glass of milk.
Just under two weeks later, Jess skipped her period. She decided it was spring fever, and she wasn’t exercising nearly enough. She went out to jog and her breasts and stomach declined doing that.
She walked quite a distance. Not as far as she generally walked, but she had to sit down and rest before starting back.
It was the having-to-rest part that just about convinced Jess something was different. She’d ignored all the other signals.
She was quiet and thoughtful. Her work did not suffer. In that element of her life, she was brilliant as usual. But she canceled attending evening gatherings. She went to bed early. She slept like a log. Out cold. No awareness.
Zach called her in a month. He asked in a husky voice, “Are you okay?”
Toplofty, she replied, “Of course. Are you?”
He replied, “It’s strange to go into a silent house.”
Another week went by and nothing changed. Well, some things stayed changed. Jessica could tell something was going on. Her breasts were fuller. She continued to be picky with food. She finally went to a doctor…in Corpus. She was, indeed, pregnant.
She drove back to Sea View slowly and in some acknowledged shock. How could she do this to a child? Life was rough enough as it was. How could she face her parents? They’d be embarrassed and loyal.
Her sister Alice would be avidly curious. A stranger? How could Jess give in to a stranger! Miss Goody-Two-Shoes dallying with a stranger? Who was it!
Even the doctor had asked her that one. He was young, pleasant looking and interested. If she would for someone else, why not for him?
Being pregnant in Sea View’s intimate, gossipy limitation was not going to be easy. How strange that she didn’t even consider canceling the baby. Why not?
She wasn’t sure why not. Being pregnant really wasn’t real to her. She had to assimilate the fact first. Then she considered her situation.
She was self-supporting. No one had to donate to her health and welfare. She was on her own and could manage.
It would be rough on her family. They would be supportive and loyal, but it would be rough for them. And for her.
Would she find out Zach’s address and let him know?
No.
Why burden him with such a problem?