Part 5 (1/2)
”What sort of experiment?” Amy punctuated the question with a catlike yawn.
”Come and spend the rest of the night with me, Amy.”
Her yawn was cut off. Her eyes widened. ”Jed, I don't think that's a good idea.”
”Let's try it and see what happens.”
”I've told you, I'm a restless sleeper. It's not just a matter of an occasional nightmare. I'm a first cla.s.s insomniac. I wake up several times a night. And I toss and turn a lot. Believe me, you wouldn't get much sleep.”
”I'll chance it.”
She shook her head and her instant refusal to even consider the suggestion annoyed him. ”No, I don't think so,” she said flatly.
Jed got to his feet and reached down to catch hold of her shoulders. She was slender and light, even though she had a woman's strength. It was easy to pull her up beside him until she was standing in front of him. ”Don't be silly, Amy,” he said calmly. ”We're going to give it a try.”
”I don't...”
He hushed her with a kiss. ”There is no good reason for you to sleep out here on the couch.” When he lifted his head she didn't say anything, just looked up at him with an anxious, searching glance that told him nothing except that she was genuinely nervous about sleeping with him.
”For pete's sake,” he muttered, turning her around and steering her toward the doorway with his hands on her shoulders, ”why the h.e.l.l should sleeping with me be so upsetting after what just happened between us?”
She ignored the question. ”I'm cold.”
He reached down to sweep her nightgown off the couch. The downward, twisting movement put stress on his injured leg and Jed swore softly. ”Here, put this on.” He dropped the flannel gown over her head.
She disappeared briefly beneath the soft material and then her frowning face reappeared as she put her arms through the sleeves. ”You've got a lot of nerve calling me bossy, you know that? In fact, I think you've got a lot of nerve, period.”
”Fortunately, I compensate for my drawbacks by being good in bed.”
”Hah.”
”You got any complaints, lady?” He had her almost into the dark bedroom now. He kept his hands on her shoulders as he guided her toward the bed.
”If I did have any complaints, who am I supposed to take them to?” she demanded as she crawled under the covers and leaned back against the pillows to glare at him.
”Always go to the source of the problem, I say.” He slipped in beside her, tangling his feet with hers.
”Come here and tell me exactly where I failed to meet your expectations and requirements.”
”Dammit, Jed.”
”Can't think of a single problem area, can you? I knew it.”
She sighed. ”Your ego could become a major problem.”
He chuckled softly and cradled her in his arms. ”If I've got an inflated ego where you're concerned, you have only yourself to blame. After the way you just responded to me, I'm bound to think I'm h.e.l.l on wheels in bed. Go to sleep, Amy.”
”I don't think I can,” she said very seriously.
”You will.”
”What makes you so sure?”
In a dramatic singsong voice he droned, ”Because you look extremely sleepy. Your eyes are getting heavy. You can barely keep yourself awake. Your body is limp, relaxed, you're pleasantly comfortable.
You want nothing more than to just close your eyes and go to sleep.”
”I'm not susceptible to hypnotic suggestion.”
”Sure you are. Creative minds are the most susceptible, didn't you know that? And anyone who writes science fiction for a living would have to be twice as susceptible as the average person.”
She shook her head a little ruefully and finally gave in to the inevitable. ”All right, but it's not going to work.”
She was asleep within ten minutes.
For a long time Jed lay very still beside her, not daring to move for fear of waking her. She looked very sweet and vulnerable lying in his arms. Her golden brown hair was spread in sensual disarray over her shoulders. The old-fas.h.i.+oned nightgown added a charming, piquant touch.
Jed realized for the first time that one of the reasons he was attracted to Amy was the odd combination of emotions she elicited from him. Every time he looked at her he felt an urge to ravish her and an equally strong need to protect hen The mixture was fraught with an emotional danger he'd never before faced.
It was a relentless curiosity that finally drove him to disentangle himself from Amy's soft body. He didn't like loose ends. Carefully he eased away from her, watchful in case she started to awaken. She stirred once or twice, but her eyes stayed closed and her breathing remained even. Jed grinned to himself.
Maybe she was one of those so-called insomniacs who believed they were awake half the night when in reality they slept peacefully through most of it.
But the nightmare had been real enough, Jed reminded himself. And he knew something about nightmares.
He wanted to see what kind of writing could cause such a chilling, frightened scream. He'd read all three books in Amy's Shadow trilogy: Wizard's Eye, Lady's Bane and Shadow's Master. The last one wasn't due out for another few months, but Amy had let him read the ma.n.u.script. He'd found it different from the other two, although all three were tied together with common characters and a quest theme.
Jed knew from what Amy had told him that she'd finished Shadow's Master only a few months ago, just before he'd met her, in fact. The tone had seemed darker than the others, not as adventurous and lighthearted in its dealing with the perils faced by the hero and heroine. In a way it had been a better book, richer in detail and characterization, but there was no doubt there had been an uneasy edge to it that set it apart from the others.
He made his way haltingly out into the living room, absently scratching the healing wound on his right arm.
Amy kept her home computer in a corner of the room near the kitchen. She also kept a bottle of brandy in a kitchen cupboard. It was an expensive brand and she tended to dole it out in tiny, carefully measured quant.i.ties. Jed headed for the kitchen cupboard first. He would have preferred a gla.s.s of Scotch, but Amy didn't keep any in the house. She hadn't kept any since the evening she'd paid him a casual visit and found him well into a bottle.
She hadn't said anything that night, but her concern and disapproval had been evident. Whenever she offered him a drink after that, it was usually white wine. Instead of taking offense, Jed had found her gentle maneuvering rather sweet and amusing.
A couple of minutes later, brandy in hand, he sat down in front of the computer. Amy had shown him how to run the word processing program and load a disk before he'd left on the last a.s.signment. At the time he'd merely been curious, his engineering mentality coming to the fore, he supposed. Sometimes it still did that on occasion. He'd been a good engineer once upon a time. He frowned intently at the dark screen and began to fumble through a box of diskettes.
He was about to load the program when he spotted a pile of printed ma.n.u.script pages lying on one corner of the desk. Dropping the program disk back into the storage box, Jed hefted the stack of paper.
It was labeled Private Demons. Amy must have decided to print out what she had done so far. Jed picked up the ma.n.u.script and the brandy and ambled back to the rumpled couch. He sat down, flipped on the end table light and quickly scanned through the pages, starting from the back. He wanted to read Amy's most recent work.
The story seemed to be a straightforward sword and sorcery tale about a very normal young lady from California named Wanda Madison, who found herself transported against her will to another world to fight mysterious creatures of an even more mysterious dark power. The new world was an aquatic environment, and somehow in the transition process Wanda was endowed with the ability to live underwater.
Somebody, however, had made a serious mistake in recruiting Wanda for the dangerous task of demon fighting. Wanda spent a lot of time trying to explain the error, but it was too late. The problem was that the demons she was supposed to battle came from the darkest part of the sea. They represented a power that thrived in the deep, and any attempt to master them meant swimming into the black depths of the sunken caves where the creatures lived.
As it happened, poor Wanda had a lifelong fear of the dark. She also had claustrophobia.
It was a major disaster. Unfortunately, for Wanda and the aquatic people who had kidnapped her, there weren't going to be any second chances. She was their one and only hope for survival.
She forced herself to swim steadily on through the murk, half blinded by the silt that had been kicked up in the creature's death throes. She was certain that at any moment her lungs would suddenly revert to normal, human lungs and she would no longer be able to breathe water. Telling herself that the drowning sensation was purely her imagination, she struggled forward into the cavern.