The Midnight Hour Read online

  “Tony,” she said, “who’s Rachel?”

  Chapter

  36

  HE LOOKED AT HER for a moment without saying anything. His body stiffened, and his eyes widened slightly as if he were absorbing a body blow. Then his jaw hardened and his face closed up, leaving it absolutely blank except for a disquieting shadow in the backs of his eyes.

  “Who told you about Rachel?” he asked carefully, as if he had to concentrate to enunciate the words.

  To her surprised dismay, Grace felt jealousy like a gnawing pain in her chest as she saw how much he cared. Whoever this Rachel was, he had obviously loved her—did still love her—desperately. No way was she ever going to be able to compete with that, she thought, and then was surprised and depressed to discover that she would even want to.

  “Your grandmother mentioned the name. She didn’t tell me anything. She told me I should ask you.”

  “Ah, Granny.” Tony closed his eyes, then almost immediately opened them again. He looked directly at Grace.

  “Rachel was my daughter,” he said.

  Was. Grace caught that word, assimilated its meaning, and felt her blood freeze. For a moment she simply stared at him, appalled.

  “Oh, Tony,” she said at last, her voice hoarse with sympathy. “I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

  “That’s all right.” He looked away from her at the TV. Some shoot-’em-up flick was playing on the channel he’d stopped at when she’d come into the room. Along with Tony, Grace watched as an enormous, muted explosion blew a car into smithereens.

  “I should be over it,” he said then, his voice very steady, cool, and collected. “It’s been more than four years now. Life goes on.”

  The pain he took so much care not to express screamed silently at her through the emotionless words.

  “I don’t think anyone ever gets over losing a child,” Grace said, her heart aching for him. Standing, she took the few steps needed to bring her to the couch, too, then sat down beside him, automatically kicking off her shoes and curling her legs up beneath her so that her shoulder butted into his side and her knees brushed his thigh. The cozy resilience of the couch gave beneath her weight; the hardness of his body was unyielding. She put a hand on his shoulder, which was warm and solid feeling beneath the softness of the cotton T-shirt, and pressed closer against his side in a wordless gesture of comfort. “Four years, forty years, four hundred years. I don’t care how much time had passed, I would never, ever get over it if something happened to my child . . . to Jessica. . ..”

  Her eyes filled with tears.

  He flicked her a sideways glance. “For a tough-acting judge, you’re pretty softhearted, aren’t you? The reality is, no matter how much you love something, you don’t own it, you know? Sometimes you just can’t keep it no matter what you do, and it goes away and you’re left behind. And you gotta deal with that, and if you do, if you keep breathing and eating and sleeping and counting sunrises and sunsets, it’ll get better. It’s been getting better for me for a while now; I can think of her sometimes and smile, just at something silly she said once or something we did. I’m glad I can do that.”

  He broke off and stared at the TV, as if he were concentrating hard on the program. As a Tums commercial had taken the place of the movie, it wasn’t hard to guess that he was focusing so intently without really seeing anything at all, trying to conceal what he would consider an excess of emotion.

  “Was it an accident?” The question was hardly more than a breath, and Grace patted his shoulder in a silent offer of comfort as she asked it. “If you’d rather not talk about it, just don’t answer.”

  For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to. Then he flicked her another one of those sideways looks and his arms slid around her waist. His hands gripped her hipbones, lifting her up and across him with easy strength so that she was sitting on his lap. His arms wrapped around her, and in answer her arms slid up around his neck. Seen at such close quarters, he looked tired and drawn—his eyes bloodshot, with tiny lines fanning out around them, deeper lines scoring his bronzed face from nose to mouth, and a day’s growth of beard darkening his lean jaw. Closing his eyes, he leaned his head back against her encircling arm and the back of the couch and took a deep breath. After a moment he lifted his head again and opened his eyes, meeting her gaze.

  “She had cystic fibrosis,” he said. “We—my wife and I—found out when she was just a little kid, hardly more than a baby. I was a cop then, too, just like now, a rookie on the force, and we lived in Cleveland at the time because that’s where Glenna—my wife—was from. They told us Rachel wouldn’t live but we couldn’t believe it; she was so full of life, such a happy kid, such an absolute joy. But there was this mucus that would fill up her lungs and we had to pound on her, literally beat her little thin chest and back with our fists so that she could breathe. Glenna couldn’t take it. She left us, left Rachel and me, divorced me, just came to see Rachel sometimes. After a while, Rachel didn’t care, I didn’t care. We had each other. We were tight. Then one morning, at the end, when Rachel was really sick, she sat straight up in her hospital bed and said, ‘Listen, Daddy, do you hear the angels singing?’ I was sitting there on the bed beside her, and she smiled right past me like there was somebody else there, and then she just slumped against my shoulder and died. I couldn’t believe it. Just like that, and she was gone.”

  He broke off, and took another deep breath. “She was eleven years old.”

  Tears that he wouldn’t let fall glittered in his eyes, and Grace’s heart swelled so with his pain and her sorrow for him and his little girl that she felt it would burst.

  “Oh, Tony,” she whispered, hugging his neck, snuggling closer, kissing his bristly cheek. “I’m so sorry.”

  His arms tightened around her so fiercely that for a moment Grace couldn’t breathe.

  “I lost it then. Just completely lost it. If it hadn’t been for Dom, who came and got me and brought me home to Columbus and basically put me back together again, I don’t know what I would have done. I quit the force, started drinking, didn’t care if I died too. In fact, I hoped I would. I couldn’t bear to think of Rachel, my Rachel, in a dark cold grave all alone. She didn’t like to be alone, especially toward the end, when she was so sick. After she died, all I could think of was, now she’s alone in that grave for eternity.” His jaw clenched, and he stopped talking abruptly. Then his head dropped to her shoulder, and his chest expanded against her as he drew in a mighty breath, and then another. In Tony’s world, real men didn’t cry, Grace realized, but he was crying nonetheless, silently, without tears, drawing in deep, harsh breaths and slowly releasing them. Helpless to alleviate his grief and knowing it, she did her best anyway, holding him close and kissing his cheek and his ear and whatever other parts of him she could reach, murmuring soft, broken things while tears coursed down her own cheeks.

  After a few moments he lifted his head and looked down at her. His eyes were red-rimmed and damp, the golden-brown irises suspiciously bright, but with her gaze on him he managed a quirky half-smile.

  “What are you crying for?” he demanded huskily. His gaze touched on her wet cheeks and brimming eyes and shaking mouth, then met hers. His voice went absurdly gentle. “Never say you’re crying for me?”

  “Oh, Tony . . .” She couldn’t help it. Her voice broke and she couldn’t continue, not that it mattered anyway because there was really nothing to say. More tears coursed down her cheeks, and as he watched them fall his mouth tightened.

  “Grace,” he said, his voice deep and low; and then he kissed her.

  At the touch of his mouth, more tears flowed from her eyes, and she was crying openly as he kissed her, sobbing in his arms when he was the one who had suffered the loss, who had been dealt the near-mortal blow of losing a child. She wept for him and his child, and for herself and her child, and for the terrible tragedy of love ripped asunder. All the while he kept kissing her, whispering her name as if he would offer her comfort. And fi
nally she kissed him back, clinging to him as she realized that she had no more defenses left, that her heavily armored heart had swelled so with emotion that the armor had finally cracked to let him in.

  His kisses turned hard and fierce then, as he felt the change in her response, and his hold on her deepened. His tongue was wet and scalding hot as it thrust into her mouth. Raw emotion consumed them, and they pulled at each other’s clothing, greedy for the warm, life-affirming contact that was sex. Grace tugged at the edges of his T-shirt, pulling it from the waistband of his jeans, her hands sliding beneath the thin cotton to find and stroke the chest she had so admired earlier in the day. Warm, faintly damp skin over steely muscles, the silkiness of fine chest hair, the rough raised bumps of his nipples: Grace gloried in each and every sensation. Cradled by his arms, her hands caressed him with sensuous delight.

  Then his hand slid beneath her turtleneck and bra and found her breast, closing over it, touching her nipple, rubbing it with his thumb, and she forgot everything else in a fiery burst of pure erotic hunger.

  Gasping, arching her back, Grace shivered and clung to his shoulders as his large warm hand moved from one breast to the other, playing and teasing, arousing with each touch. When his mouth left hers to trail hot kisses along her jaw, she moaned.

  Thwarted by the turtleneck protecting her throat from his mouth, he gripped her top with both hands and pulled it over her head, and then with his next movement reached between her shoulder blades to unclip her bra and tug it off.

  Grace had a moment of clarity when his hands were not on her body, and she opened her eyes and took in the scene. She saw herself, slender and fine-boned, with small pink-tipped breasts and pale skin, bare from the waist up in the warm pool of lamplight, curled up on Tony’s lap. He was fully dressed if a little mussed, the hem of his T-shirt out of his jeans, his black hair tousled, his eyes more golden than brown now, agleam as they were with desire for her. His shoulders in the plain white T-shirt were broad and thick with muscle. His skin looked very brown against her paleness as his hand found her breast again.

  For a moment she just looked at that large brown hand splayed out possessively against the creamy smoothness of her skin. Then his hand moved, and she couldn’t think at all.

  Her last relatively clear image was of the muted eleven o’clock newscast flickering across the TV screen in the background, and of one of his feet, clad in a snug white athletic sock, shoving the coffee table out of the way.

  Then he bent his head. She caught just a glint of silver as the lamplight struck the thick black and silver waves of his hair.

  Hot and wet and hungry, his mouth closed over her nipple. Grace gasped, and her hands moved up to clutch the back of his head, holding him to her. Her eyes closed, and she arched her back, offering him her breasts with abandon.

  When his mouth finally left her breasts, her nipples felt cold and wet and hard as pebbles in air that seemed arctic after the heat of his mouth. She whimpered in protest at the loss, only to find herself being gathered into his arms and lifted.

  She opened her eyes. He had turned off the lamp and TV, she realized groggily, so that the room was dark except for the light spilling in from the kitchen. The only sounds were the harshness of his breathing and her own softer gasps. He lowered her onto the rug, the rose-and-blue-and-tan oriental carpet that she had picked up for a song at a flea market years before and never thought to put to such use. Its texture was rough against her bare back, and the hardness of the floor beneath was readily apparent.

  A measure of sanity returned to her.

  “Tony,” she whispered. He loomed over her, stripping off his own T-shirt and tossing it aside, so that her hands, as she lifted them to hold him off, encountered the warmth of his bare shoulders. Sliding her hands along the muscular width of those shoulders, almost lost in the blaze of his eyes, she nevertheless managed to murmur: “I don’t think—not here in the house, I . . .”

  But she never finished her protest, because as she spoke he unbuttoned and then unzipped, with an audible sound, her khakis, and pulled them down, along with her panties, so that when he was finished she was naked, lying on the oriental rug in her darkened family room naked, with him in his jeans on his knees beside her and his hand sliding with slow, hot intimacy up one soft inner thigh.

  He touched her, finding the tiny moist bud that quivered desperately beneath his caress, and then he bent over her and his mouth followed his hand and the wet heat of his tongue touched her, too—and she was lost, totally lost, to conscious thought.

  Under the scalding tutelage of his mouth, her nails curled into the roughness of the carpet, scratching over its surface, clawing for some sort of grip to keep her anchored to earth. Her thighs fell open helplessly under his ministrations, allowing him free rein, and he took full advantage, his mouth and hands stroking and caressing, delving and withdrawing, wickedly teasing until she was gasping and writhing and moaning his name.

  And then he bit her, softly, gently, but it was enough, in that particular spot, to send her over the edge, to send her hips arching up off the rug to press hard against the source of her torment as her body exploded with passion, sending her spinning, her mind whirling away while her body quaked and shook and shuddered.

  Finally she collapsed limply back against the carpet, drawing in great gulps of air, feeling light-headed and peaceful and in urgent need of sleep.

  But what she had reckoned was finished was not. He was between her legs now, hard and hot and urgent with need, sliding inside her, stretching her and filling her and demanding her response when she weakly tried to close her thighs only to find them firmly pinioned apart by the muscular strength of his.

  Grace opened her eyes in protest—all she wanted to do was rest—to find him bearing down on her, his face and body deep in shadow. She could just make out the muscular outline of him, limned as his body was with light from the kitchen, and the bright glitter of his eyes. Even as she prepared to utter some variation of “uncle!” he kissed her, his tongue as hard and hot as it invaded her mouth as that other part of him. His hands found her breasts, her nipples, at the same time as he started to move. He thrust fiercely, taking now instead of giving, blatantly intent on satisfying his own need. To her surprise Grace found her body awakening again, found herself responding to his urgency, found herself quivering and clutching and cleaving to the hard body that swept her along with it on a tide of driving passion. Her nails dug into his back instead of the carpet. Her legs wrapped around his waist.

  “Tony,” she gasped as her world exploded for a second time. He groaned in response, thrusting deep, and found his own release, burying himself deep inside her quivering body.

  Chapter

  37

  IN THE BRIGHT LIGHT of morning, Grace blushed to remember the night. They had made love again and again, until they were both exhausted. In between lovemaking sessions, they talked. Tony told her about his childhood, about what it was like to be one of six boys—a cross between a world championship wrestling round-robin event and the close camaraderie expressed by Shakespeare’s “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” bit, as he described it. And Grace told him about her much lonelier childhood, which to all intents and purposes ended with the death of her mother. They described their respective marriages—bad, they both agreed—and enumerated the positive and negative points of their jobs. One thing they did not talk about was Rachel. Grace got the feeling that Tony could not bear to have that wound touched on again so soon, and she respected his reticence.

  She fell asleep at last, dozing off in his arms while they were talking, and then awoke sometime near dawn to find herself wrapped in a blanket and apparently levitating up the stairs. It was a frightening moment before Tony’s face came into focus and the situation in which she found herself became clear. Maneuvering carefully through the almost pitch-dark house, he was carrying her up the stairs to bed.

  “You don’t want Jessica to find you asleep in the family room in
the morning,” he whispered in her ear when she blinked at him sleepily, his eye on Jessica’s closed door.

  No, she didn’t. In fact, it was one of her hard-and-fast rules never to make love to a man in her own house, and certainly not when Jessica was present, even if she was asleep. But what had happened with Tony transcended all the rules. It was like nothing that had ever happened to her before.

  She had been consumed by lust.

  The thought shocked Grace, and then she had to smile at the idea. For the first time in her thirty-six years of life, she realized, she finally “got it” about sex. Before, when she had heard her friends raving about this or that sex act or this or that man, she had smiled politely and secretly pitied them for their lack of self-control. Now she knew better. She had learned over the course of one night just how earth-shattering, mind-blowing, and life-altering sex with the right man could be.

  And to think that Tony Marino was the right man. That was almost the most mind-blowing thing of all.

  Grace was still smiling over it when she fell asleep. And when the alarm went off and she slept right through, she had no doubt that she was smiling still.

  Jessica came and woke her, twenty minutes late. Thus began a mad rush for school and work that gave Grace no time to do more than flash Tony, met at the breakfast table, a semiembarrassed smile, gulp a cup of coffee and snatch up the day’s paper from the porch before she and Jessica were on the road with the police officers assigned to protect them for the day. Tony would relieve both day officers at five o’clock, when he would be back on duty at the house.

  Jessica’s officer, Gloria Baer, was a blond woman who looked no more than seventeen. Dressed like Jessica, in jeans and a loose sweater (with, Grace presumed, a gun concealed beneath), she would be introduced at school as Jessica’s cousin, visiting from out of town, and would stick with her like glue throughout the day. The officer assigned to Grace was Barry Penick. He was in his early thirties, a slim man of medium height with thinning brown hair. He wore a sport coat and tie, the better, Grace guessed, to blend into her courtroom.