She seems to melt against him, deliciously pliant and soft where he is rigid with urgent need.
He tears his lips from hers to blaze the searing trail his hands took, pressing hot kisses against her shoulders and her neck before nuzzling the delicate, subtly perfumed hollow beneath her ear.
With a soft moan, she takes a step backward, and then another, hauling him with her… toward the bed, he realizes in wonder.
“Clara, are you sure?” Jed asks, as she sinks onto the mattress and pulls him down on top of her, needing him against her, closer, even, than that.
“Yes.”
“Is this your first time?”
No, she thinks as she shakes her head, her throat suddenly too clogged with emotion to speak. This is my last.
If not forever, her last for a long, long while. And certainly her last with him.
Propped with his elbows on either side of her head, he kisses her deeply.
“It’s not too soon?” he asks, panting hot breath against her ear.
Too soon?
If he only knew that it’s almost too late.
Too late for this… for them.
“Clara?”
“It’s not too soon,” she whispers, and he groans as she pulls his head downward to capture his mouth in another scalding kiss.
His warm hands tug her dress up over her hips, and she trembles, wondering if she should say something to warn him.…
Before she can speak, he pulls her dress up over her head and, instinctively, she knows it’s okay. Somehow, she doesn’t fear intimacy with him; she welcomes it.
His hands slip to her back and fumble with her bra band; he’s looking for the clasp.
Steeling herself for whatever will come, she guides his fingers to the front, where it unfastens quickly—too quickly. He pushes the straps past her shoulders, edging the lacy cups aside, and she fights the urge to pull the sheet up to cover herself.
He looks up, into her eyes.
“What is this?” His fingers gently brush the thin strip of gauze high on her right breast. “Did somebody—did he—hurt you here?”
“No, Jed, there is no ‘he.’ I swear to you. You believe me, don’t you?”
His blue eyes are troubled but, after a moment, he slowly nods. “But what happened to you?”
“I just… I had a medical procedure, but it’s—it’s fine now.”
“What kind of—”
She cuts him off with a kiss. He groans deep in his throat when she untucks his shirt from the waist of his trousers, gliding her fingertips over bare skin and hard muscles. He lifts himself just long enough to shed his clothes.
Then she’s naked in his arms, just as she imagined. She throws her head back as his fingertips, then his tongue, stroke first her left breast, then, ever so delicately, her wounded right. It is in the moment that he presses a gentle kiss on the bandage that she realizes she was wrong about her future.
Intimacy—with the right person—will be more profoundly meaningful than ever before.
But Jed is the right person, and Jed won’t be in her life back home, after the surgery.
All they have is this one night. One perfect night. It will have to be enough to sustain her when he’s gone.
Her gaze is locked on his in the moment their bodies join; she focuses on every detail of his face, imprinting it on her memory: the fine sheen of sweat covering his forehead, the ridge of razor stubble on his lower face, the way he bites his lower lip in pleasure as he slowly thrusts into her.
Heated friction builds to molten release: first her own, then, as the potent ripples subside within, Jed moans and begins to shudder. She clings to his shoulders, riding it out with him, her legs wrapped tightly around his waist.
At last, spent, he rolls onto his back, hauling her with him and cradling her against his heaving chest.
“I don’t want to leave you tonight,” he says raggedly when his breathing has finally slowed.
“Do you really have to?” she asks, even as she wants to beg him to forget about everything else—and promise that she’ll do the same.
But she can’t.
In the morning, before he awakens, she’ll catch the first train out. What choice does she have? She’s got an early location call tomorrow, a therapy appointment, responsibilities. She can’t just abandon her own world for his. There are no guarantees that she can change anything if she stays.
“I’ll spend the night here with you,” he decides, stroking her hair. “They’re probably all asleep in the house by now anyway.”
“What if they’re not?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m a grown man.”
“But I don’t want your family to think—”
“It doesn’t matter what they think. Nothing else matters. I can’t leave, Clara. There’s no possible way I can drag myself away from you now.”
“I feel the same way,” she whispers.
And when the gray morning light seeps through the window to find her snuggled safely against a slumbering Jed, she is just as powerless to pull herself away.
Not just yet.
If she stays, there are no guarantees that she can save him.…
But if she leaves, there is one inevitable fact: Jed will not only go to a certain death, but he’ll face it believing she abandoned him.
So, for now, for just a little longer, her own world will have to wait.
But what about the scene she’s supposed to be shooting this morning? What about her appointment with Karen tonight, and, in the next few days, with the doctors who are treating her breast cancer?
If you stay, you can’t think about any of that, she warns herself.
If she stays, for as long as she stays, she’ll have no choice but to put the future out of her head, no matter how hard that is.
She’ll live in the here and now.…
Because, with Jed, that might be all there is.
Might be?
Who are you kidding? That is all there is.
Even if she somehow saves his life, she can’t spend it with him.
Nothing can change the fact that she’s in mortal danger here. If she wants to survive her illness, she’ll have to go back.
And when that happens, it will have to be enough just to know that Jed’s life was spared.
CHAPTER 15
True to her vow, in the forty-eight hours since she decided to stay with Jed, Clara hasn’t allowed herself to wonder for more than a passing moment what might be going on in her own life back home.
But those moments are harrowing. She can just imagine the chaos on the set when she failed to show up these last few days, not to mention her mother’s panic if she realizes that not only has her daughter failed to return her phone calls, but has for all practical purposes fallen off the face of the earth.
Clara will just have to pick up the pieces when she returns.
For now, her every waking moment is encompassed by Jed Landry.
He’s everything she hoped him to be, believed him to be…
Wanted him to be?
There it is: that last infinitesimal, nagging doubt that this… any of this… can possibly be happening at all.
What if she so intensely longed to escape her grim reality that her subconscious conjured all of this? Yes, she has repeatedly ruled that out since she got back here… but what if it was all just part of one long, incredibly detailed dream?
And if it is a dream…
Then, at any random moment, she might suddenly wake up.…
And Jed will be lost to her forever.
That isn’t going to happen, she tells herself, watching him sleep on the pillow beside her in the first hours of Saturday morning.
She reaches out and lays a hand on his muscular shoulder, just to be certain.
He’s as solid and real as she is.
Of course he is.
For three nights now, they’ve shared his twin bed—and an insatiable appetite for each other.
After each lon
g day working together at the five-and-dime and sharing family dinners in the Landrys’ kitchen, Clara retires to the garage apartment and Jed goes through the motions of bedding down on his mother’s sofa.
The hour or two she spends alone between the cold sheets waiting for him to come to her seem endless… but they have allowed her to devise a plan to save Jed from his grim fate.
Rather, the first step in a potential plan. But it’s crucial, because if it succeeds, she’ll know whether her ultimate mission is even possible.
If it doesn’t succeed…
If she discerns that saving Jed is out of the question…
Then she’ll have no choice but to give up, go home, and save herself.
Either way, today is the day.
Saturday, December 6, 1941.
Something is different about today.
Jed can’t help but notice that as he watches Clara efficiently wrap a customer’s purchase in brown paper. He can’t put his finger on what it is, but there seems to be some kind of anticipatory energy hovering in the air.
“We’ll need more string up here pretty soon, Jed,” she calls, without looking up at him as she untwines a length from the spool on the counter.
“I’ll grab one.”
Clara is rapidly getting the hang of working here, he thinks as he heads for the back room. She fits as easily into the rhythm of his days as she has into his nights. Sometimes he feels as though she’s always been here with him, a part of his life.
Yet other times, he battles the irrational fear that if he blinks, she’ll be gone, as if she was never here at all.
Today, especially.
She seemed inordinately quiet all morning, and several times this afternoon he’s caught her glancing at the clock, almost as though she has to be somewhere.
Which is out of the question… isn’t it?
He takes another spool of string from the shelf, remembering how he furtively watched her dress herself on this very spot just a few days ago.
Then, he was filled with suspicions.
How conveniently he’s since cast them aside.
The few times he’s brought up Clara’s life in the city—the one she seemingly abandoned with ease—she shrugs off his questions with yes and no answers.
He does know, thanks to what little he’s gotten out of her, that she’s an actress, not surprising given her extraordinary beauty. She admitted to having done stage and screen, but she refuses to tell him the details. Is she being modest? Or evasive?
He also knows that she isn’t particularly close to anyone back home—not on a daily basis, anyway.
“You mean, no one will miss you if you never go back to the city?” he asked just last night, only half teasingly.
“I have to, sooner or later,” was her disconcerting reply, and she refused to elaborate—or meet his gaze.
Jed returns to the front of the store, whistling “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” He hasn’t been able to get the song out of his head and can’t help but wonder why he has yet to hear it played on the radio.
The real radio—not Clara’s strange, small music player.
At the register, he finds her handing the deftly wrapped package to her customer with a smile and a cheerful “Merry Christmas!”
But it’s plain to see that her thoughts are somewhere else, particularly as the whistle of the daily southbound 3:27 train sounds in the distance.
Jed watches Clara turn toward the window, listening intently as the locomotive chugs into the depot.
There’s a faraway look on her face, one that fills him with trepidation.
“Excuse me, Mr. Landry, do you have any cowboy comic books?”
He looks down to see little Jimmy Henderson, whose family lives across Chestnut Street.
One eye on Clara, who is drifting away from the counter, he says, “Sure, Jimmy, come with me.”
When he returns to ring up Jimmy’s Gene Autry comic, the train’s rumble has faded into the distance and he finds Clara idly examining the broken snow globe again.
He’s noticed, these last few days, that she seems to have developed some kind of fixation on the little angel with the wounded wing.
“See you later, Mr. Landry,” Jimmy calls on his way out the door.
Jed waves, crossing over to where Clara is standing, gazing into the falling snow inside the glass orb.
“Are you all right?” he asks, keeping his voice low so that the browsing customers won’t overhear.
She looks up in surprise. “I’m fine. Why?”
“I don’t know… you seem… restless.”
“Restless?” She sets the snow globe back on the table, watching the flakes settle in the bottom. “Maybe I am restless, a little bit. Do you mind if I… take a walk or something?”
“Right now?”
She shrugs, and he sees her glancing again at the clock.
He nods slowly. Reluctantly.
What else can he do?
“Go ahead,” he tells her. “Just… promise me you won’t disappear. All right?”
He expects her to smile.
She doesn’t.
A chill of foreboding slips down his spine at her solemn expression as she says, “I promise I won’t disappear, Jed. I wouldn’t leave you again without saying good-bye.”
Watching her head to the stockroom where she left her coat, he only wishes she hadn’t tacked on those last three words.
For the first time since she arrived, Clara finds herself out on the street without Jed by her side… and all too aware that with public solitude, here, comes a familiar vulnerability.
But nobody seems to be paying much attention to her as she scurries along Main Street, quite at home now in the forties’ wardrobe gleaned from her suitcase. She only wishes Lisa had paid more attention to sizes when she was filling it with vintage items from wardrobe. Some of the clothes are much too large for Clara, others too snug.
Of course, the contents of the suitcase weren’t meant to be worn. And whenever Clara opens the lid to rummage through the garments, she can’t help but feel momentary guilt for leaving the production in the lurch.
Now, however, her mind is firmly on the task immediately before her.
The air is bitingly clear, but blue-black clouds are gathering above the wooded hills in the west. Glenhaven Park’s business district is teeming with activity. In the slushy street, enormous cars rumble along, trailing exhaust, occasionally sounding their distinct ah-oogah horns. The sidewalks are filled with pedestrians: uniformed soldiers on leave, busy Christmas shoppers, loitering teenagers, bell-ringing Salvation Army Santas, gaggles of children toting dangling ice skates, headed for the frozen pond in the park across the way.
Clara savors the small-town atmosphere as she weaves her way along the snow-scraped sidewalk, marveling that she feels almost at home here after just a few days.
If only…
Stop that!
No use in if-onlies; she can’t stay here under any circumstances.
In fact, if today proves that Jed is doomed regardless of her intervention in the past, she should leave right away, before she falls even more deeply in…
Stop that! she scolds herself again.
You don’t love Jed. You can’t possibly love someone after only a few days together.…
Or can you?
It feels like love.
But even if what she feels for Jed is authentic, what does it matter?
It can’t last, Clara reminds herself as she turns down Oak Street.
The long block is lined by two-story Victorian homes with tall old trees overshadowing small front yards. At the end, she can see the looming three-story brick rectangle that is Glenhaven Park Hospital.
But she isn’t going that far; the house she seeks turns up in the middle of the block. The black 59 above the metal mailbox matches the address scribbled on a slip of paper in her pocket. She found it last night when, under the pretext of visiting the powder room during supper, she snuck a peek
at the Landrys’ Glenhaven Park Telephone Directory.
The festive evergreen wreath on the front door seems incongruous with the missing shutters, peeling paint, and straggly shrubs. The front walk could stand to be shoveled, as could the wooden steps that creak under Clara’s weight as she ascends to the porch. Somebody must have made a haphazard attempt to clear a narrow path at one point, but fresh snow has since fallen and hardened to a bulky crust.
As Clara rings the bell, she again rehearses what she’s going to say.
Her carefully prepared speech might very well be met with suspicion. It certainly would be in her own day and age.
But she’s noticed that things are different in 1941. People are more trusting of strangers.…
Unless they think the stranger might be involved in espionage, she thinks ruefully, remembering Jed’s initial assumption about her.
The door opens, and an elderly woman looks out in confusion and surprise.
“Yes? May I help you?”
“Hello, my name is Clara McCallum. I’m new in town, staying with the Landry family over on Chestnut Street. I’m going door to door to see if anyone would like me to run holiday errands… you know, like grocery shopping, that sort of thing.”
The old woman raises a white eyebrow. “I wish I could hire you, dear, because there are quite a few things on my shopping list and I hate to go out when it’s so cold. But I’m a widow, and I’m afraid I just can’t afford—”
“Oh, I don’t want to be paid,” Clara hurriedly assures her. “I’m doing this strictly in the holiday spirit. Really, whatever you need from the store, I’ll be glad to pick up for you.”
Minnie Bouvier’s face lights up. “Well, bless your heart. I’ll get my list.”
“Jed, I’ve got to talk to you.”
He looks up to see Arnold Wilkens striding toward the cash register, his wrathful expression barely contained beyond thick lenses.
Thanks to a temporary lull in business, Jed can do nothing but fold his arms and wait for the storm to erupt.
“Jed,” Arnold growls, fists clenched, ears bright red beneath his crew cut. “I can’t believe this.”