What Dreams May Come (Berkley Sensation) Read online

  The woman burst into wild wailing. Keeping an eye on her, Jake went over and helped Maggie sit up. She rubbed her shoulder. “Shit.” She struggled to stand. Jake set a hand under her elbow and boosted. Maggie nodded thanks and went over to the woman. “Ma’am, is your daughter here?”

  No young girl peeked out at them from anywhere.

  “His. The brat is his.” The woman wiped her nose with her hand, then on the faded dress she wore. “She’s in school.” She stared at Davis’s body with glazed eyes, lifted her head to glare at Jake. “We were just having a little argument.” She said it as if their arguments generally included guns and knives. Just another loving relationship.

  Jake remembered his own parents’ “discussions.” He’d hated the shouting voices, slamming doors, sizzling rage. But they’d never been as bad as this.

  Maggie sighed, met Jake’s eyes. “Thanks, partner.” She cleared her throat. “Excellent job.” She glanced around and shook her head. “Let’s clean this up.”

  Shauna was waiting for him when he left the station. He spotted her leaning against the blue secondhand truck parked across the street. He hadn’t taken her to the station, introduced her to his friends, hadn’t been ready. Still wasn’t.

  He slipped his keys into his pocket, walked to her and straight into her arms. She felt so good. He closed his eyes and just savored the softness of her body pressing into him. The warmth of her, like the last warmth of Indian summer, steadied him, comforted him.

  “I heard on the radio,” she said.

  “I’m glad you’re here. I killed a man and I’m suspended while they investigate.” He didn’t open his eyes, just let her stroke his head and his back.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I am, too. It happened so fast. Maggie was down. I shot. He’s dead.”

  “Is Maggie all right?” Shauna asked.

  “Yeah. fine. But the guy’s dead.”

  “Shhhhh.” When was the last time someone held and comforted him? He hadn’t ever wanted it, as an adult. But he needed her arms around him, her gentle touch. Too much had brought back his childhood today, and maybe it was the ghost of the old child that wanted her so. He breathed in her scent and the residual adrenaline transformed his need for comfort into something more basic. No, it was the man who wanted her. Now.

  She shifted against him, hesitated, kissed the side of his jaw. “My place is closer.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  He seemed to have echoes in his head. Reluctantly he separated from her, glanced at his SUV in the station lot, and shrugged. He went to the passenger side of the truck, got in, and buckled up, then let his head fall back. He wanted Shauna’s hand on his thigh, between them, but she was driving.

  She gunned the motor and stamped on the gas, taking off faster and less cautiously than ever before. Jake smiled. She’d drive fast, but safe, and soon they’d be in her bed and it would be quick and hard and wild.

  He reached out and put his hand above her knee. Her breath caught, but she didn’t speed up. His smile widened. He hadn’t fumbled, known exactly where her leg was, would always know.

  They didn’t make it to her waterbed. They didn’t even make it to the living room couch. He took her on the floor with no finesse but all the need in the world.

  The next morning Jake woke near dawn and stared at the pale green ceiling of Shauna’s bedroom. “I’ve been suspended.” It was standard after a killing, but nasty fear that he wasn’t good enough nibbled at him.

  She moved closer, pillowing her head on his shoulder, stroking his chest. The tightness around his heart eased.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know how much your vocation means to you.”

  Vocation. Yeah. Trust Shauna to use the right word. Not a job. Not work. Not a career, though it was that, too. But most of all it was a vocation.

  Of course she spoke of her own work as a “calling,” or even worse, her “bliss.” No one would ever say police work was “bliss,” but he could agree that it was a calling, a vocation.

  “So.” Shauna ran her thumb along the side of his jaw, and he looked at her—pleasantly mussed from their loving, lips slightly puffy from his wild kisses. He rolled onto his side and caressed her smooth skin from her waist to the curve of her hip.

  “So, what?”

  “So, how would you like to help me plant four apple trees today and about three hundred bulbs the rest of this week?”

  He thought of digging, of young trees that he could circle with his hand, of bulbs that would sit in his palm and, with their very being, show him promise of new life. “Yeah.”

  She sighed and snuggled closer. “It will be good for you to think of planting and growing and flowers in the spring.”

  Inside himself wonder bloomed. He was unable to express it, couldn’t tell her how incredible he found her. So he slipped again into her body and showed her.

  Jake weathered the hurt of suspension very well, with the support of Shauna, Maggie, his buddies in the force, Boris, and the Friends of the Forest at Sunday meditation. Even the feral cat crept nearer to take the food he offered every night.

  The shooting was investigated and he was exonerated in record time. After the meeting, he was informed he was expected to be back at his desk the next day. On a bubble of happiness, Jake leaned against his SUV, pulled out his cell, and made enough indecent suggestions to have Shauna breathing heavily in his ear. She promised to meet him at her home.

  This time they made it into her bed and bounced around it in cheerful passion.

  After her pulse slowed and her breathing steadied, Shauna stroked his chest and looked into his fabulous blue eyes and said, “I love you.”

  “You don’t mean it.”

  Shauna’s temper broke. She jumped out of bed and stalked around the room. “At least you finally said it out loud. Every time I’ve said I loved you, you always changed the subject or started making love to me, or did anything except believe me.”

  Jake stared at her.

  “What, you didn’t think I had a temper? That I was too Goody Two-shoes and too Ms. New Age to think I couldn’t get angry? Or is it that you think I’m just too much of a wimp?”

  “No, I—”

  “Too much of a wimp to get angry, then it would follow that I’m too mushy or whatever you’d call it in your macho-speak, to be in love with you. I’m just acting girly or have blinders on or think that since the sex is so great it has to mean I love you. Is that what you’re telling yourself about me and my declarations of love?”

  “Yes. No! Geeze.” Jake rubbed his face.

  She looked at him, lip curled. “You have a low opinion of me. Because I tend to think the best of people, because I try to be kind, because I experiment with different kinds of spirituality, you think I’m nuts, or stupid, or naive. That I don’t know my mind.” She thumped a fist on her heart. “I love you. I’m a mature woman. I’ve had other lovers, other men friends. I know what I’ve felt in other relationships, and I know what I feel now. I know how I love my friends and even my blessed cats! But you don’t think I know my mind about you.”

  Now she stamped back close enough to drill a hole in his chest with her forefinger. “Just because you’re too much of a coward to open your eyes and see I love you, to listen when I tell you, doesn’t mean that it isn’t true.”

  Jake shot out of bed and dressed. “I’m not the one in this relationship who’s the coward. You made this house a home so comforting that you’d never have to leave it, risk yourself.”

  “Maybe I did, once, but not since I died and came back. Not since we died and came back. I put this house on the line, mortgaged it to the hilt to found my new business—if that isn’t risky, I don’t know what is.”

  He could only shake his head. “You’re making a go of the business; not a chance it will fail.”

  She was torn between pride and despair.

  “You keep ignoring that we both died and came back for a second
chance. It’s a simple fact that you should deal with since you’re a police officer.”

  “I haven’t ignored it. I just don’t want to talk about it. You think that just because some guy in a gray suit in a shabby office said we belonged together, that we do. That love is everything.”

  She straightened her back. “First of all, it was an angel in a magical grove. As for love being everything—yes, I do believe that. And I don’t think that belief is anything anyone can call ‘New Age.’ It’s been around for centuries.”

  “It’s bullshit.”

  “Is it? Is that why we’re arguing? If it were bullshit, if you didn’t want to believe that I love you and I know the meaning of love, why are you so angry?”

  “I don’t want you falling for me. Getting expectations of being soulmates or something like the guy said.”

  It was true she had all the expectations of him in the world, but she wasn’t going to say so. But she also knew that if he believed in their relationship, he’d work hard at it and they’d have a partnership that was loving and long-term and special. He obviously wasn’t ready to hear that, either.

  So she said, “My heart, my expectations, and my beliefs are mine. I can accept my feelings and the consequences that come with them.”

  He shifted. “Relationship-speak.”

  “And only women talk about relationships? You’ve been good with me, and Maggie, but I got the idea that you didn’t always think much of women.”

  “Geeze, don’t turn this back on me. Women can do as much as a man. They just tend to have screwy beliefs.”

  “Some women tend to have screwy beliefs.” Tears clogged her throat, and her lips were pinching together as she tried to control her voice. “Namely me. You think I tend to have screwy beliefs and one of those screwy beliefs is that I love you. Well, I think that you can’t accept you’re lovable. We’ve circled around to the start of this argument and nothing’s been resolved. Resolve it, Jake.”

  He stood straight and still and looked angry and absolutely beautiful and stared at her for a full minute. She was sick with an apprehension of doom.

  “I’ll resolve it. I’m outta here.” He turned, grabbed his overnight bag—he’d never left anything of his in her house, as if her home would contaminate it—and marched out.

  Out of her life. She sank down onto the bed and put her face in her hands. She’d done what was right, though. She’d never been dishonest, had told him she loved him when she needed to. Just now she’d confronted him. She hadn’t waited and hoped. She hadn’t manipulated.

  She’d lost. She hurt like she’d been broken in two, and all the glorious love and shining hope had trickled away like sand.

  She sat there a long time, until Jimbo came and sat on her feet. Until Prima came and gave her cheek a lick, then whined for food.

  When she rose, she moved like an old woman and envisioned a flashing image of herself alone forever in the house with cats. She straightened. She had her business. Keeping that going would work her hard and take her out of the house. She still had the same friends she’d had before Jake. With an awful feeling in her stomach that she would now always divide her life into “Before Jake” and “After Jake,” she opened cans of food and dumped them on plates.

  Jake worked out in the gym until exhaustion glazed his vision, then showered and went home to fall onto his bed in the twilight, one aching mass. The inner emptiness in his chest hurt the worst.

  With a whoosh, Boris zoomed in, landing with a thump beside Jake. He didn’t take the arm from his eyes. “Why are you here?” He heard Boris slurp. Probably licking his paw.

  “It’s dinnertime.”

  Jake grunted.

  Boris started purring in his engine-like voice.

  Lowering his arm, Jake looked at the cat. A golden outline surrounded him. One wing-tip was being studied in approval.

  “If you are stupid enough to lose Shauna, then you need Me. I will stay with you and be your companion until you go back to Shauna.”

  “Doesn’t Shauna need you, too?” Saying her name was hard.

  “She hurts as much as you,” Boris admitted.

  Not possible.

  “But she has the other Cats. You only have Me. What’s for dinner?”

  Jake sat up. “You’re going to hang around and nag me to go back to Shauna. I get it.”

  “You are not too stupid. I think you will see things the right way soon.”

  When Jake stood his thighs protested. But he rubbed a hand over his chest where it hurt more.

  He dumped out food for Boris. After the cat was done sniffing it, Jake put the plate outside. He saw the brindled, scraggly cat huddling behind the thorns of the overgrown rosebush, watching the food with lambent eyes. Maybe—

  “It will take a long time for him to trust you; maybe he never will. He is old for a feral Cat. He is three.”

  Grief twisted in Jake and he shoved it aside. Stupid to grieve for a cat. For himself.

  At work the next day Jake fiddled with his pen, until he realized that he was doing that bastard Gray’s trick. Then Jake wondered how his score sheet looked now. How many little square boxes were checked. If suffering gave him brownie points, he should be damn near perfect. Yet he thought one big box might still be blank. The love and loving and lovableness thing.

  He wondered about Shauna’s. Were hers full now? Had he been good for her?

  Boris glided through the window and lit on his desk, fluttering papers.

  “Draft in here,” said Maggie.

  Boris grinned. “You were the best thing ever to happen to Shauna. She pines for you.”

  Jake ignored the cat, the twinge of hope that expanded his heart, picked up his notebook, and left to work a case.

  Seven

  All that week and through the weekend, when he wasn’t distracting himself with long hours at his job, he thought of Shauna’s words. Her simple, incomprehensible words, which had been impossible for him to answer: “I love you.”

  How could she? How could she know after so short a time? How could anyone know, ever? And how could she love him? He’d been better with her than with any woman—any person—in all of his life, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know his own enormous flaws.

  He was a good cop. Once—before—he would have said he was a good enough man. But ever since he’d escaped death, he’d been reconsidering what he’d thought was a good man, and he hadn’t measured up. He was working on it, sort of like one of Shauna’s brand-new gardens: He thought he had good seeds in him, and some strong roots, but he still was far too barren. A long time would pass until he could show a good crop of anything except weeds.

  Boris gave a long slurp and burp. The food in the can on the floor had lost a little color and odor, but the feral cat would gulp it down. Jake shoved the plate outside, closed the door, grabbed a beer, and stumped back to his recliner.

  Boris trotted into the living room, rose vertically to the arm of the recliner without even flapping his wings, and burped again.

  “It’s Monday night. Time for football!” Boris purred, eyes gleaming. “Turn on the TV!”

  “The Broncos aren’t playing,” Jake said, taking a swallow of cold beer that seemed flat. Everything seemed flat since he’d broken up with Shauna.

  The cat snorted. “Doesn’t matter, I loooove football.”

  Jake usually liked to watch all the games, too. He had a problem with the recliner, though, recalling how wonderful Shauna had looked, how fabulous she’d felt raising and lowering herself on him.

  With a flick of the remote, Jake turned the game on. The teams were running onto the field. He looked at Boris, whose gaze was glued to the tube. “What happened to your crown and temple and Road of Great Adventure?”

  Boris’s back moved in a cat shrug. “They wait.”

  Everything in Jake sharpened. “What do you mean, they wait? Did you earn them?”

  Boris slid green cat eyes in Jake’s direction. “Yesss.”

  �
�So why aren’t you there!”

  Turning his head, Boris leveled a gaze at Jake. “You need Me here.”

  “Not so much to make you stay with me when you could have what you really want.”

  “Verrrry good.” Boris twitched his whiskers. “You are growing. You think of Me more than yourself.”

  Jake shifted in the recliner, shrugged. “Yeah, well, I know how much you loved the idea of your crown and temple and Road of Great Adventure.”

  With one of those uncannily wide grins, Boris said, “I grew, too, putting your needs before My own. Because I love you.”

  Beer spewed from Jake. He coughed. His eyes watered. “You—uh—love me?”

  Boris wrinkled his nose at the pungent odor of beer coating Jake’s shirt and droplets on the arm of the recliner. They both ignored cheers coming from the TV at a touchdown. Boris beamed, for the first time looking a little angelic. “Yesssss, I love you. You are a good man. You are worthy of love.”

  Jake’s vision clouded. He couldn’t explain the emotions flooding him. He barely understood them. He wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve. “You—you—you love me?”

  “Like Shauna does.” Boris turned back to the TV. “Maybe not like Shauna. She loves you like a human. I love you like a Cat. I have grown, too, and you love Me. I have always been worthy of love, but it took you time to learn that.”

  Flopping back on the recliner, Jake guzzled some more beer. He had to really think about this.

  The next couple of days he continued to wear himself out exercising at the gym, but no answers came. Finally he picked up the telephone and called Mrs. Freuhauff, requesting some private thinking time in the Friends of the Forest glen the next evening.

  Mrs. Freuhauff made some pointed comments about how both he and Shauna looked terrible lately, gestured to a stone chair that seemed more a piece of modern art to Jake, and left him in peace.