Chapter Twenty-Four
She was cold, so freezing cold. Everywhere she looked there was snow, blue-white snow, covering hills stretching in all directions into the distance. Snow so white it glowed with an unearthly light. Bright, silvery stars trailed sparks across the dark blueness of the sky embracing the land. Stars falling all around…sparks of frozen flame…icy snowflakes from a generous sky. How did she get here? Did she fall with the snow from the sky? How could she remember? It didn't matter. She was cold and she would freeze. She didn't want to but it was easy, wasn't it? You just went to sleep…if you could forget how cold you were…..
"Kendall! Kendall! Where are you?"
She knew that voice and she spun around, whipping up snow with her feet. It stuck between her toes and burned. She was only wearing sandals. She waved her arms like windmills through the snowflakes. They scattered, forming kaleidoscope patterns in the air.
"Bianca! Bianca, is that you? Are you all right?"
"Kendall! Bianca and I are fine! We've been looking all over for you!"
She knew that voice too. "Mother? Where are you? Where is Bianca?"
"We're here, Kendall! We're so close to you! Can you see us?"
There was nothing but snow, more of it falling all the time. It was night and the snow was so thick the sky was silver.
She strained her eyes. Snow clogged her lashes. "I can't! I can't see anything but snow!"
"Follow us, Kendall! Follow us out of the cold! We're shining a light toward you. Can you see it?"
"Bianca! Mother! I can't see your light!" she sobbed. Tears froze on her cheeks. It was just so cold.
"Follow the sound of our voices then!" The voices were fading.
The snow was as heavy and thick as a cotton wool blanket muffling all sound. The voices echoed whichever way she turned. She could never reach them. They were too far away and her feet were freezing to the ground. She broke through the ice and started sliding, sliding, sliding. Once she fell into the snow she it would bury her before she could rise. It was hopeless…
How did she get to be up in the air? She felt warmer already. Warmer and so, so relieved. The snow was still heavy. Bu someone was holding her, up above the frozen ground. Her heart soared too, as high as the stars she could not see. There was hope. She cried in relief and tears coursed down her cheeks in stinging icicles. She sought more warmth, more warmth, to thaw the ice and melt the snow from her pale, cold face.
But Bianca…Erica! She needed to tell her rescuer to help her go to them. Could he see them, see their light? If he did would he recognize it? She didn't even know who he was. She tried to distinguish his face through the blinding snow. A gust of wind whipped through them and parted the snow like lace curtains.
She saw his face then and she cried out. "Zach! Zach, you're here?"
He didn't answer. She already knew the answer to the question. Of course he was there.
"Zach, will you follow Bianca and my mother?"
He shouted. The wind whipped away his words into a feathery whirl of snow.
She didn't know what to do. Could she trust him? He saved her from falling, saved her from freezing. Why? She didn't know his reason.
Was he was taking her toward Bianca and Erica? Was he taking her away from them? She didn't know what the chances were with him. She only knew what the chances were without him. She closed her eyes and wound her arms around him as far as they would reach. She tightened her hold and hung on. He was just so warm, so very warm.
She felt his arms tighten around her. She burrowed against him. Wasn't he human? She needed the warmth and the strength of him in this foreign frigid landscape, needed them at this very moment for her very existence. She could feel them flowing from him and into her. The hard frost caking her cheeks dissolved into sweet warm healing oils….
There were tears on her wet face, her exposed feet were blocks of ice, but from her shoulder blades to the end of her torso, the back of her was feeling deliciously toasty. Rolling over on her side, she snuggled even closer, gratified by the warmth enveloping her in return. Oh, god, she didn't want to wake up. She wanted to stay asleep as long as she could. She intended to stay asleep as long as she could….
Little by little the marvelous warmth permeated her clothes, met and was absorbed by the pores of her grateful skin…raising a slight flush before sinking deeper into the fragile veins that carried her half-chilled blood, raising its temperature to where the heated blood raced headlong to muscles constricted from the paralysis of sleep. Excess heat emitted by awakening muscles tunneled deep into her innermost core where it pooled innocently, comfortably, deceptively lulling her….
There the quality of warmth inside her changed subtly…from one of wellbeing and ease to deprivation and longing. Radiating outward, back through all the levels of her indolent body, it was slyly leaving in its wake a different form of physical need than the one it allayed.
And her back felt chilly again. She was tired of being cold. Sleepily reaching for the convenient bed-warmer, she clasped her arms around its yielding form, pulling it with her as she rolled onto her back again, responding to the faintly protective yet erotic sensation of its acquiescent, heavy weight pressing her into the resilient mattress padding.
She writhed involuntarily and invitingly, still floating in the Netherlands between waking and sleeping she was loath to leave. Trying to get even closer, she pressed upward against it. The weight kept her too pinned down to permit easy maneuvering. She freed her legs and, braced with a foot on either side of the weight, softly pushed herself up again. It didn't assuage that new but familiar ache released inside of her…limbs too relaxed to supersede gravity…too feeble to share what she felt in her current state of suspension.
With a whispered a sigh she became supine. The warmth, the heaviness, the sheltering, must be enough for now. She didn't want to wake up and lose them….
It was just when she'd submitted to defeat that she found herself triumphing, wrapped in an embrace, held steady against an external seismic shift. She was the one on the bottom and then somehow she was the one on the top. Now her legs were free to sprawl as she willed, her body to realign, upon the form beneath her. She was constrained only by the close embrace in which she was still locked.
Sensually testing that bondage, a test threatening to shred the last remnants of her dreamlike trance, she was gently released from its hold. Missing its warmth and security but luxuriating in the utter freedom to do anything she wanted, she found that freedom quickly compromised. Her face was captured in a light though firm clasp and guided forward. She offered no resistance.
"Mmm," she murmured, encountering for the first time something soft and pliable, warm and moist, murmuring against her own lips. She offered up her lips in full measure. Blindly, she kissed…was kissed…. Primal sensation flowed through her, drowning any other awareness except where and how mouths touched and moved against each other.
The urge for connection was integral to every organism, kept it alive. It pulsated so strongly and internally now, deep beneath her skin, deep below her consciousness. She felt connected now…connected but not completed. She must follow where it led. Poised on the cusp of wakefulness…body increasingly stimulated by the voluptuous current it rode, mind continuing to drift in its sensuous trance.
Precariously balanced now….a second seismic shift. Reversal of the process that landed her on top. She came to be lying beneath again…Mmm…glad. Not fighting gravity now. Moving in concert. Everything more accommodating, more responsive, unconstrained.
Don't think. Don't stop. Kiss. Touch. Feel.
I need this. Don't you?
I was afraid I was dead. Does this prove I'm alive?
You're alive. You're alive too.
Answering hands as well as lips…warm too, so warm and knowing, close to tipping the balance from warmth to burn, nothing to douse the flames with if they climbed to the ceiling. I don't care. But burning was dangerous. Desire warred with self-preservation. The room was beginning to spin.
She tried to hang on to the make-believe this was nothing but a dream. But the burning…reality was too strong.
"What the fuck are we doing?" Zach forcibly pulled away from her and flopped onto his back. Freezing air rushed to fill the sudden yawning gap between them.
Kendall could only lie there in a haze of shock and regret and denial as all the warmth fled, leaving her body ice-cold again. Her eyes opened and then closed. The ceiling spun around the room in taunting circles. She felt so hollow, so empty, so wanting, that she didn't understand how there was room left to ache so much too. When you were empty inside there should be nothing inside you to ache. Maybe it was only an echo. Maybe she wasn't really awake after all. Maybe she had only slipped into another dream…another really, really bad dream, to punish her for the good one.
"Are you all right?" Zach was lying right beside her. Why did his voice sound so far away?
She wondered if her own voice sounded any less remote when she finally found it. "Oh, just fine and dandy, Zach. Just peachy. Can't you tell?"
He turned to his side to face her, and she turned her neck so that she was facing him. Kendall had never seen him this close up before with her eyes open; never close or long enough to particularly notice how his eyes harbored such startling glints of olive and bronze, or how his dark lashes swept his cheeks. It was almost more intimate than anything they'd done. Or not done, really. "And to answer your first question with another one," she added, "isn't that what we were doing?"
Zach was silent.
"But—don't worry, Zach. You can blame this one on me. This is how I react to stress and trauma. You can ask just about anybody in Pine Valley. They'll tell you I—"
"Stop it, Kendall. I'm just as responsible as you," he said intently. "No, more so."
"There you go trying to be a gentleman again," she sighed. "You'd better watch that, Zach. It might become a habit. Don't blame yourself for responding to me when I was using you for a stress reliever. I'll add it to your plus column, though."
"Add which?" Zach asked curiously. "Responding—or blaming myself?"
In spite of herself, Kendall laughed. Then tears unexpectedly came to her eyes and she hastily looked away. The ceiling was still spinning, forcing her to take a deep breath before surreptitiously glancing down at herself. She was still fully dressed except for her shoes, and she could have kicked those off in her sleep. He was fully dressed too. Maybe most of it had been her overactive libido firing her overactive imagination…but she'd never made her own body thrum quite like that.
What had come over her, really, Kendall wondered, hopelessly trying to sort things out. In her heart she knew they were nowhere near as uncomplicated as she had told Zach. Otherwise this awkward aftermath would not have been so highly charged. Finally, she replied, "Oh, well, why should we quibble over a little thing like that? I'll just add them both. Satisfied?"
There was a pause before he said, "Is this what we should be talking about, Kendall?"
Rolling off the bed, Kendall started looking for her shoes. "You know what, Zach, you don't really have a plus column—I just made that up. I was feeling magnanimous, but now I don't feel that way, so you're going back on my shit list. That's where you belong." Kendall deliberately set about provoking an argument as the most efficient way to return to safer ground.
Zach sat up, too, but remained on the bed. "That motion was already made and carried."
"No, not because of—of that, Zach. I said I'll take the blame for that. I'm talking about what happened before that. You knew I was upset when I came back up here after J.R. waylaid me downstairs." And once she got started, it wasn't so hard to keep going. "So why the hell did you get in bed with me in the first place?"
His head cocked. "The answer should be obvious, Kendall. Because it is my bed, and I felt like it."
Kendall thrust her left foot into its high-heeled sandal with so much force she almost tore a strap. "No kidding, it's your bed, Zach—but it's not like I had to crawl over an obstacle course to get to it, either. I mean, it's right out in the open. So just because I inadvertently ended up on it didn't mean I was issuing you an invitation."
"Let me explain something else that should be obvious." Zach sounded very patient. "When a woman calls me a dog, I don't usually interpret it as an invitation."
Even with the excuse of not having been fully alert at the time, the fact that she had actually, willingly kissed and been kissed by this snide, hateful man ought to be used against her in an insanity hearing, Kendall berated herself. "Well, that's good, or else you'd get turned down a lot," she snapped. Except by a genius like me, she wished she wasn't able to add.
"The bed is wide enough for four people and no, I've never put it to the test. I was tired and you, Kendall, were already asleep."
"So you didn't you just get another room?"
"In my own hotel?" he snorted elegantly. "It didn't seem necessary to humor you that far." Zach made it all sound so reasonable until he added, "And you know what? We woke up on my side of the bed. Any migration was done by you. Which brings us back to where we started."
Kendall found and shoved her right foot violently into her other sandal. "Right. The place where you blew me off, which was my cue to take a cab home. I'll remedy that right now." She stalked to the elevator and then realized she was missing the keycard with which to operate it. Shit. She couldn't even make a graceful exit. The day really just kept getting better and better.
"Kendall."
She turned, expecting Zach to at least toss her the keycard so she didn't have to stand there all night.
Instead he said, "It's almost 2:30 a.m. Look. I'll sack out on my office sofa the rest of the night." Standing, he slid his feet into his own shoes and walked around the bed toward the elevator. He pulled the keycard from his slacks pocket, sliding it into the slot. The door silently opened.
Before boarding the elevator, Zach handed Kendall the card. "It's up to you, but I'd make myself at home here. Unless you hope to run into Junior Chandler. I have it on good authority he was still lurking around outside until quite recently."