"Are you making fun of my hero complex?"
"Yeah," she said, and stuck her head back under the stream of water for another drowning imitation. He turned the water off with a snap of his wrist, slapped her on the bare butt sharply enough to make her say, "Hey!" in indignation, then wrapped his arms around her and lifted her bodily from the tub.
"You have to pay for that," he growled, striding toward the bed and tossing her onto it, then stepping back to strip off his damp clothes.
"Oh, yeah?" Naked and wet, she stretched sinuously, arching her back. "What do you have in mind?" With one hand she reached out to stroke his bobbing erection, then rolled onto her stomach and captured him in her grip. He went very still.
Delicately, like a cat, she licked. He shuddered. She tasted the entire length. He groaned.
She licked again and ran her tongue along the underside. "I think I should really, really have to pay" she murmured. "And I think it should involve… swallowing." She took him in her mouth and suited actions to words.
Since then, at least once a day, Sam would put on a pitiful face and say, "I feel so guilty."
Hah.
His attitude, more than anything, had helped her through the trauma. He hadn't babied her. He had loved her, comforted her, made love to her so often she was sore, but that was it, and it was more than enough. She had been able to laugh again.
She had visited T.J. every day. Already T.J. was taking physical therapy daily to help her overcome the resultant disabilities from her head injuries. Her speech was slurred, but better every day; and her control over her right leg and arm was iffy at best, but that too, with work, would improve greatly. Galan had been constantly by T.J.'s side, and if the naked devotion in his eyes was any indication, their marital difficulties were behind them.
"Back to your parents," T.J. said now. "Are you going to tell them when you meet them at the airport today?"
"Not right away," Jaine said. "I have to introduce them to Sam first. And we have the wedding to talk about. Besides, I thought Shelley and I should tell them together."
"You'd better do it before they go home, because their neighbors are bound to rush straight over when they see your folks are back."
"Okay, okay. Ill tell them."
T.J. grinned. "And tell them they can thank me for delaying your wedding a week, which will give them time to rest." Jaine snorted. True, delaying the wedding a week would allow T.J. to attend, albeit in a wheelchair, but she doubted her dad, at least, would thank anyone. Having the wedding the next day would have suited him just fine, because there would be less hoopla for him to endure. She checked her watch. "I gotta go. I'm meeting Sam in an hour." She leaned over the bed and kissed T.J.'s cheek. "I'll see you tomorrow,"
Galan entered the room bearing a huge bouquet of lilies, filling the room with their perfume. "Just in time," Jaine said, winking at him as she sailed past.
"Yes," said J. Clarence Cosgrove, his voice reedy with age, "I remember Corin Street very well. The situation was very strange, but there was nothing we could do. We didn't even know Corin was a girl until she reached puberty. Oh, her sex was on her birth certificate, of course, but who checks that? Her mother said Corin was her son, so… we accepted it."
"She was raised as a boy?" Sam asked. He was at his desk, his long legs propped on an open drawer, the phone glued to his ear.
"To my knowledge, the mother never admitted or even acted as if she knew Corin was female. Corin was a badly disturbed child. Badly disturbed," Mr. Cosgrove repeated. "She was a constant discipline problem. She lolled a classroom pet, but Mrs. Street wouldn't accept that Corin could ever do anything like that. She made the statement, often and to anyone who would listen, that she had the perfect little boy."
Bingo, thought Sam. Mr. Perfect. That was the trigger that had set Corin Lee Street off like a bomb that had been slowly ticking down over the years. It wasn't the content of the List itself, but rather the title that she had found so unbearable.
"She took Corin out of my school," Mr. Cosgrove continued. "But I made a point of finding out what I could about the child. The behavioral problems worsened over the years, of course. When Corin was fifteen, she killed her mother. I remember it was a particularly brutal murder, though I can't recall the specific details. Corin spent several years in a mental institution and was never charged with the murder."
"Did the murder take place there in Denver?"
"Yes, it did."
"Thank you, Mr. Cosgrove. You've helped fill in a lot of the blanks."
After he hung up, Sam tapped his pen on his desk as he pondered what he had learned so far about Corin Lee Street. She had entered the mental institution as Corin, but she was Leah – evidently chosen because of the name's similarity to "Lee" – when she came out. The picture that had emerged was that of an extremely unstable and dangerous woman who had been abused both mentally and physically by her mother until the violence that had been leaking out all of her life finally burst out of control. The psychiatrists could argue all day about which came first, the abuse or the violent personality, but Sam didn't care. He just wanted a clear picture of the woman who had wreaked so much destruction.
After he talked to Mr. Cosgrove, Corin's middle-school principal, he called the Denver P.D. and eventually got to talk with the detective who had investigated Mrs. Street's gruesome murder. Corin had beaten her mother to death with a floor lamp, then poured rubbing alcohol on the woman's face and set it on fire. When the body was discovered, Corin was incoherent and obviously mentally unsound. She had been confined in a mental institution for seven years.