Mirror Image

He shook his head stubbornly. “We have to.”

So Avery sat on one side of Mandy and Tate sat on the other. Each lived through the hell the child’s subconscious mind was being put through.

“No, no.” She gasped for breath,

holding her mouth wide. “Mommy? I can’t see Mommy. I can’t get out.”

Avery looked across at Tate. His fingers were steepled over his nose and mouth, his eyes fixed on his tormented daughter.

Suddenly Mandy sat bolt upright, as though a spring action device had catapulted her head off the pillow. Her chest was rising and falling rapidly. Her eyes were open and unblinking, but she was still in the throes of the nightmare.

“Mommy!” she screamed. “Get me loose. I’m scared. Get me loose!”

Then her eyelids began to flutter and, though her respiration was still choppy, it no longer sounded as though she’d been running for miles and each breath might be her last.

“Mommy’s got me,” she whispered. “Mommy’s got me now.” She flopped back down, and when she did, she woke up.

Once her eyes had focused, she divided her bewildered gaze between Tate and Avery. It was into Avery’s arms that she hurled her solid little body. “Mommy, you got me out. You got me away from the smoke.”

Avery enfolded Mandy in her arms and hugged her tight. She squeezed her eyes shut and thanked God for healing this child who had become so dear to her. When she opened her eyes, they melded with Tate’s. He extended his hand and stroked her cheek with his knuckle, then laid his hand on his daughter’s head.

Mandy sat back on her heels and announced, “I’m hungry. Can I have some ice cream?”

Laughing with relief, Tate scooped her into his arms and swung her high over his head. She squealed. “You certainly can. What flavor?”

He ordered ice cream from room service, along with a change of linens from housekeeping to replace the damp, tangled sheets on Mandy’s bed. While they waited for the deliveries, Avery changed Mandy into another nightgown and brushed her hair. Tate sat watching them.

“I had a bad dream,” Mandy told them pragmatically as she used another hairbrush on Pooh Bear. “But I’m not scared anymore ’cause Mommy’s there to get me away.”

She’d gotten sleepy again by the time she’d finished her ice cream. They tucked her in and sat at the foot of her bed until she fell asleep, knowing that if Dr. Webster was right, her sleep would be uninterrupted from now on. As they left the room, their arms looped around each other’s waists, Avery began to cry.

“It’s over,” Tate murmured and kissed her temple. “She’s going to be okay.”

“Thank God.”

“Then what are you crying for?”

“I’m exhausted,” she confessed with a soft laugh. “I’m going to take a long, hot bath. This day seems like it’s lasted twenty years.”

He had lived through Fancy’s crisis and Mandy’s nightmare with her. But Tate didn’t know that Avery had experienced an anxiety attack at the Spanish church when she had spotted her nemesis outside the nave, surrounded by clambering media.

Once they had safely reached the limo, she had snuggled close to Tate, linking her arm through his and hugging his firm biceps to her breast. What he’d mistaken for an outpouring of affection had actually been a reaction to stark fear.

When Avery came out of the bathroom a half hour later, her skin was dewy and fragrant from soaking in bath oil. With the light behind her, she provided him with a tantalizing silhouette of her body through her nightgown.

“Still exhausted?” he asked.

The room was dim. The bed had been turned down. Avery’s subconscious registered this, because she only had eyes for Tate. His hair was attractively mussed. The single light burning in the bathroom gilded his body hair. It fuzzily smattered his chest, whorled around his navel, then tapered to a satiny stripe that disappeared into the unfastened waistband of his trousers.

“Not that exhausted,” she replied huskily. “Not if you have something other than sleep in mind.”

“What I have in mind,” he said, moving toward her, “is making love to my wife.”

When he reached her, he curled one hand around the back of her neck and, without any hesitation, slid the other one inside her nightgown to cover her breast. Holding her eyes with his, he finessed the nipple.

“I don’t mean just couple with the woman I happened to be married to,” he whispered while his thumb continued giving her nipple glancing blows. “I mean make love to my wife.”

He drew her face up close to his, paused, probed her eyes, then took her lips beneath his. There was a difference in his kiss. The difference was subtle, yet tremendous. Avery sensed it immediately. Technically it was the same, as his tongue gently but possessively mated with her mouth. But somehow it was much more personal, more intimate, more giving.