Third Degree

She shrugged, her shoulders so tight with fear and anger that she could hardly move them. The thought of Danny having sex with Starlette could nauseate her instantly. Though he’d sworn he wouldn’t do it, her mind had spun out endless reels of pornographic footage in the lonely darkness before sleep: Danny so desperate from going without Laurel that he screwed his ex-beauty-queen wife just for relief-and found that it wasn’t so bad after all. Laurel was sure that Starlette would be trying extra hard to make Danny remember why he’d married her in the first place. Midnight blow jobs were her specialty. Laurel had dragged this out of Danny one night when he’d drunk more whiskey than he should have. Apparently, Starlette would wait until he was sound asleep, then start sucking him while he slept. Sometimes he wouldn’t wake until the instant before orgasm, and his expression when he’d told Laurel about this said all she needed to know about how much he enjoyed this little ritual. Once or twice she had thought of trying it herself, but in the end she decided it was better not to compete with Starlette at her game; better to stick to her own bedroom tricks or invent some new ones-and she had.

“We’re broken up,” Laurel said. “She’s your wife. I just assumed…”

Danny shook his head. “No. What about you?”

“No,” Laurel lied, hating herself for it, but too afraid of giving him an excuse to make love with Starlette to tell him the truth. Besides…if she admitted to sleeping with Warren-even just twice, which was the truth-the pregnancy would become a nightmare of doubt for Danny.

Danny was watching her closely. Then, as he so often did (and Warren almost never), he read her mind and did exactly what she wanted him to do. He marched up to her and smothered her in his arms. His scent enfolded her, and the strength in his arms surprised her, as it always did. When he lifted her off her feet, she felt herself melting from the outside in. The note stayed clenched in her hand, for until he let go, there was no way to slip it into his pocket. When he finally let her down, she would squeeze his behind, then slide the folded square into his back pocket. She could text him later and tell him to look in his pocket.

He was murmuring in her ear, “I miss you…Jesus, I miss you,” but she felt only the moist rush of air, which sent bright arcs of arousal through her body. As he lowered her to the floor, he slid her crotch along his hard thigh, and a shiver went through her. She would be wet in the time it took him to slide his hand past her waistband. She was thinking of helping him do just that when she saw a dark flash at the window in the door, as though someone had looked in and then jerked suddenly out of sight. She clutched Danny’s arm with her right hand and dragged it away from her stomach.

“Keep hugging me,” she told him. “You’re an upset parent.”

“What?” he groaned.

“There’s someone at the door. I think they saw us.”

Danny’s body went limp, and Laurel patted his back as though comforting him. Then she pulled away and assured him that everything was going to work out eventually, that Michael might make surprising progress before the school year ended. Danny stared back like a lovesick teenager, deaf to her words, his eyes trying to drink in every atom of her being.

“I love you,” he said under his breath. “I think about you every minute. I fly over your house every day, just hoping to get a glimpse of you.”

“I know.” She had seen the Cessna he taught lessons in buzzing over Avalon several times in the past five weeks. The sight had lifted her heart every time, in spite of her vows to forget him. “Please shut up.”

“It’s better that you know than not. I don’t want you thinking there’s anything between me and Starlette other than the kids.”

She felt a surge of brutal honesty. “But what’s the point? Either you talk some sense into your wife, or you may as well start sleeping with her again. This is the last hug we’ll ever have. I mean it.”

He nodded soberly.

“Danny?” she said, realizing that she had not yet given him the note.

“What?”

She moved forward, but now there was a face at the door, and this time it did not retreat. It belonged to Ann Mayer, mother of Carl, the severe ADD case. Ann was staring at Danny with undisguised curiosity.

“To hell with her,” Danny whispered, stepping between Laurel and the door. “What were you going to say?”

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

“It was important. I could tell.”

Laurel waved Mrs. Mayer in, and the door opened immediately. “Michael’s going to be fine, Major McDavitt,” Laurel said, using Danny’s retired rank to put some distance between them.

“I appreciate you saying so, Mrs. Shields,” Danny replied, a note of surrender in his voice. “I’m sorry I got upset like that.”

“Don’t give it another thought. It’s tough raising a special boy. Especially for fathers.”

Mrs. Mayer nodded encouragingly to Danny; at last she thought she understood what she’d witnessed.

“Good-bye,” Laurel said, and then she turned and led Mrs. Mayer over to the round table, not even looking up when Danny closed the door.

“Is he all right?” Mrs. Mayer asked, her eyes hungry for details.

“He will be.”

“Lord, he really lost it, didn’t he? Looked like he flat broke down to me.”

Laurel frowned. “I’m sure he wouldn’t want anyone to know.”

“Oh, of course not. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m just surprised, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“Well, my husband told me Major McDavitt killed dozens of Al Qaeda terrorists over there in Afghanistan. He flew with some kind of commando unit. That’s what the newspaper said, anyway.”

This local legend was partly true, Laurel knew, but in some ways a gross exaggeration. “I think he saved more people than he killed, Mrs. Mayer.”

Her eyes flickered. “Oh, really? Did he tell you that?”

Laurel pulled Carl Mayer’s file from her stack. “No, Major McDavitt taught my husband to fly last year. He doesn’t like to talk about his war experiences, but Warren dragged a few things out of him.”

“Oh, I see,” said Mrs. Mayer, relieved-or bored-to hear the word husband brought into the equation. Laurel could plainly see that in Mrs. Mayer’s eyes, she and Danny made far too natural a couple to spend any innocent time alone.

Laurel felt precisely the same.

Chapter 4

Laurel was in the middle of her seventh conference when her vision started to go. The rapt face of the mother across the table wavered as though fifty yards of broiling asphalt separated them; then the center of Laurel’s visual field blanked out, leaving a void like a tunnel through the world.

“Oh, God,” she said, in utter disbelief. “Oh, no.”

She had lied to Diane Rivers about having a migraine; now the lie was coming true. Already the blood vessels were dilating, pressing on the cranial nerves, interfering with her vision. Soon those nerves would release compounds that would drop her to her knees in unremitting agony.

“What is it?” asked Rebecca Linton, a woman of fifty with a mildly retarded daughter. “Are you all right?”

Could the pregnancy be causing it? Laurel wondered. She’d read that some women’s migraines worsened during their first trimester, but in other women they improved. It’s probably the shock of finding out I’m pregnant, on top of all the other stress. Ultimately, the cause didn’t matter. But coming on the heels of the positive pregnancy test, the incipient migraine made her feel she was being pursued by furies intent upon delivering retribution for her moral transgressions. A wave of nausea rolled through her, which might be part of the prodrome or merely fear of the crippling agony that would soon lay her low. A shower of bright sparkles burst like fireworks beside Mrs. Linton’s right ear. “Jesus,”