the night table behind him and located a condom inside before they tumbled onto the bed together.
* * *
He didn’t know how much time had passed. Two condoms’ worth, the first too fast, of course, the second long enough to make a nerd proud if he weren’t too tired to think about it. Then Stephen grinned. A true nerd was never too tired to take credit for and pride in his accomplishments. He’d made the Warrior Princess cry out, made her cling to him as if he were the only important thing in her world. Damn right he was proud.
Beside him she slept, her head on his shoulder, her arm over his middle. Her breathing was even and slow, her sleep so deep that when he brushed her hair from her face, she didn’t even twitch. He wouldn’t be surprised if she could sleep twenty-four hours. Sexual release was good for more than just sexual frustration.
But just as release had made her melt and go limp, he was now wide-awake, and his thoughts returned to her brother and sister-in-law. Macy had known Brent all her life; presumably it would be harder for him to harbor any great secrets without tipping her off.
Anne was another matter. She and Brent hadn’t been married a year yet. How long had they dated? Where had they met? Was it good fortune that she seemed to love his family as much as he did?
There wasn’t a correlation between length of time known and depth of love. Stephen had met Macy a week ago, and he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, be father to Clary, have more babies. He wanted to make Macy laugh and smile, to wake up with her every morning, to be exactly who he was and to let her be exactly who she was. He felt right with her. He belonged with her.
Anne could have had that instant strong connection, too. If her family was warm and loving, she would have been predisposed to want that kind of relationship with her in-laws. If her family was distant and dysfunctional, she could have been predisposed to want a normal relationship with her in-laws, to embrace a healthy family life with enthusiasm.
Unable to sleep and needing to do something, he carefully slid out from beneath Macy. She didn’t murmur or cling; her breathing didn’t change. She adjusted her head on the pillow and kept right on sleeping. He put on his glasses and boxers, then the thought of Clary made him add shorts and a T-shirt.
When he left the bedroom, Clary was still asleep, too. Scooter, curled up by her legs, lifted his head to watch Stephen, then laid it down again.
In the kitchen, Stephen picked up the mugs from the table, rinsed and left them in the sink, then he picked up the pill bottle. It was a popular medication, used to treat both depression and anxiety. It was a pill short; at some point, she’d felt the need to double the dose. Only six remained. And they weren’t working, she’d said.
Wrapping his fingers tightly around the bottle, he went into the office and logged online, looking up the medication. He scanned the information on the manufacturer’s website, the side effects—hallucinations, hauntings and amnesia weren’t among them—and looked at the enlarged photo of the tablet. It was round, white, with letters and a number on one side, the other blank.
With nothing else demanding his attention, Stephen opened the bottle and shook one tablet into his palm. Round, white, letters on one side.
But they didn’t match the letters shown on the screen. When he turned the pill over, it wasn’t smooth like the one on the screen. It had numbers. Maybe it was a generic, though the bottle indicated it was the brand name.
Next he searched for a description of the pill, and a result popped up an instant later. It was a medication for hypertension. No wonder it hadn’t helped her anxiety. In fact, considering that the pharmaceutical company was adamant that patients should be weaned from the anxiety medication, she was damn lucky she hadn’t had more than a few hallucinations.
Had it been an honest mistake? A pharmacy tech in a hurry sticking Macy’s label on someone else’s meds, the pharmacist not catching the error before the prescriptions were picked up?
Considering everything else that had happened, he didn’t think so. Someone had deliberately replaced her anxiety meds with blood pressure medication.
And who had access? Brent