Nicky interrupted ruthlessly. Joe was eating his salad, his expression totally innocent as their eyes met. Too innocent? She suddenly wasn’t sure he’d been telling the truth about not being able to hear. Anyway . . .
“Everything’s fine, Mother. Don’t worry. I have to go, my salad’s here. Bye.”
She disconnected, tucked the phone back into her pocket, took a bite of her salad, and reflected.
Okay. Sometimes—just sometimes—Mother had the right idea.
“So-o,” she said on a drawn-out note as her eyes met his across the table, “are you married?”
His lips twitched. “She told you to ask me that, didn’t she? The answer is no, I’m not.”
Considering the direction her thoughts had been taking, that was a relief.
“Ever been?”
“No.”
“Engaged? Steady girlfriend?” she asked with a lift of her brows, and took another bite of salad. The lettuce was iceberg, the dressing a light vinaigrette, probably from a bottle. Decent, but nothing special, was her verdict. Certainly nothing to distract her from the conversation—or the company.
He grinned. “No. And no.”
“Good,” she said.
At the implication implicit in that, his eyes darkened—and heated. She caught her breath. . . .
Before either of them could say anything more, the waitress arrived with their meals. She chatted to them both comfortably as she served the food, and the moment passed. In the low country, seafood, as the menu had stated, was king. That being the case, Nicky had ordered grilled shrimp and grits, Joe soft-shell crab. Joe dug into his hungrily, like a man who’d been catching meals on the fly for some time, and Nicky followed suit, although with considerably less enthusiasm. Like the salad, the food was good, but not, Nicky was pleased to discover, great. When it opened, which probably wouldn’t be until the season was well under way at the rate things were going, Uncle Ham’s restaurant would blow this one away.
“So, have you gotten any hot leads since we talked Thursday night?” Nicky asked as she delicately dissected a shrimp.
Joe looked up from his crab. His eyes slid over her face. “You trying to pump me for information?”
Nicky grinned. “Maybe.”
“Maybe nothing. You are. You can forget it, too. I’ve got nothing to say about an ongoing investigation.”
“Too late. You already told me stuff. When I called you.”
“It was the middle of the night. You caught me by surprise.” Without warning, his brows met over his nose and his jaw hardened. Clearly, he’d recollected his grievance with her.
Uh-oh, Nicky thought. She was already starting to recognize that look.
“Whoever this guy we’re dealing with is, he’s a very bad guy. I want you off the island. For your own safety. I’m begging here. Please.”
Nicky sighed and put down her fork. “We’ve already had this conversation.”
“Yeah, well, we’re going to keep on having it, believe me.”
“Joe . . .” His eyes darkened and flickered, and she realized that it was the first time she had called him by name. It was clear from his expression that he registered it, too.
“Nicky,” he said, his tone gently mocking hers. Their eyes locked. A strange new intimacy seemed to shimmer in the air between them, as if they’d taken a step through a door that led to—what? A relationship?
Nicky’s heart beat faster at the thought.
“I told you. . . .” she said.
“Yeah, you told me.” His voice was dry. “Basically, what you’re saying is that your career is more important than your life, right?”
Nicky narrowed her eyes at him. “There you go again with another one of those ‘heads I win, tales you lose’ things.”
For a moment, they all but glared at each other. Then, almost reluctantly, he laughed.
“All right,” he said. “So tell me about Live in the Morning. That’s the one with Troy Hayden and Angie somebody, right? If you get it, you gonna be moving to New York?”
“Yes. If I get it. That’s a very big if.”
“And why is that?”
She was surprised, a little touched, and more than a little charmed that he remembered so clearly what she’d said earlier. Very few people knew that she was interested in the job, even fewer knew that she had auditioned, and what she had said to him about it had been only a passing remark. Getting ahead in TV-land was a game best played close to the vest, she had learned, and telling people she worked with that she was being considered for the Live in the Morning spot would only result in (a) them questioning her commitment to her present job, and (b) her stock going down if the job wasn’t offered to her, which, realistically, it probably wasn’t going to be. But Joe wasn’t in TV, and that was why she had felt safe in mentioning it in the first place. Now he watched her with smiling dark eyes as she talked, and asked all the right questions, so she ended up telling him all about it. By the time she finished, their plates had been cleared, the check had been presented and taken care of, and they were lingering over coffee.
“You ready?” he asked. “I can’t smoke in here, and I need a cigarette.”
She nodded, pushed her chair back, and stood up. “You shouldn’t smoke.”
“I know.” He followed her from the dining room. “It’s one of my bad habits.”
“You say that like you have a lot of them.”
“I have a fair number.”
They were out in the open-air courtyard now. He paused to light a cigarette, and she watched with some disapproval as he cupped a hand around the flame of his lighter to shield it from the wind, then took a drag deep enough to make the tip of the lit cigarette glow red. Then he dropped the lighter back into his pocket along with the pack of cigarettes, and they started walking along the path between the pool and the hot tub, heading for the beach. His hand curved around her elbow, as casual and possessive as if it belonged there. She was very aware of it, even though, cool to the end, she pretended not to have even noticed. It was after ten now, she guessed, and beyond the reach of the tiki torches that lit the courtyard, the night was as soft and dense as black velvet. There were two couples in the hot tub, and a lone swimmer carved out laps in the pool. The smell of smoke was in the air, from Joe’s cigarette and the torches. The sound of the sea made gentle background music for the laughter and splashing of the tourists.
“I’ve been wondering,” she said, because her tension level was climbing as they reached the beach and headed toward the edge of the circle of light, and she felt a sudden nervous need to break the silence that had fallen between them, “how you ended up as the island’s police chief. It just doesn’t seem like the kind of job you’d like.”
His hand tightened on her elbow.
“What’s not to like? The sun, the beach, babes in bikinis everywhere you look—this place is practically paradise.”
They were crossing the line now, stepping from warm yellow light into cool darkness, and Nicky felt an anticipatory shiver race down her spine. It took a second for her eyes to adjust, but when they did, she saw that the old man in the chair was gone, as were the children who had played in the surf earlier. If there were other people strolling along the sand—and there had to be, it was that kind of night—she didn’t see them. All she saw was that the moon was high in the sky and the beach was washed in otherworldly light, and the white-capped waves rolled toward shore in an endless, hypnotic rhythm that was as old as time.
“Still . . .” she murmured.
He stopped walking, tossed his cigarette away, and pulled her around to face him.
“I’ve been wondering something, too.”
His eyes gleamed at her through the darkness. The top of her head barely reached his chin. They were now standing so close together that she had to tilt her head back to see his face. With the moonlight glinting off his black hair and silvering his hard, high cheekbones and the strong lines of his nose and jaw, he looked so handsome that he stole
her breath.
“What?”
He held both her elbows lightly now, and her hands rested on his upper arms. His jacket was some kind of lightweight summer material, not linen but something smooth and cool, probably a synthetic. Through it she could feel the well-developed firmness of his biceps. Her heart started to beat just a little bit faster.
“What you meant back there when you said ‘good.’ ”
“Good?” She looked down. Distracted as she was by her own shivery reaction to those admittedly impressive muscles, she didn’t follow at first.
“I said I’d never been married, that I wasn’t engaged and I didn’t have a steady girlfriend, and you said ‘good.’ ”
“Oh,” Nicky said, remembering now. “Well, I probably said ‘good’ because that meant there was a job vacancy.”
“Oh, yeah?” He smiled, a little, and she suddenly found her eyes fixed on his long, mobile mouth. Electricity seemed to sizzle in the air between them. Heat curled somewhere deep inside her body. Her heart began to thud in her chest.
“Yeah,” she said, looking up to meet his gaze. Then, because the suspense was killing her and she’d never been very good at just passively waiting for anything anyway, she went up on her toes and kissed him.
14
HIS LIPS WERE WARM and firm, and tasted faintly of cigarettes. He stood perfectly still for a moment, just letting her kiss him. Nicky would have thought that maybe she was striking out if it hadn’t been for the gradual tightening of his hands on her elbows. They were looking at each other from beneath lowered lids, watching each other’s eyes while her lips plied his, and even when he started to respond, the kisses stayed hot and soft and only faintly demanding. Her body did a slow burn. Her nipples tightened. An insistent, throbbing excitement sprang to life deep inside her. As they kissed, the feeling just kept spiraling tighter and tighter until her toes were curling in her shoes. Dizzy with the heat that they were generating, she leaned into him, kissed him harder. The sudden fierce flare in his eyes was all the warning she got before soft and gentle was suddenly abandoned as he took control of the kiss, pulling her close against him with his hands now hard on her elbows, slanting his lips over hers and sliding his tongue deep into her mouth. Her head spun. Her heart slammed against her rib cage. Her eyes closed. She kissed him back while her body went haywire with excitement, and he let go of her elbows and slid his arms around her and took her mouth with a hungry carnality that practically dissolved her bones.
Oh, God. She’d forgotten what it felt like to be kissed like this.
Her arms slid up over his shoulders to wrap around his neck. She pressed close, flattening herself against him, and kissed him as if she’d die if she didn’t. Sex had never been high on her list of priorities, but suddenly it was, suddenly it was all she could think about, suddenly her body was in the grip of a hot, sweet fire that made her absolutely mindless—or, rather, absolutely single-minded.
She wanted him.
“Nicky.” He lifted his head, trailing his mouth across her cheek until it came to rest, hot and damp and unbelievably erotic, in the soft, sensitive hollow below her ear.
“Joe,” she breathed. Her fingers stroked the warm skin at his nape, slid into the cool, thick hair that curled there, as his mouth crawled down her throat to press a hot, steamy necklace of kisses around the base of her neck. The breeze caught her hair, blew it in front of her eyes. She tucked it back behind her ears to get it out of the way, then slid her hands sensuously over the solid expanse of his shoulders. Her breasts snuggled into the firm wall of his chest. There was a protrusion—hard, unnatural—his gun. As she identified it, her body quaked all over. It was a personal first: She was wanting to get naked and horizontal with a man who carried a gun. A cop. Joe. At the thought, her head spun and her knees turned to Jell-O. If he hadn’t been holding her up, chances were good that she would have gone down.
“That thing won’t go off, will it?” she managed.
“What thing?” His head lifted, and he looked down at her. His eyes were dark, restless, gleaming. She could see the wanting there, feel the tension in his arms, his body.
“Your gun.”
Their mouths were just inches apart. His big body was curved protectively around her, and she could feel the heat of him seeping through the layers of their clothes. His arms were hard bands holding her against him; his hands felt large and strong as they splayed out across her back.
Behind his head, the night sky was aglitter with stars. “Oh. No. The safety’s on.” His voice was thick and low. The warmth of his breath feathered her cheek.
“That’s good,” she said.
“Mmm.” His eyes moved over her face. “Just for the record, you have the sexiest mouth I’ve ever seen.”
She started to smile at him but got no further than a slight upturn at the corners of her lips before he was kissing her again, so expertly and thoroughly that she quivered with pleasure. She kissed him back shamelessly, on fire for him and not caring if he knew it, wanting him to know it. Her hips rocked into his. Her thighs pressed against his thighs. She could feel how turned on he was, feel the hot, urgent bulge beneath his zipper, and she pressed closer yet, moving sensuously against him.
“God, I want you.” His voice was a rough whisper. Nicky opened her eyes to discover that he was looking down at her. His face was hard, his eyes dark and hot. He almost looked like a stranger—a tough, aggressive stranger—and it struck Nicky then that she really knew very little about him, and maybe she should be careful and . . .
His hand found its way between them, unbuttoning the single button that secured her flimsy jacket with practiced ease, then sliding over her breast. Nicky felt the jolt of it clear down to her toes. Her body tightened instantly. Arching her back, she kissed him feverishly and pressed closer into that caressing hand. His thumb found her nipple. Even through the thin layers of her shell and bra, she could feel the heat of it brushing back and forth over the sensitive nub. She quaked, she quivered, she melted, she burned.
The one cohesive thought that managed to form in her passion-stupefied brain was, The man knows his way around women.
He tugged her shell out of the waistband of her pants. His hand slipped beneath it. She felt the hard heat of that hand sliding up the cool skin covering her rib cage and moaned into his mouth.
In answer, he pulled her closer yet, and his thigh pushed between her legs.
Wait. Hang on. Get a grip. Slow down.
Even while that niggly little voice in her mind tried to tell her that this was a mistake, that she was going way too fast, that if she didn’t call a halt soon, this was going to turn into one of those you’re-going-to-hate-yourself-in-the-morning kind of situations, she ignored it in favor of abandoning herself to sensation. It had been so long since she’d felt anything like this. Had she ever felt anything like this? She tried to remember. . . .
Then her instant mental replay of past boyfriends crashed and burned as her thrice-damned phone began to ring.
The sound came out of nowhere, shocking her with its incongruity. It took her passion-fogged brain a moment to figure out what it was. Then she realized, and stiffened.
He lifted his mouth from hers, met her gaze with eyes that were narrow and gleaming with desire.
“Let it ring,” he said.
She wanted to. Oh, she wanted to. But as much as she would have liked to ignore the strident summons, she couldn’t. It was her mother, she knew it was her mother, and the idea that it was her mother was like having a bucket of cold water dumped on her head. It was stupid, it was maddening, it was probably childish as all get out, but there it was: She couldn’t fool around with a man knowing that her mother was at the other end of her phone.
“I can’t.”
By the time she started wriggling to get free, it was on its fourth peal.
His eyes blazed, his jaw clenched, his body went taut and still—but he let her go.
“Sorry,” she said distractedly as a glan
ce at the caller’s number confirmed her suspicion. Joe’s fists were on his hips, he was breathing hard enough so that she could hear it, and he was looking tall and dark and dangerous in the moonlight. She discovered that she especially liked the dangerous part.
I’m going to kill you, Mother.
She sent the thought winging its way toward Twybee Cottage, and tried not to sound as ticked off as she felt as she answered the damned phone.
“Are you on your way home yet?” Leonora demanded.
“Yes, I am, Mother.” Okay, she probably sounded just a little annoyed. Anyway, Joe, who was now about three feet away, lighting a cigarette, smiled a little as he listened.
“Did I interrupt something?” Her mother wanted to know. Clearly the edge in Nicky’s voice had told her more than her daughter would have voluntarily imparted.
“Not at all.”
“Oh,” Leonora said. “Well, you’re an adult, but I would have thought you might want to wait just a little bit longer. . . . But that’s your decision to make, of course.”
“I’m hanging up now.”
“Wait. The reason I called is Marisa’s here at the house. She brought the tape from Sunday night. There are voices on it. Tara and Lauren and Becky, I’m almost sure. You can hear them whispering things like ‘He’s here’ in the background. They mean the man who murdered them, of course, and I thought Joe ought to come and have a listen.”
Nicky glanced at Joe. He was watching her, the smile gone now, his expression impossible to read as he puffed away at his cigarette. At the thought of conveying this news to him, Nicky’s stomach tightened.
And not in a good way.
It was hard to discuss ghosts in a reasonable manner with a man who patently didn’t believe in them.
Her mother was still talking. “I knew they were there that night. I just couldn’t see them. All I could do was pick up Tara’s imprint. Nicky, what on earth am I going to do if I don’t get over this?”
“You’ll get over it,” Nicky said, added a quick “We’re on our way,” and then disconnected.
Superstition Page 25
