“On whether you meant what you said earlier about not sleeping with me.”
There was a huskiness to his voice that made her breathing quicken. Her lips parted. Instinctively she lifted them toward his.
His eyes narrowed; his lips compressed; his head pulled back. Then his hand caught hers and pulled it out from under his shirt despite her sound of protest.
“Mac!”
He hesitated, his hand tightening on hers, and their eyes met again. Electricity leaped between them, so strong it practically ignited the air. Then he muttered something that sounded like damn under his breath, leaned forward and kissed her, his mouth slanting across hers with a hungry urgency that made her dizzier than she already was. Julie’s eyes closed. Her lips parted. His kiss was hot, and fierce, and tasted faintly of beer, and she responded to it with mindless pleasure. Her loins tightened and began to throb. Her breasts swelled greedily toward his chest. Her fingers curled around his, claiming his hand for her own. Head reeling, she licked into his mouth and pressed the hand that was joined to hers palm-down over her breast. It rested there, radiating heat through the thin layer of silk, hard and heavy and crazy-making on the soft fullness of her. His hand on her breast felt so wonderfully, unbelievably good. . . .
For a moment, as she held his hand to her breast and her nipple pebbled against his palm, she thought he wasn’t going to respond. Then he made a sound deep in his throat, the kiss seemed to burst into flame, and his hand got with the program, tightening and squeezing with an almost compulsive need. Her heart pounded; her loins throbbed; her toes curled. His kiss drove her wild. His hand caressed her breast, cupped it; his thumb ran knowingly back and forth across her nipple. She moved enticingly, straining upward against the constraint of her seat belt, her hand sliding behind his neck to pull him closer yet; a delicious tightening sensation began deep inside her body. She moaned, arching her back—and then he was pulling away, lifting his mouth from hers, removing his hand from her breast, putting inches of space between them when all she wanted to do was get closer to him than his own underwear.
She opened her eyes and gave him a look that said do me right now or die as clearly as if she’d shouted it. Although, of course, verbally she would never be that crude. Instead she fluttered her lashes and gave him a sexy little murmur of encouragement.
“Mac . . .”
His eyes narrowed at her.
“Don’t mess with me, Julie, or I’m liable to forget you’re operating with a bad case of scrambled brains here.”
And with that he pulled his hand from hers and withdrew, just like that, shutting her door and walking around the hood to get in himself.
“I do not,” she said with what dignity she could muster, crossing her arms over her still tingly chest and scowling at him as he put the key in the ignition, “have scrambled brains.”
“Tell me that after a doctor’s looked at you.” He started the car.
“Maybe I’m just rethinking my position.” She uncrossed her arms, and trailed a teasing finger down the sinewy arm closest to her. “After all, why shouldn’t I sleep with you?”
“Because it’s a bad idea.” He dodged to escape her touch. Julie let her hand drop.
They were moving now. The car slid through the night with a whisper of tires, leaving the playground behind. In seconds they were once again cruising past dark houses with sleeping families tucked cozily inside.
“Why is it a bad idea? Don’t you want to sleep with me?” She hunched her shoulders petulantly, casting him a sidelong look.
He laughed. They were moving into the commercial district now, and by the light of 7-Elevens and Dunkin’ Donuts and streetlamps she was able to see him quite clearly. He looked—better than a chocolate-glazed. And also faintly rueful.
“Does that mean yes or no?” There was an edge to her voice.
“I’d say definitely yes.”
She rested her head on the seat back and glared at him, exasperated. “So what’s your problem?”
His eyes cut to her. “My problem is that we need to have this conversation when you’re not a couple of french fries short of a Happy Meal.” He sounded way too patient for her liking.
“That’s ridiculous.”
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
She made a face at him. “Chicken.”
“Damn right,” he said, and made clucking sounds. “And here we are.”
To her annoyance, he sounded relieved.
He parked in the lot to the left of the emergency-room entrance and turned off the car. Then he sat for a moment with his hands resting on the steering wheel, staring out through the windshield at the nearly full lot with a gathering frown on his face. The yellowish glow of the tall lamps that illuminated the area allowed her to see him clearly. His mouth and jaw were taut; his eyes were hard.
“What?” Julie asked when he didn’t say anything.
“Okay.” The word was abrupt. His gaze slashed toward her. “I need to know. Were you raped?” His fingers curled around the steering wheel as he spoke, then tightened so that his knuckles showed white.
“No. No.” Julie swallowed as the brutality of the attack came back to her in a sudden sickening wave. “He—I think that’s what he had in mind, but it didn’t happen.”
“Why not?” He looked fully at her then, and his tone was milder. The tension in his body eased. Even his grip on the steering wheel relaxed to a degree.
“I bit his nose. Then I ran.”
A beat passed. “You bit his nose?”
Julie nodded.
“Hard,” she said with relish, remembering. “It was bleeding. I heard it crunch. Then he screamed and rolled off me, and I jumped up and ran downstairs.”
He stared at her for a moment as if he couldn’t believe his ears. Then his face relaxed and a hint of a smile turned up one corner of his mouth. “That would work.” The smile widened into a grin. “You’re something, you know that? Really something.”
“So sleep with me.” Julie’s tone was deliberately, flirtatiously seductive. Her gaze locked with his.
“Later,” he said. “Maybe.”
He pulled the keys from the ignition and got out of the car. Julie watched as he came around to open her door. She was starting to feel really bad again, she realized, light-headed and sick at her stomach, and it occurred to her that maybe Mac was right—maybe she was short a few vital french fries. Or maybe she felt so ill because talking about it so graphically had brought the reality of the attack back to her with a vengeance. Before, when she’d been flirting with Mac, the whole nightmarish sequence of events had seemed far away, long ago, and almost as if had happened to someone else.
That kind of distancing was, she realized, probably some sort of defense mechanism kicking in. Whatever, its protective effect was gone now, and she felt bad.
Mac opened her door and reached across her to unfasten her belt. This time she didn’t move, just lay limply back against the seat with her hands in her lap, battling a renewed urge to heave. When the latch released, he eased the seat belt away from her and took a quick, assessing look at her face.
“Hang on a few more minutes, tough guy,” he said, his voice both rough and surprisingly tender at the same time, and slid his arms around her to scoop her out.
Julie didn’t answer. She was too busy trying to keep all her cookies on board. Instead, she curled her arms around his neck and burrowed her head into the hollow between his neck and shoulder and closed her eyes, trusting him to take care of everything, to take care of her.
It was amazing to consider how much, in such a short span of time, she had grown to trust Mac.
“When we get inside,” he said, striding toward the emergency room doors with her in his arms, “here’s what I need you to do. . . .”
* * *
Later, after the police had arrived along with a frantic-seeming Sid and, some ten minutes after that, Julie’s even more frantic-seeming mother and sister, Mac slid out from behind the potted ficus and the newspapers
that had served as his cover and left the hospital. The circus was in full swing inside. He didn’t want any part of that. And Julie didn’t need him anymore. At least, not at this end.
Dawn was just beginning to outline the eastern horizon in glowing orange. Not that the early hour made any difference to his plans. He slid into the taxi that waited, and made a second phone call as it pulled away from the curb.
When Mother answered, clearly peeved at having his beauty sleep disturbed, Mac cut him off with a few well-chosen words.
“I need some information.”
17
BY TUESDAY MORNING JULIE WAS BACK AT WORK. She’d spent Sunday night in the hospital for observation and Monday night at her mother’s. Although to everyone else she insisted that she was fine, to herself she acknowledged that she was still not mentally over the attack. Or physically over it either, for that matter. As Mac had suspected, she had suffered a slight concussion—or, as he’d so descriptively put it, scrambled brains. She had a baseball-sized bruise on her temple, three more in the approximate shape of ladyfingers on her throat, and one small crescent-shaped one just to the left of her belly button. All were an ugly shade of purple, and the ones on her face and throat were all but impervious to attempts to hide them with makeup. In their honor, she wore a petal-pink sleeveless sweater dress with a high, concealing turtleneck that she would have ordinarily deemed too hot for the weather, and accessorized it with a narrow purple belt and a pair of sinfully expensive purple sandals.
At least, she thought with a glimmer of humor, eyeing herself in one of the mirrored walls of her shop, no one could say she wasn’t color-coordinated.
They could say plenty of other things, though. She was starting to feel like a one-woman sideshow. She’d been badgered for details by everyone from the police to Sid to her mother and Becky to friends and neighbors to people she didn’t remember ever meeting in her life. Only Sid’s combined cajoling and threatening of the publisher had kept the story out of the local newspaper. The consensus was that the attack was probably related to the theft of her car: either the thief had come across her picture in her purse—on her driver’s license, maybe—and been moved by it to attack, or the attack had been part of the original plan, which had been aborted for some reason, and the criminal had come back to finish the job.
After all, what were the chances of two unconnected crimes occurring at the same address within two days?
Not to worry, though: The police assured her that (a) they would solve the case; and (b) it was unlikely that the criminal would return.
Given what they knew, Julie supposed that both were reasonable assumptions. She was not convinced of either point, however: look how easy they were to fool. She was sure that the man who had attacked her was not one of the punks who had stolen her car. No way, no how. Number one, the punks who stole her car had her keys, a fact of which the police were not aware and which she could find no way of letting them in on that did not involve admitting her lie; they would not have needed to jimmy the back door, which her attacker had done. For obvious reasons, she discussed that small glitch in the official theory with no one but Mac. He had called her twice, once at the hospital and once at her mother’s, and they’d spoken briefly and guardedly, but she had not seen him since he’d left her in the emergency room.
To her own dismay, she caught herself missing him. A lot.
It was an unusually busy morning, both because Monday’s appointments had been blended with Tuesday’s and because of the looming start of the Miss Southern Beauty pageant. Besides Carlene, Julie was dressing seven other contestants. All had come in for final fittings, and finding herself knee-deep in adjusting built-in padded bras and waist-whittling spandex dress liners was cathartic. Life was, more or less, back to normal, and Julie was grateful for that. She never in her life wanted to go through another weekend like the one she had just spent.
When the phone rang around one, Julie was on her knees putting the last few stitches in a client’s competition evening gown. Her mouth was full of the pins she had removed from the aqua silk-satin creation as she worked her way around the hem, tacking it up.
“Julie, you have a phone call,” Meredith said, entering the dressing room and looking down at her. “Someone named Debbie.”
Julie almost swallowed the pins. In the interests of personal health and safety, she spit them out in her hand.
“Thanks.” She motioned Meredith over to continue the task, and stood up, smiling at her red-haired client through the mirror. “Excuse me. I’ll be right back.”
This one—Tara Lumley—was sweet, as most of them were. Her handler sat quietly in a corner thumbing through a magazine. Absolute dolls, both of them. Too bad that, in Julie’s expert opinion, Tara didn’t have a prayer of defeating Carlene. Julie was all for someone, anyone, defeating Carlene.
Julie deposited the pins in a crystal container on her desk, and picked up the phone.
“Hi,” she said, her voice far huskier and more intimate than it would have been if she truly had been addressing a Debbie whose name and gender matched.
“Hi, yourself.” The sound of Mac’s voice made her heartbeat quicken and her hand tighten on the receiver. Julie recognized her response as a bad thing, and enjoyed it anyway. “You got any plans for lunch?”
“I’ve already eaten.” Two carrots and some crackers, just before noon. Oh, God, she wanted to see him. So much it scared her.
“Me too. So’s how about you heading across the street to the Taco Bell anyway? I need to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“Tell you when you get here.”
Julie hesitated, thinking of Tara. Amber had gone to lunch, which meant that Meredith would have to handle everything alone. But Amber would be back within the hour, and Meredith was perfectly capable of dealing with anything that came up, as long as Julie was back by three. That’s when Carlene was scheduled for her next fitting. Thinking of Carlene, Julie groaned inwardly and made up her mind. She deserved a break today.
“Be right there,” she said, and put down the phone. Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirrored wall across the room, Julie frowned. Suddenly pink and purple to match her bruises didn’t seem like such a good idea—and the clingy skirt seemed to make her butt look enormous. Frowning, she walked into the showroom and rifled through the racks until she found the square-necked lilac sundress she sought. It was short, slim-cut, and far more chic than the pink sweater dress, and had the added advantage of working well with her sandals. Hurrying back into her office, she changed, hanging her discarded dress on the rack with some of the newly arrived stock that had yet to be put on display. With the addition of a four-strand pearl choker to hide the worst of the bruises on her throat, and pearl earrings, also from stock, she was ready. Observing herself in another of the ubiquitous mirrors as she left, she smiled. With her black hair and tanned skin providing a nice contrast to the lilac linen and pearls, she looked good. Very Jackie O, but good.
Butterflies took flight in her stomach at the idea that Mac was waiting for her right across the street, and she shook her head at herself. She was reacting like a teenager in the throes of her first crush. And over Debbie! The thought made her smile.
After calling Meredith aside and telling her that she had to run a quick errand, Julie walked across the street to the Taco Bell. She said a cheery good afternoon to one of the clerks from the candle shop next door, who was outside smoking a cigarette and stared at the still faintly visible, despite her best efforts with makeup, bruise on her temple with unabashed curiosity. The sun was blinding as it bounced off the pavement, the heat hung like a translucent veil in the air, and the passing cars were no more than shooting flashes of color and carbon monoxide.
Traffic was heavy as usual at midday as shoppers patronized both the strip mall where Carolina Belle was located and the larger shopping center directly across the street. Julie was careful as she hurried across the road, shielding her eyes with her hand and look
ing both ways. Jaywalking was officially illegal, but everyone did it, including the tourists. Summerville was that kind of town.
The Taco Bell was busy. A line of cars crept toward the drive-through window, and through the plate glass Julie could see that the restaurant was full. She was just about to head inside when a short, sharp whistle drew her attention. Glancing around, she spotted Mac, and her pulse rate immediately increased. He was near the back of the parking lot, leaning against the Blazer with his arms crossed over his chest, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt under a Hawaiian shirt so bright it rivaled the sun. A pair of Oakleys were wrapped around his face. It was clear from the smile just touching the corners of his mouth that he was watching her, but the sunglasses kept her from seeing his eyes.
God, he was gorgeous, was the thought that immediately sprang into her mind. Then, with an inner groan: Why did he have to be gorgeous?
Even as the thought hit her, Julie felt an answering smile curve her lips quite of its own volition. Gorgeous or not, she was glad to see him. Really, really glad to see him.
And a little embarrassed, too, she realized, which wasn’t surprising when she thought about it. After all, this was the man she had kissed shamelessly the last time she’d set eyes on him. The man whose lap she had straddled and whose hand she had boldly pressed to her breast. The man she had all but begged to make love to her.
The man who had said no.
She didn’t know whether to be mad at him or grateful for that.
“Yo,” Mac said by way of a greeting as she got closer. His arms uncrossed, his hands dropped, and Julie realized that he was holding one end of a leash. A black leather leash. Eyes widening, she followed it down past the front of the Blazer just in time to see Josephine emerge from behind one of the small, scruffy bushes that grew in the grassy strip that separated the Taco Bell parking lot from the Kroger parking lot next door: Josephine, minus her pink hair bows and nail polish, sporting a black leather collar with silver studs.
Spotting Julie in turn, Josephine gave a sharp little yap of recognition and danced to meet her.
To Trust a Stranger Page 19
