by Debra Dixon
That was a bad three years.
Abruptly Beau felt the need to change the subject. He didn’t want to take a trip down memory lane, and he definitely didn’t want any more reason to empathize with Maggie. “Look. It’s late. Let’s just get this over with.”
Maggie recoiled from the cold, emotionless order. For a second she’d forgotten that Beau wasn’t a friend exchanging confidences in the wee hours of the morning. “Right. I’m sorry for boring you. Silly me. I forgot you’re only interested in taking me to bed or to jail.”
A flash of anger flickered across his features, but he said nothing.
“So, let’s have it, Beau. What did you find in the barn? How much trouble am I in now?”
“I didn’t find anything in the barn. But since the fire started at night and there’s no evidence of flammable goods having been stored there, I think we can rule out spontaneous combustion.”
Pushing away from the table, Maggie picked up the cookie plate just as he reached for an Oreo. “Yeah, let’s rule out spontaneous combustion. We wouldn’t want this to be too easy.”
“Who owns that land?” He twisted in the chair to watch her.
She put the plate on the kitchen counter and rummaged for a big plastic container that actually still had a lid. She settled for a mixing bowl and aluminum foil. “Beats me. It was for sale about two years ago. Holkum Realty was the name on the sign. I’m sure they can tell you who owned it and if they sold it.”
Maggie dumped the cookies into the bowl. “Not that it’s going to do any good. You and I both know whoever the owner is, he could care less about that barn. The property is probably worth more without it. The owner didn’t burn down his barn for insurance. Before you can run an insurance scam, you have to have something to run the scam on. There isn’t an insurance company in the world that would have insured that firetrap.”
“You seem to be an expert on fire insurance scams, Maggie.”
She shot him a withering glare. “I worked insurance claims to put myself through nursing school. Jesus, Beau, I own a television, and I’m not stupid. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out.”
He didn’t argue. He just asked another question. “Don’t you have the seven to three shift?”
“Yeah.” She swiped the black crumbs into the sink and rinsed her coffee cup. Housekeeping wasn’t a priority with Maggie, but right now, fiddling with meaningless chores gave her an excuse to ignore Beau’s attention.
“Most people on that schedule would have been asleep at one in the morning. Why were you up, Maggie? Nightmare? Insomnia?”
“A good book.”
“What book?”
“A travel book about Ireland!” She flung the sponge onto the counter. “I don’t remember the exact title. It’s on my bedside table. You wanna see it?”
“Yeah. As a matter of fact I would. I’ll go with you.”
When he stood up, Maggie realized that he’d just politely called her a liar. Worse, she’d foolishly invited Beau Grayson on a tour of her bedroom, and he’d accepted.
SEVEN
Beau was glad Maggie had the counter to lean on. All that blood rushing from her face couldn’t be good for her equilibrium. “Is there a problem with showing me the book?”
“No! No. It’s the bedroom.” She frowned. “I wasn’t expecting company. It’s a mess really, so why don’t I just bring the book down?”
Slowly Beau shook his head to veto that suggestion. Visiting Maggie’s bedroom was his reward for dragging himself out of bed in the middle of the night. He wasn’t about to let her wiggle out of the tour. Not until he was satisfied that she wasn’t lying to him. And he intended to enjoy every awkward moment.
“Maggie, darlin’, I won’t tell the home patrol you toss your dainties on the floor … if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Yeah, that’s it.” Maggie wiped the palms of her hands against the seat of her jogging pants, but she didn’t move. To Beau she looked like one of those cliff divers psyching themselves up for the plunge.
“Maggie?” he prodded, eyebrow raised. “The book?”
“I know. I know.” She moved away from the counter finally, but not without protest. “But this is stupid. I told you I was reading. What else would I have been doing in bed at that time of the night?”
“You want a list?” Beau offered.
Much to his disappointment, she ignored the question, but she heard it and understood the subtext. The flush in her cheeks gave her away, so he relented.
“It’s not just the book, Maggie. I need to see your vantage point of the fire.”
“Vantage point?” The frown furrowed her brow and shadowed her eyes.
“You were reading in bed,” he explained. “I assume you first saw the fire from upstairs. So I’d like to see your view.”
“All right. That makes sense.” Maggie motioned to the wolfhound. “Stay here, Gwen.”
“Thank, God!” he whispered instantly. He caught her grudging smile at his fervent gratitude and added, “I don’t think she likes me.”
“I don’t imagine many people like you, Grayson.”
“It goes with the territory.”
“What territory would that be?” She led him toward a narrow staircase off the back hallway.
He answered her question with one of his own. “How did you feel when the engine arrived, Maggie? How did you feel when the first volunteer jumped off that truck?”
Puzzled, Maggie halted halfway up the stairs and twisted her upper body to look down at him. “Relieved. Glad. Maybe like the cavalry had arrived.”
Beau stopped with his foot on the step below her. Then slowly he transferred his weight. Her hip brushed intimately against his abdomen as he rose to claim the stair, but he didn’t avoid the contact. Didn’t want to. He liked the feel of Maggie snugged up against him. Maggie didn’t budge either, but she swallowed hard.
“And how did you feel when you saw me, Maggie?” he asked. The stairs had almost balanced their height, but Beau still had the edge.
“Truth?” The whisper hung in the quiet of the old house like a warning.
“Truth.”
She finally turned to face him, breaking the tenuous contact of her hip but still so close that air barely passed between them. “When I saw you walk up, I couldn’t breathe.”
“Why was that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do,” he urged. “Why, Maggie? Truth time again.”
“Because you … scare me.” The words were obviously dragged out of some secret place inside her. She didn’t want to admit it any more than he wanted to know it. But it was a fact of his life for the last couple of years.
“I scare a lot of people, Maggie. Day in and day out. They’re all afraid that I’m going to ruin their lives or their plans, arrest them or someone they love.” He shrugged. “Guilt attaches itself to even the most accidental of fires. Firefighters? Well, they help. Whether the firefighter is a man or woman makes no difference to the public’s collective sigh of relief when that red truck heaves into sight. Arson investigators? That’s a different story. They hurt. That’s how people see us. It goes with the territory.”
“If you don’t like the job, then why not go back to fire fighting? Go be a hero.”
“Truth?”
“Truth.”
She clearly wanted a secret of his, so he gave her one. “Because I can’t trust the fire anymore. Can’t trust myself not to take impossible risks when she’s whispering to me. So I gave her up, put on the badge instead. This way I can still save a few lives, and the people who work for me can go home to their families every night. Each of them still in one piece because they didn’t follow me into hell.”
Maggie tightened her grip on the railing. That his team would follow Beau into hell was easy to believe. He inspired confidence; he had that trick of making people believe he could protect them. But what worried her was that he also talked about the fire as if it we
re a living entity. As if he knew it. As if it spoke to him.
Watch me.
She rolled her bottom lip inward to wet it, worried it with her teeth, just as she worried the impulse to tell Beau about the past. Maybe he’d understand. Maybe she could tell him. Maybe if he knew—
No! She couldn’t forget that Beau would play any role to get what he wanted. His job depended on winning the confidence of suspects, and he was so good at getting people to talk about themselves. At comforting a woman without revealing anything of himself.
“And who do you go home to, Beau?” she asked, realizing she had kissed him, but she didn’t even know if he was married.
“An empty bed.” Beau leaned, just a fraction of an inch. That’s all the room there was. With one hand he grabbed the railing beside her; the other he flattened against the wall at his side. “I go home to a great big lonely bed. Now, you tell me, Maggie May. Is that the answer you wanted to hear? Or does that scare you even more?”
Surprisingly, Maggie didn’t lean away; she held perfectly still. For a moment he thought she was issuing a silent invitation to be kissed. Lord knows that’s what he wanted to do. A second before he obliged, he realized the problem. His lips were almost on hers as he whispered, “Breathe.”
Maggie sucked in air and stumbled backward up a few stairs. Her eyebrows scrunched together as she struggled for words, pointing behind her head. “The … um … the … ah …”
Beau supplied, “Bedroom?”
“Yeah! The bedroom’s up there.” She inched away and then turned to flee in earnest.
He gave her a head start before he followed. Watching her rump sway in front of his face wouldn’t have improved his mood or changed the facts. He could have kissed any other woman and been done with it. Suspect or not.
But he couldn’t kiss Maggie. He still hadn’t forgotten the moment of panic in her living room. Or the haunted shadows in her eyes at the hospital. Because of that he couldn’t separate his need to touch her from his need to protect her. The problem was that he didn’t know what he was supposed to be protecting her from.
Maybe you’re protecting yourself.
Beau swore aloud. Thankfully, Maggie had already disappeared from the stairwell. He followed the noise and turned right.
Her room was at the end of the hall and like the rest of the rooms in the house—cluttered but comfortable. The furniture was a dark and heavy baroque style. The four-poster bed was swaddled in mismatched bedclothes. A red comforter was kicked into a pile at the end of the mattress, obviously unnecessary in the summer heat. One of the chairs was lost beneath a mountain of clothes, and a number of shoes were trying to escape from her closet.
On the nightstand, resting tent style over Maggie’s alarm clock, was a large green book.
Walking purposefully to the stand now that he was in the room to observe, she scooped up the book and held it out to him like exhibit “A.” Beau had to move closer and lean across the bed to reach it, but he took it, flipping through the color pages. “Economical Ireland. It must be hard to travel with Gwendolyn to worry about.”
“Oh, I don’t travel.”
Beau stared at her. “You have stacks and stacks of travel books. Of course you travel.”
She laughed and folded her arms, suddenly made braver by the expanse of bed between them. “I have a Cuisinart and instructions, but I don’t use it either.”
He tossed the book down on the bed. It sank into the folds of the plump red comforter. “Why?”
“I’m a lousy cook.”
“No. Why don’t you travel?”
“Because nothing is ever as good as the advertising.”
Thoughtfully Beau looked at a set of patterned nylon stockings she had draped carelessly around one of the bedposts and then back at her. “Meaning that you don’t like disappointment.”
Maggie hated people who played psychologist. Especially when they were on the mark. She’d had more than enough disappointment in her life. She didn’t need to go to a foreign country and pay extra for it. And she didn’t have to justify herself to Beau. He probably wasn’t as good as the advertising either, no matter how much she wanted to believe that he was.
Disappointment and irony pricked her as she faced that fact. Without realizing it she’d been counting on Beau. She was back to wanting someone who knew everything about her and still cared. How stupid could one woman be? Beau Grayson sure wasn’t that someone. She’d been a fool to make that telephone call.
Turning her back on him, Maggie stepped over a couple of doggie chew toys and headed for the balcony. “I’ve got to get up really early tomorrow—no, today,” she told him with a glance over her shoulder as she unlocked the door. “So do you think you could take your look around and leave?”
“First, you tell me what happened tonight.” Beau’s sudden and sharp request froze her. “Beginning to end.”
“What’s to tell?” she asked, straightening cautiously, but leaving her fingers on the door handle. “I got out of bed, walked to the balcony because the night air clears my head. I smelled smoke. Saw it. Panicked like any good citizen, and raced back in to call the fire department. Then I raced downstairs to get your card and called you from the kitchen. Why I felt compelled to call you escapes me at the moment, but after we hung up I grabbed some jogging pants from the dryer and went out to wait for the fire truck.”
“And you saw the fire from the balcony?”
“I didn’t see fire,” she corrected impatiently. “Not that I remember anyway. Not at first. I saw smoke. Over the top of the magnolias. And I’m getting really tired of you trying to trip me up, Beau. I didn’t have to call you, but I did. For that, at the very least, I ought to get some brownie points and some slack.”
Without waiting for a response, she jerked open the doors and walked to the ornate railing that rimmed the upper story. The wooden planks beneath her feet were slightly damp from the cooling night air, but Maggie didn’t care. Any sensation that didn’t start with Beau Grayson was welcome. Then she realized his socks would absorb the moisture. “You better not come out here. It’s—”
“Too late.” He slipped noiselessly up beside her, standing too close.
His attention was focused on the field beyond. At the tops of the magnolias. He was judging her again, assessing the truth of her story. The scent of fire was still on the night but diluted by river breeze. His arms were locked, supporting him as he leaned outward into the darkness.
Finally, he made his pronouncement. “It’s possible.”
“Well, thank you, Chief Grayson! Gosh, I know I’ll sleep better tonight knowing that you believe me.”
“I didn’t say I believe you.” Rounding on her, he took her arm. “And if I were you, I wouldn’t be sleeping at all. I’d be working on a defense. Let’s get down to it, shall we? Do you know what the odds are of your finding two fires in such a short period of time, and both before they raged out of control?”
Something about him had changed since stepping out on the balcony. His eyes, she decided. In the moonlight they were a flat, dark sienna, devoid of the compassion that lent them warmth. She pulled away, rubbing her arm, glaring. “I don’t know the odds, and I don’t care. It happened. Deal with it. That’s your job.”
“Oh, I am dealing with it. With you.” His assurance slithered up her spine and raised the hairs on the back of her neck. The next soft question did little to allay her apprehension. “Do you always carefully close and lock the balcony doors behind you?”
“W-what?”
“The balcony doors. They were locked.”
A mental alarm flashed at the edge of her consciousness. “Your point?”
“I’m in the business of details, and that detail does not suggest panic. You said you rushed in to call the fire department. And me. If that’s true, when did you stop long enough to lock the doors?”
She hesitated, knowing how irrational she’d sound telling him she locked the doors because she thought it would make t
he fire go away. Instead she gave him what she hoped was a plausible lie. Unfortunately, she waited a second too long. “After I changed. Before I went downstairs.”
“You grabbed a pair of jogging pants and changed downstairs. Try again.”
There was no mistaking the chill in his voice or the intent in his body language. He was waiting to pounce—anxious to spring the trap. Allowing her a second answer was just a formality. A game.
When she refused to play, he took her arm again, drawing her all the way to his chest. This time he was gentle, but the touch actually felt more dangerous than the one before. Their T-shirts didn’t offer much of a barrier to contact. Body heat seared her, and her head fell back to meet his gaze. That’s when she realized his anger was personal, that she’d somehow betrayed him without even trying. God help the woman who planned to betray him.
“Let me lay it out for you, Maggie. The way I see it. You liked the attention you got from the hospital fire, so you thought you’d do it again.”
She started to protest, but the pressure on her arm cut her off.
“You never walked out on this balcony. You didn’t see the fire from up here because you didn’t need to. You set it, Maggie. All you had to do was call it in. Call me in. And wait for the fireworks. That is what you wanted, Maggie, isn’t it? Fireworks? Like this?”
He bent his knees and shifted so that her breasts pressed into his chest, so that her body molded to his hard contours. He tucked her arm behind his waist and trailed one finger along her neck. As his thumb outlined her bottom lip, he mused, “The breathless act was brilliant, by the way. It suckered me right in. And the story about foster homes was inspired.”
His words took on a cruel edge, even as his touch seduced her. “What I can’t figure out is why you have to go to this much trouble to get a man in your bed.”
“Oh, my God,” Maggie whispered, uncertain whether she should be horrified, outraged, or just give in to laughter. “You think I’m a lonely woman with a faithful dog and nothing better to do than invent crises for male companionship.”
