by Rebecca York
“Amanda! How are you? Did you get the little present I sent you?” she asked.
“Are you talking about Zachary Grant?” she asked as she sat down in the desk chair.
“Yes, isn’t he delicious?” Beth asked with a lilt in her voice. “It was tempting to keep him for myself.”
“He’s good looking,” she said cautiously. “But . . . but from your phone message, I thought he’d come down here to do a magazine or a newspaper article. And he didn’t bother to set me straight. Then I found him going through my dresser drawers.”
“Oh goodness. He seemed like a nice guy. And so yummy looking.”
“His looks are beside the point. He’s not exactly ethical.”
There was a long silence on the end of the line. “Maybe by his standards he is. I mean, don’t detectives use all kinds of techniques? Haven’t you seen those cop shows where they get the suspect to admit he’s guilty by pretending they have evidence they don’t really have?”
Amanda took the receiver away from her ear and stared at it for a second as if she could see through the instrument to her friend’s face. Sometimes she wondered how Beth could have gotten to be the editor of a major magazine—when her logic could be pretty strange.
“What does any of that have to do with me?” she asked carefully. “He doesn’t think I’m guilty of anything, does he?”
“I didn’t mean that he did. I was just giving an example.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t dismiss him out of hand.”
“Didn’t you hear me? He was snooping through my stuff.”
On the other end of the line, Beth took a moment before answering. “You know I have pretty good instincts about people. He’s a good guy.”
“Oh, sure.”
Amanda put forward another argument. Beth countered it. They went on for several minutes in that fashion, and Amanda finally decided there was going to be no way to convince Beth otherwise. In fact, by the end of the conversation, she had let Beth persuade her that Zachary Grant was only doing his job.
###
After his encounter with Dr. O’Neal, Zach wasn’t feeling particularly hungry, but because he didn’t want to hang around his motel room, he went down to the seafood restaurant on the St. Stephens dock. It was a large wooden building with several dining rooms, and he asked for a window seat where he could look out over the water. He’d always liked eating a meal in a waterfront restaurant. Maybe that went back to when he’d been a kid and his parents had taken the whole Grant brood for a day trip to the Jersey shore.
As he drank a bottle of Flying Duck beer, and picked at a crab cake sandwich, he looked out at the harbor, watching two swans fight a flotilla of ducks for bread crumbs being thrown to them by tourists.
He’d screwed up royally with the pretty blond sexual advice columnist. Probably because she’d thrown him badly off-balance. As he’d read through the folder he’d accumulated on her, he’d decided that interviewing a woman who gave sexual advice was going to be intimidating. Then she’d opened her door, and he’d felt his chest go tight.
She’d looked too young and vulnerable to fill the role he’d assigned her. And when they’d started talking, his impressions had done another flip-flop.
As first he hadn’t acknowledged what he was feeling. Now that he was several miles and several hours away with a beer in his hand, he could admit how attracted he’d been to her. Probably because it had been a long time since he’d let himself get involved with a woman—and the sexual context of the interview had started working on him.
He grimaced. Being turned on by her was damned inconvenient, particularly since he had a long evening ahead of him. Maybe he should remind himself that she had a lot to gain by taking over the column. But he simply couldn’t assign her ulterior motives.
Sitting at the restaurant table, he silently admitted that he’d admired the way she’d recovered from her shock at seeing him rummaging in her bedroom drawer. She had guts. But what if he’d really been a pervert? Then she should have gotten the hell out of the house. But she’d stood her ground.
He should warn her about that the value of cutting and running when you were in a tight situation. Only he wasn’t going to get a chance. He’d be going back to New Jersey tomorrow. Back to work, because he’d finished what he needed to do down here.
The problem was, he didn’t love the work. He liked being a cop a lot better. But he’d changed his profession to please his wife. He’d opened his own one-man agency, and taken whatever assignments walked in the door because he and Mindy had needed the money. Then the marriage had blown up in his face, and he’d just drifted along doing the same old thing.
But he’d been thinking recently that he was ready to go back to the police force. He wanted more challenging assignments. Stuff that was more worthwhile than getting the goods on cheating husbands and wives or people working insurance scams. Like this murder investigation, for example. Not that many murders cases came his way. This was the most exciting job he’d had in a couple of months.
Or maybe it was Amanda that was exciting him. He wished to hell he could tell the difference.
After paying for his meal, he killed some time by driving around the small Eastern Shore town. As he headed west, he thought about going back to O’Neal’s house and checking to see if that white van was there again—until he pictured her catching him driving past.
With a shake of his head, he went back to his hotel and paid for a movie that he hoped would distract him.
He picked a guy flick, with plenty of action. Then the hero climbed into bed with a beautiful spy, and Zach found himself getting hot as he put himself and Dr. O’Neal into the bedroom scene.
He moved his shoulder uncomfortably on the bed, thinking there was no reason he couldn’t do something about the hard-on straining behind the fly of his slacks.
Hadn’t Amanda O’Neal given him permission to enjoy his sexuality—any way that worked for him?
But he couldn’t get her image out of his mind. It was almost like she was standing there beside the bed, watching him. And he wasn’t going to jerk off in front of her.
When his gaze flicked back to the television, he found that a truck full of explosives was about to crash into a nuclear power plant. Good, that should prove sufficient distraction to take his mind off the lower part of his body.
###
Amanda had made herself a tuna salad for dinner, but she’d finally put most of the meal into the refrigerator. If she’d been at Harmons College, she would have called one of her girlfriends and gone out to dinner and maybe a movie. Her friend Jane Baxter in the Sociology department or Carolyn Martin who was also in Psychology. They would have discussed the whole thing. Zach. The murder case. Her reactions. His reactions. Maybe she’d even have been able to laugh about the vibrator.
She’d had a pretty good support system at the college. Until the scandal had made a lot of people start avoiding her. Well, not Jane and Carolyn. She’d been the one to avoid them because she’d been too down on herself. And she’d silently argued that she didn’t want the scandal to rub off on them. Now she wished she hadn’t broken the ties. But she couldn’t just call them out of the blue because she had a guy to discuss. She was on her own.
To fill the time, she went back to the column. Beth had asked her how it was coming, and she’d said she was almost ready to turn it in. Now she had to make that claim a reality.
But she found it more difficult to concentrate than she had that afternoon, because when she’d put away the vibrator, picking it up had made her previous arousal return. Only now there was nothing she could do about it. When she lay down on the bed, she couldn’t banish the picture in her mind of Zachary Grant. He was too handsome. Too vital. Too complicated. Too interesting to her.
Unfortunately, she didn’t have as much actual dating experience as most women her age. First she’d been focused on getting her PhD. Then she’d found that men were intimidated by a woman who’d made huma
n sexuality her specialty.
Well—either intimidated or eager to take advantage of her supposed experience.
She’d sensed that Zachary was nervous. And she’d tried to put him at ease. But perhaps she’d gone about it the wrong way—by babbling about her theories of human sexuality.
Was that why he’d gotten caught going through her dresser drawers? Because he’d wanted to be caught. So she’d throw him out—and that would end the relationship.
That was kind of convoluted thinking. Yet as a psychologist, she knew that people often did things that they couldn’t explain on a conscious level.
Take herself, for example, she thought with a twist of her mouth. She was lying here going into Byzantine psychological explanations for Zachary’s behavior—when she knew what she was really doing was trying to convince her body that thinking about him wasn’t making her hot and tingly.
She might be composing a psych paper in her head, but her nipples were hard, and the hot, swollen feeling between her legs was certainly annoying.
She moved restlessly on the bed, glanced toward the drawer with the vibrator, and then looked quickly away.
What she needed was some nice, calming deep breathing exercises.
Eyes closed, she made herself comfortable on the mattress, then took in a breath and held it for several seconds before slowly letting the air trickle from her lungs.
It had the quieting effect on her senses that she’d hoped for. And she did it again, focusing on the in and out passage of air from her body.
But just as she was about to suck in another breath, a noise outside made her go rigid.
It sounded like someone had knocked over a flower pot on the patio. As she listened intently, her gaze shot to the clock on the bedside table. It was almost midnight.
Should she call the police? And say what—that a detective had come here to interview her and made her nervous?
She could just imagine how that would go over. It wasn’t difficult to picture them having a good time laughing in her face.
One officer in particular. The one who had pulled her over for speeding when she’d first arrived in St. Stephens.
Apparently the locals knew that the traffic patrol lay in wait for speeders along Route 50. But nobody had bothered to tell her—until she’d heard a siren and seen the flashing red and blue lights in her rearview mirror.
The trooper who had pulled her over had been excruciatingly polite—which hadn’t done anything to convince her that he wasn’t having a perfectly wonderful time looking at her breasts as he explained her summons.
No, she wasn’t going to call the police and chance having that same guy show up at her door.
Closing her eyes, she focused on her breathing again. She was just starting to relax, when another sound made her body jerk off the mattress.
This time it wasn’t a flower pot. This time she heard a stealthier sound—the knob on the French doors to the patio slowly twisting.
Chapter Four
Amanda’s heart leaped into her throat as she sat up in bed and reached for the phone, along with the business card Zachary Grant had given her.
Earlier she’d had it in her hand, intending to throw it in the trash. But some impulse had made her set it on the bedside table. She had never believed in fate. Now she wondered if the universe had been watching out for her.
There was enough light coming in the window from the street light outside for her to see his mobile number.
“Zachary, thank God,” she blurted when he answered.
“Amanda, what’s wrong?”
“There’s someone outside on my patio.”
“Where are you?”
“In the bedroom.”
“Lock the door. And call the police. I’ll be right there,” he clipped out, then hung up.
She was left clutching the phone in the darkness.
Lord, how far away was the Duck Blind Motel? How long would it take him to get here?
Before she could follow his directions, there was another noise from the front of the house, this time the stealthy sound of the patio door opening.
With her pulse pounding in her throat, she jumped out of bed ran to the bedroom door and locked it. But how much good would that do her?
She was about to call the police when she heard footsteps coming down the hall. Heavy footsteps. A man’s footsteps.
Then someone tried to turn the knob on the bedroom door. When he found it locked, he leveled a blow at the barrier.
She was dressed only in the long tee shirt she’d worn to bed. But she didn’t hesitate to leap to the window and flip the lock open.
After pushing up the double sash, she kicked the screen out with her bare foot and climbed through.
Luckily the bedroom of the small house was on the ground floor. It was only three feet down to the flower bed, where she stood for a moment feeling dazed.
The sound of the bedroom door bursting open galvanized her to action. Dashing down the drive, she fled into the underbrush at the side of the road, stones digging painfully into her bare feet.
When headlights cut through the darkness, she stepped to the shoulder, waving. The car slowed and Zachary rolled down his window.
“He’s in the house,” she shouted to him.
“Did you call the cops?”
“Not yet.”
“Do it.”
Zachary pulled to the curb, sprinted up the drive, and then disappeared around the side of the house.
Her cell phone was inside, finally getting charged. And she couldn’t go back to get it. The neighborhood was fairly rural, and the closest house was fifty yards away. Wishing she had on more clothing, she ran down the road to her nearest neighbor and started banging on the front door. Ten seconds later, an upstairs window opened.
“What’s all that racket?” a man’s voice called into the night. “I’ve got a gun.”
She was glad the porch roof was between her and the weapon. Or would that make any difference?
“There’s an intruder at my house,” she screamed. “Just down the road. I can’t get to my phone. Call 911.”
The window banged shut, and she didn’t know whether the guy was going to do the right thing or not. So much for small town neighborliness.
Turning back toward her house, she wondered what to do now. Zachary had disappeared inside, and she realized suddenly that he had put himself in danger—for her.
With her whole body rigid, she stood, staring at the front door as though that would give her insight into what was going on inside.
Although she could go in there, it was likely that she wasn’t going to be much help. Maybe she’d even make things worse.
Still, as centuries dragged by, she took a step closer and then another.
She jumped back and screamed when the front door flew open and a man emerged and fled across the lawn.
Seconds later, Zachary appeared—and took off after him. The two men disappeared in the darkness beside the river.
When she heard Zachary curse, she ran toward the sound of his voice and found him picking himself up from the ground, just as a car engine started somewhere nearby.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I tripped over a damn tree root, and the bastard got away.”
“Are you all right?”
“Fine,” he snapped, striding back toward her house.
She followed, limping slightly now because the bottoms of her feet hurt. When she’d stepped into the living room, Zachary closed the door, then turned to face her.
Hours ago, she’d kicked him out. Another man in the same position wouldn’t have felt compelled to rush over and rescue her. But somehow she’d known he would.
“Why did you go after him?” she asked softly, taking a step toward him
He didn’t answer, only moved toward her, and they met in the middle of the living room.
Reaching out, she clasped her arms around him. She wasn’t even sure why. To comfort herself? To tel
l him how grateful she was? To let him know how relieved she was that nothing serious had happened to him?
Now that the danger was over, she had started to shake.
“You’re fine. Everything’s okay,” he murmured, his hands soothing over her back and shoulders.
When she lifted her face to his, staring up into his dark eyes, the emotions of the moment overwhelmed her. “I got . . . got out of the house all right,” she stammered. “Then you went in. And I was scared for you.”
He looked down at her for a long moment. Then his eyes focused on her lips. She could have pulled back. But when he lowered his head toward hers, she raised up on tiptoes—meeting him halfway.
She’d always considered kissing a pleasant activity. She would never have labeled this kiss as merely pleasant.
The first mouth to mouth contact was like a bolt of electricity, sizzling along her nerve endings, swamping her mind and body.
She discovered very quickly that Zachary Grant knew how to kiss—with his lips, his tongue, his teeth. He was sensual and masterful, subtle and overwhelming by turns. And thoroughly absorbed in what he was doing, as though kissing were an end in itself.
She’d met few men like that. Usually kissing was a prelude to sex. Or that’s what they wanted it to be.
But she sensed that for Zachary Grant, it was an activity to be enjoyed for its own sake.
She made a small needy sound as she drank in the heady taste of the man who held her so firmly in his arms. She clung to him while he angled his head, first one way and then the other, as though he were greedy to experience her every way he could—and greedy to take the kiss to levels she’d never thought possible in mouth to mouth contact.
It wasn’t enough. Not for her. And apparently not for him, either. She felt one of his large hands slide down to her hips and slip under the hem of her tee shirt to pull her lower body in against his erection, as though he were desperate to satisfy his craving for intimate contact with her.
The other hand flattened against her back, pressing her breasts against his chest.
