“A little green man?”
“Sure.” Mac set the note aside. “It goes with all the broom-riding witches I’ve documented.”
“Ha.”
“Anyway, it’s interesting. We’ll see how it goes. If nothing else it got you in my bedroom.”
“You’re not as fog-brained as you look.”
“Only about half the time.” He patted the bed beside him.
“That’s a really thrilling offer, but I’ll pass. I’m going to head home.”
“Why don’t we grab some dinner?” He took off his glasses, tossed them carelessly on the bed. “Out. We’ll go out and get some dinner. Is it dinnertime?”
“It could be. Take your glasses off the bed. You’ll forget and sit on them or something.”
“Right.” He picked them up, laid them on the nightstand. “How did you know I do that?”
“Wild guess. Mind if I call home, let my family know I won’t be home for dinner?”
“Go ahead.”
When she stepped to the phone, he took her hand, turned her, nudging her in until she stood between his legs. “I’d like to discuss that break from kissing you talked about. And I think since you’re the one who apologized, you should be the one to kiss me.”
“I’m thinking about it.” She picked up the phone first, kept her eyes on his as she called, spoke briefly to Zack, then replaced the receiver. “Okay, here’s the deal. Hands on the bed. And you keep them there. No touching, no grabbing.”
“That’s very strict, but okay.” He placed his palms down on the edge of the bed.
It was time, she decided, to show him he wasn’t the only one with moves. She leaned over, slowly, letting her hands run through his hair before they rested on his shoulders. Her mouth paused an inch from his, curved.
“No hands,” she said again.
A brush of lips, a slight scrape of teeth, a hint of tongue. She nibbled one corner of his mouth, then the other, let her breath come out on a long sigh.
She eased back, a breath away—held the moment suspended. Then her fingers dived into his hair, fisted, and she plunged.
Instant heat, enough to burn a man alive from the inside out. His hands tightened like vises on the edge of the bed, and his heart spiked straight into his throat.
It was like being devoured, with merciless greed.
She took him over, pumped into his system like a fast-acting drug, one that scraped nerve endings raw rather than numbing them. He could feel . . . too much, and waited for his system to simply implode.
She nearly shoved him back, nearly gave in to the need plunging inside her and pushed him back on the bed. Something happened to her, every time she was with him, that jangled her brain, shocked her body, squeezed her heart. Even now, when she’d demanded and taken control, she was losing.
She felt him tremble, and her own shiver of response.
It took every ounce of will for her to end the kiss, to draw back.
He let out a ragged breath. She could see the pulse beating in his throat like a jackhammer. Yet he hadn’t touched her. That kind of control was something to respect, she thought. To admire, and to challenge.
She dabbed a fingertip at the corner of her mouth. “Let’s eat,” she said and strolled out of the room.
Point for point, she decided as she scooped up her coat, they were dead even.
Nine
Jonathan Q. Harding knew how to get people to talk. It was a matter, first of all, of knowing that under the veil of dignity and discretion or reluctance, people wanted to talk. The seamier or more bizarre the subject, the more they wanted to gab about it.
It was a matter of persistence, patience, and occasionally palming over a folded twenty.
The story had its teeth in him every bit as much as he had his teeth in it. He started back at the cliff on Highway 1, where a desperate woman had faked her own death. It was a picturesque spot—sea, sky, rock. He imagined stark black-and-white photographs, the drama of them.
He was no longer thinking just a feature in a magazine. Harding had upped the bar to a big, juicy, best-selling book.
The seeds of that ambition had been planted during his first visit with Remington. It was odd, he thought, that it hadn’t occurred to him before. That he hadn’t realized how, well, hungry he was for the fame, for the fortune.
Others had done it, turned their expertise or their hobby into a book with a glossy cover and fast sales. Why couldn’t he?
Why was he wasting his time and his considerable skill on magazine bylines? Instead of him pursuing Larry King for an interview, this time around Larry King would come to him.
A voice he hadn’t known was inside him had awakened, and it continually whispered, Cash in.
That’s just what he intended to do.
Gathering tidbits of information, morsels of speculation and hard bites of fact from police records, he began to follow Helen Remington’s, now Nell Channing Todd’s, trail.
He had an interesting conversation with a man who claimed to have sold her the secondhand bike she’d used as her initial transportation, and after various questions asked at the bus station in Carmel confirmed the bike’s description.
Helen Remington had started her long journey pedaling a blue six-speed.
He imagined her riding up and down the hills. She’d been wearing a wig—some reports said red, some brown. He was going with the brunette. She wouldn’t have wanted to be flashy.
He spent more than two weeks tracking, backtracking, rapping into the wall of false leads until he hit his first jackpot in Dallas, where Nell Channing had rented a cheap motel room with kitchenette and taken a job as a short-order cook in a greasy spoon.
Her name was Lidamae—it said so on the name plate pinned to the candy-pink bodice of her uniform. She’d been waiting tables for thirty years and figured she’d poured enough cups of coffee to fill the whole of the damn Gulf of Mexico. She’d been married twice and had kicked both sons of bitches out on their lazy asses.
She had a cat named Snowball, a tenth-grade education, and a Texas twang so sharp you could’ve cut diamonds with it.
She didn’t mind getting off her dogs for a few minutes to talk to a reporter. And didn’t scruple to refuse the offer of a twenty for her time and trouble. Lidamae tucked the bill just where you’d suppose she would. Into the generous cup of her bra.
The sheer perfection of her, the overbleached hair teased into an enormous cascade, the blowzy body, the staggering blue of the eyeshadow that covered her lids almost to her eyebrows, had Harding wondering who might play her in the film based on his book.
“I told Tidas—Tidas, he runs the kitchen back there—I told Tidas there was something odd about that girl. Something spooky.”
“What do you mean by ‘spooky’?”
“A look in the eye. A rabbit look. Scared of her own shadow. Always watching the door, too. ’Course, I knew right off she was on the run.” With a satisfied nod, Lidamae took a pack of Camels out of her apron pocket. “Women, we sense these things about our own kind. My second husband tried to kick me around a time or two.” She dragged in smoke like breath. “Hah. It was his ass got kicked. A man raises his hand to me, he’d better have a good health policy, ’cause he’s gonna spend some quality time in a medical-type facility.”
“Did you ever ask her about it?”
“Wouldn’t say boo to a goose, that one.” Lidamae snorted, sending a dragon-stream of smoke out of her nostrils. “Kept to herself. Did her work, you can’t say different, and never was anything but polite. A lady, I said to Tidas, that Nell’s a lady. Got quality written all over her. Thin as a rail, her hair all whacked off any which way and dyed mongrel brown. Didn’t matter, quality shows.”
She took another drag, then wagged the cigarette. “I wasn’t the least bit surprised when I saw the news report. Recognized her right off, too, even though she was all polished up and blond in the picture they showed. I said to Suzanne—Suzanne and me were working the lunch shi
ft—I said, ‘Suzanne, look at that on the TV set.’ That one there, over the counter,” she added for Harding’s benefit. “I said, ‘That’s little Nell who worked here a few weeks last year.’ Coulda knocked Suzanne over with a feather, but me, I wasn’t surprised.”
“How long did she work here?”
“Right about three weeks. Then one day, she just doesn’t show for her shift. Didn’t see hide nor hair of her again till that news report on the TV. Tidas was pissed, let me tell you. That girl could cook.”
“Did anyone ever come looking for her? Pay more attention to her than seemed natural?”
“Nope. Hardly ever poked her head out of the kitchen anyway.”
“Do you think Tidas would let me see her employment records?”
Lidamae took a last drag on her cigarette, studying Harding through the curtain of blue smoke. “Don’t hurt to ask, does it?”
It cost him another twenty to look at the paperwork, but it gave him the exact date of Nell’s departure. Armed with that, and a reasonable assessment of her finances, Harding scouted out the bus station.
He tracked her to El Paso, nearly lost her, but then dug up the man who’d sold her a car.
He followed her trail by day, read, over and over, every news article, interview, statement, and commentary that had been written since Remington’s arrest.
She’d worked in diners, hotel restaurants, coffee shops, rarely staying in one spot longer than three weeks during the first six months of flight. There seemed little rhyme and no reason to her route.
And that, Harding thought, had been the point. She would head south, then east, then overlap her own tracks and drive north again. Even so, she’d always, eventually, headed east again.
Though he didn’t put much credence in Lidamae’s opinion of her own insight, he did find a thread of consistency throughout his interviews with employers and coworkers.
Nell Channing was a lady.
How much more she was, he’d have to judge for himself. He couldn’t wait to meet her face-to-face. But before he did, he wanted more. He wanted Evan Remington’s story.
Unaware that her life was currently under a microscope, Nell took advantage of her day off and a break in the weather. The February thaw offered a teasing hint of spring, with warmth that required no more than a light jacket.
She took Lucy for a walk on the beach and toyed with the idea of going into the village to buy something foolish and unnecessary. The fact that she could toy with the idea was one of her daily miracles.
For now, she was content with the beach, the sea, and the big black dog. While Lucy entertained herself chasing gulls, Nell sat on the sand and watched the waves.
“Lucky for you I’m in a good mood, or I’d have to write you up for having that dog off the leash.”
Nell glanced over as Ripley dropped down beside her. “You’d have to write yourself up, too. I didn’t see a leash when the two of you went for a run this morning.”
“I used the invisible leash this morning.” Ripley wrapped her arms around her updrawn knees. “God, what a day. I could take a few hundred of these.”
“I know. I couldn’t stay in the house. My to-do list is as long as your arm, but I ran away.”
“It’ll keep.”
“It’s going to.”
When Nell continued to stare at her, Ripley tipped down her sunglasses, peered over them. “What?”
“Nothing. You look . . . pleased with yourself,” Nell decided. “I haven’t seen much of you in the past couple weeks, but whenever I have you’ve looked quite smug.”
“Is that so? Well, life’s good.”
“Uh-huh. You’ve been spending some time with MacAllister Booke.”
Ripley trailed her fingers through the sand, drawing little curlicues. “Is that your polite way of asking if we’re doing it?”
“No.” Nell waited a beat, exhaled. “Well, are you?”
“No, not yet.” Content, Ripley leaned back, braced her elbows in the sand. “I’m enjoying this pre-sex interlude more than I figured I would. Mostly, I’ve always figured if you’re going to dance, just get up and dance. But . . .”
“Romance is a dance of its own.”
Ripley’s look was sharp and quick. “I didn’t say we were having a romance. Like hearts and flowers and cow eyes. He’s an interesting guy to hang out with, that’s all—when he’s not caught up in spook patrol. He’s been all over the place. I mean, to places I didn’t even know were places.”
He’d known the capital of Liechtenstein, she remembered. Imagine that.
“Did you know he graduated from college when he was sixteen?” she continued. “Is that brainy or what? Even with all that, he gets into regular stuff. Like movies and baseball. I mean he’s not snooty about, what is it, popular culture.”
“No intellectual snobbery,” Nell commented, enjoying herself.
“Yeah, that’s it. He’s into Rocky and Bullwinkle, and he listens to regular music. It’s like he’s got this enormous brain capacity so it can hold on all the E-equals-MC-squared junk, but it still has room for the Barenaked Ladies. Plus, he’s totally buff, and he’s got excellent form in the water, but sometimes he just trips over his own feet. It’s kind of cute.”
Nell opened her mouth to comment again, but Ripley was already plowing on. “Sure, he’s a complete geek, but it’s sort of handy. He fixed my headset when I was going to pitch it. And the other day . . .” She frowned when she caught Nell’s wide grin. “What now?”
“You’re smitten.”
“Oh, please. What kind of a word is that?” She snorted, crossed her legs at the ankles. “Smitten. Jesus.”
“It’s the perfect word from where I’m sitting. And I think it’s wonderful.”
“Don’t get on that romance boat of yours and sail, Nell. We’re just hanging out. Then we’ll have sex and hang out. We’ll keep it friendly as long as he doesn’t shove the witch angle down my throat. Then he’ll go back to New York and write his book or paper or whatever. We’re not stuck on each other.”
“Whatever you say. But in all the months I’ve been on the Sisters, I haven’t seen you spend this much time with anyone else, or look as happy doing it.”
“So, I like him better than most.” Ripley sat up again, shrugged. “And I’m more attracted to him than most.”
“Smitten,” Nell said under her breath.
“Shut up.”
“Bring him to dinner?”
“Huh?”
“Bring him home to dinner tonight.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m making Zack’s favorite, and there’ll be plenty.”
“We’re having Yankee pot roast?” Ripley’s mouth began to water.
“I’m sure Mac would appreciate sitting down to a home-cooked meal instead of eating takeout or eating in a restaurant, or heating up one of my deliveries.” Nell stood up, brushed sand off her pants.
“Sure, he likes to eat. Nell, you’re not going to try any matchmaking deal, are you?”
Her blue eyes widened with innocence. “Of course not. Tell him six-thirty, and let me know if that’s not convenient.”
She clapped her hands, called for Lucy, then started for home.
She had a great deal to do in a short amount of time.
“I’m not doing a spell.”
Mia angled her head, smiled sweetly as Nell scowled at the potato she was peeling. “Then why did you ask me to come by and discuss your plans for tonight’s dinner?”
“Because I admire your taste.”
“Try again.”
“Because you know Ripley better than I do.”
“Keep going.”
“Oh, all right.” Grimacing in disgust, Nell snatched up another potato. “It’s not a spell. That would be wrong . . . wouldn’t it?” she added with a quick sidelong glance.
“Yes, that would be wrong. You have neither party’s permission. Added to that, interfering with anyone’s personal life crosses a line.”
“I know it.” Nell’s shoulders slumped, just for a minute. “Even when you have their best interest at heart?” She let the statement hang as a question, though she knew the answer. “She looks so happy. You’ve seen it for yourself. You should have heard her. She was absolutely bubbling about him.”
“Deputy Dawg bubbling?” Mia chuckled. “I’d have paid to see that one.”
“She was, and it was adorable. All I wanted was to give her a little nudge. Not with a spell,” she added quickly, before Mia could speak. “A nice friendly family dinner. And if I added a little of this, a bit of that, just something to encourage clear vision. Something that would lower the boundaries just a tiny inch or two.”
“And if they’re seeing what they need to see, feeling what they need to feel, at this moment? Can you be sure your . . . nudge won’t be in the wrong direction?”
“You’re so frustrating when you’re practical. Worse when you’re right. It’s hard not using what’s available to help.”
“Power’s a tricky business. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t mean anything. You’re in love yourself,” Mia said. “Still riding on that lovely rush of it all, and you’re seeing everyone coupled and cozy and content. Not all of us are meant for what you have with Zack.”
“If you could have heard the way she babbled about him before she caught herself.” Shaking her head, Nell scrubbed her peeled vegetables. “She’s halfway in love with him and doesn’t even know it.”
Mia indulged herself in one moment of pleasure and envy at the thought of her childhood friend taking the fall. “And if she did know it, if you helped her see what may be happening inside her, she might scramble back from that edge before she falls. It would be just like her.”
“You’re right again. I hate that. Tell me what you think of him. You’ve talked to him more than I have.”
“I think he’s a very clever man, very astute and very focused. He’s not pushing Ripley with his research because he knows she’ll balk. So he circles around that.”
Mia wandered to the cookie jar, dipped in. “Chocolate chunk. I’m doomed.”
“That’s calculation.” Automatically Nell moved to the stove to brew tea to go with Mia’s cookie. “If he’s using her—”
Books by Nora Roberts Page 184
