“Hey, Mark. Why didn’t you just call me?”
“I was in Carson’s neighborhood.” His brother’s slick-with-indifference tone oozed from the phone’s speakers. “And I knew you wouldn’t pick up if you saw my number.”
Right there was the reason why Mark Daniels was a respected detective.
“I’ve been busy,” Noah said. Equally indifferent.
“Too busy to give me a solid yea or nay about Dad’s retirement party?”
Noah’s spine gave a soft click as he straightened, his gut twisting around it in a stranglehold. “It’s a process getting a replacement sole-charge officer over here,” he said. “You know that.”
He squeezed his eyes shut at the sound of Mark’s irritated exhale. And in three, two, one…
“Wouldn’t be a problem if you’d quit wasting your life on that dreary backwater and come back home,” Mark said.
Come back to Wellington where you belong. Come back to the real police force where you were part of a dedicated team. Come back to the squad and make Dad proud of you again.
He’d heard every version of that propaganda speech from Mark before and he was adept at reading between the lines. From staunch silent backslaps of encouragement during the first few months after the crap hit had the fan, to It’s Time To Get Back On That Horse That Bucked You monologues, and frozen radio silence once he’d made the decision to accept the position on Stewart Island.
“This is my home.” Noah kept his voice pitched low. “And I’ll let you know as soon as I can if I can make it.”
Though, yeah, the thought of being stuck in a roomful of his father’s senior cop cronies and some of Noah’s former squad buddies was right up there with the thought of a voluntary testicular removal.
Mark swore and Noah heard retreating footsteps, his brother grumbling, “You talk some sense into him. I’m off.” Then the slam of a door.
“Well, that was fun,” Carson said a few beats later. “Next time I’ll make sure he has a search warrant before I allow him inside my house.”
“Sensible.” Noah carried his bottle to the breakfast bar and climbed onto a barstool, hitting the speaker icon so he could continue to drink his beer.
Three seconds of taut emptiness silenced his phone and he knew Carson well enough to guess his next response.
“You know how it’ll look if you’re a no-show.”
“Yep.” Noah swallowed the cold liquid and it sat like an ice cube in his gut. He knew exactly how it’d look.
Noah, the black sheep middle child who’d once been his dad’s protégé, following his footsteps into the elite ranks of the Armed Offenders Squad, now refused to celebrate his father’s long and illustrious career in the police force.
“Your mum is coming.”
Noah choked on the next sip of beer. After he finished coughing, he swiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “What the actual hell?”
Noah could almost see Carson twisting his mouth and shrugging.
“That’s what Mark says,” Carson said.
“Mum—my mum, who divorced Dad over his refusal to take a less dangerous job in the police—is coming to his retirement party?” Noah shook his head.
He spoke to his mother every month or so, and although she’d mentioned she was on better terms with their dad since she’d remarried a dairy farmer, it was a shock she’d even consider attending this event.
“Go figure.”
The familiar sounds of soft tapping drifted out of the speakers. Carson, as usual, was multitasking with his laptop. Noah took advantage of the conversational lull to take another sip. The fingers on keyboard stopped abruptly.
“If you do make it, are you bringing a plus-one?”
With a grimace, Noah set his beer down, giving his phone the stinkeye. As if Carson could actually see him on a voice call. “Don’t even think about setting me up with someone.”
“Would I do that?”
“It’s your job, loser.” Carson was the stinking-rich tech geek behind New Zealand’s most successful online dating website, Kiwi Match.
Carson snorted and the tapping resumed. “Anything happening on that front?”
The cold beer bubbles tickled his stomach and he sat up straighter, a vivid picture of Tilly rising in his mind. “On what front?” He needed a minute to get his thoughts under control—considering he hadn’t stopped thinking about the firecracker brunette two doors up.
“The you getting laid front,” Carson said.
“Didn’t I tell you to get your nose outta my business at New Year’s?”
“Yeah. But we had a flurry of sign-ups in January and February and one’s a Reese Witherspoon lookalike who’s a biochemist. Smart and sexy. Whaddya reckon?”
“Not interested.”
“Okay, okay. Well, there’s a redhead who has a mouth that is borderline pornographic and says she’s turned on by dangerous men—”
“Carson.” Noah pinched the bridge of his nose and sucked in a deep breath. If he didn’t say something, Carson would run through the gamut of available women from Stewart Island to the Far North in his futile but genuine desire to see Noah happy. “I’ve met someone.”
“Say whaaaaat?”
Before Carson could launch into his own version of detective mode and demand details, Noah planned to feed him enough information to get him off his back. “Her name’s Tilly. She’s just moved to Oban and is living two doors up from me.” No need to mention it was only temporarily. “She’s heart-attack sexy.” True. “And she’s got a great sense of humor,” he finished lamely.
“You’re not stalking her, are you?” Carson asked suspiciously. “I mean, you have actually spoken to this woman, and not in an official, on-duty way?”
Was his game really that pathetic? Yeah. It kinda was. But the memory of the helmet ticket discussion made him smile—she really was feisty and even prettier than usual when her temper woke up.
“We had dinner the other night, and I conversed like an actual adult.”
Carson chuckled. “Good for you. So she’s into you, then?”
Noah couldn’t truthfully say yes, but there was definitely something crackling between them when they got their eyes on each other.
“Early days, mate. But she’s the only woman in a long time to make me feel…”
What, exactly?
He’d spent so long repressing and ignoring feelings that he was unable to identify exactly what emotion Tilly stirred in him. The only word that came to mind was hopeful—and that was a girlie word you didn’t use when talking to a mate. He cleared his throat. “Horny. As I said, she’s sexy as hell. I’m planning to tap that ASAP, man.”
“You’re so full of BS I can smell your stench from here. You actually like this woman, don’t you?”
Yeah, he did. “Maybe,” he offered instead.
“Well, don’t screw it up,” Carson said. “Would be mucho uncomfortable with an ex who’s also your neighbor.” He paused. “I’ve got another call coming in. Gotta go. Keep me updated.”
Noah disconnected and wandered out onto his back deck. From the angle of the hill rising to his left, he could see the glimmer of light through a gap in the trees from one of Southern Seas’ windows. He’d been a cop for too long not to figure out that something had been going on with Tilly that afternoon. She’d been unsettled, possibly had been crying a little as her pretty hazel eyes were shiny, in the way that people are when they’re trying to conceal strong emotion.
He drained the last of his beer while continuing to study the cold glitter of Venus rising in the night sky. All of life came down to which path you chose, which star to follow.
Yes or no. Action or inaction. West or east. Pull the trigger or don’t. Remain at home or go for a walk two doors up.
A no-brainer.
Tilly opened her door and her mouth—her borderline pornographic mouth—sagged in surprise.
“Noah,” she said in a breathless voice that shot straight to Noah’s libido and
jolted it awake. He got a sudden mind picture of her saying his name in that voice while his face was buried in the silky skin of her throat.
“Hey.”
Tilly’s gaze flickered down his long-sleeved T-shirt to his second-best pair of jeans—the ones with only a solo knee tear, so as not to appear as if he were trying to impress—and hovered for a split second at fly level. He could’ve written it off as imagination, except her small white teeth dragged over her lower lip for a drawn-out moment. Then she lifted her chin and planted a hand on her hip, the other on the door, possibly in anticipation of slamming it.
“Have you come to arrest me?” she asked.
He showed her his empty palms. “No handcuffs tonight. I’m off duty.”
“I doubt you’re ever really off duty.” She raised her eyebrows in a questioning arch. “Need to borrow a cup of sugar, huh? Or maybe you’re here to order me to keep the noise down.”
From behind her in the living room came the muted sounds of a television conversation. “Nope.” He was interrupting her evening—her quiet evening after possibly a taxing day sorting through her great-aunt’s possessions. He took half a step backward. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
Her lips twisted to one side. “After I flipped out on you earlier, you mean? Sorry about that. My mouth gets away on me sometimes. Verbal dysentery. I should start a support group.” She tilted her head, studying him with a quiet intensity that even he, master of the smackdown stare, found unnerving. Then she nodded as if she’d come to a decision. “I have cookies I’m willing to share, if you want to come in.”
Something of his attraction to her must’ve shown on his face as her eyes narrowed. “And sharing cookies isn’t code for having sex.”
A goofy grin split onto his face regardless of his desire to remain Mr. Cool. “And what is code for having sex? Just so we’re on the same page.”
She returned his smile, causing his heartbeat to skip erratically. “Put it this way. If I ask you in to taste my muffins someday, maybe you should consider that an invitation to rock my world.”
“I’ll remember that,” he said, then gentled his voice. “All joking aside, are you sure you want some company for a while?”
“Yeah, I do. I could use a friend right now.” She opened the door wider and stepped aside, softly massaging her forehead.
The vulnerability in the taut set of her mouth gut-punched him. He remembered what it was like moving to a new place where you were the outsider looking in at a community where everyone soon knew who you were but you didn’t know who they were.
He stepped inside and closed the door. Tilly had already started down the hallway toward where he knew Mary’s kitchen was. She spun around, walking slowly backward. “Go and grab a seat in the living room. It’s warmer there. I’ll make a hot drink—coffee?”
“Tea. Milk, no sugar.” As it was he’d find it hard to fall asleep tonight. He definitely didn’t need any more stimulants bouncing around in his system.
He wandered into the living room and chose to sit in an armchair rather than the couch that showed signs of being Tilly’s preferred spot. A knitted afghan was tossed on the middle cushion, and poking out from beneath it was the dark leather cover of a book, the word Journal stamped on the front in embossed gold.
Tilly’s journal? What sort of revelations about herself would she choose to put pen to paper over?
Noah eased into the armchair, continuing to eyeball the leather-bound book. He’d never been especially curious about what made people tick beyond the superficial. In his old life, from his dealings with criminals—both career and opportunistic—they were a lot simpler to understand than what the squad privately called ‘the crazies.’ Criminals could often be talked down from violence with rational discussion; crazies were unpredictable at best, and at worst…well. At worst, people got hurt or, in some cases, died.
It’d been his father’s and brother’s job as detectives to understand the minds of the unhinged in order to apprehend them after a violent crime had been committed. It’d been Noah’s job to, if possible, prevent the crime from happening. He hadn’t been particularly interested if the offender had thought tiny aliens had taken up residence in his brain, or if the guy holding a knife to his three-year-old’s throat was convinced the child was the spawn of Satan. He didn’t need to know the whys or what-fors, or if the guy with the gun pissed the bed until he was sixteen. Noah’s only priority was to keep the perpetrator from hurting an innocent and, if possible, from injuring himself.
But Tilly…she did make him curious. Desperately curious—though not enough to invade her privacy by pawing through her journal.
She came into the room with a mug in one hand and a plate of cookies in the other. With a shy smile she handed him the mug and offered him a cookie.
“Macadamia and white chocolate chip,” she said as he selected one.
“Mrs. T does give good cookie, I have to admit.” He bit into it, the sweet chewy consistency of the cookie nearly causing his eyes to blissfully roll back in his head.
Tilly sank onto the couch and waved a cookie under her nose as if it were a glass of finely aged whiskey. She took a bite and closed her eyes, her mouth pursing as she tilted her chin, exposing the delicate line of her throat. A soft hum emerged from her as she slowly chewed, the sound shooting straight to his groin. Again. His dick waking up with a hungry twitch, Noah casually held his mug in front of himself, ordering the twitch not to turn into an inappropriate boner.
“So you keep a journal?” he blurted into the silence.
Tilly’s eyes popped open and her chewing motions froze. She swallowed, following his gaze down to the book. “Not since I was an angst-infected teenager going through my bad poetry phase. That’s Mary’s journal. I found it in her nightstand earlier when I was packing up her things.” She kept her eyes locked on the corner of the book, her cheeks flushing a pretty rose pink. “I feel guilty reading it, but Mrs. Taylor told me I should.”
“I don’t think Mary had any skeletons tucked away that she wouldn’t want you to find. She wasn’t one to keep secrets.”
Tilly glanced up at him then, the directness of her gaze convincing him she could see into his soul. “Everyone keeps secrets.”
Even you, her hazel eyes seemed to say.
“I guess you’re right,” he said. “Some people’s are bigger than others.”
She picked up Mary’s journal and set it on her lap, stroking her fingertips over the embossed lettering. “There was a photo of a young man in her bedroom. His name was Jim Akurangi. Do you know of him?”
The name was vaguely familiar and Noah scrunched up his face. “I think there were a couple of Akurangis living on the island, but before my time. If I remember correctly there was an Akurangi living next door to Pete Reynolds and his sons years ago.” He angled his head at her. “Does Mary talk about Jim in her journal?”
Her fingers stilled on the cover. “I haven’t gotten that far yet. I’ve been reading about her childhood growing up in Invercargill.”
“You’re not going to cheat and skip to the good stuff?”
Tilly rolled her eyes. “Obviously you’re one of those horrible people who turn to the last page to find out how a book ends.” Before he could laughingly defend his honor as a bookworm, her mouth thinned into a straight line. “And I know how Mary’s story ends. With her dying alone in her house without anyone she loved or who loved her holding her hand.”
He suspected she wasn’t only talking about her great-aunt, and his chest squeezed in sympathy, hard enough to crack ribs. He eased out of the armchair and scooted over to sit beside her on the couch. A less than intimate distance away, but close enough that she could hopefully feel his solidarity.
“Not many people end their stories in such an ideal way,” he said quietly. “But Joe Whelan, the island’s doctor, said it would’ve been over for her very fast.”
“Not without pain, though. A heart attack hurts.” Her lip wobbled, gaz
e dropping to the carpet beyond the coffee table where her great-aunt’s body had been discovered. “I hate to think of her scared and alone in here.”
His hand moved of its own accord, covering hers on top of the journal. “So do I.”
A belly-deep sigh gusted out of her and she leaned toward him like a slowly felled tree until her head rested against his shoulder. The sweet scent of her hair and the soft tickle of it as a flyaway strand brushed his neck caused an eruption of butterflies in his stomach. Her gesture was absent of any hint of attraction, yet it touched him with its simple intimacy and a kind of permission for him to comfort her. He wouldn’t take advantage of that.
He squeezed her hand. “Only a few people know this, but on the night Mary died she was watching a DVD from her collection. It was still playing when I arrived.”
“What was it?”
“Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It was her favorite. She loved the old rom-coms, she told me once.”
Tilly chuffed out a sad little laugh. “I’m glad she was enjoying herself before…well, before. And I wish I could’ve told you about her favorite things, but I didn’t know her anywhere as much as I could have.”
“Her journal will help fill in some of the blanks.”
“Yeah.” She straightened and sat back on her side of the couch, sliding her hand from under his.
Noah immediately missed her warmth. He was about to move back to the armchair to give her space when she set a hand on his knee.
“Stay.” She offered up a sheepish smile. “You’ll get a better view of the movie from here.”
“What movie?” he asked.
Tilly slipped off the couch and crossed to a bookshelf full of DVDs. She didn’t answer, instead running her fingers along the cases until she spotted what she wanted and pulled it from the shelf. She turned and showed him the DVD’s front title with Audrey Hepburn decked out in diamonds beneath it. Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
“Ah. You’re gonna make me sit through a chick flick?”
Bending The Rules: Stewart Island Book 10 Page 8
