by Leslie Kelly
“I don’t think I’m a strong enough man for that.”
She took in a deep, comfortable breath, honey-sweet satisfaction oozing through her body. Letting her mind trip back to moments ago when all she could see was the sky, all she could hear was the churning of the waves and her own choppy breaths. All she could feel was him. “How long was I asleep?”
“Just a little while. Twenty minutes or so. But long enough that the beach traffic has thinned out a bit.”
Glancing over his shoulder, she saw that the family with the young boy had gone. Nibbling her lip, she asked, “Do you think they left because of us?”
He shook his head. “I think it had something to do with the kid lying about putting on some sunscreen. His mother was screeching something about him being red as a lobster as she dragged him up the beach.”
“Thank goodness,” she replied with a chuckle. Then she rose from the chair and extended her hand. “Let’s go for a swim.”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
They dropped their sunglasses onto their chairs then dashed, hand in hand, into the surf. The shock of cold water against her ankles made Jade moan in appreciation. Her whole body was sticky hot, and the cool waters of the Atlantic provided exactly the relief she needed.
They dove under the next wave, rising a few yards out beyond the break.
“Have I thanked you yet for suggesting this?” she asked as they treaded water.
“Not with words.”
“Thanks,” she replied. Then she gave him a saucy grin. “With words.”
“Have I thanked you, yet, for tying me up naked to a statue in Mamie Brandywine’s garden?”
She laughed aloud. “Not with words.”
He swam closer, shaking water off his hair as he pulled her into his arms. “Thanks, Jade. I’m beginning to think this trip to Savannah might be one of the best things I ever did.”
She studied his face, gauging his meaning. His voice had sounded husky, but also sincere. He stared back at her, as if not seeing the sopping hair and sun-reddened face. His expression said a lot about what he was thinking, what he was feeling.
The same things she was?
Whatever crazy feelings were swirling around here about this—this thing they’d fallen into—she wasn’t the only one feeling them.
A wave washed over them, pushing them closer to shore until they could stand chest-deep in the water. Ryan slid his arms around her shoulders and pulled her close. “No children or harried moms to be shocked if we kiss.”
She snorted a laugh. “I think we did a little more than kiss on the beach.”
Instead of replying, he lowered his mouth to hers, sweeping his tongue along her lips. Salty. Minty. Delicious.
She kissed him back and tilted against him, sliding her wet body against his beneath the surface of the water.
He groaned against her lips. She knew why when she felt his instant reaction. “It’s pretty deserted,” she said. Her voice was low, wicked.
“You’re so bad.”
“Isn’t that why you like me?”
He nodded. “One of many reasons.”
One of many. That implied he liked her a lot, didn’t it? Darn good thing. Because she suspected she more than liked this man. Amazing, really. Someone she’d set out to destroy might turn out to be the man she’d been waiting for all her life.
“So what are you suggesting?” he asked, slipping his hands down to cup her waist, then her hips. Then lower, until he was playing with the waistband of her bottoms.
“What do you think I was suggesting?” She wrapped one leg around him, curving herself more intimately against him until he sucked in a harsh breath.
“I don’t exactly have condoms in the pocket of my trunks.”
“Shucks.” She rubbed against him again, drawing out the torture for both of them.
“I’m not going to be able to walk out of the water for a good ten minutes now.”
She glanced toward the beach. Now, with the full afternoon heat blazing down, more people had left to escape the sun. “Unless those two guys fishing down there have a pair of binoculars, they’re not going to have any idea what we’re doing under the waves.”
“I like how you think.”
“You’re gonna like my next move even better,” she promised. Without warning, she reached into the waistband of his trunks and captured his thick, throbbing erection in her hand.
“Oh, yeah,” he managed to croak out between ragged breaths. “I definitely like that.”
She liked it, too. Liked the solid, heavy weight of him in her palm. Liked how he moaned when she squeezed. Liked feeling so wicked and wanton and elemental with the roll of the waves and the far-off cry of seagulls in the background.
“If a wave comes and knocks us down, I’m gonna end up bare-ass naked on the beach with my trunks around my knees,” he said, weakly trying to protest. She knew he didn’t want her to stop. The way his head was thrown back and his lips parted told her he loved what she was doing. Each stroke brought another slight groan. Each roll of her thumb over the tip of his erection made him shake.
“Do you really care?” She rose on tiptoe to press a kiss against the base of his throat, the taste of salt water mixed with the salty essence of man completely intoxicating her.
He could only shake his head, then lower his mouth to hers to grab a deep, wet kiss even as he grabbed another deep breath. Without a single protest, he gave himself over to Jade as she took him to the same heights of pleasure where he’d so recently taken her.
By the time they came out of the water, he could only think that he was damned glad he’d used the waterproof sunscreen.
11
A FEW NIGHTS LATER, Ryan was ready to confront Jade about her secret life of crime and offer to help her work through it. Because he’d come to a few conclusions.
First, he couldn’t keep up the deception. He hated lying, hated it. And lying to someone he cared about was proving too much to bear.
Second, until he figured out how to extract Jade from the sticky legal situation she’d gotten herself into, he wouldn’t feel safe loving her.
Loving her. God, that sounded dramatic. He’d known the woman only slightly more than a week and he’d fallen in love with her.
Well, why not? He’d been engaged to a woman for a year and had never felt one moment of the pure joy he shared with Jade.
Besides, he’d simply followed in the footsteps of his family, hadn’t he? His grandparents, parents and sister—they’d all met their one-and-only, their soul mate—and had never been willing to settle for anything else.
His grandmother had been warning him for years that he came from passionate stock. That when the right woman came along, he’d know, down to his bones, that she was the one person in the world he couldn’t do without.
“What you t’inking, boy?”
Ryan looked up from the fabulous fried-chicken-and-okra dinner Aunt Lula Mae had made for them tonight and caught the old woman watching him with a knowing smile. Jade had invited him over to meet her much-loved relative. Neither Ryan nor Lula Mae had admitted that they’d already met. Lula Mae seemed to enjoy conspiracy—she’d given him several broad smiles and surreptitious winks throughout the evening.
“You know what I’m thinking about,” he replied, knowing he was right. Whether she was truly into anything supernatural, the old woman had an uncanny ability to read people.
“You wonderin’ how Jade gonna react when she fin’ out you came here ’dat night. Because you don’ trust her.”
He glanced around the sparse dining room, furnished only with a small table and four chairs, to make sure Jade hadn’t returned from her bedroom, where she’d gone to take a call during their dinner.
“Didn’t,” he clarified. “I understand her much better now.”
Lula Mae nodded, setting the thick strand of beads around her neck clicking against her throat. No bunny slippers tonight. No chicken claws, either. She was dressed in a brightly-colore
d, loose dress with an island pattern. A red bandanna covered her spiky gray hair, and on her fingers she wore a number of large rings. She pointed one of those ringed fingers in his direction. “You see? You understan’ the truth now?”
He nodded. “Jade doesn’t think she’s doing anything wrong.”
Lula Mae nodded. “She never do anything she know is wrong.”
“But she could get herself into trouble.”
The woman cackled. “Didn’t she already, when she hook up wid’ you?”
Trouble? Maybe at first. But not now. Having spent nearly every hour in each other’s company for the past several days, troublesome was not how he’d describe their relationship.
Exciting. Passionate. Playful. Sultry. Oh, yes, all those things. Things he’d almost forgotten he wanted and now knew he couldn’t do without. Just like he couldn’t do without her.
His grandmother, as it turned out, was right.
“I’m supposed to go back to New York tomorrow,” he told Lula Mae, letting her hear his genuine anxiety.
He hated to make that trip for another reason as well. Because he’d have to go face Grandmother and tell her that if she wanted her stolen painting back, she was going to have to fight the Savannah Historical Society. Not to mention one more little tidbit—that if he had his way, she was going to be setting one more place at the table come Thanksgiving.
For Jade, the con woman his grandmother had sent him to find. The woman he planned to spend the rest of his rich, exciting, passionate life with.
How did I ever get by without her.
He didn’t voice his question aloud, but Lula Mae seemed to know to answer, anyway. “Jade, she’s like you. Not bein’ true to herself, not lettin’ anyone too close because she feel she got to protect all of us. Now, though, she doesn’t have her mama and Jenny to play mama to. So time for her to have a life of her own.”
With you.
This time, he was the one who heard the words the old woman didn’t say.
“Well, it sounds like we met each other at exactly the perfect time in both our lives, doesn’t it?”
He didn’t even realize Jade had entered the room until she answered. “Absolutely.”
She greeted him with the kind of open, genuine smile that made him shake under its power. Jade when sultry and wicked was deadly. Jade when happy and sunny was simply beyond resisting.
And he had no intention whatsoever of doing that.
“Lula Mae, if I could ever get my grandmother to visit Savannah, I want you to cook these greens for her.”
The woman waved off his compliment with an airy hand.
“Speaking of which,” he said, turning his attention to Jade, who’d settled back in her seat, “I have to go home tomorrow. Got to get back to work, pull an article out of my Jade-fried brain and meet my deadline.”
“Wonderful,” she replied, not looking at all dismayed by the prospect of him leaving.
Her response was deflating, to say the least. Then he saw the grin on her lips and knew she was toying with him.
“Because,” she continued, “it just so happens that I need to make a trip up to New York, as well.”
“Really?”
She nodded, then nibbled delicately at a piece of chicken. She remained silent, licking her lips and tasting the meat. She shot a look at Lula Mae. “You used something different in this.”
The old woman merely smiled and shrugged before getting up to clear the table. “What fun is spice if you can’t play with it?”
“She’s always trying out different things,” Jade said once the older woman had left the room. “I’m sometimes afraid to ask where she gets this stuff.”
“As long as it doesn’t come from midnight flowers blooming on a grave on a moonless night, I have to say I approve of her cooking.”
“I think midnight flowers only bloom in graveyards when there’s a full moon.”
“The better for the werewolves?”
She tsked. “There’s nothing as gauche as werewolves in Savannah. Maybe vampires.” She gave him a heated look, telling him where her thoughts had gone. “Have I ever told you about my vampire fantasies?”
He shook his head. “No, but I think I’d like to hear about them.”
“I think you’d love to hear about them,” she retorted with a definite lick of her lips.
He shifted in his seat, trying to remember that Lula Mae was in the next room. “I don’t remember hearing you mention vampires on any of your tours.”
She shrugged. “I don’t. Only ghosts. Weren’t you paying attention?”
He’d gone on three of Jade’s tours now and learned as much as he wanted to about the ghosts who populated the most haunted city in the U.S. “Yes, I was paying attention. But today I kept getting distracted by the wiggle of the woman walking in front of me during the tour.”
She shot him a glare. “That blonde had a lot of wiggle in her walk.”
“She had a lot of wiggle in a good stiff breeze,” Ryan replied, sparing barely a thought for the bimbo who’d made a play for him today right in front of Jade.
Jade hadn’t so much as batted an eyelash. But she’d gotten her revenge, telling a particularly gruesome story about the murder of a blond tart who preyed on other women’s men back in the twenties. Ryan hadn’t known whether to feel sorry for the woman, who’d blanched red, or laugh his head off at Jade for being jealous.
Leaning across the cluttered table, he pressed a kiss on her shiny lips. “I was talking about my tour guide. The woman who’s taught me quite a lot this past week.”
“Like, not to go to the beach in the middle of a July afternoon unless you want to become as crispy as this chicken?”
He snorted. “Are you kidding? That was the best trip to the beach I ever had! I’ll never want to go in the ocean again if you’re not with me.”
“I think you mean come in the ocean,” she replied, completely deadpan.
He barked a laugh. “Oh, did I ever set myself up for that.” He pulled Jade from her chair and onto his own lap. “You are so bad.”
“And so are you,” she replied, pressing a kiss against his lips before tucking her head against his neck. “Thank goodness.”
He liked holding her. Liked feeling her in his lap, curled up in complete trust and comfort.
“Now, tell me why you’re coming to New York. When we can leave. How long you can stay. And promise you’ll wait outside my apartment door for ten minutes when we get there so I can change the sheets, hide my stash of porn, and make sure the toilet seat’s down.”
He should have known she wouldn’t focus on the sheets.
“Porn?”
“I was a bachelor in my former life.”
“A naughty one.”
“Why do you think we go together so well?”
“Like Bonnie and Clyde.”
Whoa, that comparison cut a little too close for comfort. But it was a perfect opening. “Jade—”
Lula Mae came back into the dining room before he could open up the conversation about Jade’s secret life as a stolen-art avenger.
Hmm…sounded like the name of a dark super-heroine. He could totally get into seeing Jade in a skintight spandex catsuit. He closed his eyes to appreciate the mental flash.
“Aunt Lula Mae, do you think you’d mind going and staying with Tally for a couple of days?” Jade asked.
The woman pursed her lips. “She doesn’t have HBO. I don’ wanna miss any Sex and the City reruns.”
“You’ve seen every episode. And Mama has the first season on tape anyway. We can pick them up from her place if you can’t survive without them,” Jade said with a roll of her eyes.
“You don’ have to go out of state if you want to fool around with your man,” Lula Mae said with a wag of her thin, gray eyebrows. “I got bad hearing.”
“You hear like a guard dog,” Jade retorted.
Lula Mae smirked.
“And I’m not going for that reason,” Jade added as she
rose from Ryan’s lap to stand beside the table. “I just confirmed a meeting with someone who has something I’ve been looking for.”
Ryan immediately went on alert. “What do you mean?”
Jade shrugged but didn’t meet his eyes. “I’ve been investigating the disappearance of a famous pair of dueling flintlocks from the Harrison estate.”
Oh, no. Dueling pistols. Sounded old, antique, Civil War-era.
“What does it have to do with you?” he asked, meeting Lula Mae’s speculative stare over Jade’s shoulder.
Jade busied herself by picking up the remaining dishes from the table. “It’s a sideline. I like going on treasure hunts for the Historical Society. I’m going to visit the current owner, who happens to live up in New York. Seems like a whole regiment of New Yorkers spent some time in Savannah during the war.”
Visit. Would she pose as a gun appraiser this time? A historian? A potential buyer? Or would she don all-black and creep into a strange house late at night to steal back what somebody stole more than a century ago? “Jade, you don’t mean to—”
“Okay,” Lula Mae interrupted. “I’ll stay with Tally. And I bring Jinx, too.”
Jade paused, dirty dishes in hand. “Tally hates cats. I can ask the neighbor to look in on him.”
Lula Mae merely shrugged. “Jinx don’t go, I don’t go.”
Jade groaned and glanced at Ryan. “She likes to scare Tally’s housemaid. Voodoo priestess, black cat and all that stuff. She’s as big an actress as Jenny.” Then she sighed. “And Mama.”
The old woman continued as if Jade hadn’t spoken. “You go have fun on one of your treasure hunts.” Turning to Ryan, she shook her finger at him. “And you make sure you stay close to keep my girl out of trouble.”
“Trouble? Now why would I possibly get in any trouble?”
Ryan could think of a bunch of reasons—police, criminal charges and armed homeowners among them.
Lula Mae shot him another warning look. She seemed to be telling Ryan not to confront Jade about what she was doing. He wanted to, more than anything. He wanted to get things out in the open and do whatever he had to—including locking Jade in her room, if that’s what it took—to get her to give up this crazy idea.
