Bone Deep

by Janice Kay Johnson

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE MINUTE SHE STOOD, the minute he saw the decision she’d made in her eyes, Grant quit thinking. He only felt.

  A groan tore from his throat. “Kat,” he heard himself say hoarsely. “Kat.”Having her body hard against his, thigh to chest, her arms around his neck, her scent in his nostrils, staggered him. It was pure, sweet relief, if relief could be so powerful it hurt.

  She was straining upward even as he bent his head. Their mouths met, open, hungry. He couldn’t be tender or patient, he couldn’t coax. All he could do was take, his tongue driving into the slippery depths of her mouth as his hips rocked and he squeezed her butt to drag her even tighter against him.

  At last. Thank God. Thank God. At last.

  He hadn’t known it was possible to want so desperately. Four years, seeing her just often enough to keep the edge of his hunger honed, had been torture. And now she was in his arms, shaking. Or maybe that was him. Or both of them. She kissed him as fiercely as he kissed her. If his tongue retreated, hers followed. When he wrenched at her shirt, she yanked at his and he heard buttons pop.

  The bedrooms were upstairs. They weren’t going to make it that far. But he didn’t want to take her on the hard floor like an animal. Living room. There was a sofa. Somehow even as they devoured each other’s mouth and stripped each other, he also maneuvered her, a few feet at a time, in that direction.

  Every so often he had to lift his head to stare at her face in disbelief and exultation. Kat, the way he’d dreamed of her. Passion had deepened her eyes to a color so rich, it defied words. The closest he could come was the twilight sky beyond the fiery reach of the setting sun. Her mouth was beautiful, lips parted and swollen and damp. That glorious, indescribable hair, tumbling loose from whatever knot she’d confined it to, fell over slim, bare shoulders and curled over breasts that were ripe and perfect. And then he’d have to kiss her again, lose himself in her taste and response to him.

  He stumbled across the coffee table, vaguely surprised they’d gotten that far. He hoped like hell she’d never made love with Hugh here, but couldn’t have stopped even if he knew the couch was their favorite place to do it.

  He laid her down and peeled off her jeans and panties at the same time. Oh, damn; the V of curls at the juncture of her thighs wasn’t a plain brown any more than the hair on her head. Chestnut, he decided. And he found the curls to be silky as, fascinated, he slid his fingers into them. He bent over her, one knee on the edge of the cushion, his own jeans un-snapped but as yet zipped. Momentarily dazed, he looked at her long legs and pale belly and breasts, curves, convex and concave, hollows beneath her collarbones and the sharp points of her pelvic bones. She was too thin, and yet his eye could find no fault. She could put on fifty pounds and he wouldn’t then, either. It was her. Just her. Which made no more sense than it ever had.

  “You have no idea…” he said rawly.

  Her unblinking stare ate him up. Her fingers, splayed on his chest, kneaded as sinuously as a delighted cat.

  “I do,” she whispered. “I know.”

  Maybe she did. He’d seen her looking sometimes, too. It was those stolen, suspended moments when their eyes had met and held that had kept his hope alive. Foolishly, idiotically alive, he’d tried to tell himself a thousand times, but he hadn’t been able to let go of it. He’d never wanted another woman like he did this one. Never would. It was that simple.

  He kept kneeling there above her, stroking her slick flesh until her hips were rising and she threw her head back, whimpering. And then, all of a sudden, she jackknifed up and reached for his zipper. In an instant, she had him in her hands and was stroking with the same intent he had.

  With a guttural sound, Grant pushed her down and followed her until he remembered that he had to protect her. Swearing, he found the packet in his wallet, tore it open and, with far from steady hands, got the damn thing on. He kicked off his boxers and jeans before he lowered himself on top of her.

  Kat’s legs wrapped his hips and she arched upward to meet him even as her lips sought his again. He pushed inside her. Slowly, slowly. She was a small woman. Tight, so tight. He’d never felt anything like this. He kept going until he was seated deep, and then he did it again. They were both making sounds, maybe words, maybe not. He held his weight off her on one elbow even as the other slid under her hips to lift them higher.

  He made out words after all.

  “Grant. Oh, Grant. Please. Now.” And her body convulsed around him, nothing gentle about this climax, as if she’d been saving up not for four years but forever. He lunged, hard, deep, fast, following no more gently. The glory encompassed mind, body, heart. It washed out more slowly than it had come, ripples of sensation making his body jerk as he collapsed heavily, managing to come down with most of his weight between her and the couch back rather than crushing her.

  He was breathing in harsh pants. His face was buried in her hair and he almost started to laugh, remembering that damn city council meeting when he’d lost forty-five minutes staring at her hair, trying to count the colors. It was as silky and vibrant as he’d imagined. Ticklish, too.

  His chest must have vibrated, because she tilted her head back to try to see his face. “Are you laughing?”

  He was. A rumble that wasn’t amusement but something else altogether. Happiness, shaken until it fizzed.

  “And they say anticipation is half the fun.”

  With a choked giggle, Kat wriggled her way out from under him and onto her side so they were facing. Neither of them were laughing when they gazed solemnly into each other’s eyes.

  “I’ve never,” she said, sounding stunned. “I didn’t know…”

  “I didn’t, either.” He thought for a minute. “No, that’s not true. I suspected.” His hand stroked her from nape to the curve of her ass. Her vertebrae were delicate, nothing like the knobs of his own. She was delicate, so finely made, and yet strong. It was the long, toned muscles that made her legs so amazing, that had let her wrap him with arms strong enough he’d thought she could hold on forever.

  He kept thinking that word. Forever. Pretty stupid, when he doubted she was anywhere near as advanced in her thinking as he was.

  Their eyes kept searching each other’s. He wanted, in the worst way, to say, “I love you,” but he thought that might scare her. Hell, it scared him. It always had. Being this vulnerable to another human being wasn’t easy to take in stride.

  She sighed at last. “This wasn’t a good idea.”

  “Best one I’ve ever had.”

  “It’s too soon.”

  He gave something close to another laugh over that. “Yeah, we really rushed into this, didn’t we?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  She meant that suspicion for Hugh’s death could still fall on her. Grant knew that, but right this minute he didn’t care. Maybe later he would; it was true that other people still wondered.

  As if Kat were reading his mind, she said, “You don’t know me that well.”

  He kissed her forehead, then nuzzled her hair. “Your favorite color is purple.”

  She made an indignant sound.

  “Yes, I do,” he whispered. “I know that much. I heard you tell old Mrs. Mallory the other day about how useful slugs are, the place they have in nature, and how you don’t like to poison them. That in your own garden you trap them, and then dump them in a cow pasture on the way to work.”

  “Sometimes we poison them at the nursery. We have to. I can, you know.”

  He laughed gently. “The confession of a killer.”

  “Well, it’s awful,” she mumbled against his shoulder. “Especially when you get a banana slug. You know, the big ones? I really think they feel pain.”

  He laughed again, but silently. Did she think for a minute she was convincing him that she could have murdered Hugh if she were mad enough? He felt like an idiot for ever imagining she could have. But he knew he hadn’t really believed it, not gut deep.

  “I�
�m scared,” she said suddenly.

  Grant moved her away from him enough that he could see her face again. “What do you think’s going to happen?”

  “I don’t know.” She compressed her mouth. “But whoever is doing this keeps escalating. So…what’s next?”

  The same question had already been keeping him up nights, and that was before the theft of her pickup this morning. Returning the bones made one kind of statement, snatching the truck right out from her nose made another one altogether.

  I can make you disappear, just like I did him.

  “I’m going to drive you to work and take you home every day,” he said.

  Kat blinked at him. “It’s a five-minute drive.”

  “But you get there first in the morning. And you’re often last leaving, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but…I don’t have to be.”

  “For now,” he said quietly. “It’ll make me feel better.”

  “People will talk.”

  “Let them.” He made his voice hard.

  “No.” Suddenly she was struggling. Caught by surprise, he didn’t stop her in time. She’d scrambled off the couch and was wriggling into her jeans, lightning fast. “No. I can’t afford to have people talking any more than they already are, and neither can you.”

  Grant sat up. “Kat, keeping you safe matters more than dodging some gossip.”

  As if self-conscious, she crossed her arms over her breasts. “You can’t keep me safe by driving me to work, Grant. I’m alone at night, I’m alone in my office at the nursery, out in the greenhouses… I have to drive to the grocery store, to the library… You can’t guard me around the clock.”

  She was right, but he didn’t want to admit it.

  Frowning, he said, “Will you quit arriving way before your first employees in the mornings?”

  “Yes.” Her throat worked. “I’ll be careful. Okay? I promise.”

  Shit. He didn’t see what he could do but concede. God knows, she was right that he could do his job more effectively if no one knew they were involved romantically. He didn’t like to think what Mortensen would say if he knew his police chief was screwing the wife of a man who’d died under suspicious circumstances. But it also didn’t sit well with Grant to keep hiding how he felt about Kat. He’d been doing that for too long already.

  “All right,” he said reluctantly. “Why don’t I pick you up in the morning and drive you to a car rental place?”

  After a brief hesitation, Kat gave a choppy nod. She seemed to be working hard at keeping her gaze at the level of his face, which meant she was embarrassed now that he was still sitting here butt naked.

  By the time he’d gotten his boxers and jeans on, Kat had retreated to the kitchen. When he got there, she’d already pulled on her shirt and had his in her hands. Cheeks pink, she said, “I think I pulled a couple of buttons off. I could sew them back on—”

  “I can do that if we can find them.”

  They found one, but not the other. He shrugged and dropped the one in the breast pocket of his shirt. He had some stray buttons at home that were close enough. He kind of liked the idea of a mismatched one; every time he did it up, it would remind him that she’d wanted him enough to rip his shirt off his body.

  “You’re smiling,” she said suspiciously.

  “Yeah.” Grant stepped forward and kissed her. Quick, keeping his tongue in his own mouth, but letting her know that he’d have liked to start all over again. “Just a thought.”

  She was looking shy again. It seemed a contradiction, for a feisty, spit-in-your-eye woman who’d been married and widowed, but he guessed she didn’t have much practice in flirting and that her sexual experience was limited. Maybe to Hugh alone.

  “There you go again,” she snapped.

  He wasn’t only smiling this time, he was flat-out grinning. Because her experience was no longer limited to Hugh and whatever high school or college boyfriends she’d had; now it included him. And she’d liked it every bit as much as he’d liked making love with her. If that made him smug, Grant figured he was entitled. It had been a long time since he’d felt anywhere close to this good.

  “Invite me to dinner tomorrow night,” he suggested.

  Her expression was reproving. “Two nights in a row? I don’t think so.”

  The smile left him. “This wasn’t a one time deal, you know.”

  “I hope it isn’t,” she whispered. “But…”

  She didn’t have to finish. But.

  Find out what the hell happened to Hugh. Who’d hidden his bones, who was taunting Kat.

  “I was thinking,” he said. “Would you have noticed if your truck had turned off the highway right away? Say, onto Hazeltine Road?”

  Kat blinked a couple of times. The change of subject, Grant realized, had been jarring.

  “Yes,” she started to say, then frowned and said more slowly, “I think so. But there’s that row of poplars and the fence.” She thought about it some more. “It was definitely accelerating, though. I didn’t see brake lights.”

  “But it could have made the turn. Or gone a little farther, turned around and come back.”

  Her mouth opened, closed. “Yes,” she admitted. “By then I was calling you.”

  “I wish it had occurred to me earlier that the best way to make it disappear was to get off the road immediately. Aren’t the Schultzes still in Arizona?”

  “They don’t usually come back until May.”

  “I’m going to drive out there,” he said. “Poke around a little.”

  “You think it was stashed there temporarily.”

  “I don’t know, but it would have been smart, wouldn’t it? Could’ve been parked behind the barn, or even in it.”

  “It’s probably locked. They still have a tractor and some farm equipment.”

  “Okay, how about the RV garage? It’d be empty. Would they bother locking it?”

  She shook her head to indicate she didn’t know.

  He pulled her into his arms for the pleasure of feeling her close, kissed her again and said, “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  On the drive out to the nursery and the Schultz farm, which lay behind it, Grant metaphorically kicked himself a few times. Chances were, Hugh had driven to his fate. But whoever took the pickup had a problem. The whole point was to steal it right in front of Kat’s eyes; to mimic the last time she saw her husband. That meant she’d be reaching right for the phone, though, and there might have happened to be a patrol car close by. So the pickup had to disappear immediately. What would be quicker than to turn off on the road that ran alongside the nursery and stash the truck on the farm until dark? Any local would know it was deserted this time of year.

  The logistics puzzled him some because it seemed unlikely that there were two people involved in Hugh’s death and the current campaign to terrify Kat. Getting here this morning might have been a problem.

  Or maybe not, he reflected. The river curved from town past several farms, including the Schultzes’. Walking along the riverbank from town was doable. He or she could have walked back, too. Or not. He—for convenience Grant decided to make it a he—might have taken a good book and spent the day at the farm, waiting for the cloak of darkness to drive away again.

  Darkness which, unfortunately, had fallen a good two hours ago. If he’d used his damned head, Grant would have thought of this possibility midmorning, not at eight at night.

  He didn’t find a thing at the farm. The long, hard-packed gravel driveway that ultimately circled in front of the barn, garage and big metal RV garage wouldn’t have held tire tracks even if the ground had been wet. A padlock secured the barn doors, but he managed to aim his flashlight in a small window and saw the tractor and a whole lot of empty space. Definitely no pickup. The rolling doors of both the garages slid up to show him more emptiness. Will and Martha towed their car behind their RV to Arizona every winter. After looking around, Grant thought that if he’d wanted to hide a pickup out here all day, he
’d have used the RV garage. The other one had windows. But the tall metal building didn’t, only a side door that locked. A person could drive into the garage, come out the side door and padlock the big door on the outside, then go back in, lock and be snug as a bug all day long.

  He shined his flashlight on the hasp and saw scratches, some newer looking than others, but no surprise there; Will probably kept the building locked when his fancy $100,000 plus RV was inside it.

  There was nothing to find inside. No convenient cigarette butt, no half-empty pop can, carelessly left sitting there. But the hairs on the back of Grant’s neck prickled, and he knew.

  Sure as hell, Kat’s pickup had been concealed here today.

  GRANT DIDN’T HAVE A LOT to say in the morning when he drove her to the rental car office, and Kat was grateful. It was hard enough exchanging the few words they did, when every time she looked at him she remembered him naked.

  She’d have said she didn’t like hairy chests, but his was different. The dark, curling hair over hard muscles had struck her as intensely masculine, just the way he was. Thinking about the thin line of downier hair that led down below his navel was enough to make her shiver. A few dark hairs curled on the backs of his fingers, too. Her eyes kept being drawn that way, to where those big, competent hands gripped the steering wheel. She remembered looking down at his hand on her breast, seeing her own milky pale skin between his dark fingers, loving the rasp of his palm over her nipple. Oh, damn. She turned her head to look out the passenger window. This wasn’t going to be easy, dealing with him in a businesslike way. She’d known better, but some foolishness had overcome her.Four years of longing had slammed through the dam she’d erected so carefully.

  “Did you find anything last night?” she asked.

  He shot her a glance. Cheeks warm, Kat knew he had to be remembering, too.

  “I’d have called if I had,” he said. “But it would have been a good place to hide temporarily. Both garages were unlocked.”