Irresistible Stranger

Chapter 10

Griff knew what a long day she’d had. As he ushered her inside, his thought was a soothing soaker for them both, after which he’d pour her into bed.

That wasn’t his preferred plan. Ideally he’d make love to her again-maybe twice. His body was inspired to replicate the extraordinary experience on the raft-on a comfortable mattress. But that was pretty damned selfish. There was always the morning.

And the next morning.

And the next morning after that.

“Griff…” She yawned as she stumbled in behind him. “I see the blinking light on your machine. You’ve got messages.”

“They’ll wait.” He switched on a living room lamp, only to illuminate their path back to his room. He’d turned off his cell, knew she’d turned off hers for a few hours that evening. Surely they were safe from any more emergencies or catastrophes for a few hours. He needed that time with her.

It was still rattling in his head-an awareness that all the sweet talk after making love hadn’t been sweet talk. Not for him. He was hooked.

He’d never been hooked. In lust, a million times. In crush, more than a million. In love. Real love. Never.

The sensation was damn near terrorizing.

Abruptly, he heard her shriek coming from down the hall, and had to grin.

“Come on. You’ve seen the bathroom before.”

“I wouldn’t care if I’d seen it a dozen times. That’s not the point! The point is that I’m living with you forever! That’s it! Don’t argue with me! Nothing and no one will ever make me leave you!”

“Yeah, yeah. Now you talk big. But the first time I snore you’ll probably run for the hills.” He pushed off shoes, switched on the bedside lamp, pulled off his shirt-but she wasn’t paying any attention to him.

She was still shrieking and crowing from his bathroom. “This is sinful. You should be ashamed! Talk about sybaritic. Talk about-”

“Don’t be so shy. Tell me what you really think.” The bedroom, truth to tell, wasn’t much. He never spent much time there. The mattress was the best money could buy, the sheets high quality, but otherwise, it was just a big room that did a good job of shutting out noise and distractions. Back when he’d been a serious insomniac.

That had been part of his motivation for the fancy shower. De-tensing wasn’t easy for him. Everyone thought he was a low-key guy-everyone except Lily, anyway. The reality was that he used to walk the floor at nights, so tired he couldn’t think, yet still unable to sleep. He told her about that.

“Sounds like pretty serious insomnia,” she said.

“It was. One time, I went three days without sleep. I started to get downright weird.”

“Of course you did.”

He frowned, unsure how she’d sort of manipulated things. He’d barely stepped in the bathroom before she was pulling off his shirt, peeling down his shirt, looking up at him with a grin that…well, hell. Obviously he was aroused again. He could have nailed railroad spikes with the hammer strength of his hard-on. That was her doing. He was trying to be good.

She’d raved about his bathroom before, but he figured she might be laying it on thick because she was Lily, and she knew he loved the damned room. The core structure was white marble and lapis-nice, but the big to-do was the shower room. The glass wall overlooked the ravine. It was fun as hell, being naked, feeling like you were in the open. Every bird in the county could see you-maybe raccoons, if they could climb high enough. But there were no houses or humans with that kind of visibility.

The other three walls of the shower were redwood, as were the long, layout benches. The shower had a double step-down, so you could soak feet, or sit in waist-high water…or you could just stand there and do the shower thing, choose either a deluge or tropic storm or spring rain, depending on the force of water you wanted.

As far as he could tell, Lily wanted it all. Just stood there and lapped it all in like a sea nymph. He shampooed her hair, because she was such a sucker for a head rub. From the suds to the sluice of water to the slick textures of soap and silky skin, he saw the building laughter in her eyes. That natural sensuality coming out of hiding. That come-on in her expression, as if all inhibitions had been stripped away, locked out of this room-their room-their moment together.

And it was light in here, not dark, like on the raft. He could run his hands down-walk his hands down-all the slopes and valleys at a nice, slow pace. Her breasts had an extra tightness. “Lumpy,” she whispered.

He understood. She was warning him that she was tender, probably pre-period tender. He was more than happy to be careful, infinitely careful. He could have played on her skin all night. Cartwheels. Sonatas. Poetry. Rock and roll. Art. He wanted to drink her in in every which way…

Until out of the blue, he noticed her suddenly trembling.

“Hey? You cold?”

“No. No.” She lifted her head. Smiled. He saw the terror in her eyes. “I know what you’re doing,” she said.

Her voice was brave.

“Yeah?”

She rushed on. “Both of us have been doing a lot of play talk. Pretending like we have a relationship. But you live here, Griff, and I don’t. I can’t even imagine coming back here to live. And I just want to be sure you know-I’m happy playing. I never expected more.”

“No?” He murmured, and started switching off the jets, the faucets. She sounded as sure as a leaf in the wind.

“Absolutely not,” she promised him. “I’m happy with us. Just as we are.”

That chin was tilted up, but she still couldn’t hide that crack in her voice.

He reached for a towel-one of those bigger-than-a-blanket towels, so it was easy to get her immediately covered and warmer. He rubbed her dry, thinking this was the best job he’d had in a long time.

“I don’t want more,” she said. “You don’t have to worry. This is perfect just as it is.”

“Uh-huh.” It was hard to buy the deal she was selling him. Lily was a player like Bambi was a wrestler. He’d known it from the start. She wasn’t a one-shot deal. An affair. A wonderful-but forgettable-lover.

She was unforgettable even before he’d taken her to bed.

For a man who’d resisted all efforts to be tied down-who had never allowed himself to believe in permanence, who didn’t believe himself capable of caring that much-she was shaking his timbers. And he didn’t like it.

Still, if he was stuck suffering the terrors of falling in love, he wasn’t the only one going down.

“Hey,” she murmured. “I’m smothering.”

When he wrapped her up in the big towel, her face had gotten accidentally covered. “I will never,” he promised, “smother you.” He laid her down on the bed, switched off the light, then dove down beside her. He pulled back the towel edge just to see her face.

A wicked smile was waiting for him. Her eyes were dark with desire, with boldness. Some of that bravado was still hovering in her trembling mouth when he dipped down and took it. In the process of that kiss, he discovered that his own damn mouth was trembling, too.

“Lily,” he whispered, and started to say something else-when the telephone rang.

The cell phones had been turned off, and the ringer wasn’t from his landline. The chime was from the private cell he kept on the dresser, an emergency number that only a handful of people had.

Lily saw his expression change. “Go,” she said.

“I have to answer it.”

She just nodded, lifted up on her elbows as he vaulted across the room and grabbed the phone.

He didn’t know ahead which kid was calling, just that it was a kid. Jason’s voice could sound as if he were one hundred and ten years old or four. This was a small child’s voice. “You said I could call if I ever really had trouble.”

“You know you can. Where are you?”

“The road into Shanty Creek. The woods left of the entrance road there.” A pause. “The bugs are pretty bad. I just wondered if-”

“I’ll be there. Take me less than ten.” He filled Lily in while he yanked on pants, a tee, pushed on sandals, grabbed his car keys.

“Do you want me to go back to Louella’s?”

“No.”

“Do you want me to make up a bed, that kind of thing…?”

He should have known she’d get the picture.

Less than a half hour later, he was bringing Jason into the house. The boy had been in worse shape. There were no broken bones this time, no burns. But the right eye was almost swollen shut, and he’d taken a kick to the kidneys that made him wince when he walked. Every mosquito in the county had nailed him, and his face had that look-that no one’s gonna reach me look-that Griff had seen before, but Lily sure as hell hadn’t.

She’d pulled on a T-shirt of his, a pair of his shorts, somehow found some string, tied it into a belt to hold up the crazy outfit. His washing machine was running. A first-aid kit sat open on the counter. She took one look at Jason, sucked in a breath, lifted frantic eyes to him-and then just moved.

“Well, if you aren’t a complete mess,” she murmured gently. “Let’s get you cleaned up and some ice on that eye. You go bury yourself in mud, did you? You hungry, honey?”

Jason didn’t want to look at her, didn’t want to talk to her, clearly didn’t expect anyone to be there but Griff.

Griff could see she was handling him. She kept up a steady patter of gentle talk, which enabled him to do what he needed to immediately do-which was to hit the phone.

He called Sheriff Conner first, woke him up, told him where the boy was. “Nobody getting any sleep this week in the whole durned town,” The sheriff grumbled. “You know Lily hasn’t left town besides.”

“Lily is right here with me.”

“Well, at least we know she isn’t setting fires. You call Loreen?”

“She’s next.”

“Need a hospital?”

“Close. But no.”

“All right. I’ll check with you first thing in the morning.”

He called the social worker, Loreen. They’d been through the same routine a half-dozen times before.

The house didn’t quiet down until past three in the morning. Lily sat in the spare bedroom until Jason fell asleep. She left a light on, the door open, tiptoed into his bedroom with zombie eyes. His were just as blurry.

“How often does that happen?” she asked. “And what happens to Jason after this?”

He gave her the rundown. He called, told people where Jason was, so there’d be no question. The sheriff would roust Jason’s father, coop him up for a few days. It was like a lot of life’s problems: everyone knew what should happen, but it wasn’t that simple to make “right things” happen in an imperfect world.

“I’ve gotten Jason out of the house, into foster care before-but so far, he’s always found a way to steal back home. He doesn’t want to leave his mom and younger brother. So he goes back. The mom’ll get counseling. The dad’ll get counseling and jail hours. The dad’ll be real, real sorry. And it’ll happen again. Until Jason’s mom leaves the creep. That’s the real answer. But so far she’s not willing to do it.”

“And how did you get involved?”

“Beats me. I’m just trying to sit around and sell a little ice cream.”

“Griff.”

“What?”

“It’s a little late to sell me the lazy bad-boy persona.”

He shut his eyes. “He wants me to take him in. But that’s not an answer, you know? I know Jason thinks it is. Steve. A couple other kids. But what they really need is more complicated than that. They need a legal system that works for them, that they know how to use. They need to develop enough insight to analyze who to trust, who not to trust. They need to see and believe that good people will stand up for them. They need to believe that life can work, that things can be better, that there are other choices and how to get to them.” He yawned.

“You didn’t need this on top of the arson problem, did you?” she murmured, and then, “What is this? We’re talking like kids on a sleepover. It’s the middle of the night.”

“Well, quit talking then, sugar.”

“You first.”

“I can’t go to sleep if you’re going to spoon against me like that.”

“Oh, yeah you can,” she whispered again, and the damn woman-and really, Lily could be mighty annoying sometimes-was right.

That was the last thing he remembered until daylight.

When Lily awoke, she was burrowed into Griff’s shoulder like a squirrel in wintertime. The room was snuggle-cool, all the shades drawn, Griff’s warmth the perfect way to open her eyes.

Until she did open her eyes, and unfortunately remembered her life.

She was in a strange bed, wearing nothing at all, in the middle of a town of people who seemed to think she was an arsonist, where trying to clear her father’s name had caused unexplained trouble for everyone. On top of which, she was in love with a man she had as much in common with as peanut butter and anchovies.

It was enough to wake up a girl fast.

She sneaked out of bed, tiptoed around to find toothpaste and steal his deodorant, then pulled yesterday’s clothes out of the dryer and went in search of a coffeemaker. Griff needed all the sleep he could get, she figured-since being around her seemed to have shortened everyone’s sleep in the whole town. Including her own.

She peeked in on Jason, who was also sleeping like the dead, curled up in a fetal position, the light still on, looking very much like a normal, innocent ten-year old…except for the swollen red-and-black eye. Her heart clenched. It wasn’t totally her fault she’d fallen for Griff. The big faker was exactly that kind of man-the type who’d take in a battered kid, who’d take on the system, who’d pick up a child who wasn’t remotely his responsibility in the middle of the night and stand up for him.

She aimed for his kitchen, prowled around. The boys were going to probably want eggs and a serious breakfast, so she located where various pots and pans and supplies were, then started up his German coffee machine.

While coffee brewed, she dug in her purse for her cell phone, switched it on. Voicemail indicated almost a dozen calls-six of them from Cate. Her oldest sister had probably worked herself into an ulcer by now.

Lily waited until she had the first mug poured, then carried it through the living room, opened a glass door and sank in a chair on the patio. The morning was already lushly warm, but a breeze whisked through the air. More to the point, the boys wouldn’t likely hear raised voices from outside, and Cate, even from a thousand miles away, was likely mad enough to rival a symphony in volume. She took a long pull on the coffee, hit redial, and waited for the blast.

“You don’t put yourself in dangerous situations, you dimwit. Do you hear me? The three of us-we’re not losing each other. Period. If you’re in trouble, we’re all in trouble, and now we’ve got a couple of husbands to add to the protection force. You don’t just…”

Yada yada. Lily finished the first cup, went back for a second before she got a word in edgewise, and finally slipped in an “I totally love you, Cate.” Usually that stopped Cate dead in her tracks, no matter how wild a rant she was on.

And that worked for a while. She filled Cate in on the newspaper records, the teenage girl likely responsible for three of the old arson fires, how or if they could possibly be linked to their parents’ fire-and the current arson incidents.

Cate interrupted to ask, “So that teenage girl, she’d be between thirty-five and forty now?”

“Add twenty years to back then. Yes.”

But neither of them could seem to conclude more than that. It had been a long time since Lily had been able to coax Cate-or Sophie-to talk about the fire. All three knew what that fire had cost them-fear of loss, grief that never went away, the loss of home and life and everything they knew. None of the three had ever felt safe again.

It was always there, the knowledge that fate could suddenly step in and rip out everything from beneath you.

Lily said, “My plan today is to hit the social service office. I don’t know if the social worker is still there who had our case, but it’s really bugged me. Why were the three of us separated? Doesn’t have anything to do with the fire, I guess-but I want to know how it was decided that we sisters should be split up.”

“Good,” Cate said thoughtfully. “And then…did you happen to look up the old high school yearbooks?”

Lily frowned, looked into her empty cup, and ambled back to the kitchen with the cell still glued to her ear. “Why?”

“You pinned down a reason for fires. Something we never had before. A girl who was jilted or hurt. The year of the fire-and maybe the year before? So, if she was a teenager, maybe her picture will be in the high school yearbook.”

“I can’t imagine that I could conceivably recognize anyone.”

“Probably not.” Cate sighed. “It’s just grasping at straws. But even if the faces mean nothing to you, maybe a name will ring a bell. Or something could be familiar.”

“Okay. No harm in trying.” She heard a door open, saw Griff emerge from the hall, his hair sleep-tousled, his chin beard-bristly. Barefoot, wearing nothing but cutoffs, she thought he looked downright edible.

“Then get out, Lily. I mean it. I admit, I’m glad you went there. Sophie is, too. You uncovered a bunch of things that we never expected to know, and we all wanted that. But no ‘closure’ malarkey is worth your being in danger. Cross your Ts, see if there’s anything else to find, but then, for Pete’s sake, pack up.”

“Hmm.” She watched Griff pause in Jason’s doorway, peer in, and then make a beeline straight for her. Didn’t look right or left, didn’t notice the day or the darkening sky or the mess in his kitchen. He pounced. Pressed a kiss tight to the top of her head. Then zoned for the coffee machine.

“Lily, are you listening?”

“Yes.”

“You’re at his house, aren’t you.”

“Yes.”

“Stop saying ‘yes’ or I’m flying there as fast as I can buy ticket. How far has it gone?”

“As far as anything in my life,” Lily said simply. She hung up. Not intentionally. She saw Griff had filled his mug and had already put it down, was aiming for her again. Without thinking about it, she put down the phone-just in time to lift both her arms. Griff slid right between them, and hooked her into a good-morning kiss. A serious good-morning kiss this time. A life-altering good-morning kiss.

“Hey,” he murmured. The light in his eyes was strong enough to burn.

“Hey right back.”

“I have an idea.”

She laughed, shook her head. “We both have major agendas today. No time for ideas, big guy.”

“I’m fast.”

“Last I noticed, you were dazzlingly slow. But a far more immediately important agenda issue is walking up beyond you, handsome.”

Griff arched an arm, felt even before he saw Jason edge out of the hallway shadows, hustle to take a quick place against his side. Griff gently squeezed a hug, then let him loose. Lily watched him take a long look at the young, battered face.

“We’ve got some things to take care of, my main man.”

“I’m up for anything you are,” Jason said, and offered a hesitant smile to Lily.

“You guys aren’t going anywhere without a decent breakfast. Don’t even try,” Lily warned them.

The day’s plans were aired over scrambled eggs and guava-jam-covered toast. Griff had running around to do, organizing the cleanup of his shop, a little real work, some ordinary chores. “Jason’s hanging with me through that. But after lunch, we’re going to make a stop at social services.”

“No,” Jason said immediately.

“I didn’t say you’d be stuck there. I said we’re going in there together. Loreen’ll take pictures. And you’ll go back to your mom’s-if your dad’s in custody.” Griff fielded his dishes to the sink. Jason did the same.

“It sounds like we’re going to run some parallel paths,” Lily admitted. She was headed back to the B and B first for a change of clothes, then headed for social services herself, to see if there were records from twenty years ago on the disposition of her and her sisters. After that, she wanted to track down high school yearbooks for the two years before the fire.

“At soc services, ask for Loreen. She’s sharp, good lady. She’ll do you a favor if she can.”

They made a tentative plan to catch up predinner, but Lily wasn’t taking odds on that happening and told him so. “You’ve had days since you had a chance to get into your own office here. You need and have to get some time to yourself.”

“No, I don’t,” he argued.

“Well, we’ll see.” She wanted to be with him-more than he knew. But there was no guessing how long Jason would be with him, and no forecasting how long either of their days would be. “Call my cell if you want to cancel out-or if you have stuff to do and you just want me and Jason to hang out. At least, if that’s okay with Jason.”

It wasn’t quite. She could still see wariness in Jason’s eyes. There was only one person the child really trusted, and that was Griff. But he agreed-where Griff didn’t. Griff insisted on their catching up via cell several times during the day. And she couldn’t escape until she’d agreed to the tyrant’s demands.

Naturally though, nothing went as planned.