Family Jewels (Dix Dodd Mystery #2)

“Not that I can find.”

Crap.

Make that crap, crap, crap!

I’d been hoping for an ‘aha’ moment. For that one trigger to my intuition that would lead me along. Was I too close to this case? Too much at stake here?

“And what did you find out about Mom?”

He took a sip of his wine. “You didn’t ask me to check out your mother.”

“No, I didn’t. So what did you find?”

While I’d been sitting on the sofa bed, Dylan had maneuvered onto his side — leaning up on one elbow. Suddenly, he had eyes only for the wine in his glass. “Okay, so I did make some inquiries.”

“And?”

“She’s been doing quite well financially lately. Very well, in fact. In the last two months, over thirty thousand dollars has gone into her bank account.”

Well, that sucked. Mother received a small pension from a plan Dad and she had invested in many years ago. There was insurance money and of course, royalties from songs still trickled in. I racked my brain trying to think of any way in hell that thirty big ones could suddenly start popping into her account.

And my brain racked back … I didn’t like any of the possible answers.

By the look on Dylan’s face, I knew there had to be more. “What else?

“Your mother and Frankie Morrell had been fighting the night he disappeared. Loudly. Threats were uttered, on both their parts.”

I shook my head. Not good. I knew that my mother was not capable of committing a crime. Well, a serious crime. Katt Dodd was a good person. Honest as the day is long. The salt of the earth. She was my mother, for Pete’s sake! She was not a criminal. Not a thief and certainly not a murderer. No matter where the evidence pointed. But I was far from naive. In the eyes of others, the evidence, circumstantial as it was, did not bode well for Katt Dodd.

“Just want to get all the information on the table,” Dylan said. “Best way to protect your mom.”

He was right of course. “You know she’s innocent, right?”

“Absolutely,” he answered.

And bless him, I believed him.

Silence.

I’d pretty much been looking at him while we’d been talking. But now I caught myself staring into my wine. Staring into my thoughts. And somehow, now, drifting into the feeling of being so very close to Dylan Foreman.

When I looked at him again, he was looking back at me. Seeing me.

He set his glass on the end table, then reached for mine. Heart pounding, I surrendered it. He placed it beside his, then turned and hauled me down beside him on the bed. Gently. He never would have pulled me hard enough to lie down beside him if I hadn’t met him half way. But I went willingly. And there we were, face to face, body to body.

Come morning, I would probably blame it on the sagging middle of my mother’s pull-out couch, but right now I knew it was something entirely different. It was two magnetically charged bodies moving toward each other, following the immutable laws of physics. And sweet gentle Jesus, it felt good! I think I missed this the most about being celibate, the solidity of a male body beside me, the warmth of his breath on my skin, the feel of his heart thudding as hard as mine was.

Then he slipped his hand under the hem of my t-shirt to find a breast.

Correction — this was what I missed the most. I reached for him, my fingers bunching the denim at his lean hip, pulling him closer with my hand and with the leg I’d looped over his.

“Dix….”

He found my mouth with his. And unlike that first time all those weeks ago when we’d shared that one kiss, there was nothing tentative about the way this one started. He kissed me like he was sure of his welcome. Maybe that had something to do with the way I was moving against him like I wanted to crawl inside him. Or maybe because of the way I was kissing him right back, with lips and tongue and teeth.

When he lifted his head, I wanted to pull him back down to me, to taste again the wine’s soft, ripe tannins on his tongue. Then I felt the air on my skin as he pushed my t-shirt up and decided I liked his plan better. He applied that talented mouth to my breast, and a soft gasp escaped me.

Okay, this was what I missed most.

He pressed me down onto my back … and right onto the freakin’ remote.

The volume blasted just at the very same time the channel changed to last channel selected.. WAW-WAW-WAWWWWWWWWW.

“What the—” Mrs. P’s distinctive voice cut into the living room.

The light snapped on in my mother’s room, as evidenced by the clear bar of light showing under the bedroom door. Mother called out, “Everything all right, Dix?”

“Everything’s f-f-fine, Mother.”

I pulled my shirt back down and Dylan jumped off the bed. With one hand he adjusted himself in his pants and with the other he frantically began searching for the remote (yes, it was somewhere under my butt).

“Omigod, what a huge dong!” the appreciative red-headed female in the movie cried out.

“What’s that, Dix? Did someone say ‘dong’?”

“No, Mrs. P.” — where was that fucking remote? — “It’s an old movie. King Kong, I think. Yeah, that’s it … a huge King Dong!” Shitttttttt. “I mean King Kong!”

Through a frantic flap of the sheets, I flipped the remote onto the floor. Dylan grabbed it and clicked the TV off again.

The room was in darkness except for the light from beneath mother’s bedroom door. I could hear Dylan’s breathing. Oh, I liked his breathing. Then I could hear his giggling. It was pretty much matching my own.

We waited a few minutes, without of course admitting we were waiting a few minutes, but the light stayed on in mother’s room. God, I felt like a teenager all over again. Horny as hell. Young and smitten. Falling head over —

That did it for me. I pulled myself back in. Dix Dodd didn’t do close. Not anymore.

Dylan sighed, as though he sensed the change in me.

“I’d better get going.” He walked to the patio doors. “Gotta hike it back to the Goosebump Inn, and I’ve got an early day tomorrow.”

I followed him to the door, at his insistence. He wanted to be sure that I locked it after him. I wrapped a sheet around me, and walked with him outside onto mother’s little patio and wiggled my bare toes on the patio stones.

“Some dark out here, Dylan,” I offered. “Better use your flashlight.”

He grinned, oh so handsomely under the light of the Florida moon. “I didn’t bring a flashlight, Dix.”

He walked away after I locked the door.

Probably a good thing, I reminded myself.

Yeah?

…Yeah.

Chapter 6