“It’s quiet. I like being near the water. Hold this.” He shoved the leash into her hand and walked over to a large, twisted stump, heaved half out of the needle-strewn ground.
While she watched, he circled it, crouched, knocked on it.
“Is this your property?”
“Yeah. We haven’t walked that far.”
“I want this.” His eyes, the color of old gold in the luminous streams and dapples of light, shifted briefly to hers. “Can I have this?”
“You want... the stump?”
“Yes. I’ll pay for it if you want to be greedy.”
“How much? I’m going on a spa vacation.” She walked closer trying to see what he saw.
“Pee somewhere else.” He gave Jaws a nudge as the pup prepared to squat. “Ten bucks.”
She
“It’s just sitting here. You’re not using it, and I’m going to have to yank it out and haul it off. Twenty, but that’s it.”
“Replace it. Plant a tree in the hole and we’re good.”
“Done.”
“What’ll you do with it?”
“Something.”
She studied it, circled it as he had, but still only saw the twisted remains of a tree broken off in some long- ago storm. “I wish I could see like that. I wish I could look at a tree stump and see something creative.”
He glanced up again. “You looked at that dog and saw something.”
She smiled. “I think that was an actual nice thing to say. Now I guess I have to be sorry for being mean to you.”
“You have a strange scale, Fiona. ‘Sort of’ kissed me when you were locked on like a clamp. Being mean when you told me to mind my own business.”
“I yelled at you in my head.”
“Oh, well, now I’m crushed.”
“I can be mean. Harsh and mean, and I can be okay with it. But it has to be justified. You just asked what was wrong. You can come back and get the stump anytime.”
“Next couple of days.” He straightened, glanced around to orient himself. Then he looked at her. “You might as well spill it.”
“Let’s keep walking.” She held the leash, bringing Jaws to heel, letting him range, bringing him back while they wound through the trees, skirted the curve of a quiet creek.
“This reporter’s hounding me,” she began. “Calling, e-mailing. I haven’t talked to her—just deleted all the messages.”
“What does she want?”
“To talk to me about Perry—in connection with the two women in California. She’s writing a story on it. That’s her job; I get that. But it’s not mine to talk to her, to feed that fire. The only victim who escaped—that’s how she put it. I’m not a victim, and it just pisses me off to be called one. I had enough of that when it all happened.”
“Then keep deleting.”
“Sounds simple—and I will—but it’s not simple.”
The headache was gone, she realized, but the anger and frustration that had caused it remained lodged like splinters.
Small, sharp and nasty.
“When it happened, the prosecution and the cops kept me away from the press as much as possible. They didn’t want me giving interviews—and God knows, I didn’t want to give them. But a story like that? It’s got juice, right? They kept calling, or talking to people who knew me—people who knew people who knew me. Squeezing the juice.” She paused, glanced at him again. “I guess you’d understand that, from your relationship with Nina Abbott.”
“Relationship’s a pretty word for it.”
“And now you like quiet islands.”
“One doesn’t have much of a connection with the other. And this isn’t my brood.”
None of her business, she thought. Well, he had a point. “All right. After Greg, it started up again. Then the trial. I don’t want any part of what’s happening now. So I’m angry all over again, and that makes me feel sick inside. Because twelve before me, and Greg after me, died. And I didn’t. I barely had a scratch, but they say I’m a victim or they say I’m a heroine. Neither’s true.”
“No, neither’s true. You’re a survivor, and that’s harder.”
She stopped, stared at him. “Why do you get it? That’s the mystery.”
“It’s all over you. It’s in your eyes. So calm, so clear. Maybe because they’ve already seen so much. You’ve got wounds. You live with them. That shouldn’t be appealing to me.”
She might have smiled at the way he tossed her own words back at her, but they made her stomach flutter. “What have we got here, Simon?”
“Probably just some heat.”
“Probably. I haven’t had sex in almost ten months.”
“Okay, it’s getting hotter.”
Now she laughed. “God, you’ve actually made me feel better. But what I meant was I haven’t had sex in ten months, so waiting longer isn’t such a big deal. We both live on island—have a connection with Sylvia. I like your dog, and right now I’m part of his team. I think I need to figure out if sleeping with you would just be a nice release, or cause too many complications.”
“It wouldn’t be nice. Nice is cookies and milk.”
“Confident. I do like confidence. Since I’m not going to have sex with you in the woods, especially since we’ve only got about twenty minutes before the sun sets, I think we’re safe. So why don’t you give me a little preview of possible coming attractions?”
He reached behind her, wrapped her hair around his fist. “You like living on the edge?”
“No, I really don’t. I like stability and order, so this is unusual for me.”
He gave her hair a tug, enough to lift her face, to bring his mouth within a breath of hers. “You’re looking for nice.”
“I’m not really looking at all.”
“Me either,” he said, and closed the distance.
She’d asked for it, and thought herself prepared. She’d expected the fast strike, that immediate explosion of heat and lust and want that flashed through the brain and body.
Instead, he came in easy, disarming her with a slow kiss, the sort that shimmered through the system just before it fogged the brain. She sighed into it, lifting her arms to link them around his neck as he tempted her to offer more.
As she did, he pulled her deeper, gradually building that heat they both acknowledged, degree by degree, so when the strike came, she was defenseless.
The world snapped off—the woods, the sky, the deepening shadows. All that was left was the wonder of mouth against mouth, body against body, and the floodwall of need rising in her.
Even as he started to pull back, she dragged him back and dived again, dived deep.
She frayed his control. That combination of yielding and demand tore at his resolve to set both tone and pace. She reached inside him somehow, opening doors he’d determined to keep locked until he was no longer sure who led the way.
And when he intended to step back, regain some distance, she lured him back.
Soft lips, lithe body and a scent that was somehow both earthy and sweet. Like her taste—neither one thing nor the other, and utterly irresistible.
He lost more ground than he gained before the pup began to bark—wild joy—and scrabble at his legs in an attempt to nudge through and join the fun.
This time they stepped back together.