Vicious

towel.

“Thanks,” Jordan said, smiling at her. “I got it.” He took the dish towel from her and kissed her hand. Then he wiped off his face.

Unconsciously, Moira touched her hand where he’d kissed it. She noticed Jordan’s lean, muscular physique— and realized his pants were still unfastened in front. He must have put them on in a hurry. She could see a trail of black hair moving down from his navel. He still had a tan line.

Leo cleared his throat.

Moira turned to find him glaring up at her. It was obvious he knew what she was feeling for his friend. He’d stopped drinking and took several long, labored breaths. All the while, he kept staring at her—wounded and disappointed.

Jordan was oblivious. He mussed Leo’s hair. “Well, you know the diabetic drill, stay put for a while and have a little more juice. I’m going to get cleaned up.”

Moira didn’t dare look at him as he started to walk away. She couldn’t look at Leo either. She glanced down at the floor—and the different patterns of dirty footprints on the kitchen tiles. The ones she’d noticed earlier were lost amid the others now.

On his way out of the kitchen, Jordan hesitated and turned to Moira. “What were you doing with the poker?”

Moira shrugged. “Nothing,” she said. “It was nothing.”

As he raced through the woods in front of the Prewitts’ cabin, he couldn’t help chuckling. He’d come so close. He’d had her trapped in the basement when he’d heard Jordan’s voice in the backyard: “C’mon, Leo, hang in there….”

Five minutes later, and those boys would have come home to an empty house.

Maybe he should have been angry that his plans were thwarted. But it was kind of exciting almost getting caught. He’d made his escape—out the front door—with mere seconds to spare.

He slowed down and got his breath back. No one was chasing him. No one had seen him.

The girl must have not said anything to her friends. Perhaps right now, she was chalking up her terrible fright to being a stranger in a strange house. Maybe she was telling herself that the sounds she’d heard were the cabin settling or a raccoon outside one of the windows. People thought up all kinds of explanations to avoid thinking the unthinkable.

Tonight had whetted his appetite for Moira. He had to have her now. She’d be alone again soon enough, and he’d get another chance at her.

Deep in the forest now, he listened to his own breathing—and twigs snapping under his feet. The car was parked on a nearby trail.

He hadn’t forgotten about Susan Blanchette. In fact, he was already thinking of a clever way to incorporate this girl into his grand plan for the weekend. He chuckled again when he considered it.

Killing two birds.

CHAPTER FIVE

She didn’t realize where she was at first. Susan rolled over on her right side, expecting to see the alarm clock with the glow-in-the-dark numbers on her nightstand. But there was nothing, just unfamiliar shapes in the murky blackness. And she was alone.

It took a few moments, but then she knew. They were in that house by the bay in Cullen, their weekend getaway. Allen must have gotten up to read. He did that sometimes. He had problems sleeping.

She had problems, too. Tonight, for example, when they’d made love, she had to fake it again. She’d become quite the actress lately. It wasn’t Allen’s fault. He wasn’t doing anything wrong. She just had a hard time letting herself go with him. Susan chalked it up to the fact that she was too cautious, afraid of loving someone again—and possibly losing them, too.

After Walt’s death, she’d gone to this grief counselor for a while, a skinny, fifty-something East Indian woman who dressed like a conservative lawyer and wore her hair in a tight bun. Six months after the accident, Dr. Kumar had told her that she needed to move on. She suggested Susan start by taking down some of Walt’s and Michael’s pictures at home. The woman acted as if Susan had a regular shrine to her dead husband and son in the duplex. Yes, she had a few pictures out. She wanted Mattie to feel a connection to those images. And okay, maybe she still needed that connection, too. It was tough enough giving all of Walt’s clothes to Goodwill. So Susan didn’t get rid of the photos. She got rid of the counselor.

That first year without Walt was like sleepwalking. She felt numb. It was all about taking care of Mattie and finding work, going through the motions to survive each day without her husband and firstborn. Thank God her lawyer brother-in-law, Bill, jumped in and got a local attorney to represent her in the class-action lawsuit. Everyone who had been injured or lost a loved one when that deck had collapsed was suing the construction company— which, in turn, was trying to blame the city inspectors and the architectural firm. It was a mess, and the blame game promised to drag on for at least another year. Susan’s lawyer was asking for 1.5 million dollars.

She couldn’t get excited over the money, though, God knows, they needed it. Walt’s insurance had only covered seventy percent of the hospital bills. A year after the accident, Susan was still in debt.

She still missed Walt horribly, but started noticing other men. In fact, some days—and most nights—she just wanted to be near a man, any man. Dr. Chang had a few attractive, athletic male patients—men who spent too much time in the sun with their shirts off. Susan would sit in the small examining room with them, the clipboard in her lap, taking notes and doing her best not to get caught looking as Dr. Chang examined those tanned, toned bodies for moles and melanomas. At some point in the session, the gown often got tossed aside, and the patient would be naked or in his underpants. Susan managed to keep a clinical, business-as- usual expression on her face, and then she’d go home that night alone and frustrated.

Her friends tried to set her up, but not too many men were looking to date a woman in her mid-thirties—with a three-year-old, no less. So one of her girlfriends bought her a month’s subscription with an Internet dating service: MatchMate.com. Susan met several interesting men through the service, but most of those interesting men were just interested in getting laid.

When she agreed to a coffee date with Jack—38, 6 feet, 175 lbs, brown hair, blue eyes, ad executive, nonsmoker, occasional drinker, spiritual, no tattoos, Taurus—Susan was skeptical. They got together one February afternoon at the Top Pot on Capitol Hill. Jack was actually better-looking than his photo. Coffee turned into a romantic dinner at That’s Amore restaurant, and then a long kissing session by Susan’s car. By the time they said their final good night, her head was swimming, and she felt almost giddy.

They made a date for dinner at Daniel’s Broiler at Leschi on Lake Washington that Friday. The same afternoon, she had to appear at a deposition—four grueling hours in a conference room. One of the defense attorneys made wild claims about people jumping up and down on the deck—and filling it beyond capacity. Susan was furious. The SOB made Jim and Connie’s Fourth of July gathering sound like a frat toga party. She didn’t even get to testify. At the end of it, her lawyer gave her a pile of documents to review and said they might have to wait another six months before they saw any money.

Susan got home late that afternoon to a voice mail from her babysitter, canceling on her.

“It’s okay,” Jack said, when she phoned to tell him what had happened. “We can still have dinner at Daniel’s. Bring Matt along with you. I’d love to meet him. Maybe afterward, I could follow you home, and we can put Matt to bed. I’m pretty good at reading bedtime stories. We can stay in and have a nightcap or something. How does that sound?”

It sounded wonderful. And nightcap sounded like code for something else.

She didn’t know Jack very well and wondered if he’d really show up to this date with her—and her child. Maybe he’d just been jerking her around. When she pulled into the parking lot by Daniel’s Broiler, Susan kept looking for Jack’s car. She remembered he drove a white Mazda Miata.

The restaurant was in a little marina-type complex off Lake Washington, across the street from several secluded lakefront homes. The gravel parking area could have used a few more lights. Carrying Mattie toward the restaurant, she spotted Jack’s white Miata under the shadow of a tall oak tree. So he’d come, a man of