Текст книги "The Last Victim"
Автор книги: Karen Robards
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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 24 страниц)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It was the kind of kiss that Charlie never in a million years would have expected from him: gentle and tender, a tasting. A testing.
Her heart lurched. Her pulse drummed in her ears. Fireworks went off somewhere deep inside. For a moment she simply stood there, not breathing, letting him kiss her, letting him learn the shape of her mouth and sample, just sample, the warm wetness between her lips. Her hands closed on the front of his T-shirt and her wide-open eyes searched his face.
The kiss should have been a nothing, should have been a throwaway on the keeper scale of kisses, and yet it set her body ablaze.
When he stopped kissing her and drew back and opened his eyes to look into her face, Charlie finally remembered to breathe. She was melting inside, liquefying, and it was the most unsettling thing she had ever felt. No way should she be reacting like this to a barely-there kiss. She had kissed her fair share of men—really kissed some of them, too—and not one of them had made her feel like this.
Not one of them had made her feel as hungry for sex as an animal in heat.
“Doc,” Garland said. He looked down at her with what she recognized as a predator’s unblinking gaze. His jaw was tense, his mouth unsmiling. Tall, hot, and dangerous as hell: Charlie knew it. Knew it.
In an instant, a thousand reasons why she didn’t want to do this chased one another through her mind. And vanished, blown away by a blast of desire stronger than reason could ever be. Want didn’t enter into it anymore. What she felt was pure need.
“Garland.” Hands still fisted in his T-shirt, Charlie went up on tiptoes and kissed him back, a hot, tantalizing sampling of her own that made her dizzy.
“Michael,” he corrected against her lips as she drew a little away.
Another thousand reasons why she needed to turn back now assaulted her brain. Calling him by his first name made it personal, signified a connection that she’d have to be crazy to form. This was the last guy on earth, or in heaven, or hell, with whom she needed to forge any kind of emotional bond. Any kind of physical bond. She knew that if she didn’t call a halt now, right now, she was stepping into a quagmire from which she might never be able to extricate herself. But if the heart wants what it wants, the body equally needs what it needs. What was happening between them was pure chemistry, pure animal attraction, and it was as impossible to resist as a magnet’s pull to the north. Their lips were millimeters apart now, but still she shivered, even as, deep inside, her body burned.
Maybe she still would have summoned the fortitude to turn away while she had the chance if she’d thought that what was happening between them was anything other than a dream.
His eyes held hers, waiting. The price for what she wanted was his name.
“Michael,” she said obediently, in a throaty voice that she scarcely recognized as her own. His lips curved into the slightest of smiles. His eyes blazed down into hers.
“Charlie.” He drew her name out like he was savoring the feel of it on his tongue. Other than that, his only response was to tighten his grip on her hips. His hold was almost hard enough to hurt, his strong fingers digging into her flesh, but she barely noticed and didn’t care. Her heart hammered. Her body was on fire. He might be able to take his time, but she couldn’t wait. Impatient, she let go of his shirt, slid her arms up around his neck, fitted her lips to his, and slipped her tongue inside his mouth. Molding herself to the whole long length of him, she kissed him with an urgency that was a silent testimony to the conflagration he’d lit inside her. He stayed still as stone against her, letting her coax him, letting her tantalize him into coming out to play.
Until he did.
One minute she was touching her tongue to his, and plying his lips with hers, and pressing herself ardently against him, and for all the response she got she might as well have been trying to seduce an especially hunky statue. Then he let go of her hips to slide his arms around her. They stayed underneath her nightgown, encircling her waist and back, hard as iron and warm as a furnace against her bare skin as he pulled her even more tightly against him. He seemed to pause for a second. She got the impression that he was making sure he had himself under rigid control.
“You’re going to hate me for this in the morning, you know,” he murmured in a rough-edged voice that made it as much a turn-on as a warning. She shook her head.
“No, I won’t. Why would I?”
“I guess we’ll just have to see.” His eyes moved over her face, fastened on her mouth. Then his lips slanted across hers and he tipped her head back against his shoulder and took her mouth, and she was lost to everything except him, and the way he made her feel.
He kissed her with a fierce passion that made her blood sizzle and her bare toes curl into the sand. His mouth was hard and hot and demanding, taking possession, taking control.
Fire shot through her body as he explored her mouth with a voracious hunger that was greedy and domineering and completely enthralling all at the same time.
He knows his way around women, she thought, and it shows.
She kissed him back as if she would die if she didn’t. Her senses went into instant meltdown. The hot spiral of arousal that had been building inside her for what seemed like days spun into a blazing whirlwind that threatened to consume her in the flames. As they kissed, lightning struck and thunder rolled, and Charlie felt herself being swept away by a blistering storm of passion that was like nothing she had ever experienced.
Those experts in sexual attraction, the French, have an expression: coup de foudre. Thunderbolt. That’s what she felt. He was kissing her like he could never get enough of her mouth, and for her the heavens split and the earth shuddered, and everything she had ever thought she knew about the depth and breadth and height of her own capacity for sexual desire flew out the window.
She saw now that as far as her own sexuality was concerned, she had never had a clue. Something about him—his kiss, his touch, the feel of his body against hers, she didn’t know—roused her to a fever pitch of excitement. He kissed her, and she burned for him. She lusted for him. She craved him.
His mouth was fierce on hers. His tongue staked bold possession. She kissed him back with abandon. She loved the taste of him, the heat of his mouth, the feel of his body against hers.
By the time she pulled her mouth from his, she was shaking. Her knees had gone weak and the hot rhythmic throbbing deep inside her body was too urgent to ignore.
“Michael. Let me go.”
His eyes opened, narrowed, and he looked down at her with a frown that couldn’t quite mask the hungry glint in his eyes.
“Getting cold feet, Doc?” His face was hard and tight with passion, and a faint flush rode his cheekbones as she unlocked her hands from around his neck and set her hands against his chest and pushed a little away from him. Calling her “Doc” was, she felt, an effort to distance himself from the attraction blazing between them now that he thought she was calling a halt. He didn’t quite let her go—she remembered his concern about that—but he did loosen his grip enough that she could put a few inches between them. His next question was a growling taunt: “Ready to turn tail and run already?”
She shook her head. Not in a million years. “No.”
Then she did what she had been meaning to do all along: grasped the hem of her nightgown and pulled it up over her head. When it was off, when she was naked except for her panties, she dropped the gossamer flutter of blue to the sand. The sea breeze caressed her skin. Glancing down, she saw that, bathed in silvery moonlight, she looked slender and pale. Her breasts stood up full and firm, with her nipples proudly erect. His hands were big and dark against the suppleness of her waist. The delicate triangle of blue clinging to her hips was the only interruption to the long slim line of her hips and legs.
If this was her dream, her sexual fantasy, she wasn’t going to be half-assed about it. She would have what she wanted, and she would have it all.
His eyes were riveted on her. They were hot and dark as they roamed her body. That perfect masculine mouth of his firmed into a hard, sensuous line.
“You’re beautiful.” She could feel his tension in his hands gripping her waist, and see it in the bunched muscles of his powerful arms, and hear it in the guttural undertone to his voice. “I’ve been imagining you like this since the moment I first laid eyes on you.”
Remembering the steely-eyed, honey-voiced convict chained across the table from her, she shivered, then put up her chin. “You think I didn’t know?”
His mouth quirked. His eyes met hers with tender mockery. “You were a real ball-buster. Sexy as hell, though. If you knew, why didn’t you run away screaming?”
Charlie gave a delicate shrug. “I wanted to psychoanalyze the heck out of you. Plus, I had a lot of faith in those shackles.”
He laughed, looking like the sound was surprised out of him. Then he pulled her toward him. Charlie’s heart hammered and her breath caught and her body went up in flames.
She caught just a glimpse of his eyes, glittering with the thrilling promise of what was to come, before his arms closed around her. Then the two of them were kissing and her hands were moving up under his T-shirt to slide over the taut muscles and warm, sleek skin of his back and he was scooping her up and then sinking down with her onto the sand. It was soft and warm and faintly damp, the perfect mattress. She felt it give beneath her even as she surged against him. He rolled onto his back and pulled her on top of him, to protect her from the ground, she thought, until his mouth on hers stopped her from thinking at all. He kissed her like he was never going to get enough of her mouth. The feel of his hot, strong body beneath hers drove her wild. Then his hands closed on her rib cage and he lifted her a few inches higher. His mouth, scalding hot and hungry, slid down her throat and over the upper slopes of her breast in search of her nipple.
She waited with breathless anticipation. His lips were crawling over her skin. He was taking his time, taking it slow. Closing her lips on a groan, she buried her hands in the tawny thickness of his hair.
“I want you,” he said in a voice that was like nothing she had ever heard from him before.
She wanted him, too. So much that she could no longer form words, or get them out. So much that she felt everything in the world that wasn’t connected to sex and him start to spin away.
“Michael,” she breathed, writhing against him shamelessly as every single inhibition she had ever possessed fell away. She needed him to hurry, needed him to …
A sound jolted her. It was loud. Shrill. Intrusive. Charlie’s eyes snapped open as abruptly as if someone had slapped her in the face. For a moment she simply lay there, blinking dazedly into the dark, not knowing quite where she was or what was happening. She was breathing in ragged little gasps. Her legs moved restlessly, and her body burned. She felt hot all over, like she had a fever. Her lips felt swollen and tingly. So did her breasts. Deep inside, she felt a desperate wanting. She throbbed. She quaked.
Oh, God, Michael’s—no, Garland’s—mouth had been just about to close over her nipple. Even now, awake, she wanted it there so badly that her back was arching up as if to offer it to him.
Where is he?
A long shudder racked her, along with a surge of searing heat. I want you was what he had said. Well, she wanted him, too.
Now. Hot and hard and …
Charlie took a deep, shuddering breath. She diagnosed her problem at just about the same time she realized the darkness she was staring up into hid a plain white ceiling and not a night sky full of an improbably large moon and millions of stars. The surface she lay on was a bed, not a beach. What was twisted around her were the covers, not Garland’s gorgeous body. What she smelled wasn’t sea air, but a hint of fabric softener combined with bleach.
Her problem was that she was consumed with lust. Suffering from a bad case of near coitus interruptus. Turned on to her back teeth. Horny. Aching for a man.
Face it, you’re aching for Garland.
And she had reached that sorry state of affairs because she’d had a bad—okay, bad and really, really sexy—dream.
Even as Charlie recognized the truth of that, even as she recoiled in dismay from the path her wayward subconscious had led her down, she was startled into motion by the blare of the alarm clock on the bedside table. In a flash she knew where she was: in her bed in the in-law suite of the FBI’s rented beach house. Apparently the clock’s ring was what had jolted her out of her dream, and, still groggy, she’d hit snooze, and the thing was going off again. Turning a disbelieving eye toward the clock, she saw that it was 6:05 a.m. As she grimly smacked the off button, she remembered right before she had fallen asleep sitting up and setting the alarm clock for her scheduled run with Tony.
For a moment, as she lay there trying not to think about the still urgent clamoring of her body, Charlie debated: exhaustion plus the sudden disinclination to go messing up her love life any further by dragging a perfectly nice man into it argued with canceling out by staying in bed. Mental confusion, a sexed-up body that needed to be cooled by about several hundred degrees, and the need to give herself a guy to think about besides Garland weighed in on the side of the run.
What sealed the deal was the thought of Garland in the next room. The TV was still on; she could hear it. Given the time frame, and the salt, he was almost certainly in there, no convenient vanishing in the middle of the night for him. The knowledge made her tense. It made her nervous. It made her insides take on the approximate consistency of melted butter. It made her—well, she refused to acknowledge it, but the bottom line was that she badly needed to clear her head before she had any kind of significant interaction with Garland. The last thing in the world she wanted was for him to get some kind of an inkling of the role he had so recently played in her dream. And the way she was feeling right now, he might pick up on it.
As aroused as she was, she was probably giving out massive vibes screaming Do me.
That did it: the run won.
Stifling a groan, Charlie clicked on the lamp, tossed back the covers, swung her legs over the side of the bed, stood up, and headed for her suitcase. Padding across the carpet, she yawned hugely.
I feel like I didn’t get any sleep at all.
On the heels of that thought came another, horrifying one: what if her little interlude with Garland hadn’t been a dream? Her pulse kicked into overdrive at the mere possibility. A quick glance down at herself was reassuring: her blue nightgown was definitely on. Definitely the same one she had gone to sleep in. Her panties were intact, too. In other words, she was still as completely dressed as she had been when she had tumbled into bed the night before. Anyway, he was about as substantial as water vapor, remember? No way they could have …
Wincing as vivid images of herself pulling her nightgown over her head replayed themselves in her mind, Charlie shucked her sleepwear—not so much as a single grain of sand in it—and quickly checked herself out in the mirror over the dresser. No swollen lips, no love bites. No telltale signs of a passionate interlude on a starry beach. Letting out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, she pulled on her running gear, brushed her hair back into a ponytail, and headed for the bathroom. Moments later, face washed, teeth brushed, moisturizer-cum-sunblock in place, she was ready to race out the door.
Only she had to get past Garland first.
The last thing you want is to let him sense fear.
She remembered thinking that about him back at Wallens Ridge. When he’d been nothing to her but a dangerously handsome serial killer she’d been studying—who was having, according to what he’d told her in her dream, a high old time imagining her naked. Now she had the same thought about not letting him sense her fear—albeit fear of a totally different kind.
What was scaring her now was that he would somehow divine how badly she wanted to have sex with him.
A predator was a predator, and she knew how to deal with those. But a spectral predator whose bones she wanted to jump? That was new.
Get a grip, she thought. Then, back straight, chin up, she strode into the living room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Garland lay sprawled on the couch with one arm bent behind his head, watching some kind of sports show. The living room was dark except for the glow from the TV, so she didn’t get the details, but she could see that he was staring at the screen with a less-than-enthralled expression on his face. His big body took up practically the entire piece of furniture and was as solid-looking as her own. He’d taken off his boots: his feet were encased in white athletic socks. He looked so completely normal, so alive, so much the typical, couch potato, sports-watching male that for a moment, as he turned his head and looked at her, Charlie was thrown off her game.
Was his expression appraising? Broody? Or, God forbid, knowing?
Say good morning and get out. That had been the plan.
But just looking at him made her heart pick up the pace, and her breathing quicken, and her blood heat. Panicking a little as his eyes slid over her—it absolutely had to have been a dream, so there was no point in letting herself even begin to imagine otherwise—she felt her body tightening deep inside.
Thank God it was dark.
If the warmth in her cheeks was any indication, she was blushing. The man—ghost—whatever—was not a fool. Given a reasonable degree of light, a blush he would see. That, coupled with her expression, which she guessed was something less than cool indifference, would be easy for him to interpret.
Probably as a sadly misguided case of the hots for him.
Crap. Leave. Fast.
Jerking her eyes away from him, not saying a word, Charlie kept on moving, heading for the door even as Garland frowned and sat up.
“Where are you going?” His eyes tracked her.
“For a run,” she answered, and was out the door before he could say anything else.
She ran lightly down the stairs. Like her rooms, the house was dark, shadowy, because all the window coverings were drawn. She was just thinking that if Tony wasn’t up she had a problem, because she didn’t know which of the downstairs bedrooms was his, when she saw movement in the little alcove off the kitchen. Her heart gave an automatic lurch a split second before Tony’s black hair and tall form registered. He was up, then, dressed in running gear, and doing a series of stretches as he waited for her.
“You’re early,” she said.
“I heard your alarm go off.” He grinned as her eyes widened fractionally. “My bedroom’s right below yours.” Charlie barely had time to wonder what else he might have heard when he added, “So, you ready?”
She nodded.
“Security alarm’s already off,” he said as she started toward the keypad, so she turned back and waited for him. What she really wanted—no, needed—at the moment was to be alone. Usually her runs were her time to think her own thoughts, sort through things, clear her head. But being alone right now wasn’t smart; and if she couldn’t run alone, she would just as soon have Tony with her as anyone else. No, sooner, actually. She liked him a lot, and she certainly wouldn’t have to worry about the Boardwalk Killer with him beside her, which, she discovered as he followed her out the door into the pale morning light and the fresh ocean-scented air hit her in the face, was a bigger relief than she would have thought. With the rustle of the sea oats and the roar of the tide loud enough to drown out any noise up to, possibly, a siren, and the dunes to provide concealment if someone wished to hide, Charlie realized that, alone, she would have been feeling pretty vulnerable as she set out down the narrow wooden walkway toward the beach. With Tony only a couple of steps behind her, though, she did not.
That was the thing about a man with a gun.
“If you’d told me you were going with your boyfriend, I wouldn’t have busted my ass breaking through your ju-ju walls to get out here,” a growly voice said in her ear. It was so unexpected that Charlie almost stumbled on one of the weathered gray boards underfoot as Garland materialized beside her, looking disagreeable as all get-out. He was bleary-eyed, with stubble on his jaw, and if ever a ghost could look like the morning after the night before, he did.
“Go away,” Charlie muttered out of the side of her mouth.
“Cramping your style, Doc?” But to Charlie’s relief, he vanished as suddenly as he had shown up.
She was left to deal with a jumble of emotions, none of which were pleasant and all of which it was necessary to hide as she reached the beach and Tony caught up with her.
“Beautiful morning,” Tony observed, smiling at her. With his chiseled features, dark eyes, quick smile, and tall, well-built frame, he was good-looking enough to make any woman take notice. Charlie noticed, but, unfortunately, she was not in the mood to appreciate. She nodded, and set out.
The beach was perfect for running: firm and flat, a wide, white sand surface that she refused to compare to the soft, crumbly texture of the beach she’d visited in her dreams, although that comparison—was this the beach?—was what immediately popped into her head. Dismissing the memory with an inner snarl, she picked up her pace. To paraphrase South Pacific, she was going to run that … whatever he was, right out of her hair. To that end, she put one foot in front of the other and concentrated on the here and now. She deliberately didn’t look at the Meads’ house as she passed it, although all she was actually able to see of it from the beach was the second story, which had its own terrible connotations that she wasn’t going to allow herself to think about. As it was, she could almost feel Julie Mead’s anguish rolling out in waves from the master bedroom. As long as she kept going and kept her eyes turned toward the ocean, though, she could cope.
The view was spectacular. The sun was just rising above the eastern horizon in an orange and purple and pink blaze of glory. Rainbow-colored breakers rolled toward shore. The temperature verged on hot—probably low eighties—but it was not yet humid, and a nice breeze blew in off the ocean. Only a few others—a couple of joggers, a wader or two—had ventured out so early in the morning, so she and Tony practically had the beach to themselves.
“You usually do five miles, right?” Tony asked. He was between her and the dunes and the houses, Charlie noted, and wondered if he’d done that deliberately, positioning himself to act as a buffer for her against the most likely source of potential danger, sort of like a certain kind of man automatically walked on the outside of the sidewalk to protect the woman with him from runaway cars.
It was a nice gesture, but again, she wasn’t in the mood to really appreciate it.
Damn Garland anyway. Last night he’d invaded her dreams. Now he was invading her run.
“You found out I usually do five miles from the background check you ran on me, right?” Charlie asked with resignation.
“Yes.” He kept pace with her easily, although she was kicking it up because she really, really needed the endorphins. A sideways glance told her that he wasn’t even breathing hard yet. Athletic, which considering his build wasn’t really a surprise. Probably played some kind of sport in high school or college. Plenty muscular, although he was less so than—anyway, he was muscular, and from the way he’d had his gear with him and his current lack of difficulty catching his breath although she was setting a mean pace, she guessed he must run regularly to keep fit, too.
Here’s the guy I should be dreaming about, she thought sourly, and scowled.
“Like I said before, I was just doing my job,” Tony said, clearly misinterpreting her expression. Since it was impossible to explain how cosmically unfair it felt that she had found this great guy at the same time as she had been saddled with the ghost from hell who unfortunately seemed to possess the ability to invade her dreams and make her wild with lust, she changed the subject.
“Any luck identifying the car from the surveillance film Officer Price gave you?” she asked.
He shrugged. “It’s a gray Avalon. Right place, right time to be of interest. No visible license plate or identifying marks. Driver impossible to see.”
“Hmm. So how helpful is that?”
“We’re having a DMV check run to identify all local owners of gray Avalons. I imagine we’re talking a fairly substantial number. Will our guy be among them? Who knows? It’s one more puzzle piece.”
“That’s what you do, isn’t it? Put the puzzle pieces together.”
“We have to find them first.” Tony gestured at a banana yellow shingle house a little farther up the beach. “If you’re going for five miles, that’s the halfway mark. We probably want to turn around there.”
Charlie glanced at him. He was breathing a little harder, and there was sweat beading his brow. Well, she was breathing a little harder and sweating, too. Usually she ran at a more deliberate pace, but this morning she’d felt the need to clean out as many cobwebs as she could.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“I try to run every day. Keeps me sane.”
Charlie gave the cosmos a mental kick. The thought of seizing the day and suggesting they run together regularly in the future occurred, only to be immediately dismissed. Later she might count it as an opportunity lost, but for now she just was not in the mood to pursue this particular romantic path.
She had a ghost to deal with first.
They reached the house Tony had indicated and turned around. Despite her best efforts, Charlie had another flashback to that thrice-damned dream. Only as she forcibly rejected it did her mind’s eye focus on the other key player beside herself and Garland: Holly.
Holly in that pink prom dress.
The connection hit her like a baseball bat to the head. The only possible excuse she could make for not having seen it before was that she had been preoccupied with Garland.
“You know, I think the dance connection is key.” She was huffing a little as she spoke now, which was good. Despite certain unwelcome mental intrusions, she was already feeling much less tense. “Last night I …” Dreamed was what she didn’t say. “… had kind of an epiphany about Holly Palmer—my friend who was murdered.” Tony nodded to indicate he knew who she was talking about. “I think she might have gone to a dance in the days before she died, too. I wonder if all those girls did.”
“I’ll have it checked out, although I don’t remember reading anything about the victims going to dances in the original files.” His breathing was coming a little harder than it had been, too, as he frowned at her. “You realize that if it turns out the girls who were killed fifteen years ago also attended dances in the days before they died, it makes it more likely that we’re dealing with the original Boardwalk Killer than a copycat.”
Charlie nodded. “I thought of that. But it’s also possible that this guy is a copycat who is intimately familiar with details of the original case, details that didn’t really register on law enforcement’s radar at the time. If he’s a copycat, he would be obsessed with the original. You’ve heard the saying ‘Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’? This guy will be trying to slavishly re-create the original murders down to the smallest details.”
“That the current killer possibly finds his victims at dances is something that’s not out there in the media. Even the local agents are unaware. We just started to look in that direction ourselves.” Tony sounded like he was thinking out loud. “So if this is a copycat, he must be basing his actions off the original files, assuming this information is in there somewhere. How would he have access to them?”
Charlie shook her head. “Maybe it’s not the files. Maybe at the time of the original murders there was speculation in the media that the Boardwalk Killer might be trolling dances for victims. Or maybe he has some kind of tie to the original killer, so he knows how the victims were selected.”
“All possibilities.” Tony’s face was a study in concentration as he kept pace beside her. “We’ve gone over the original Boardwalk Killer investigation with a fine-tooth comb. There’s no mention of dances in there, unless we just plain missed it, which I don’t think we did.”
Charlie stopped as she reached the point opposite the rented beach house where they’d started their run. Having finished with a flat-out sprint, she was panting. Tony stopped beside her, and she saw that he was panting, too.
She felt one hundred percent better.
“Look, I know you’re banking on this being a copycat. But at this point that’s not something we can be totally sure about.” Tony gave her an unsmiling look as they stood there catching their breath.
Charlie knew he was right. Still, she had to argue, and she knew why: to do anything else was to admit the possibility that the bogeyman who had stalked her nightmares for years was back. “This guy’s not using duct tape. And the original Boardwalk Killer definitely wasn’t subduing any of his victims with a stun gun.”
“So maybe he’s evolved.” Tony sounded impatient. “Charlie, I know this is hard for you. But you’ve got to keep an open mind. For your own safety, and for the investigation. Fixating on the idea that this is a copycat might cause you to miss something that’s important.”
Tony was right, of course. Charlie knew it. The idea that the vicious animal who had killed the Palmers was slaughtering new victims and possibly now setting his sights on her terrified her to such an extreme that she was doing her best to reject it at every level. She recognized that, and also recognized the possibility did indeed exist. The last thing she wanted to do was miss something that might assist in the search for Bayley Evans.
