Desperate to the Max (10 page)

“Don’t know.”

She waited ever so patiently. Witt added nothing. Crickets chirped in the bushes. A train whistled in the distance. The dog slept on. “Can’t you find out?” she was forced to prompt.

“It was only mentioned peripherally in your husband’s case file, a reference to what he’d been working on at the time. Ordered the Spring file from Records. Should have it in a day or two.” He paused, and his eyes looked almost black in the darkness. “Findings came down on that case after your husband was dead.”

“Dead.” God, she hated that word. So inevitable. So final. Yet life with Cameron had never ended. She wrapped her arms around her middle, suddenly feeling the night chill.

“Coincidence, Max, I don’t like it. The number 452, Bethany Spring living next door to my mother, your husband’s involvement in the father’s case. Ask him what the hell’s going on.”

Chapter Eleven

Max’s eyes damn near felt like they’d popped out of her head. “I thought you thought I was crazy.”

“Nutty as a fruitcake were my exact words. Ask him anyway.”

It was the strangest thing she’d ever done in her life. Cameron’s answer was in her head before she’d even finished thinking the question. “He says he can’t remember anything before he died.”

Witt wagged his finger and raised a blond brow. “Seems to remember
you
well enough.”

She pursed her lips. “He says I’m quite unforgettable.”

“Second that.”

A pleasant little quiver ran up her spine at Witt’s words. She didn’t add that Cameron had also said she was a pain in the corporeal ass. She was sure Witt would second that, too.

“So if he remembers you, why can’t he remember what happened before he died?”

“He remembers strong emotions, not events. He usually doesn’t remember any details unless I remind him first.” It was what Cameron claimed, though she wasn’t totally convinced of his ghostly amnesia. Sometimes Cameron came out with stuff she knew they’d never talked about since he died. Like his persistent questions about that argument they’d had the night he died. He remembered something she certainly didn’t.

His voice pounded relentlessly inside her head, drowning out her own thoughts. “He doesn’t remember the Spring case at all, but the name does feel familiar to him.”

“Did he mention anything to
you
about it before he was killed?”

She sensed Cameron’s excitement, started to speak. It was like translating a foreign language, with Cameron’s thoughts coming so fast, she could barely keep pace.

“Will you wait up,” she snapped. Her throat was dry, and her tongue felt odd, like the time she’d taken too many codeine after a dental visit.

“Okay, okay. There was something else, something that took his mind off the case, but he can’t pinpoint what it was.”

Witt, a quick study, abandoned the questions about memory and went straight to the heart. “How’d he feel about it?”

She didn’t like talking feelings with Witt. Even if they were Cameron’s. “Angry. A little worried. Puzzled.”

“Anything else?”

She listened, then shook her head.

Witt stared at her for a heartbeat, then grabbed her arm. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

What are you thinking, she wanted to scream at him. What does it mean? Cameron.

I love you. Let him help you. We’ll talk about this later.

So she let Witt pull her across the lawn, let him hoist her over the fence and detour around the sleeping dog to the opposite side of the yard. He went through the hedge first, giving her the all clear, then pulled her up and over to safety. Relative safety. Except that the touch of his hands stayed on her skin like phantom fingers, and that didn’t leave her feeling anywhere near safe. He’d done all of it, too, without saying a word.

She wanted to throw a tantrum.

She still felt the slime of Bethany’s Achilles.

The street was empty, though she could hear distant traffic down on the El Camino. She glanced at her watch. Just after one. She couldn’t believe she’d been in the house that long. Witt’s hand reached out, slipped along her flesh, past her elbow, over her forearm, and down to take hold of her hand.

No one had held her hand to walk down a street in two years.

Dammit, she hated to admit how good it felt, her fingers snugly in his. Proprietary. Wanted. Special.

Bethany liked it, too, skin tingling, heart racing. Yeah, that was Bethany.

“I can walk by myself, thank you very much.” Perversely she pulled her hand away.

Witt merely shrugged. She knew the creep was only waiting to get back to her car to explode. Well, she’d beat him to it. She widened her stride and quickened her pace, already digging in her pocket for her car keys.

Within sight of her Miata, Witt’s voice rumbled close to her ear, “Don’t even think about leaving until we have a little talk, Max.”

Damn the man. He was getting as bad as Cameron, reading her every thought and move. “Don’t you have to get up early for work in the morning? I wouldn’t want to get in the way of your beauty sleep.”

“You already have. Even when I’m not with you.” He groaned softly. “Jesus,
especially
when I’m not with you.”

God, she wished he’d quit saying those pseudo-sexual things. They started her pulse racing. At least she wasn’t cold anymore. Well, only a little.

They came abreast of her car; it was then she saw his big truck parked behind the tiny Miata with only an inch to spare between the two vehicles. With a white Honda in front of hers, to which
she’d
parked a
scosh
too close, she couldn’t have gotten out of the spot if she wanted to. She
did
want to get out. Badly.

Witt pulled his own set of keys out of his pocket, unlocked the passenger side of his truck, and stood beside it with the door open, his hand out graciously. “We’ll talk inside.”

She stared. First at him, then the inside of the cab. No way. Absolutely no flipping way. The devious man knew about her fondness for Dodge Ram trucks, specifically the black and red Sport model like his. He knew her penchant for a Dodge Ram kind of guy. Especially him, especially while he was wearing that black and red plaid shirt. She was a goner. Climbing into that truck with him for a “talk” was like giving an alcoholic that first drink. She’d sworn off relationships. She’d even sworn off sex. She’d particularly sworn off DeWitt Quentin Long.

“Too conspicuous out here,” he offered, by way of explanation since they stood beneath a bright streetlight. Still, it smacked of something close to coaxing a prom date into the back seat of the car by promising you
wouldn’t
try to coax her out of her dress, too.

Max wasn’t falling for it. She simply stared him down.

“Don’t worry, won’t try to have my wicked way with you once I get you inside.”

She narrowed her eyes. That was exactly what she wanted. Not that she’d tell him that. Despite the horrible taint of that phone call, sexual tension still thrummed through her body.

He sighed. “I swear.”

She stared at the arm behind his back.

He pulled it out, drew an X with all seriousness across his chest. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

He was too damn cute to deny. She was a big girl. She could control herself. Totally. She could control Bethany, too. She slipped beneath his arm, catching a whiff of his musky aftershave, and climbed in. One whiff was too much. Yet nowhere near enough.

He stood there a moment, barring her exit. “Unless, of course, you beg me.”

She smiled thinly. “Dream on, Long.”

He stepped back. “Always do, Max, always do. My dreams are getting sweeter, hotter and wetter all the time.”

“I don’t think wetter is proper English.” Though it did describe her state perfectly.

He winked. “Not proper at all.” Then he shut the door, trapping her inside.

It had gotten too damn cold out there anyway, the night air cutting through the material of her sweatshirt. She turned to watch as he rounded the tail of the truck, waited as he climbed up beside her, and noticed as he pushed the seat back and settled his long legs.

God, there was a lot of room. Enough that she could have straddled his lap with ease and still had plenty of room between the steering wheel and her butt. Plenty of room for ...

Well, that really was Bethany getting carried away. Like a shot, Bethany had taken the Dodge Ram fantasy and made it her own. Max fanned herself ferociously and only managed to fill the cab with Witt’s potent male scent.

Bethany breathed it in, luxuriated in it. Max crowded up against the door as far from him as she could get. Thank God the console separated them.

“What are you doing, Max?”

Playing Squirmin’ Herman and feeling like a fool. “What was it you wanted to talk about?”

He shifted, leaned against the door, and hiked one leg across his knee until she could see his booted foot. He watched her a full ten seconds, light through the windshield reflecting in his eyes. “Still don’t get how you do that.”

“Do what?” she asked, mimicking his position.

“Had the best head of steam going there, really gonna lay into you about these idiotic notions you get into your head, straighten you out on a few things, like who’s the macho cop and who’s the dainty woman around here, and then wham-bam, I look at you, and all I wanna do is drag you home.” He rolled his head from side to side slowly. Remorsefully. “Just don’t get it.”

Damn. That was one of the longest speeches she’d ever heard from him, and he’d definitely used the “I” word twice. She couldn’t decide what it meant. She only knew that his words made her skin prickle in a nice way. A
very
nice way. Too nice. “Maybe you weren’t all that mad in the first place.”

He shook his head. “Can’t even stay pissed with you when I want to. Not like my ex-wife. Not at all. Stayed mad at her for days. Like the time she threw out all my underwear—”

“Boxers or briefs?” She couldn’t resist. Or maybe the question had come from Bethany.

He raised his eyes heavenward.

“Sorry.” She still wanted to know the answer.

“She threw out all
my
stuff and bought—” He cut himself off this time. She could have sworn his cheeks turned pink.

“Yeah. She bought what?”

“Colored Speedos.” He looked thoroughly disgusted.

Her lips twitched. “I take it you’re a white-cotton man.”

He answered indirectly. “A man has a God-given right to choose his own underwear.”

“Is that anything like the God-given right to take a leak standing up?” Which was the reason he’d given her for his divorce, the fact that his ex-wife had insisted he sit while performing certain bodily functions.

“Damn right.”

God. Another Witticism. She almost laughed out loud this time. He was too damn cute for words. Too damn dangerous to her plans to stay unencumbered. This conversation had gotten way too intimate. She threw an immediate monkey wrench into the works, her tone intentionally belligerent. “Do you want to know why I went to Bethany’s or not?”

“Would be nice for starters. Business first. Save the hot stuff for last.”

“No hot stuff.”

He snapped his fingers. “Shucks.”

The man was simply adorable. Was that a Bethany word or her own? The longer she sat in the confines of his truck, the harder it was to distinguish. Nor could she remember what she’d been so upset about. That thing about Cameron and Bethany’s father. And ... oh yeah, the phone calls. “Coming here wasn’t something I planned, you know.”

Witt observed her skeptically, but let her go on without interruption.

“As I was laying in bed—”

“Naked,” he flashed out. The man was quick.

“Noo. Cut it out if you want to hear the rest.”

He leaned his head back, watching her beneath hooded lids.

She went on. “It suddenly occurred to me that the cops didn’t know about Bethany’s little side business.”

“And you wanted to see if he called back.”

There. He’d done it again. Read her mind. She’d like to know how he did it. She didn’t even have to ask who “he” was. “Yes. If Achilles called, that would go a long way, in my mind, to proving he didn’t know she was dead. If he didn’t call ...”

“You’d send out the cavalry to look for him.”

“Yeah. There’s got to be a way to trace the calls through the 900 service. Or if he used a credit card, you could get him that way.” Her excitement rose, the fun of the chase took over.

“So what happened?”

“He called.”

She noticed Witt’s shoulders visibly sag, and then he shrugged. “So he’s not our man.”

She liked the way he said
our
, automatically throwing them together in this. “Well ...”

“Well, is he or isn’t he? What’s your psychic little brain tell you?”

“The conversation was kind of odd.” She chewed on her bottom lip. “I can’t exactly put my finger on it.” She sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him how explicit Bethany had gotten with the man.

Witt shifted, sat a tad straighter against the door. “Did he talk sex?”

God, she was blushing, she just knew it. “Yeah.”

“What’d he say?”

“He didn’t talk to her the way he did in my vision of the night she died.” There, that was honest, and really all the detail that Witt needed. “That night he said he wanted to meet her, sort of threatened, and I’m pretty sure they used to fight about that a lot. But this time he didn’t ask.”

A shudder ran across her shoulders. She’d stopped short of telling Witt about the creepy feeling she’d gotten because she didn’t understand it herself. She knew if she said anything at all, she’d have to explain the whole she-bang. And ... well ... she couldn’t tell Witt
everything
she’d felt in that house.

He leaned forward, his face thrown into shadow. “What’d you say back?”

“I played along. I had to.”

“What’d you
say
, Max?”

There was something in his voice. It was deeper, harsh, and his features intense as he strained forward.

“You mean you want to know specifically?” Uh-oh.