Irresistible Stranger (6 page)

“That's my impression, too. So, can either of you think of someone who might have done this?”

Jason toed an imaginary spot on the cement. “Some people think that'd be you. Not that I'd be thinking that, of course. But some people been saying that.”

Steve shot him a look. “Not
us.
Griff, he set us straight about you. We know you're okay.”

Lily kept an intrusive eye on Jason's face. “I can't tell you how much I appreciate hearing that. It really hurts to have people think the worst of you—especially when they don't really know anything about you.”

Jason suddenly squinted at her hard, then said slowly. “Yeah. I know what that's like.”

A moment later he shifted a little closer. She knew better than to push for any closer connection this soon. The gifted kids Lily taught tended to be well dressed and quiet, wealthy kids; but these two were so similar in other ways. Her students all had sharp edges, radiated the same don't-fit-in loneliness. They were always braced for people to judge them as “different.”

In the meantime, the crowd was slowly drifting away. The smoke was still thick, the burned stench pervasive, but the fire was out, the danger clearly over. The fire truck had turned off its flashers. The authorities still hovered with Griff. Lily was uncertain how much time had passed. One hour? More? For darn sure, it was well past midnight…and the two boys were weaving on their feet.

She didn't ask if their parents knew where they were. She would have bet the bank it was a waste of time. She just said, “I can see they're starting to close this down. And I was thinking…”

“What?” Steve asked.

“Well. Nobody's going to be allowed to touch anything until they take off the yellow tape—which I assume will be tomorrow, at the soonest. But the thing is—it really looks like a mess.”

“You're not kidding,” Jason said.

“Griff is really going to need some help. But not now. So, it'd seem the best thing to do for us is to go home and get some rest. Because he'll need all the energy we've got to help him tackle this tomorrow.”

“I don't think we should go,” Steve said.

“I know. It feels wrong. But I keep thinking, if we're all exhausted tomorrow, how much help can we really be for him? And there isn't a prayer anyone will let us do anything tonight.”

“I don't know,” Jason said unhappily.

 

But twenty minutes later, when the last bystanders disappeared into the night, the boys finally agreed to pack it up—after some more ardent words about being there for Griff first thing the next day.

Eventually, the fire truck left. Then the sheriff drove off with the fire chief right behind him.

An older man with a thatch of gray hair parked in front of the place, opened his windows—it looked as if he'd been assigned to stay the night, make sure no one trespassed on the fire scene until morning. Griff stood talking with him for a while after that, before turning around and aiming for his car.

Initially, he didn't notice Lily sitting on the curb, which suited her just fine. He wasn't devil-may-care womanizer Griff now. The lazy stride was gone.

He was mad. He had to be beyond exhausted, but he stalked toward the car with a clipped step, an iron cast to his chin, his mind obviously working overtime at a hundred miles an hour. The character in his face fascinated her. So did the splotches of soot decorating his clothes and arms and face.

He was startled when he suddenly spotted her. “What are you still doing here, you crazy woman?”

“I figured I'd take you home.” She stood up, wiped the cement crumbs from her fanny.

“I assumed you'd have already gone home. You weren't supposed to wait—”

“I wanted to.” She wanted to wrap her arms around him right then, too, but she didn't. He moved tighter than wire, every muscle coiled up and bunched. “It was arson, yes? Gasoline as the accelerant?”

“Yeah. I take it you heard some of the talk.” He scraped a hand through his hair, which only added more soot to the mess. “It's actually not as bad as it looks. The clean-up will be a godawful mess, for sure. But the two locked rooms in back—the freezer section, and my experimental kitchen—those would have taken serious money to replace, and they're fine. It's just the main part of the store that's a wreck. Apparently, someone used a skeleton key, dropped a homemade gasoline explosive in a wastebasket. It seems impossible. A crime with no motive. Vandalism for no purpose. But planned.”

“So…”

“So, the fire team needs to see the scene by light of day. Do their investigative thing. Then I can get in there. Rather than clean up, frankly I suspect it'll be easier to gut the place, start with new sheet rock, new floor, just redo the darned thing. What?” He seemed to suddenly notice that she was dangling her car keys in front of him.

“I want to hear more,” she assured him. “But it's been a long night. Let's get you in the car first. I'll take you home.”

“You're taking
me
home?”

“Don't get your hopes up. I'm not offering a wild night of sin and surprises. You're just not going home alone tonight. I'm driving, because you have to be stressed. Then I'm putting you in a hot shower, and after that, tucking you into bed.”

He shot her a look. “I don't think so,” he said dryly.

She
did.

She was gaining a certain comfort level in this odd, powerful attraction she had for him. It was like looking at a diamond so expensive that she couldn't have it. Griff was a fantastic flirt, but he couldn't
really
be interested in her. His home was here. Hers would never be here again. He played a sophisticated game. She went to makeup and jewelry parties. He had a secret life. She never had a reason to keep a secret. Bottom line was that she might as well let this singing, zinging fire between them smoke through its course, because she couldn't imagine how she could get burned. He wasn't for her. She'd never lie to herself about that.

But tonight wasn't about such heavy issues. Tonight was just about watching over a man who was beside himself and worn out.

His house was dark. Neither had thought to leave an outside light on. Griff gave her grief every step of the way, insisting she go home, that he didn't need a babysitter, that he could get his own towels—when she turned on the shower, she prowled around for a linen closet and clean towels, then prowled in the kitchen until she found a bottle of Talisker's.

She wasn't exactly positive what kind of liquor that was, but when she unscrewed the top and smelled,
she knew it was exactly what she was looking for. She splashed a couple shots in a water glass, and put that on the bathroom counter, too.

“If you're determined to stay here, you could at least come into the shower with me,” he called from the other side of the smoky glass.

“Maybe next week,” she said.

“What? What's next week?”

“The point is that you're not getting any tonight, so just get your mind off it.” She left the door ajar, and went into his bedroom. The master suite wasn't particularly huge, but the balcony was a pool of moonlight, the room colors a rich blend of silvers and pale grays and charcoals. She plumped his pillows, turned back the sheets.

She debated what to do with the clothes he'd peeled off—her first choice was to trash them, but really, she hardly had that right. The fire stench was too noxious for them to stay inside, so they got a temporary home in his garage.

Griff emerged from the shower still protesting—but his voice was starting to slur, his eyes bloodshot from all the smoke. She pointed with a royal finger—her teacher royal finger—toward his room. “I'm not tired,” he said. “And besides that…”

She didn't need to tune him out. He was out for the count from the instant his head hit the pillow. Actually, he crashed so deeply that she was a little fearful he'd gone straight into a coma—but his chest was rising and falling, so there was no excuse to keep hovering over him.

Because she couldn't find any herbal tea, she poured
herself a thimbleful of that Talisker stuff, found a blanket from his linen closet, and curled up in an oversized chair in his living room. With that location, she was within springing distance of his landline, just in case anyone dared try to call and interrupt his sleep again.

She expected to nap, but couldn't. She was too troubled—by the fire, by why arson fires had suddenly started when she came back. By why anyone would target Griff. By that long-ago fire and the memory of her dad's face in the window, backlit by flames….

Unsettled by the old nightmares, she scrounged in her purse for her cell, thinking that maybe it was past time to consult with the big guns. She used to either call or email her sisters several times a week—but that was before they'd both fallen in love last year. Their guys were great, but her sisters had been so insufferably, relentlessly happy that they couldn't talk about anything but
her
finding someone. Tonight, though, she just plain needed sis time.

Because it was the middle of the night in D.C., she couldn't call her youngest sister, Sophie. But Cate was honeymooning in Alaska, and the time there was relatively early evening.

“You are in
such
trouble.” Cate not only immediately answered the phone, but started right in with the bossy business. “You haven't answered your email in days. Sophie said she hadn't heard from you either. What's going on?”

“Guilt,” Lily admitted. “I knew you'd yell at me if I told you what I was up to.”

“Of course I'm going to yell at you.” Cate adjusted
the phone, said something to Harm—her good-looking groom—informing him that a girl had priorities. Sex was an important second. But sisters came first. “Now—where are you? And I don't want to hear that you're spending your whole teacher summer doing stupid stuff like jewelry parties and gardening and volunteering endless hours for some godforsaken cause. I want to hear that you're up to no good. With a man. Preferably a bad boy kind of man. Preferably—”

“Yup,” Lily said peaceably. “I'm doing exactly that.”

The silence between Alaska and Georgia was abruptly deafening.

“What?”

“For years now, you two have been urging me to strip off the teacher clothes, quit being nice, quit dating safe guys. So I took your advice—”

Cate, in a crisis, didn't fool around. She cut through the drivel. “Where are you? I can get the next plane out.”

Lily smiled into the receiver, but then got serious. “I'm in Pecan Valley, Cate. I'm looking into our fire. Or trying to. I know we've talked about this a zillion times, that we need to put the fire behind us, take charge of our lives. Only you and Sophie have done that. And somehow I haven't been able to.”

“Wait. Honey. Wait. If we knew you wanted to do this—or needed to do this—the three of us could have found some time to come together, go there together—”

“No. You'd both have tried to talk me out of it.” Lily
snuggled up tighter in the blanket, leaned her head back. “I never thought Dad started that fire. We all repeated the things we were told. That he loved us, but he was desperate, not in his right mind—all that. But I never believed it, Cate. Every time I'm with a guy…I'm thinking of dad. How much I loved him. How perfect we all thought he was. How good. And that if he set that fire, maybe I can't judge
anyone's
character. Maybe I'd just love blindly. Trust blindly. I'm probably not explaining this well, but—”

“You are, Lily. But I hate the idea of you doing this alone. And what about this man you mentioned?”

Lily heard her brother-in-law's voice in the background, and figured she'd interrupted enough. “Cate, I'll talk to you in another couple days, promise. Don't worry. Everything's fine. Give Harm a big hug from me. Love you.”

She switched off her cell, thinking she'd prowl around Griff's place one last time, make sure all the doors were locked, make sure he was sleeping, make one more run to the bathroom.

That was the plan. But the last thing she remembered was snuggling just a moment longer in the blanket. It wasn't as good as Griff's arms around her, but thinking about Griff set off a chain reaction of dreams.

G
riff awoke with his heart pounding, the threatening smell and heat of fire invading nightmare after nightmare. Immediately, of course, he was fine. His bedroom was familiar, dark and cool and safe. And his bed damned lonely.

He vaguely remembered Lily bossing him around, bullying him into the shower, absconding with his clothes, ordering him into bed. He couldn't recall ever being so offended…male-ego offended. The bossiness had charmed him. But then, she didn't even seem to notice when he was naked in the shower, and later tucked the covers around his neck as if he were a boy instead of the sexiest man she'd ever seen in her life.

It was enough—almost—to destroy a guy's confidence.

The bedside digital claimed it was 3:00 a.m. He'd only
slept two hours, was still groggy with exhaustion. Still, he pushed off the covers, swung his feet to the floor. First thing in the morning, he needed to devote 100% effort to the fire and all the fire's complications. But right now there wasn't a prayer he could get any further rest without knowing where Lily was.

She could have gone home of course, just taken his car. That would have been a no-sweat. And when he checked the spare bedroom, the couches, and didn't find her, he thought she'd had the brains to do that—but no. The bunched-up blanket in his favorite recliner had a body swallowed in it. He had no idea how she'd managed to curl herself into that small a ball—much less how she'd escaped being smothered.

When he peeled back the edge of the blanket, he found the gleam of her dark hair in the moonlight. But she didn't awaken. He scooped her up, blanket and all. That didn't awaken her either. Her cheek nuzzled against his shoulder, as if she'd been sleeping against him her whole life.

Halfway through the hall, he almost tripped because part of the blanket slipped, tangled with his bare foot. But he managed to compensate, pushed against a wall—none of that commotion woke her either—and finally made it to the bed.

He dropped her on his side, his pillow, and when the last of the blanket slipped away, realized she was still wearing clothes. He hesitated. This wasn't about seduction, it was about…something else. Showing her that he didn't need taking care of. Showing her that he could take care of
her
. Or something like that. Still,
sleeping in clothes seemed bulky and uncomfortable. So he pulled off her knee-length shorts—or pants—or whatever they were. Then he re-covered her, and finally sank onto the other side of the bed, and discovered the strangest thing.

His body went bone hard the minute his skin touched hers—that was neither a surprise nor remotely strange. But somehow, just the act of wrapping his arms around her, her just being there with him, felt crazily, insanely right. In spite of the fire and all the troubling questions threatened by that attack of arson, he was able to forget it, really close his eyes this time, and zone out completely.

 

Lily woke to the soak of sunlight on her closed eyelids, her body all cuddled in a nest-warm cocoon—and the erotic, rhythmic stroke of a thumb on her shoulder.

A man's thumb.

Her eyes popped open. In her immediate vision was a bunched-up blanket, a shoe twice her size, a shirt she could have used for a tent and a wide window overlooking a steep, green hillside. Only strips of sunlight made it through the tangled thatch of trees, but the verdant spice of pine scented everything. A bird suddenly landed on the windowsill—gorgeous, bright blue in color, an indigo bunting, she was pretty sure. It cocked its head, looked at her as if to say, “what on earth are you doing in his bed, you crazy woman?”

And still, that thumb kept stroking.

She knew perfectly well where she was. Griff's. But she could have sworn she'd fallen asleep in his living
room chair. A thousand unexpected sensations all seemed to require her immediate analysis. His bristly chest hair against her back. The weight of his hand. The width of his hips, spooning against her bottom. The hardness of his erection. The size of his erection. The throbbing warmth of his erection.

She strongly suspected that she wasn't the only one awake. Not that she was willing to turn around and face him yet.

“I have to think up a strategy,” she murmured, and he picked it up as if they were in the middle of a conversation.

“For how you're going to go back to the B and B?”

“Exactly. If I were back in Virginia, it wouldn't matter. I'm an adult. Everyone around me is adult. But here…Louella's going to grill me as if I were ten years old, the instant I walk in the door. Being absent for a night is one thing, but if I also walk in wearing yesterday's clothes…” She lifted the sheet. “Uh-oh. I seem to be to be missing some of yesterday's clothes. Something happened to my capris.”

“I was helping you.” Griff's voice was still husky with sleep.

“Uh-huh. I'll bet you say that to all the girls.”

“Lily.”

“Hmm?”

“I don't say that to all the girls. In fact, there's a giant list of things that I plan to say and do with you. That I've never considered doing with anyone else.”

Talk about a way to melt a girl. Griff's Secret, she thought, wasn't just an ice-cream flavor. It was
this ingredient in him, a secret, insidious factor, that annihilated defenses and seduced a heart without half-trying. She turned in his arms, well aware they were suddenly breast to chest, tummy to tummy, danger zone teasingly rubbing against danger zone.

“Hey,” she murmured worriedly. “Where's that kind of talk coming from?”

“I don't know,” he admitted. “But you're scaring me. I barely know you.”

“That's supposed to be my line. I'm the girl, remember? I'm the one at risk if I fall in love with a guy who's reported to have no settle-down or responsible genes in his entire DNA.”

“That's me,” he admitted. “If I were you, I wouldn't get involved with me either. I've never had a committed relationship in my life. Never bought a ring or shopped for one. Never had the energy or ambition to.”

Oh, for Pete's sake. He'd been selling that snake oil since she met him. Being only a pinch away made it easy enough to…well, to shut him up. It was as simple as laying her lips against his.

On his.

With his.

Yearning shot through her bloodstream like a silky streak of surprise, crazy strong, achey wild. He tasted so good. He tasted like everything she'd been forbidden, everything she'd secretly dreamed of.

His tongue dove inside her mouth, combined tastes and textures, at the same time his knee eased between
her legs. His hands swept her body—up, down, roaming, igniting the slope of her spine, her fanny, back up…

She twisted in his arms, not kissing him back—more—feeling inhaled. Taken in. Taken under. She'd liked kissing him before. She'd liked his touch. She'd liked that electric sensation of risk and desire, the rush of need and want. But this was different.

Recklessness. She'd never tasted it before. Heat. She'd never suffered from it before, not like this. She'd been afraid of fire her entire life—but somehow not with him.

Not this kind of fire.

She opened her eyes, saw his—dark, intent now, not playing. He looked at her as if she was the only woman he'd ever wanted, the only woman he'd ever needed. The hunger in his touch, his eyes, his mouth, was more than sexual. It was about loneliness. Gut loneliness. The kind where you knew there was no one else who could accept you, all of you, who could know you, all the way inside, and still want to be there.

She didn't do fantasies like that. Ever.

But with him… Her breath caught when his palm found her breast, cupped, then squeezed. Her hand slid down his side, down his bare hip, knuckled inside, to cup where he was hard and hot. She squeezed.

“Okay,” he hissed. “You're in real trouble now.”

His head disappeared under the covers. She didn't quite remember when she'd lost her shirt, but her bra was still on, all a tangle, straps around her arms, cups pushed away. He got rid of it altogether, started sampling slopes
and valleys of skin, found freckles between her breasts, found each nipple, analyzed each thoroughly with his tongue—until she was gasping for breath, and her legs reflexively clenching. He roamed down her tummy, found her navel and appendix scar….

“Hey,” she whispered. “Maybe…hold on there. Just for a second. Maybe…wait. Maybe I need to think about this.”

“No.”

“No? Huh? You can't say no. If you vote no, we stop. If I vote no, we stop. Those are the rules.”

“Now, Lily, trust me. I know the rules. Come on, though. Give me a chance to be a hero. I'm in the striving class. Don't know what I'm doing. You could help me learn. You could give me an achievement badge if I'm good. Or a whack upside the head if I goof this up. See? No risk.”

She almost laughed at his words. Only, Griff wasn't a fledgling, and he knew—awesomely, brilliantly, inventively—exactly what he was doing.
She
didn't. Oxygen locked in her lungs when he dipped lower, scooped her legs in his arms, and sampled tastes and textures with his whiskery cheek and his lips and his tongue.

She stopped thinking. Stopped breathing. Forgot her name. Forgot just about everything but that she was female, pure female, and Griff, damn him, was more man than she'd ever dreamed existed. She gulped in pleasure, greedily wanted more, needed more. Needed him. Yelped his name in her angriest tone, her bossy teacher tone. “
Now,
Griff, and quit fooling around—”

“Okay, okay, I'm coming up,” he promised her—only right then his landline rang.

Then her cell phone did its bell tone thing.

And then his cell phone did some kind of jubilant chime.

The three noxious sounds struck her as a blast from planet Earth. For a little while—for an insane, wonderful, breathtaking little while—she'd forgotten about reality. Her fire. His fire. The way that past seemed to be strangely spilling over into the here and now.

Maybe she'd been haunted all her life by fire. But she'd never been afraid…until coming home again.

Now she tasted fear. And the upsetting flavor of guilt—because somehow, her history with fire had managed to hurt Griff.

 

“I got a proposition for you.”

The only proposition Griff wanted was from Lily, but he turned around to face the new interruption. Debbie, from Debbie's Diner, had straw-dry, big blond hair, boobs so big you wondered why she didn't fall on her face just trying to walk and was decent to the core. She always chose the wrong men, made fried chicken so good it could make a rock salivate, never met a dog so ugly she wouldn't take in. She was one of the best commerce neighbors on Main Street.

She peered into the burned-out shell of Griff's ice-cream parlor and clucked in sympathy. “I was thinking, Griff, I got spare freezer space. We could put your ice creams on the menu in the diner until your own place is up and running again. That way, you could use up the
ice cream so it's not wasted, and I'd get more customers coming into the diner just for the ice cream. We'd both win.”

Debbie had barely left before Manuel Brook showed up, tapping him on the shoulder. Manuel came from a family of farm workers, and had gotten a business started cleaning carpets. He barely reached five-four, had beady little eyes, and a wife—some claimed—who regularly slapped him around. “Hey, Griff. You got a big mess here. I clean up fire and water messes before. Once you get the debris out, you call me. I'll do the cleaning, my own time, on me.”

“That's not necessary.” Griff said immediately, but it had been the same story all morning. Neighbors and friends stopped by, didn't waste time sympathizing, just dug straight in with offers of help.

Margo, his insurance agent, had been on the site almost the minute he'd parked the car. “I know there are still questions as far as the investigation goes,” she told him. Margo was well over sixty, spare as a reed, hair the color of iron. “But I don't want you worried about the claim. I sold you good coverage, and I'll have a check to you as fast as we can get the details on paper and get it processed.”

Every kid who'd ever worked for him showed up through the morning as well—the ones who'd been in jail, the ones who couldn't stop fighting, the ones who'd been drinking hard liquor since fourth grade. Not a clean-cut kid in the lot. Yet all of them showed up, offering to help, offering to shoot whoever did this, offering to
stand guard, offering to hang with Griff in case anyone else tried to hurt him.

By noon, Griff couldn't keep his eyes off the street. He hadn't forgotten that wild body in bed with him this morning. For damn sure, he hadn't forgotten what had unfortunately been interrupted by the blast of phone calls. He also hadn't forgotten finding Lily sitting on the curb last night, waiting for him, hanging with his boys.

When they'd split this morning, she said that she was going back to the B and B, needed to shower, clean up, change clothes, and then she'd be here. It wasn't as if either of them had set a timetable.

He hadn't been worried about it—until the sheriff and fire chief had stopped by, taken him out back to have a quiet talk.

His fire hadn't been accidental. Maybe Griff had already guessed that, but it was still another thing to have “arson” put in indelible ink.

His fire had started from a gasoline accelerant, exactly like the accelerant used in the deserted mill fire the day after Lily arrived in town. Exactly the same accelerant had been used in that long-ago fire that took her parents' lives.

Gasoline was one of the most common accelerants arsonists used, the fire chief told him.

He got it.

But he'd never liked coincidences. And he didn't like not knowing where Lily was.

Damn town was full of the best people a man could ask for in neighbors—friends, people who cared.