Sex, Lies, and Online Dating (10 page)

“I’m not looking for a woman to replace Millie.” He reached for one of her hands and slid it up his chest to the back of his neck. “I want to be with you.” He straightened and brought her up against his chest. “I like being with you,” he continued. “When I’m not with you, I’m thinking about you. No one else. Just you.”

Lucy ran her free palm up his arm to his shoulder and brought his mouth down to hers. She kissed him lightly at first. A slow brush of lips and light touch of tongues. She recognized the scent of his skin and the wet texture of his mouth. She felt his hands and fingers in her hair, and he whispered her name.

“Lucy,” he said, “this is what keeps me up at night.” The kiss turned hotter. Like liquid sunlight, it spread across her skin. Deeper, so deep that it touched her heart and made her feel light-headed. So light-headed that she thought she heard bells, and when Quinn lifted his mouth from hers, she realized she did hear bells.

“Pizza’s here,” he said as her doorbell rang once more. “We could ignore it.”

Lucy dropped her hands from the back of Quinn’s neck and sighed. “No. I order from them all the time. The delivery guys know to keep knocking until I answer.” Occasionally, if she was really into her work, they had to call to tell her they were at her front door.

Quinn took a step back and ran his fingers through the sides of his hair. Frustration burned from his hooded gaze, and Lucy wondered how far things would have gone before one of them would have stopped. She liked to think not far, but she wouldn’t have staked her life on it.

Quinn watched Lucy stand and move across her office when what he really wanted to do was put her back on that desk and crawl on top of her. His gaze moved from the top of her blonde head, down her back and narrow hips, to her round behind. He dropped his hands to his sides and let out a deep breath. He felt like a kid again, living day in and out with a constant hard-on. It was enough to drive him insane. “I’m going to use your bathroom and be right down,” he told her.

She looked over her shoulder at him. “Okay,” she said and walked through the doorway. Quinn listened for her footsteps descending the stairs before he turned his attention to the hutch on her desk filled with crime reference books. Homicide investigation checklists and field guides. Books on investigators’ tactics, procedures, and a whole slew of books on forensics. He noticed studies of clinical disorders and criminal behavior in her shelves. Her reading covered everything from poisons and weaponry to material on the most infamous serial killers in history.

Perfectly understandable reading for a mystery writer. The more he knew Lucy, the more he was convinced she wasn’t a killer. Of course, his brain reminded his groin, that could be because he was attracted to her and didn’t want to believe he could get hard for a psychotic nutball.

Her cat wove itself like an orange Slinky between his feet. He didn’t particularly like cats. Especially cats named Snookums. Christ, even thinking the cat’s name made his sac shrivel. He reached for her mouse and enlarged the document she’d reduced when he’d first walked into her office. He didn’t expect to see anything incriminating, but he placed his hands on the desk and read anyway.

She gave him a look filled with contempt and scooted across the bed. It had taken her a month to find this guy. It would probably take her a month to find the next one too. But there would be others. There were always others. It was so easy. Some men would do anything if they thought it led to sex.

She grabbed her panties off the floor. Men were so pathetic.

Quinn straightened, and everything within him got real still. He stared at the screen and the blinking cursor. Then he leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

“Fuck,” he whispered to the empty room.

“I hope it isn’t too strong. I told them a triple shot, but I think they might have gotten it too strong.”

Lucy looked into Cynthia’s light green eyes and smiled. She didn’t know Cynthia well, only that the woman was kind of fussy. “It’s perfect.”

For the meeting, Lucy had decided to wear something bright and fun. She’d dressed in a cable-knit sweater the color of a tangerine, a black leather skirt, black hose, and spiky calf boots. She’d curled her hair, then pulled it up into a loose ponytail. The afternoon sunlight sliced through the windows to her left and created long rectangles on the carpet.

With the exception of a few new faces, she’d met all these ladies before. She was well acquainted with them, and she knew they were a real mix of serious writers and dabblers. Their personalities ranged from down-to-earth normal to truly bizarre, but they all had one thing in common: They loved mystery novels. They knew the genre inside and out and had great fun talking about every aspect of it.

For an hour, Lucy spoke about the importance of weaving a good, believable plot, then she opened the rest of the time up for questions. In the front row, a woman she didn’t recognize raised her hand. Lucy took a drink of her coffee and pointed to the lady.

She stood, consulted her notes, then asked, “Where do you get your ideas?”

Lucy groaned silently and lowered her cup. It was the question she was asked most often, and the one she could never truly answer. “I don’t know,” she answered as best she could. “A snippet of conversation enters my head, or I’ll get a flash of a scene, and I know that’s the next book. I have to figure out what it means, but I never know where it comes from. I just thank God it keeps coming. The day it doesn’t, I’m in trouble.”

Next she pointed to an older woman whom she recognized from past meetings. “Yes,” the older woman began as she stood. “Do you have an agent? And do you recommend getting one?”

Okay. That one is easy.
“Yes I do, and yes I would.”

A third woman stood. “In your talk, you mentioned the use of red herrings or false clues as important in order to keep the reader guessing. In the book I’m writing, I have one of the townspeople kill a dog. Everyone in town then thinks he must be the killer, and that’s what readers are led to believe also. But he isn’t. Would you say that’s a good red herring?”

Lucy swallowed. The woman was serious and expected a serious answer. “Well, without reading your story and knowing the context in which the dog was killed, nor the mind-set of the townspeople, I’m not sure I can answer that for you. But I would say that you’re the writer, and if you feel it works, then I’m sure it does.” That answer seemed to satisfy the woman, and she sat down.

The next woman to stand was Jan Bright, president of the Women of Mystery and also a Barnes and Noble employee. “When you talked to us last year, you mentioned that the next idea you had for a book involved erotic asphyxiation and Internet dating. Is that what you’re working on now?”

Lucy hadn’t recalled talking about the book at a writers meeting, but she obviously had at some point. “Yes, that’s the book I’m working on right now.”

“Can you tell us how it’s going?”

Hmm. How did one describe bouts of muse-induced euphoria sandwiched between thoughts of ramming your head through the wall? “Great.” She smiled and raised her coffee. “I’ve killed off three men, and I’m about to kill a fourth.”

The ladies laughed, and Lucy glanced up from the group seated in front of her to the store beyond. Like a magnet, her gaze was immediately drawn to a tall man leaning one hip into the “local interest” book rack a few feet beyond the last row of chairs. He had dark hair, and, like the first time she’d met him, he pinned her with his intense brown eyes. He wore a black long-sleeved Moosejaw T-shirt tucked into a pair of jeans. One corner of his mouth slid up, and her heart pinched and swelled at the same time. Quinn was the last person she’d expected to see at the Women of Mystery meeting—although technically he wasn’t standing close enough to be considered in the meeting.

Lucy bit her lip to keep from smiling and answered the next question.

“How much money do you make?” someone she didn’t recognize asked.

“Enough to live on, but not as much as I deserve.” She didn’t want to read anything into Quinn’s appearance. The night before last, when she’d told him she wasn’t a nurse, he’d seemed to take the news really well, but during pizza he’d become distant. It hadn’t been anything tangible. Nothing that he’d said or done, but she’d felt him withdraw. She’d wondered if bringing up his dead wife had been a mistake. She’d wondered if, while he’d been in the bathroom, he’d rethought his involvement with her.

“When’s your murder-on-the-Internet book going to be out?”

“May of next year.”

Next question. “Can you give us four examples of books in which red herrings or false clues kept readers guessing right until the very last page?”

What?
Was she back in college? Get real. Even if she hadn’t been distracted by a mad, bad, and handsome-as-hell man staring at her, she’d have had a hard time with that question. She shrugged and named four of her books.

“We have time for one more question,” Jan announced.

A woman with white hair and big brown glasses stood, and Lucy groaned inwardly. The woman’s name was Betty, and, seeing her stand, the group as a whole gave a collective moan of agony.

“I’m writing a book that takes place in a nursing home,” Betty began, although Lucy knew all about Betty’s book. Betty had been writing and talking about the same scene in the same book for years. “If I wanted to kill off an old man, like my ninety-year-old father, how best should I go about doing that? I called
Ask A Nurse
, but they were no help at all.”

She’d called
Ask A Nurse
for research help? Like they had nothing better to do? “I’m not sure. Perhaps if he’s on heart medication, you could overdose him.” Lucy straightened her papers, then shoved them into the collapsible folder in which Maddie had returned Lucy’s six chapters when they’d met for lunch earlier. She was looking forward to reading Maddie’s notes. Lucy placed the folder beside her briefcase and hoped Betty would get the hint.

She didn’t. “I thought smothering him with a pillow might work better.”

“Suffocation would be good if you want to use something that is hard to detect. There’s no specific autopsy findings that can prove suffocation,” she explained. “There might be bruising or abrasions if the victim struggles, but with airway constriction deaths, a coroner has to rely on physical evidence from the scene to support a diagnosis.”

“Huh?”

“If you want the killer to get caught, have him or her leave something behind at the scene.” She smiled. “Thank you, ladies, for inviting me here today. As always, it was my pleasure to speak to you again.”

She grabbed her briefcase and shook a few hands. As she slowly made her way toward Quinn, she chatted briefly with some of the ladies who were always kind enough to attend her signings.

After Quinn had left her house the other night, a part of her had wondered if she’d see him again. When he’d left, instead of grabbing her and locking lips as he had the few times they’d been together, he’d kissed her forehead. Something had been wrong, but he’d called yesterday afternoon and asked her over to his house for dinner. She was embarrassed to admit, even to herself, how happy she’d been to hear his voice. Of course she’d agreed, but the dinner wasn’t for several more hours.

“What are you doing here?” she asked as she came to stand in front of him.

He pushed away from the book rack. “You told me you were talking to these ladies today, and I wanted to hear you.”

She looked down at her briefcase so he wouldn’t see her smile. “That’s sweet.”

He chuckled, and she looked back up. “No one’s ever called me sweet.”

“What have they called you?”

He gazed beyond her for several seconds, then put his arm around her shoulder. “Things I can’t repeat in public.” Together they walked past a group of The Peacock Society lined up at the checkout. “I thought you might come over early.”

“How early?”

“Now.”

She really needed to work, since she doubted she’d get much work done later tonight. “I have to go home and change.”

Quinn opened the doors for her. “Don’t change. I like your skirt.”

“Well, I still have to go home. I made dessert.”

“Really?” Together they moved across the sidewalk to the curb. “What did you make?”

A chocolate torte that she worried might be too much this early in the relationship. It never paid to cook so soon. It set a bad precedent. “Something decadent.”

“You wrapped up in that skirt is decadent.” He slid his hand beneath her ponytail and lowered his mouth to hers. He kissed her for several heartbeats, then lifted his head. “See ya in a few.”

“Yeah, see ya.” She watched him move across the parking lot to his Jeep, and her gaze slid down his back to his tight behind in his jeans. He’d driven all the way across town just to hear her talk to a group of women mystery writers. It was such an incredibly sweet thing to do. She felt a scary little pinch in her heart.

She reached inside her briefcase and pulled out her sunglasses. She slipped them on the bridge of her nose, then turned to glance inside Barnes and Noble. Jan Bright and a few of the other ladies stood just inside, watching her and Quinn. Lucy waved good-bye before stepping off the curb and heading toward her car. Toward dinner and decadence with a man who seemed too good to be true. A man who made her heart pinch in her chest.

A man who, if she wasn’t very careful, could make her fall in love with him.