“Are you sleeping with Peyton?” The question, growled into her ear, was abrupt, almost angry.
She tilted her head back to look at him. “What do you think?”
His fingers sank deeper into the firm flesh of her back. “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”
His eyes glinted at her, pale and hard as aquamarines. Nearby, other couples danced, some so close that a random wrong step would cause a collision. She got a whiff of some other woman’s too-sweet perfume, heard laughter and the murmur of conversation rising and falling beneath the pulsing music, and was glad that they had somehow wound up near the center of the floor because of the relative privacy it afforded them. Even though it was supposed to be air-conditioned, it was too hot in the tent, or at least she was too hot. But probably, she thought, that had more to do with the way Scott was looking at her than the actual temperature.
He was looking at her as though he wanted to take her to bed.
“None of your business,” she said sweetly.
His face hardened. “He had his hands all over you tonight.”
“Really none of your business.”
“Damn it, Lisa . . .”
A muffled boom interrupted. The band stopped playing with a flourish. Somebody yelled, “Fireworks!” and everybody stopped dancing and began to move off the dance floor en masse. She and Scott stopped dancing, too, and looked around in some surprise, having been too caught up in each other to pay much attention to anything else. But she made no move to free herself, and he wasn’t releasing her.
“Lise, there you are!”
Joel was coming toward them to the accompaniment of another loud boom, threading his way through the crowd that was exiting the tent. As his genial expression turned into a frown, Lisa realized that she was still wrapped in Scott’s arms, still pressed up against him as snugly, as if they were glued together, still all gooey and shivery inside from the electricity they had generated together.
Still weak at the knees with wanting him.
She knew instantly when Scott saw Joel. The arms around her hardened to iron. The expression on his face turned ugly.
“Scott, let me go.” It was a quiet order, issued as her arms slipped from around his neck. He didn’t budge. “Scott.”
At that he glanced down at her, then let her go. As his arms dropped, she moved away from him to join Joel. Behind Joel, she saw, came Nola, with Alexis and Ben and Macy and Thornton trailing after.
If there was any kind of scene here—and from the way Scott was looking at Joel, she feared there might be—news of it would fly all over the county within the hour. Not good for any of them, and especially not good for Scott, with the public office he held.
“Come on, we’re missing the fireworks.” Catching Joel by the arm, she all but dragged him away from Scott toward the outdoors. With a single wide-eyed glance at her, Nola went past them, toward Scott, Lisa thought, but she didn’t look around to make sure. Fireworks were exploding over the golf course one after the other now, boom, boom, boom, BOOM, flashing lightning bolts of color across the interior of the tent.
“Do you have something going on with that guy?” Disbelief tinged with outrage in his voice, Joel looked at her askance as they emerged into the darkness. A slight breeze had arisen, carrying the scent of gunpowder from the fireworks on it. Despite its acrid smell, she welcomed its cooling breath against her overheated skin.
“No more than I ever did,” Lisa said shortly. This was a subject she didn’t feel like discussing, not right now, not with Joel. Her fingers dug into his arm through the sleeve of his natty summer suit to hurry him toward where the assembly sat on specially provided blankets or chairs or stood to watch the fireworks. “We’ve known each other forever. He gave me a job. Right now he’s my boss. That pretty much tells the story.”
The sound Joel made was practically a snort, and it conveyed a considerable degree of skepticism, but he didn’t say anything more, for which Lisa was thankful. She was thankful, too, that Scott, now in Nola’s hands, kept his distance. Nola wasn’t so reticent, however. When they were all out on the golf course staring up at the bright bursts of pinwheels and rockets and umbrella-like cascades exploding against the black velvet sky, Nola left Scott’s side—he stood on the edge of the group, watching the display silently, his hands in his pockets, his profile looking as if it had been carved from stone—and came over to her.
“Sweetie, I’m releasing our friend back into the wild, so if you want to go after him, feel free.” Nola was practically whispering in her ear.
“What? Nola . . .”
“You should totally go for it. He couldn’t take his eyes off you all night. And that thing you two did on the dance floor—that was hot.”
“We danced.”
“Uh-huh.”
Lisa gave up on trying to act as if she didn’t know what Nola was talking about. “Anyway, nothing’s going to come of it. I practically invited him to sleep with me, and you know what he said? ‘You and me. No way.’ ”
“Sounds like a bad case of wishful thinking on his part.” Nola gave her arm a sympathetic squeeze. “I know what I saw, believe me. That man’s got it going on for you big-time.”
Suddenly conscious of how many interested parties were standing nearby, Lisa rolled her eyes at her friend but didn’t say anything more on the subject, preferring to steer the conversation in a more general direction just in case the multiple explosions overhead weren’t ear-splitting enough to cover their voices.
After the fireworks ended in a final Technicolor display that lit up the sky, the party broke up, with each couple going their separate ways and without her saying another word, or so much as exchanging a glance, to Scott. As Joel drove her back to the hotel, Lisa thought of how unlikely it was that she would get any appreciable sleep alone in her hotel room with Katrina in the closet and thoughts of unknown assailants, white SUVs, etc., in her head. Then she thought of a possible remedy for her problem—i.e., not sleeping alone in her hotel room—which would involve having Joel spend the night, which, knowing him, he was already thinking about trying to make happen. Finally she acknowledged something else that she’d known in at least part of her mind for some time: The thought of sleeping with Joel left her cold.
It was never going to happen.
That being the case, it was time and past to face up to it and move on.
Half an hour later, Joel dropped her off at the hospital’s well-lit main entrance, roaring away in his Porsche without even waiting to see if she’d made it safely inside.
Grimacing as she looked after the car, Lisa decided she couldn’t blame him, especially since he had no idea in the world that she might actually be in any kind of danger. Hurrying inside, glad of the security guard on duty in the lobby and the number of people moving around the halls even though it was nearly one a.m., she slowed her step as she headed for the elevator, then took a deep breath as she joined the few people waiting for one to show up. When an elevator finally came, she rode up to the fourth floor with a janitor pushing a cleaning cart and an elderly couple who giddily announced to both Lisa and the janitor that their granddaughter had just had a baby. Smiling her congratulations at them, Lisa got off the elevator with the intention of telling Robin, who was spending the night in Martha’s room, that she would sleep there instead and Martha could go ahead and leave. In the morning, she would take a taxi back to the hotel. She just couldn’t face being in that room alone tonight.
But what she found when she opened the door to her mother’s room changed her mind. Defying all her expectations, the room was dark, the TV was off, and both her mother and Robin were sound asleep.
Robin even snored.
For a moment Lisa, nonplussed, stood at the foot of her mother’s bed with a shaft of light from the hall providing the only illumination. Then she finally, reluctantly faced the truth: She couldn’t stay. Waking up Robin from a sound sleep and asking her to leave wasn’t something she was going to do. Not at s
uch a late hour. She herself was going to have to leave instead. As in, go back to her hotel room and sleep in it all alone like a big girl. She would call a taxi to meet her at the front of the hospital, which subsequently would let her off at the Marriott’s well-lit front entrance. Not risky at all.
With that plan in mind, Lisa quietly left the room, closed the door behind her, and started, slowly and reluctantly, to walk back toward the elevator bank, fishing in her purse for her phone as she went. The hall wasn’t empty. A nurse and an intern conferred over a chart outside one of the rooms, and another nurse was on duty at the nurses’ station. An elderly man in a cardigan sweater, worn presumably to combat the hospital’s air-conditioning, because it was hot and sticky outside, walked toward her from the direction of the elevator bank carrying a plastic bag of food from Taco Bell. Lisa was just registering the spicy scent when she saw that another man had gotten off the elevator, too, and was coming toward her with the slightest of wry smiles on his face.
Scott.
Her eyes snapped open with surprise, and she forgot all about her phone. She’d been feeling sleepy, and slightly headachy, and even a little lonely and scared, but all that vanished in an instant. Her steps slowed as she waited for him to reach her.
“My mother’s asleep,” is how she greeted him.
“I didn’t come to see your mother.” He stopped in front of her, and for a moment they looked measuringly at each other. His hair was waving a little—proof of the humidity—and the scrape on his cheek stood out starkly in the unforgiving light. His eyes were slightly bloodshot, there were lines in his face she hadn’t noticed before, and stubble darkened his jaw. He still wore his suit, but he had unbuttoned the top button of his shirt and loosened his tie.
Lisa’s heart started to beat faster from just looking at him.
“You can give me a ride to my hotel,” she said abruptly, and stepped around him, heading for the elevator bank. “I was going to send Robin home, but she’s fallen asleep in my mother’s room, and I don’t want to wake her up.”
“No problem.” He fell into step beside her.
“So, what are you doing here?” They reached the elevators, and Lisa pushed the down button.
“Well, see, I had a theory.”
She gave him a sharp look. “What kind of theory?”
“Once I really thought about it, I figured I know you well enough to be fairly certain that if you were sleeping with Peyton, you wouldn’t be coming on to me. And if you weren’t sleeping with Peyton, you’d show up here. So, I decided to test it out.”
Indignation infused her voice. “You were checking up on me.”
“I was trying to prove a theory.”
Her eyes sparked at him. “That ’s a load of crap and you know it.” “Admit it. My theory was right. You’re not sleeping with Loverboy.”
The elevator arrived with a ping, and the doors slid open. Stepping inside it, she cast him a fulminating look as he followed her in.
“You know what your problem is, don’t you?” She gave the lobby button a savage jab, then turned to glare at him as the elevator lurched into motion. They were facing each other now. Her back rested against the polished brass wall. She folded her arms over her chest. “You’re jealous.”
“Insanely,” he agreed with a rueful little smile, astonishing her. Then he leaned forward and kissed her.
23
The touch of his mouth on hers made her heart lurch. It was so unexpected that for a moment Lisa couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t respond at all. Her pulse drummed in her ears. Her stomach dropped clear to her toes. Every sense suspended. Then the reality of it hit—Scott was kissing her!—and her lips quivered and parted beneath his, and she closed her eyes and clutched at his shoulders.
And kissed him back.
His lips slanted across hers, warm and firm and fiercely hungry. His tongue came into her mouth, and she responded with a fierceness of her own. Planting his hands on either side of her head, he leaned into her, pressing her back against the wall with the whole long length of him so that she could feel every muscular inch. As the weight of his body pinned her in place, a hot spiral of arousal began to burn deep inside her. Arching against him, she gave herself up to the kiss she’d been waiting for for years.
The elevator door opened with another ping.
Opening her eyes, Lisa saw through a bedazzled fog that they had reached the lobby and there were people standing in front of the open elevator door waiting to board: two female medical types, either doctors or nurses, she couldn’t be sure which; a man in a track suit; and a middle-aged woman holding a balloon. All stared in wide-eyed surprise at the entwined couple in the elevator, and in turn Lisa stared blankly back at them.
Just as she was recovering enough presence of mind to realize that (a) she needed to stop kissing Scott and (b) they needed to get off the elevator, he lifted his mouth from hers, levered himself upright, cast a quick, comprehensive look at their audience, and caught her hand, pulling her after him from the elevator. She gave the gaping onlookers a small embarrassed smile as she was hauled past them, then hurried after Scott, who kept her hand in a firm grip as he strode for the lobby and the exit.
Her heart was still hammering, her breathing was still erratic, and it was still hard to focus on anything besides the fact that he’d kissed her. But she took a deep breath and tried.
“Scott. Wait. Where are we going?”
“Somewhere private.”
“I’m wearing heels,” she protested. “The floor’s slick. I can’t walk this fast.”
Not quite the conversation she had always dreamed of having with him after their first kiss, but needs must, as the saying went.
“Sorry.” He slowed down, and she caught up. Then, as their eyes met, he smiled at her, a slow, intimate smile that had her melting inside just as quick as that. Her heart thundered anew. He was still holding her hand, and she loved how big and warm and strong his hand felt. “I forgot about the shoes. How you women can walk in those things is an eternal mystery to me.”
She disregarded that and went straight to the point. “You kissed me.”
“I know.”
She waited in vain for more, then chose to abandon the topic for the moment as they reached the middle of the lobby and the big glass doors with the black night stretching endlessly beyond looming up in front of them.
“Stop a minute. I have to tell you—last night there was a white Ford Explorer. I think it was following me. It turned into the hospital. For all I know, it may be out there now. We need to be care—”
She broke off because they had reached the door by this time and he was pushing through it. Her fingers tightened urgently on his hand. She would have planted her feet, but given the slick terrazzo surface beneath her soles, it wasn’t happening.
A wall of humid air hit her as she was propelled over the threshold. Outside, the entrance was lit by round white lights recessed in the concrete overhang, and she was instantly conscious of what a target they must make for anyone who might be waiting farther out in the dark parking lot for just such an opportunity.
“Scott—”
“It wasn’t anything you need to worry about. In fact, you weren’t supposed to know squat about it,” he said. They were stepping off the sidewalk into the parking lot proper about then, and she was busy casting scared glances all around. As his words registered, she looked at him instead and frowned. “I asked a friend of mine to keep an eye on you while I was out of town. Make sure you got to the hospital safely, that kind of thing. He’s a cop, he was off duty, he owed me a favor. I called it in.”
Lisa stopped dead. He had perforce to stop too, which he did, turning to look at her inquiringly.
“What?” he asked.
“You had somebody following me?”
“Yeah, I did. Don’t tell me you’ve got a problem with that.”
“Oh my God. That is so typical of the high-handed way you do things. You could have at least
told me.”
“I didn’t have time. I was on my way out of town, remember? And I didn’t want to have to spend the whole night worrying about whether or not you were okay. I had enough on my plate, believe me. Besides, I figured you’d probably just pick a fight with me about it.”
At his urging, they were walking again by that time, heading into the dark recesses of the parking lot, where she could just see his Jeep among the scattering of waiting vehicles. The lights out there were far apart, set high on tall metal poles, and cast only the most meager of yellow glows. The moon was big and round and high overhead now, and the stars were almost as thick as the twinkling lights in the tent earlier. In the distance, occasional explosions gave evidence that all the Independence Day celebrations weren’t finished. His hand gripped hers firmly, and Lisa tingled all over at the contact. At her age, to react so strongly to a man holding her hand was probably ridiculous, she knew. But this wasn’t any man, this was Scott, and react she did.
“I do not pick fights with you.”
“Baby, you’ve been picking fights with me since you were twelve years old.”
Not wanting to prove his point, Lisa switched gears. “I ran his plates. They came up as being registered to a company called Diurnal Plastics.”
“He does PI work on the side. I guess he likes keeping things on the down-low.”
“I was scared to death!”
“I’m sorry about that. You weren’t supposed to even notice he was there.”
“Believe me, I noticed.”
They reached the Jeep, and he opened the passenger door for her. Fixing him with a mildly reproving look, Lisa slid inside. No sooner had she settled into her seat than he leaned in and kissed her. It was a quick kiss, hard and possessive, scarcely more than a hot branding of her mouth by his lips and tongue, certainly nothing to make her senses go into instant meltdown. But they did.
Looking up at him as he straightened away from her, she was so entranced she forgot all about the off-duty cop in the Explorer. Forgot about everything, in fact, except him and the way he made her feel.
Shattered Page 24