by JoAnn Ross
But instead of pressing charges against him, Claren merely stated what little facts she knew about the break-in, answered the sheriff’s questions as well as she could and returned to the car without uttering a single word about Dash’s behavior.
“What happened to charging me with kidnapping?” he asked. “I thought you couldn’t wait to have the cops toss me behind bars and throw away the key.”
She turned to him, and Dash could see the lingering anger in her eyes. “You had no right dragging me out of my own house that way,” she insisted. They were the first words she’d spoken to him since he’d carried her out to the car. “And I think you’re overbearing and horribly chauvinistic. But this is between you and me. There was no reason to involve anyone else.”
So she was a woman who fought her own battles. Somehow Dash had guessed that she would be. “You know, Irish,” he said as he twisted the key in the ignition, “I like your style.”
The casual words shouldn’t have given her such pleasure. They shouldn’t, Claren told herself over and over again. But heaven help her, they did.
She was right. Every place Dash tried was booked full.
“I hate to say I told you,” Claren said when he came back to the car after being turned away by the Puffin & Gull Apartment Motel.
“You love it,” Dash muttered.
“Perhaps we ought to go back to the house,” she suggested sweetly.
“Not on a bet.”
“But that was the last place to stay in town.” She knew that either Maxine or Mildred or any of a number of townspeople would be happy to take her in. But although she was still furious at him for his autocratic behavior, Claren was curious to see what Dash was going to do next.
“No, it wasn’t.”
“But—” When he turned the car around and started in the opposite direction, headed back out of town, comprehension dawned.
It was a test, she decided as he pulled the car into the gravel parking lot. There was no way the man could be serious. The blinking sign advertised water beds, in-room adult movies and a vacancy. The V in Vacancy had burned out, but the sign still managed to get its point across. If the movies and the water beds weren’t entertainment enough, an adult bookstore was located next door.
On the other side of the motel was a tavern. Built to resemble a log cabin, the bar had been appropriately named the Timberline. The marquee announced the appearance of a band whose name Dash did not recognize. Which wasn’t surprising. After all, he’d been out of the country for a long time and, since this wasn’t exactly a bustling hub of civilization, he suspected that the band would consist of local musicians.
“I can’t believe it,” Dash said as he cut the engine.
“Believe what?”
“That you’re not screaming bloody murder.”
She shrugged. In for a penny, in for a pound. Besides, she’d secretly longed to see the interior of the county’s most infamous rendezvous location for years.
“I’m too exhausted to scream.” That was definitely true. An old expression of her father’s came to mind: rode hard and put away wet. That’s exactly how she was feeling.
“You’ve had a bad shock, finding Darcy’s house trashed like that,” he said, not quite trusting her easy acquiescence. Thus far, nothing about this woman had been easy. “You could probably use some sleep.” He pocketed the car key. “I’ll go check in. Wait here.”
She hated the way he had of issuing orders, as if he was accustomed to everyone snapping to attention for him. But, too tired to start another argument, Claren simply nodded her assent. Once he was gone, she leaned her head back against the seat and shut her eyes. Within seconds she’d fallen asleep.
“You’re going to hit the roof.” Dash’s words jerked her from a light slumber.
“There was only one room,” she guessed.
Having expected a furious tirade, Dash looked at her cautiously. She reminded him of the calm before the storm. “I know it’s a cliché, but I swear, it’s true.”
Her eyelids had gone incredibly heavy. She could hardly hold them up. Even if there was another place to go, Claren was too tired to move. Merely getting to the door of the room would take all the strength she could muster. Privately she wondered if she could con Dash into carrying her into the room by refusing to budge.
Dash saw the faint smile flit across her lips and wondered at the cause.
Claren saw him looking at her and realized that he was waiting for an answer. “I believe you,” she murmured sleepily.
She was exhausted. Her face, in the flashing red glow of the motel sign, looked unnaturally drawn and the light had gone from her eyes. She looked unbearably fragile. Something unbidden, unwanted, stirred inside him.
“Let’s get you to bed.”
Bed. It had to be the most marvelous word in the English language. Half-asleep already, Claren nodded her assent.
The room was beyond even Claren’s wildest imagination. The walls were covered in red embossed velvet wallpaper; the carpeting was an unsettling blend of red and black and purple and dotted with innumerable cigarette burns. Gold-flecked mirrored squares on the ceiling reflected the enormous bed, which was covered in a fake velour tiger-skin bedspread.
The only other furniture in the room was a red velvet wing chair. Claren doubted that the usual occupants of this room missed having a chest of drawers.
“I didn’t even know they made heart-shaped water beds,” she murmured. Her attention was drawn to the wall over the immense bed, where a well-endowed nude blonde had been painted on black velvet.
“Live and learn.” Dash went into the adjoining bathroom, satisfied yet not surprised to find that the narrow window had been barred. “It’s not exactly the Kublai Khan’s pleasure dome, but I suppose it’ll have to do.”
When he came out of the bathroom, Claren was standing beside the bed, right where he’d left her. He watched her fingers fumble clumsily with the buttons running down the front of her peasant dress. “Here, let me help.”
Grateful for the assistance and trusting Dash perhaps more than she should, Claren obediently dropped her hands to her sides.
Although he knew he was playing with fire, Dash maneuvered each button through its hole while trying not to be moved by the growing expanse of ivory flesh he was exposing.
The dress slid to the carpeting in a puddle of multicolored gauze. Too exhausted to worry about modesty, Claren reminded herself wearily that the lace-trimmed teddy—another one of Maxine’s brilliant suggestions—covered a great deal more than the bikini she’d worn water-skiing on Lake Washington last weekend.
The bodice of the scarlet silk teddy clung tenuously to her breasts. Dash knew that it would take only a casual motion of his hand to send it falling down around her waist. The urge to do exactly that, when her pallor revealed her absolute exhaustion, made him wonder what kind of man he’d become.
Perhaps, Dash considered, St. John had been right when he’d told him that he’d been away from civilization too long.
“I’ve got to go next door and get some cigarettes. I won’t be long.”
The reluctant note of caring in his voice made her smile. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be asleep the minute my head hits the pillow.”
Maybe one of them would sleep. But Dash knew that just the thought of her lying in that ridiculous bed, clad in that brief scrap of crimson silk, would be enough to keep him awake all night.
* * *
THE TIMBERLINE WAS like every other country-and-western bar in the country. A layer of cigarette smoke hung over the room like a shroud, the center of the floor was taken up by pool tables, two brightly colored pinball machines and a pay telephone stood against the far wall. Dusty bottles were lined up behind the bar, and beer signs glowed dimly in the smoky haze. On a small wooden platform at the back of the bar, a trio of musicians, dressed in snap-front Western shirts, faded jeans and cowboy boots, sang desolately of unfaithful women, hard days and even harder nights.
&n
bsp; A lone woman, with wildly permed blond hair and wearing an off-the-shoulder black blouse and short black leather skirt, swayed dreamily to the music, apparently content to dance alone. Two men, loggers, Dash decided from their appearance, sat side by side on stools at the bar and watched the woman as they drank their beer from bottles, enjoying the free floor show. A lone elderly woman seated a few stools down from the loggers was engaged in conversation with the bartender.
Dash felt the blonde’s gaze burning into his back as he made his way to the pay phone and knew that if he turned around he’d see an open invitation in her eyes. Dash was used to women wanting him; from the time a carhop down at the Burger Shack in Guthrie had seduced him on his fifteenth birthday, women had demonstrated an attraction to his size and what they always referred to as his dangerous looks. In his younger years Dash had taken advantage of their willingness to go to bed with him. These days he’d grown a great deal more choosy.
In fact, he considered thoughtfully as he punched the telephone buttons with more force than necessary, it had been more than six months since he’d had a woman. Perhaps all those months of celibacy were why he found himself so attracted to Claren. The idea made sense, Dash told himself. It also made him feel a hell of a lot better.
“We’ve moved to a motel,” Dash said when St. John answered the phone. He listened to the complaint he’d known was coming. “Hey,” he said when his superior’s furious diatribe had finally run down, “this way you can get the forensics guys on the place without her suspecting a thing.”
Dash glanced over at the poster that had been stapled to the wall next to the phone, and realized that the weekend jazz festival was the solution to his next problem. “Yeah, I can keep her away tomorrow,” he assured St. John. “Just get the place cleaned up by nightfall, because I’m not certain I can keep her in this motel two nights running.”
There was a time when he would have laughed at the sexual suggestion St. John proposed. There was also a time when he might have resorted to keeping Claren in bed if that’s what it took to keep her under surveillance. But that was in another lifetime, a life he’d thought he’d put behind him. Until Darcy O’Neill had shown up in Jamaica and pulled him unwillingly back into the fray.
Cutting the conversation short, he hung up, ordered a beer and took a table by the window that offered a view of both the parking lot and the motel-room door.
Once again the thought of Claren alone in that enormous bed created a deep sexual pull. This time Dash comforted himself with the idea that it was not Claren who had him feeling this way. Any reasonably attractive woman would do.
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you that it’s not healthy to drink alone?”
He glanced up at the dancer, who was standing beside his table, her eyes bright, her smile inviting. She was, Dash realized with some surprise, actually quite attractive. Or she would be if she washed some of that makeup off her face. Her perfume, dark and musky and straightforward, was a decided contrast to Claren’s light, tantalizing floral scent.
“I guess I’m just not in the mood for company tonight,” he said. “Sorry.”
She glanced out the window, following the direction of his earlier gaze. “You had a fight with your girl. I watched you check in,” she explained at his quick, sharp look. “Sure didn’t take you long to get kicked out.”
“The woman has one hell of a temper,” Dash said.
“She’s also a damn fool to let you get away,” the woman decided with a toss of her platinum head. She reached out and ran her fingers through his hair. “You could always try making her jealous.”
Her voluptuous breasts, overflowing the bodice of her tight black blouse, were almost in his face, her perfume was surrounding him like a seductive cloud and her fingers were kneading the back of his neck with a warm, practiced touch. Dash waited with a certain fatalistic curiosity for his body to respond.
Nothing. Nada. Zip. So much for his theory about needing a woman. Any woman.
“Sorry, babe.” He gave her an apologetic smile. “But I guess I’m just not in the mood tonight.”
She licked her lips, giving him one last taste of what he was turning down. “You sure? Sometimes all it takes is the right woman.”
She had hit just a little too close to home for comfort. “I’m sure.” Frustrated with the way Claren had him feeling, Dash forgot his manners and turned back to watch the motel-room door.
“Well,” the woman huffed, tossing her curly blond hair over her shoulder, “it’s your loss, cowboy.” Marching away on impossibly high-heeled black suede boots, she returned to her solitary dancing.
Dash wasn’t aware of her leaving. Every ounce of his concentration, every atom of his body, was directed toward that ridiculously decorated room and the oversize heart-shaped bed.
After a second beer Dash decided that he’d waited long enough. Surely she’d be out like a light by now; after all, the woman had practically been asleep on her feet when he’d left.
Once again he was wrong. He heard the soft weeping the moment he entered the room. In the moonlight slanting through the window, he could see her, curled up in a tight little ball, her arms wrapped around the flat feather pillow, her shoulders shaking with her sobs.
“Claren.” He turned on the lamp, bathing the room in an unearthly red glow, then sat on the edge of the water bed, starting off a series of violent waves. “It’s going to be okay,” he murmured, stroking her trembling pale shoulders. “Darcy’s house will be cleaned up by this time tomorrow night.”
“That’s not what I’m crying about,” she said into the pillow.
The room was warm, but she was unnaturally cold. Her skin was like ice. “Then, what?”
“It’s Darcy.” She surprised him by suddenly sitting up, flinging her arms around his neck and pressing her face against his shirt. “Oh, Dash,” she sobbed, “he’s not coming back. Darcy is really truly dead.”
Dash wondered why realization had been so long in coming. After all, Darcy had been reported missing two weeks ago. But as she clung to him, sobbing harshly, he realized that, having not wanted to face the truth, she’d allowed the elaborate wedding preparations to numb her grief. Now finally the pain had broken through. Aided and abetted, he decided, by the unpalatable sight of the destruction of her uncle’s beloved house.
Her tears were soaking the front of his shirt. Dash didn’t say anything. Instead, he simply held her, waiting for her to cry out her grief. Grief that was long overdue.
When she ran out of tears, Claren remained silent for a long time, content to remain where she was, safe and secure in the circle of Dash’s arms. She wondered how it was that Dash could be both strong and gentle at the same time. Elliott, she thought with a sad little sigh, had been neither.
“Thank you.”
He ran his hand down her hair. “Hey,” he said with forced composure, “I miss him, too.”
She dashed at the moisture on her cheeks. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without him,” she admitted raggedly. “When you left for your cigarettes a little while ago, it suddenly dawned on me that I’m all alone.”
He thought of reminding her about her aunt and uncle, then decided that wasn’t what she was talking about. Families were not something genetic, like green eyes or red hair. Families consisted of people who truly cared about you, and about whom you cared, all of you watching out for one another, sharing the good times, as well as the bad, protecting each other from outsiders.
Dash hadn’t had a big family, but he’d had his mother, who’d never whispered one word of regret at the way their life had turned out. She’d been a wonderful woman, soft and gentle and heartbreakingly frail. Dash had been with her at the end, holding her hand, begging her not to leave him. But she had.
That’s when the orphaned five-year-old learned exactly how lonely the world could be. Considered a half breed because of his Cheyenne father, he’d been shunned by both races, forced to spend his youth in a variety of foster homes until th
e angry young boy finally landed, at age ten, in the Oklahoma Bible Fellowship home for wayward boys. Which was where he’d discovered exactly how cruel and brutal people could be.
He shook his head, irritated at the way Claren had him thinking of things he’d put behind him long ago.
“You have me,” he heard himself saying.
Startled by the husky warmth in his voice, Claren tilted her head back and looked up at him with moist and shining eyes. “How long are you going to stay?”
Until I crack this case, he thought. Until I clear Darcy’s name. Until I know that you’re safe. “For as long as you need me,” he said instead.
Hope was a hummingbird fluttering its delicate wings inside Claren’s heart. And at that moment, as she basked in the warmth of his smoky gray eyes, she felt herself falling totally, inexorably in love.
Dash saw the hope and something else a great deal more dangerous in her gaze and cursed himself for having put it there. Now that the crisis had passed, he was starting to realize just how good—how right—she felt in his arms. He’d been right, her fragrant skin was softer than silk.
“You’d better get to sleep.” He bent his head and kissed the top of her head. “We’ve got a big day ahead tomorrow.”
“I know.” Her bare shoulders sagged. “It’s going to take forever to clean up that mess.”
He moved his wide hand up and down her back, enjoying the feel of silk against his palm. “I was referring to the jazz festival that starts tomorrow morning.”
It was the last thing she would have expected him to suggest. “The jazz festival?”
“You do like jazz, don’t you?”
“Of course, but the house—”
“I’ve got all that taken care of. While we’re enjoying the hot jazz and cool blues, a team of professionals is going to put Darcy’s house back to the way it was. Probably a lot neater, considering your uncle’s housekeeping skills.”
“You hired a team of professionals?” Claren looked at him as if he were speaking a rare Martian dialect.