Still Waters

by Tami Hoag

  “Does this hurt?” Carefully he ran a hand along the slope of her shoulder and with his other hand gently manipulated her arm. God, her skin was like silk, and the subtle scent of some expensive perfume drifted up from the curve of her neck to tease his nostrils. He wanted to lower his mouth to the spot where shoulder and neck met, and taste her.

  Elizabeth winced a little. The shoulder hurt, but the pain was being overridden by other factors. “Yes,” she murmured breathlessly.

  “I don't think anything is broken,” he said tightly. “Bruised. Do you want an X ray?”

  “No,” she whispered. A tremor went through her, not from pain but from the feel of his hand on her bare skin. “I just want to go to bed.”

  Dane bit back a groan. He wanted to take her to bed. But that wasn't going to happen.

  He helped her up the stairs to the second floor, putting an arm around her and taking some of her weight against him. When they reached the upstairs hall, he stepped behind her and let her lead the way so she couldn't see how turned on he was.

  Elizabeth stopped with her hand on the door of her bedroom and shot a look at Dane over her shoulder. “Don't you dare laugh at my bed,” she warned, brows pulling low over her eyes.

  “Why would I laugh at your bed?”

  “Brock did.” She pushed the door open and limped into the room, flipping on the lamp on the nightstand instead of the ceiling light. The room didn't look quite so shabby cast in soft shadows.

  Dane stepped into the small, pink-walled room, amazed, but not at all tempted to laugh. He wouldn't have laughed on pain of death. The look she was giving him was too proud, too tender.

  The bed dominated the room, barely leaving space for a mismatched dresser and nightstand. Elizabeth walked around it, turning back the eyelet comforter and fluffing ruffled pillows, her chin set at a defiant angle, daring him to comment on the ornate brass headboard and footboard.

  “Brock called it my whorehouse bed,” she said. “He thought it was vulgar, but I like it and I don't care what anyone else thinks, including you.”

  The very way she said it made it clear to Dane that she did care. She didn't want to be laughed at or teased or talked down to—as Brock Stuart had done. The bastard.

  “I think it's beautiful,” he said softly.

  She shouldn't have thought him sweet. He was a hard man. She'd seen that aspect of him too often to believe anything else.

  Her breath caught as he came up behind her and slid a hand beneath her hair to caress the back of her neck.

  “I think you're beautiful,” he said, stepping closer. He dipped his head and brushed his cheek against her hair. “I don't give a damn what Brock Stuart thinks about anything. It's becoming obvious the man is a fool.”

  She started to turn toward him, and he captured her mouth with his, kissing her softly, tenderly, trembling inside with the force of restrained passion. He wanted to lay her down across that enormous bed and kiss every inch of her, but he pulled himself back from her, hating the scant inch of space he put between them.

  “You need to get some rest,” he said, struggling to keep his breathing even. “I'll be downstairs if you need me.”

  She needed him now, Elizabeth thought. But it looked as if Dane had decided to take a stab at nobility. A part of her admired him for it. Another part cursed him for it. She wanted him to stay, but she couldn't ask him. There was Trace to consider; he would be coming home sooner or later. And there was her pride. She wouldn't beg a man to care no matter how badly she wanted it.

  She slipped between the sheets, still wearing Brock's favorite Gianni Versace shirt, and pulled the covers over her legs as she propped her back against the mountain of frilly pillows. Dane started to turn toward the door.

  “Dane?” The word had escaped her lips before she could bite it back. She scrambled for something more to say as he looked at her expectantly. “Thank you,” she murmured. “For being here.”

  He nodded and started to turn again.

  “Dane?” He arched a brow and waited as pride warred with need inside her. Pride won out. “Thanks for not laughing at my bed.”

  Dane held her gaze for a long while. Something more complicated than gratitude charged the air between them.

  “Dane,” she whispered. Pride be damned. “Stay.”

  He turned his back on the door and nobility as her need reached out across the room and touched him. She sat on the edge of the bed, her eyes locked on him as her fingers slowly slipped the rest of her buttons from their moorings. She let the shirt fall back off her shoulders.

  “Please stay,” she asked. “Just for a little while.”

  Dane reached out and traced her injured shoulder. “I don't want to hurt you.”

  She just shook her head, shook off his concern. The pain would come eventually. Not the pain he was thinking of, but something deeper. She had opened the door for it. All she could do now was hold it at bay by taking what he could offer her physically. She thought of Jolynn for a second, understanding for the first time what it was that allowed her to let Rich come back time and again.

  Then she didn't think at all. She didn't try to analyze or chastise. She took Dane's hand and guided it to her breast.

  Dane watched her eyes drift shut and her head fall back as he touched her. A better man might still have walked away, he told himself, but he wasn't better. He was just a man, a man with simple needs touching a woman whose need was consuming her. He didn't have it in him to walk away from that.

  He stripped off his clothes, and the bed dipped as he settled his weight on the mattress. “We'll do things right this time,” he whispered, leaning over her. He lowered his head and brushed his lips across hers. “I'll kiss you. Touch you.” He cupped her breast in his hand and massaged the nipple with his thumb. “Taste you,” he said, kissing her throat, his tongue dipping into the delicate hollow at the base to touch the pulse that fluttered there. “Taste you,” he whispered again, sliding down in the bed.

  He took her over the edge three times then followed her into oblivion. Release, sweet, hot release.

  Elizabeth clung to him, stunned by the intensity of the moment, frightened by the glimpse of what was at the heart of this for her. She closed her eyes against it and buried her face in the curve of Dane's shoulder. Please God, she couldn't love him. It wouldn't work. It never did for her.

  Now came the pain. She bit her lip and fought it with every scrap of strength she could scrape together.

  “Are you all right?” Dane whispered. “Did I hurt you?”

  She didn't trust her voice and shook her head instead.

  Dane braced himself over her, leaning on one elbow as he brushed her hair back from her face. He thought of the countless times he had done this with Ann Markham, thought of the almost feral look of carnal satisfaction that gleamed in her eye and heightened the color across her cheeks. Elizabeth didn't look that way. She looked fragile and vulnerable, and Dane knew an almost overwhelming need to comfort and protect her. He leaned down and kissed her temple, and her arms tightened around him again, holding him against her and within her.

  “It's all right,” he whispered. Whether it was or not, he wasn't sure himself, but he needed to offer her . . . tenderness . . . something . . . “It's all right.”

  He gathered her gently in his arms and rolled onto his side, content to hold her as her breathing slowed and evened and she fell asleep, exhausted. Content. It was something he never felt with Ann. This was usually the time weakness stole over him and that hollow ache carved out a hole in his chest. Now he looked down at the woman cuddled against him, felt her soft breath against his skin, and felt . . . content.

  It rattled him. The independent male in him raised its head and sniffed the air for danger. He didn't want ties. He didn't want contentment. He wanted simple, honest, non-obligatory sex with a woman who didn't need him for anything other than to scratch a carnal itch. What he had shared with Elizabeth had gone way beyond the need to slake a purely physic
al thirst. Dangerous territory lay on the near horizon, territory he had vowed to steer clear of.

  He eased away from the warm woman beside him and turned onto his back. Staring up at the cracked ceiling, he lay there for a long time, wondering what the hell he'd gotten himself into, wondering why, when that woman snuggled close to him and murmured in her sleep, he didn't leave the bed, but slipped his arm around her and held her, and felt . . . content.

  BONNIE RAITT'S SMOKY, SOULFUL VOICE WHISPERED through the stereo speakers into the dimly lit living room. A song about tenuous relationships, transient love. Too blue and too close to the truth for comfort. Dane tuned it out and concentrated on the note cards that were scattered on the floor around his stocking feet. He had given up on the idea of sleep and sat on the couch, brooding and sipping a glass of Elizabeth's stolen scotch. Her ideas, hunches, impressions about the Jarvis murder were spread out on the carpet like pieces of a puzzle she couldn't make fit together.

  He wasn't making it fit either, Dane reminded himself. He had the suspect he wanted, but no evidence to bind him to the crime. Of all the fingerprints in and on the Lincoln, Carney Fox's had not been among them. That didn't mean he didn't do it; it meant Dane didn't have shit to take to a judge for a warrant. And he had to wonder about that. Carney Fox was no rocket scientist. He was sly and slippery, but he wasn't smart enough not to screw up somewhere along the line.

  Dane snarled to himself as the sliver of doubt worked its way under his skin. Elizabeth's allegations came back to him, echoing through his mind. He was lazy. He was trying to pin this murder on a stranger because it was easier and because he didn't want to look at the people he'd known all his life and see them as suspects.

  His gaze followed her meandering trail of notes. Helen Jarvis: Unbalanced. J. cheated on her. Inherits big. Garth Shafer: Creepy! Old grudge. Bitter. Violent temper. Rich Cannon: Jerk. Stood to gain, but has alibi—Jolynn. BLACK BOOK: KEY. Where the hell is it? Who's in it?

  His natural impulse was to dismiss each of her suspects with his personal knowledge of them. Helen had gotten too much mileage out of being Jarrold's wife. Garth's grudge was too old and Garth too deeply immersed in self-pity to do anything about it at this late date. Rich was too complacent, too comfortable with his position as Jarrold's pet.

  But Elizabeth saw all of these people through very different eyes, the eyes of a stranger. She had no history with these people, no preconceived beliefs about their characters. Her impressions of them had been drawn instantly and under extreme conditions. Did that make her view of them accurate or exaggerated?

  Dane rubbed his eyes and sighed. He wished he didn't have to find out. He wished he didn't have Elizabeth's accusations prodding at him. She was right. He didn't want to look beneath the surface of his town or its people. He wanted everything to go on as it always had.

  You're lazy, that's what you are.

  And she was ambitious. For the truth, for her paper. He looked around the shabby living room with its cracked plaster walls and sagging ceiling and had to think she was ambitious to get out of here. She had gone from squalor to splendor back to squalor. It wasn't hard to figure which she would prefer. She looked too damn good in French lace to settle for less.

  The sound of the back door softly slapping shut instantly derailed Dane's train of thought and put him on alert. He flicked off the lamp and moved silently from the living room, through the dining room to the kitchen, walking on the balls of his feet, breath held fast in his lungs. Ever so gently he toed open the kitchen door and took a peek through the crack.

  Trace Stuart was leaning into the refrigerator, reaching for the milk carton.

  “Getting home a little late, aren't you?”

  The milk carton slipped from Trace's hand and hit the linoleum with a splat, spewing milk in all directions. He wheeled and stared at the man in the doorway, his heart racing like an Indy car right at the base of his throat. The sheriff. Oh, shit. Oh, Christ. What was he supposed to do now?

  “It's after two,” Dane said evenly. “Where have you been, Trace?”

  Trace gulped at the jagged rock of fear in his throat. He was a dead man. Jantzen knew something. Why else would he be here? He knew something; it was there in those spooky blue eyes of his. Trace could feel that gaze on him like a pair of lasers, boring right into his brain.

  “Hanging out,” he mumbled, rolling his shoulders uncomfortably. “Just hanging out, that's all.”

  “With who?”

  “Some guys.”

  “Carney Fox?”

  “Yeah. So? We weren't doing nothing. Just hanging out.”

  “So you said.”

  Dane eased away from the door and lazily crossed the room, watching with interest as a fine sheen of sweat beaded across the kid's forehead. The boy looked like a spooked colt, ready to bolt and run if he got the chance. He was hiding something. As Elizabeth had said, Trace was a failure as a liar. But Dane had nothing to question him on.

  He plucked a wadded-up dishtowel off the counter and held it out. “You'd better clean up the mess.”

  “Yessir.” Trace snatched the towel away and squatted down to sop up the milk that was puddling around his sneakers. He wanted to become invisible, maybe miniaturize himself and disappear among the cracks in the linoleum. He wanted to be anywhere but here with this man watching him like a hawk, asking him all kinds of questions in that voice that was just like Clint Eastwood in all the Dirty Harry movies.

  Damn Carney. It was all his fault.

  “Someone attacked your mother tonight, Trace.”

  Trace jerked his head up so fast his glasses almost fell off. “What? Shit! Is she okay?”

  He abandoned the towel and shot up to his full height, ready to go to her. A different kind of adrenaline surged through him, the kind a man felt when his family was threatened. His mom was all the family he had—or all he counted anyway.

  “She's a little shaken up,” Dane said. “She's sleeping.”

  “Oh, man.” Trace huffed a sigh and ran a hand over his short-cropped hair. He paced through the milk he'd spilled, tracking it all over the floor.

  “Somebody was digging through some papers she left in her car. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?”

  “No.” He shook his head, then cast a suspicious look sideways at the sheriff. “Why would I?”

  Dane shrugged. He wanted to link Fox to this too, and the vandalism to the Clarion office, but he didn't have a motive. The vandalism could have been written off at face value, but now . . . Somebody had been looking for something and, dammit, Elizabeth's black-book theory was the only thing that made sense.

  “Are you saying you think I hurt my mom?” Trace asked defensively, poking himself in the chest with a forefinger. He raised his chin to a stubborn angle reminiscent of his mother and glared at Dane. “'Cause I wouldn't.”

  “Wouldn't you?” Dane asked quietly.

  He crossed his arms and leaned a hip against the counter, his gaze steady on Trace the whole time. He was a good-looking kid, a boy on the brink of manhood, just starting to fill in his gangly frame. It seemed like a century ago, but Dane remembered what that age was like. Like walking down the crack of a sidewalk, teetering one way, then the other, never quite sure which side you were going to fall on—boyhood or manhood—and deep down not sure which side you wanted to be on.

  Trace had that look in his eye now, as though he thought he should live up to being a man but a part of him was afraid of what that would mean.

  “You think it didn't hurt her to have you hauled in and questioned the other day?” he asked.

  Trace glanced away, his jaw tightening. He hadn't asked to be hauled in and grilled. That was Carney's fault too. Damn Carney. Some friend he was turning out to be. Misery tightened into a knot at the back of his throat and he tried to swallow it down so it could churn in his stomach with its good pals, guilt and fear.

  “She worries about you, Trace.”

  “She doesn't have to. I ca
n take care of myself,” he mumbled, looking down at his shoes. He was standing in milk. Wasn't that just the story of his life? Always stepping in something. Well, a man had to take care of his own messes, he thought as he bent down and reached for the towel. He reckoned he'd have to find some way to deal with his.

  “Stick around with Carney Fox long enough and you'll be taking care of yourself in jail. Is that what you want?”

  “No, sir.”

  Dane grabbed another towel off the counter and squatted down to help the boy wipe up the last of the milk. “You've got some choices to make here, Trace,” he said quietly. “I hope you make the right ones. For your sake and for your mom's.”

  Trace pushed his glasses up on his nose and blinked at the hot moisture pressing against the backs of his eyes. “Yessir,” he mumbled.

  They rose together. Dane took the wet towels and tossed them into the sink. Trace stood with his head down, shoulders hunched, looking like a young pup who'd just gotten chewed out for chasing cars. Poor kid, Dane thought. He didn't have a friend in the world . . . or a father . . .

  He reached out and clamped a hand on the boy's shoulder. “Why don't you go on up to bed? There's a softball game at Keillor Field tomorrow. I imagine they could use an extra slugger. But a man can't hit worth a damn if he doesn't get a few hours sleep.”

  Trace just nodded, too miserable to speak. He doubted anyone would want him on their team. He was that white trash southern kid who talked funny and hung out with Carney Fox. He could probably live here till he was a hundred and no one would want him on their crummy softball team.

  He stuck his hands in his pockets and started for the door.

  “Trace?”

  Jantzen stood watching him, eyes as keen as a wolf's. Trace got the feeling not many people fooled him—or were fool enough to try. His heart sank a little farther into his stomach.

  “Your mom says you're a good kid. Don't disappoint her. She's had enough to last her awhile.”