“They’re gone,” he said eventually, his voice harsh and low, his thumb moving in a slow circle around her throat. “I thought they might be smart enough to leave someone behind, but they didn’t. Not to say they won’t stop somewhere down-river closer to the road and send Leon and Gil on a search party, though.”
“Think we can find the flashlight?” she whispered, “And the car?”
“Yeah.” He cupped her neck. “But not in the dark. We were lucky I found the cypress. I didn’t think they’d look up.” Satisfaction shone with the flash of his teeth. “Most people forget to do that. Especially when they hear clumsy people making lots of noise off in another direction.” His lopsided grin quirked and vanished. “Well, here we are, birds of a feather, sitting in a tree—”
“K-i-s-s-i-n-g.” She finished the old grade-school taunt with a smirk.
“Waiting for the sunrise,” he said, with a cryptic glance at her mouth that made her breath hitch in her chest.
Maggie leaned over and stared at the jagged shapes of bushes and vines below. She’d blurted out the rhyme, teasing, not thinking. “At least most of the snakes are on the ground.”
“I wasn’t going to bring that up. That snakes climb.” He shuddered. “God. Creepy, crawly, damned things. I hate snakes.”
Maggie snickered. She couldn’t help it. “Poor baby,” she cooed, patting his arm in commiseration. “Me, too.”
“You mean you’re not going to rush to my rescue?” He outlined the curve of her ear, trailing his fingers down the back of her neck.
She brushed her chin against the edge of his palm. “Not if snakes are involved.”
“Are you going to rescue me, sweet Maggie?” Layers of meaning shaded his measured syllables.
“Of course. That’s my job.” She answered the only way she could.
“Yeah. For a minute I forgot.” Releasing her, he reached for the branch above him and pulled himself up. Parting the leaves, he gazed out at the river before pulling her up beside him. “I don’t see anyone waiting for us. Do you?”
Maggie squinted into the distance, watching for movement. “No.”
The shimmer of the river flowing past them and the night wind lifting the leaves of the trees in shades of gray stretched in front of her. High overhead, wings flapped and the lonely tu-whoo of an owl signaled its evening hunt.
If it weren’t for the stench burning her nose, the scene would have had a desolate, brutal beauty. Without the cloak of night, she knew she would see rusting drums, rotting fish, the oily rainbow that made the river shimmer.
“Well, Detective. My vote is to aim in the general direction of the car. I can’t see the compass, but I can head us the right way. Then we’ll see what morning brings.” He yawned, the ligaments of his jaw popping.
“You want us to walk around all night? I’d rather stay here. Cozy pillows—” she patted the cypress bark “—and deluxe sleeping arrangements.” Wiggling into the crotch of trunk and branch, she smiled up at him.
His returning smile was a brief twitch of the lips.
“Not all bad, Sullivan. Much better,” she said, “than playing hide-and-seek with snakes and Tolly.” Leaning against the trunk, she faked her own yawn as she slid to a sitting position. “You don’t have to be a hero and prove you see through steel. It’ll be okay to let down, enjoy the easy life for a change. Come on, Tin Man, the road back to Kansas will be much easier to see in daylight,” she coaxed.
“You’re something, Maggie Webster.” His lips twitched again in what she was learning to recognize as next-best-thing to a smile.
One of these days, she promised herself, she was going to cajole a by-heaven-for-real smile from Sullivan Barnett. Chasing the always-present darkness from his blue eyes, that smile would curl a girl’s toes.
And generate a major meltdown in a woman.
“Of course I am,” she said smugly, wriggling her toes at him. “We’re staying at the Cypress Inn, right? Right, Sullivan?” she said as she sat up, alarmed by the time he was taking to answer her.
“No.”
“Darn you.” She thumped the toe of his boot. “I’ve already unpacked and picked my side of the bed.” She couldn’t see any reason for leaving the safety of the cypress branch. It wasn’t the most comfortable seat she’d ever had, but she was becoming attached to it. “Listen, Sullivan, I really, really, don’t want to cavort through Seth’s Landing anymore tonight.” She scowled and blew hair out of her eyes, trying to assume as formidable an expression as Alicia would have. “I mean, I really don’t want to.”
“I know.”
She didn’t know how to act with him when he was being so agreeable. A good argument would disperse the treacherous yearning she felt for him, blast away the cobwebs in her sleepy brain and put the starch back in her spine.
Sullivan didn’t like the situation they were in. When he’d been in country by himself, dug in for observation, he’d never cut off his bolt hole. His instincts had brought him home safe, had allowed him those months with Lizzie, the best time of his life. “Maggie,” he repeated, “we can’t stay here.”
Her head drooped. But then she was looking him right in the eye, no quarter asked.
The weary shine of her face might have weakened his resolve, but he’d ignored that screeching inner alarm earlier when they’d left the car. He shouldn’t have, and once upon a time, in another life, he would have listened to that insistent clanging. This time, though, Maggie had almost been killed.
He wouldn’t make any more mistakes, not after he’d pledged to protect her.
“Maggie, our friendly dumpers may not be the guys who murdered the clerk.” She’d been so brave, cracking jokes and teasing him. He dreaded dragging her through the night without being able to see anything. “I don’t want to stay here and be trapped if a killer comes back for any reason. In the tree, our options for action are limited. I’d rather have a back door available.”
“Okay.” There was defeat in her exhausted acceptance.
Dropping to the ground, Sullivan held out his arms for her. “Won’t be so bad, Maggie. Tomorrow you’ll look back on this and laugh.”
“Think so?” She lowered herself over the edge and dropped into his waiting arms.
“Maybe not,” he conceded, staring into her dark eyes and not feeling a bit like laughing himself. She slid down his body, saying “oof” when her knees buckled. He held her upright with his arms still around her, wishing they were anywhere but Seth’s Landing, wishing they were somewhere he could lay her down across cool, clean sheets and stroke her softly, endlessly, until she whimpered, her eyes widening with need for him.
And then, in that bright, clean place, he would burn in her, finding peace.
“Maggie…” He started to tell her how it would be in that sunlit room, tell her how he would touch her, what they would do, but the fantasy held him in its grip with such power that his throat closed.
He wanted her, wanted to see her in sunshine, wanted to see her the way he’d fantasized ever since she’d strolled into the office, the sway of her hips provoking wild, primitive impulses.
Finally, he understood. If he stayed around her, he would eventually give in to those impulses. Not because he couldn’t control them, but because, ultimately, he wouldn’t want to. He would no longer care what happened afterward.
And there would be consequences.
There always were.
“Let’s go,” he said, not liking what this night was teaching him about himself.
He headed west, taking his initial bearing from the river and establishing landmarks to use once they were out of sight of the Palma. Silently, Maggie worked her hand into his, trudging by his side as they forced a path through the growth snatching at their clothes, hair, faces.
Despite his own exhaustion, he forced himself to stay alert, watching for anything, everything, listening.
Sometime around midnight, by his best estimate, they found the chickee.
Its thatched
roof rose out of the dark beside a shallow, meandering bayou that branched off from the Palma. Open on all sides, the hut’s pond-cypress support logs rose to the cabbage-palm thatching.
“It’s not the Cypress Inn,” he said, tilting Maggie’s face up to him, “but it has a bolt hole.” He pointed to the dugout made from bald cypress and to the larger, creaky-looking wooden rowboat at the bayou’s edge. “Want to see if there’s a vacancy?”
Maggie walked stoically ahead and collapsed on a wooden bench by a rickety table at the far end of the hut. “You can’t make me move again tonight, Sullivan.” She glanced up at the thatching and dropped her head to the table. It wobbled beneath her. “Tell me there aren’t any snakes in that.” With an upraised arm, she waved apathetically at the fronds.
“There are no snakes in this thatching,” he repeated obediently, knowing there were.
“Oh, Sullivan,” she lamented. “You lie so good, and I don’t even care that I know you’re lying.”
“Maybe I’m not,” he said, stroking her bent head. “Since I don’t see snakes, there aren’t any.” It wouldn’t matter anyway.
Ever since Vietnam he’d hated snakes with a ferocity usually reserved for much more personal enemies. On reconnaissance in very unfriendly country toward the end of his enlistment, he’d stayed silent and paralyzed, not daring to move as a large snake slithered lazily across his camouflaged body. If he’d moved, he would have been spotted and killed by the ten-man squad huddled together yards in front of him.
“Sounds like a reasonable proposition to me.” Mechanically, she lifted her head. “Do you want the table or the bench?”
“I hate to break the news to you, but we don’t take either one. It’s the rowboat for us, brown eyes.”
She didn’t even bother arguing. Helping him strip palm fiber from the thatching close to the ground, she worked steadily with him as they plaited the fiber into trip wires.
Dragging the rowboat into the shelter of a stand of palmettos, Sullivan bent branches over the boat, forming a cave. Around the clearing and near the palmetto stand, he bent other branches and fastened them with the palm fiber. The snapping swoosh of the trips would alert him if anyone approached.
Kicking loose brush from the rowboat and ripping out one of the seat boards so that he and Maggie wouldn’t be twisted into corkscrews trying to get comfortable, he finished his preparations. They would be hidden; they had an alarms system and shelter. He’d done what he could.
He moved the last branch aside, pointing out the entrance to Maggie. Following her, he fastened the concealing branch around them. In the private cocoon fashioned of branches, they lay down in the rowboat, its sides screening them.
“Here,” Sullivan turned to his side and shifted Maggie so that her head was cushioned on his shoulder as they lay face-to-face, her nose mashed against his chin.
At a sudden rustling and shrieking outside their cave, Maggie stiffened.
He lowered his head. She lifted her chin. His mouth found hers, soft and open in surprise.
He meant to reassure her, to tell her the sounds were nothing. He didn’t mean to kiss her, not when he was strung-out with adrenaline still pumping through him, not when his guard was down and his hunger so powerful.
But he did.
And she kissed him back with an answering hunger that had him driving her fast into passion, yet not fast enough for the hunger spiraling him into sensation.
Slanting his mouth across hers, he tugged at her lower lip, opening her mouth and deepening the kiss, tongue to tongue, stroking the innermost recesses of her mouth.
She opened for him, her mouth warm and welcoming, inviting the sweep of his tongue.
He’d thought he wanted her to whimper with need. Instead, her touch spoke for her as she twisted restlessly against him, one knee sliding over his thigh, and he cupped her, pulling her into his rhythm, pulse to pulse in urgent, tearing need in the night.
And he found that this, after all, was what he wanted. Her, against him, pushing him higher with each light touch of her hand. Her, sliding her fingers recklessly under his waistband and working the metal button free as she brushed her knuckles against him, taking him into mindless, dangerous sensation.
*
Chapter 9
« ^ »
Maggie clung to him as if the world ended and began with Sullivan Barnett, exploded and recreated itself in his touch on her, hers on him. Somewhere in the dim corridors of memory, where time walked in a measured pace, she must have known this rapture of pounding hearts and a man’s whiskered face against hers, this surrender to the honeyed flow rushing through her.
Must have known, and couldn’t have, because once experienced, how could she ever have walked away from the electrical buzz along her skin, the craving to get closer than the barrier of skin allowed?
It was as if she had plunged into the sun and whirled in its brilliance, transformed.
She sighed in delight as Sullivan impatiently pushed her shirt up. Holding her with one arm wrapped around her waist, and half rising, he stripped her shirt over her head and flung it into the boat in one smooth motion, the pale flutter a butterfly floating to earth.
Still half sitting, he lifted her onto his lap, cradling her in the V of legs and groin. Sliding his arms under hers and back toward him over her shoulders, he rocked them slowly back and forth. With each rocking, she slid over him, that sliding push of his maleness against her a salutation to her feminine core. And he made her ache to have his touch on her, in her. Where he thrust, she yielded; where she retreated, he followed in a dance as old as time, as new as innocence.
Running her hands along his thin, well-defined ribs, she worked his shirt off. He buried his groan in the curve of her ear, his breath hot against her as he nipped the lobe and held it between his teeth, the delicate pain trembling through her in an unending wave of shivers.
“Oh, God, Maggie,” he muttered against her breast, pulling her tight against him, taking her shivers and blending them with his shuddering response to the scrabble of her fingers against his back. “I want you.” He raised his knees until they supported her back, and buried his face against her breasts. “God help me, but I want you so much it’s killing me. And I hate myself for not being able to resist. Every time I touch you…”
And he touched her where she wanted most to be touched.
Wrenched from him, his admission affected the most vulnerable part of her soul, the part that had wandered sad and confused for months.
His lips closed hot and hard around her, the damp flick of his tongue against her nipple arching her to him with a longing she’d never imagined. Here in this private place, they were dependent on each other, and she needed him, needed the forgetfulness his urgent touch promised he would give her.
The back of his hand brushed her stomach as he popped the snap of her jeans. His palm was warm, sweeping across her, agitating her. “Lift,” he whispered, cupping her fanny and tugging her jeans down.
She never noticed the downward slide of her zipper, but he encouraged her to give him access. Lifting onto her knees, she let him peel her jeans down to her ankles, leaving her clad only in her panties. The tips of her breasts brushed against the smooth planes of his chest, hardening into aching points. She twisted against him, wordlessly telling him where she hurt.
Gripping her hips, he slid her up and down his sleek chest in an agonizing delay until she lost all sense of anything except the drumming of her body against his, or his against hers—she no longer knew which. His flesh, hers, intertwined, humming with shared energy, both of them captive to that strumming beat.
But she knew she wanted to touch him and so she ran her open palms down the corded muscles of his belly, slipping her hands under the opened button. Spreading the worn fabric, she freed him from the thin cotton restricting him. A leap and throbbing against her palm as she touched him, a male force that urged her closer, tantalized her with the notion that she had created this power, that she had ca
lled it forth.
Untying the scarf, he released her hair. Crushing strands of it in one fist, he buried his face in it, trailed tendrils across his chest, his mouth. “So sweet,” he groaned.
He brushed the silky scarf against her in a subtle teasing that tickled her stomach and the sides of her breasts, her nipples, her mouth, all her bare skin until each drift of the scarf merged into a cataclysmic rolling deep inside her that she couldn’t stop, didn’t want to stop, couldn’t stop, and then he kissed her again, taking the deep tremors into his mouth, devouring her.
And when she lay limp and spent against him, he began to move again, a slow slide of his palms over her naked back, down to the dimples of her fanny, dipping his finger into them and drawing it up her sides and over her breasts, lightly circling her nipples before beginning again.
Underneath her, his satiny length pushed and pressed against her belly, asserted his intention with an aggression that should have frightened her, but Sullivan had shown her that she was the magician and that strength hers to command or deny.
His face was tight with the control he exerted, his mouth thinned in a grimace, and she marveled at his strength, exulted in it because he shared it with her. Taking his face between her palms, she touched the seam of his lips with her tongue. His tongue met hers in a kiss that stopped her breathing with its tenderness. So sweet, that mingling of breath.
Delicately she touched his flat nipples with the tip of her tongue and felt him shudder. Against the silk of her panties, he was hard and pulsing, a powerful statement of purpose. Shy, surprised by her delight in touching him, and not quite sure what she was doing, she lowered her head, slowly sweeping his chest with her hair, and kissed his navel.
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