by Misty Simon
“Okay, but we are picking up where we left off when we get home.”
I giggled. “We’ll see.”
He pinched my butt, making me jump about a foot before turning around and scowling at him. “Behave yourself.”
“Never.” He flicked the end of my hair. “And you like it that way.”
Since there was little I could say in response (because you know I loved him just the way he was), I walked into the house with a little extra swish in my hips.
And then we got down to business, with me ignoring some of the more pointed looks from Ben every time Mark looked at and answered me when Ben asked the questions. I had some questions of my own, fortunately. I tried to inject them at regular intervals to keep the momentum going.
“Do you have any idea at all where your sister is?” I asked, leaning forward to gauge his body language. Because, really, at this point Mark was the last sibling we knew was definitely alive. We had no idea about his sister, and his brother was barbecue.
“No, I haven’t heard from her in a day or two, but that’s not unusual.” He leaned forward, too, and I realized how close we were when I felt his breath on my cheek. I abruptly sat back in my seat.
Ben took the next question. “Do you know anyone who might want to hurt your brother?”
Leaning back in his chair, Mark dangled his soda from his fingertips. He used the other hand to stroke his now smooth chin. “You might want to look at the mistress he had who got pregnant and expected him to leave the fiancée he was supposed to marry in a month. Maybe the pregnant mistress’s brother, too. I heard he was awfully angry about the whole mess.” He looked smug for the first time. I have to say it wasn’t a good face on him.
I cleared my throat. It was time to tackle something I hadn’t thought of earlier, and a subject I wasn’t looking forward to. “How long have you lived here?”
“In this house?” He lifted his gaze to the ceiling. “About three months.”
“Okay.” I looked at Ben but he appeared mentally out of the room.
Maybe I could slip the question in now. “Have you always lived in Martha’s Point?” Because I hadn’t seen him before my father’s wedding and couldn’t imagine someone not knowing their way around the small town if they’d lived here forever.
“Now, why would I have come to your house and asked for directions if I had lived here forever?”
That was eerily similar to my own thoughts. Unfortunately, it also got Ben’s attention from wherever he had been.
“You’ve been to our house?” Ben sat forward with his hands gripped onto his knees. Ben’s gaze whipped back and forth between Mark and me.
Um. I could feel my face heating up, even though I had nothing to be ashamed of. It felt like the millionth time I had told myself the same thing. Time for a subject change. “Okay, so we know you aren’t from around here. Do you have an alibi for the night your brother was killed?”
Mark’s whole face seemed to shut down. The twinkle went out of his melty eyes, making them hard like rock candy. “I think you should leave now.” He stood, appearing a heck of a lot taller than he had before.
I scrambled out of my chair, catching my heel on the foot of it and tripping. Ben caught my arm before my face hit the floor at Mark’s feet. He hadn’t moved to help me at all, and his face was still hard and angry.
“We’ll see ourselves out,” Ben said, pulling me along by the elbow. Let me tell you, he wasn’t very gentle about it. I was very afraid of what that meant. He was normally extremely gentle with me (except when we were playing cops and robbers), but I had a feeling this wasn’t like other times.
“I—”
“Get in the car.”
And he slammed the driver’s side door before I could utter another word.
Chapter Eleven
It was a very silent and incredibly tense ride home. I had tried to say something again, but he cut me off at word one. After two more attempts, I finally got the hint and kept my big mouth shut. I didn’t think this had to do with Mark having been at my house, or at least I hoped not. But I wasn’t looking forward to getting yelled at for making our suspect shut up tighter than a house in winter, either.
Ben slammed into our little home, flipping lights on as he entered each room. Once he got to the kitchen, with me trailing behind like a good little puppy, he yanked open the refrigerator door and grabbed a bottle of beer. Tearing the top off, he took a long swallow with his hand propped on his hip and his eyebrows so low on his forehead they nearly covered his eyes. Not an attractive look for him.
But it did make me a little bit angry. Okay, so I had messed up. I wasn’t a child. “Look, buster.”
He shot me a steely-eyed glare.
I shot him one right back. “I don’t need your attitude.” I crossed my arms over my chest and gave him the Eye of Forbiddance. When his gaze dropped to the cleavage I had created without intending to, I could have shamelessly used his lust to change his mood, but I wasn’t going to go there. “Eyes up here, buddy.”
To his credit, he did look back up at my face, but his eyebrows also drew back down to nearly form a single line over his forehead.
“I said I don’t need your attitude.”
He tried to cut me off again, but I was having none of it.
“Don’t even start with me.” I uncrossed my arms and stalked over to him. Poking him in the chest, I said, “Since you have not deigned to let me know what has you boiling, I’m going to assume you’re mad because Mark told us to get out when I asked him where he was on the night of the murder.” And I very carefully avoided letting him say anything about Mark being at our house. I wasn’t dumb.
He made a snorting noise.
“I’m going to also assume your braying like a donkey means I’m right.” At that he sputtered, but I barreled on. “I might have asked the wrong question at the wrong time, but you can’t deny it was something you wanted to know, too.”
“Yeah, well, I would have done it with a little more finesse.”
“Puh-lease,” I said, channeling Bella. I propped my hands on my big hips and widened my stance. If we were going to fight dirty, I was ready, eager, and willing. “Don’t talk to me about finesse. I happen to remember several instances where you were not exactly at the top of your game, and I didn’t try to make you feel like an idiot.”
“I never—” He slammed the bottle on the counter.
“Oh, yes, you ever have. So don’t pull that crap on me. Besides, it’s not like we won’t get a chance at him again. Or the police won’t. Let him cool down for a few days and we’ll try to see him again. In the meantime, there are a few more people we have to look at. A pregnant mistress with an angry brother deserves our attention, and so does the fiancée with her eye on the prize. Surely, those are two viable suspects. Not to mention the fact that we really need to find Heather and talk to Jerry.”
His face softened a little bit. He was much more controlled when he picked the beer bottle back up from the counter. There was even a little half smile flirting with the corner of his mouth. I wasn’t falling for the softening treatment when I saw his eyes flick back down to my chest. But at least he appeared to be in a slightly better mood and hadn’t brought up the Mark-at-the-house thing.
“We do have quite a few leads,” he said, seeming to wrench the words out through his still tight jaw.
I walked toward him, no longer afraid of using my feminine wiles to get him the rest of the way out of his crappy mood. Deliberately and very blatantly, I rubbed my boobs against his arm. “We do have other equally important leads.”
“And we did get some good information before you—”
I silenced the last thought with a kiss that bent back the spikes in his hair.
One phenomenal bout of floor sex later, I had rug burns on my knees and a song in my heart. I stood in the shower, letting the song come out of my mouth to the tune of a Depeche Mode ditty from the eighties. While belting out the tune, I washed my hair. I was
feeling good and loose and ready for some serious Z time before beginning again tomorrow on finding a killer. Personally, I was pretty happy with what we had so far, and Ben wasn’t going to make me feel inadequate unless I let him, which I wasn’t. So there.
I grabbed my spongy-thingy off the wall, then flipped open the cap of my body wash. And got a nose full of what had to be dead cat scent. Yick!
A quick look at the bottle settled the question of whether or not I had picked up the wrong bottle, or if someone had switched it. Still said cucumber melon. Huh.
“Ben!” I called, hoping he’d hear me from the bedroom. If someone had been tampering with the shower, there was no telling what else they had done. A snake could slither out of the drain at any second. The thought of which sent me scurrying back against the far wall.
“Ivy, I’m too tired to go again,” he said, his voice muffled through the shower curtain.
Of course, we both knew the statement to be a lie, especially when he whipped back the curtain and there was his penis waving at me, proud and tall.
I stifled a giggle. Really it wasn’t appropriate, and I had more important things to discuss. “I won’t bother you for favors of the sexual kind, then.” I said it with a straight face. I was very proud of myself. Then I got down to business. “Smell this. Does it smell tainted to you?”
He took a big whiff, his nostrils flaring, then shook his head before he was done inhaling. “Smells normal to me.”
“Huh.”
“Are you sure you didn’t want to bother me for anything else?” His leer was present. Thank God it still did wonderful things to my stomach and parts farther south.
After looking at the digital clock on the counter, I decided I did indeed have time for a roll in the shower before I had to go to bed. I was the boss, after all, and I could be late tomorrow morning if it got to be after midnight before I went to sleep. Plus, Charlie had a key and could open the front door and access the money for the cash register just as easily as I could.
I let Ben sweep me away into a fragrant bout of sweaty sex. And was ever so thankful we were in the shower when we were done. There was no way I would have gone to bed directly after he was done with me.
The next morning it was as if I were walking on the clouds when I entered The Masked Shoppe. I floated into my domain and smiled at the gentle tinkling of the bell over the door. I loved that sound. Or at least I did today.
I loved the smell of the candles gently flickering on the counter, their flames dancing in the breeze I’d created when I sauntered in. The colors of the costumes pleased me, too. Reds and oranges, blues and greens, the shimmer of iridescent fabric worn by a belly dancer. All were a pleasure to my eyes. Brushing my fingers against the fabric, I absorbed the slightly raspy feel of the cloth. I wanted to roll in it, wrap it around me from head to toe, and experience the full-body tingle echoed in my fingertips. But there was nothing for me to taste in the room, I thought, disappointed. Apparently I was going through all the senses, and one lacking was no fun. So I licked my lips to appreciate the lingering Ben taste.
After the bell over the door ended its tinkling, I realized the one absent thing was sound. It took about thirty seconds for me to have my sensual exploration, and almost that long to realize no music played, no customers wandered around, and I didn’t hear Charlie humming or whistling. Strange.
But not as strange as hearing a groan and a cough break the near silence.
Quicker than a flash, I ran around the corner of the counter to find Charlie lying flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling with glassy eyes.
My sense of taste was finally triggered, but unfortunately it was by the bile rising up into the back of my throat. It was one thing for me to get hurt on the job, but I couldn’t have Charlie injured.
“Are you okay?” I asked, crouching down and frantically running my hands over his chest, arms, and down his legs. I tried not to think about the telltale indentations around his rib cage. It wouldn’t do to wonder which kind of bra he had on today.
I had the answer to my ridiculous question when he continued staring at the ceiling and said, “I think we might want to consider having that painted. It’s looking a little dingy.”
Jeezumcrow.
After getting Charlie situated in the back room on the divan, I flipped the front sign to Closed, with a small note letting people know we were having a staff meeting and would return in an hour. I also called Ben, asking him to get down here as soon as he could.
He, being the horn-dog he is (and isn’t that lovely?), said I’d recently had him in the bathroom and there was no way he could go again. But after an exasperated sigh, I told him what had happened, at least as far as I knew, and he immediately got serious. He’d be here any second.
When the sound of the front door crashing open reached Charlie and me in the back, I thought Ben was being a little melodramatic, but then Charlie was his friend, too. And I had run to him when I saw him on the floor.
But it wasn’t my hunka burnin’ love rounding the corner through the small vestibule between the front and the back. It was Debbie in full power mode. She pushed me aside before I could even consider moving. And she wasn’t exactly gentle about it.
I crashed into the wall, back first, and felt my stomach lurch. Yeck. I stayed there for a moment to catch my breath, only to have it whoosh out of me when Ben ran into the room. He took the scene in with one glance and rushed to me, hugging me so hard the breath left my body again.
Seriously, people, breathing is a necessity!
But I carefully extracted myself from Ben’s grasp to see if everything was okay on the divan.
Debbie was leaning over Charlie, patting his hand and cradling the back of his neck with her other hand. Her low tones made me strain to hear what she was saying. Once I heard the words clearly, I almost fell away in a dead faint.
“I told you it was a bad idea to work here,” she continued on in the same vein. “We’re going to find you another job. One where you don’t have to work with the one woman in town who everyone seems to have it out for. There has to be a safer place for you work than here with Ivy. Really.”
Before I could step in and tell her “over my dead body,” Charlie sat up. Actually it was more like a jack-knife up, but that’s semantics. Either way, he was up and talking before I could get the babble in my head to quiet down enough to form a coherent “Hell, no!”
“Not happening,” he said in this very manly voice ringing with finality. “I have a job to do here. One I love. I knew the risks when I came in. One little incident is not going to change my mind.” He brushed her hand aside from where she was essentially petting his cheek. Throwing his legs over the side of the divan, he straightened his back and his shirt, then gave me a smile.
Well, damn. Risks? Should I be offering combat pay or something? We sold costumes and lingerie, for heaven’s sake. He shouldn’t have had to weigh the risks of working at a costume shop. But I was so glad he had come down on the side of yes.
I ran to him and gave him a big hug.
He lost his breath this time but didn’t push me away until he was wheezing for air. “Okay, Ivy. It’s okay. I’m okay. If only you’d let go, I’d continue to be okay.”
I stepped back, embarrassed to be wiping a little tear from my eye. It felt like a very intimate moment until I remembered both Ben and Debbie were still here. I cleared my throat and surreptitiously (I still love that word, no matter how many times I use it) wiped at the lone tear.
“Okay, so you’re all right and we’ve had some excitement.” I brushed my hands against each other, then twisted my fingers together. “You want to tell me what happened?”
He looked at me, then at Ben, and then finally at Debbie. “Well…”
Chapter Twelve
Now was not the time for hesitation. Charlie couldn’t evade the whole telling thing. Besides, I had my doubts Debbie would let him move from his current position without explaining himself. The set of her jaw a
nd the way her hands seemed welded to her hips were a pretty clear indication she was about to become a rock of immovable proportions.
“Don’t even think about saying you want Ben and me to leave, buddy,” she said, her scowl growing fiercer. “Something happened to you, and I want to know what it is. I’m not leaving until you tell me.”
Sometimes it is so not a comfort to be right.
Just then, someone knocked on the front door. More like banged, since I could hear it all the way back here. I assumed Ben had called Debbie to let her know her boyfriend had been injured in some way, but who the hell else had he called? Or who had Debbie called? I did not want another parade in here.
“Go answer it and send them away,” Debbie said, never taking her eyes off Charlie. I still knew she was talking to me, though, since I didn’t think she wanted the injured one to move.
I didn’t need to be told what to do in my own shop. I opened my mouth to say those words, but instead out came, “Don’t start the story without me, Charlie. Please.” And then I ran for the front of the building to head off whoever thought the sign saying we were closed didn’t apply to them. I looked through the front window as I made my way across the sales floor. For some reason my vision felt a little off, because I could have sworn I saw Mark through the small opening. What in the world would he be doing here? And why now?
I had a decision to make here. I wasn’t sure what the right lesser of two evils really was. I could tell him to go away and risk pissing him off again, and in turn making Ben angry with me again. Or I could let him in, though that didn’t feel like the right decision either. What if he contaminated the crime scene, or some other detective jargon like that? I didn’t want Debbie to be angry at me, either.
Seriously, when was I going to stop having people throwing negative emotions at me all the time? I could have done with some positive reinforcement right about now. I could do with any reinforcement right now, to be honest.