Almost Always_Book 2

by Christie Ridgway

  Was testing required for the technicians at tanning salons? “You’re a student?”

  “Graduate work. Marine biology.” Then she cracked up. “You should see your face! I’m kidding. I’m in beauty school.”

  The young woman didn’t need to take classes for that, Jane thought. She was striking in that wide-mouthed, big-breasted way of women who were soap-opera actresses or models in Maxim magazine. “You visit Griffin often?”

  “It’s Party Central, y’know? My girlfriend’s boyfriend surfs with him, so we’ve all been hanging out here. He doesn’t seem to mind.”

  Which seemed to also verify he wasn’t hard at work on his manuscript. Figuring he’d had enough time to take care of the liquor delivery, Jane excused herself and went in search of him again. It took a few minutes to determine he wasn’t in the galley-style kitchen, any of the bedrooms, the bathrooms or even the garage that housed another gathering of partiers clustered around a table set up for beer pong. On her second search, she discovered that somehow he’d gotten past her and was now stretched out on a lounge in a corner of the deck, his eyes closed once again. His fingers were curled around a fresh bottle of beer.

  He might as well have been alone.

  Jane didn’t let that deter her. Instead, she dragged a molded plastic chair to his side and plunked herself onto its seat, tucking her wild hair behind her ears. Not a single male muscle twitched.

  With a huff, she sent him a pointed look, but that didn’t appear to pierce the bubble he’d erected around himself either. Though she supposed waiting him out would give her the upper hand, she didn’t have that kind of patience. His deadline was at stake. Her reputation.

  She huffed again. “Griffin.”

  Only his lips moved. “Honey-pie.”

  Her back teeth ground together. “Look, I’m here because you told your agent you were interested in someone helping you with your manuscript. That’s what I do.”

  When Griffin didn’t respond, she raised her voice. “I’m a book doctor,” she said. “My name is Jane.”

  That prodded him a little. His eyes opened a slit. They closed again as one corner of his mouth ticked up. “Of course it is.”

  She ignored his amused tone. It wasn’t an unusual reaction, after all. She looked like a Jane. Her brother Byron—as serious and renowned a scientist as their father—had the wild and dramatic appearance corresponding to his literary namesake. Her other overachieving brother, Phillip Marlowe Pearson, could pass for a hard-boiled detective, though as a medical researcher he was much more interested in running DNA tests than running down criminals. Just like them, her name matched her exterior. Her dishwater-blond hair, her pleasant but unremarkable features, her plain gray eyes all said—in a restrained, ladylike hush—Jane.

  If her mother hadn’t died when she was still an infant, Jane might have asked her why she hadn’t made a more exotic choice for her only daughter’s given name. Would she have looked different if she’d been called Daisy or Delilah?

  However, Jane had an inkling that Griffin Lowell would be attempting to ignore her even if she looked like Scheherazade. And the one who had stories to tell was the man on her left. “About your book…” she started.

  “I can’t talk about that at the moment,” he said.

  “Why? You don’t look busy.”

  His lashes remained resting on his cheeks. “I have guests.”

  “Who have found their diet cherry cola,” she pointed out, inexplicably annoyed as she glimpsed that particular woman at the other end of the deck. When she bent over to brush some sand off her calf, her bountiful chest nearly escaped its triangular fabric confines.

  “She doesn’t look like she needs to watch her weight, though, does she?” Eyes wide open now, he was looking in the same direction as Jane.

  “I wouldn’t care to opine,” she said.

  He snorted. “You even sound like a governess.”

  She smiled at him. Thinly. “All the better to get the job done.”

  “Yeah?” The picture of nonchalance, he folded his arms over his chest and crossed his legs at the ankle. “I think your luck would improve if you’d loosen up a little. Why don’t you go inside and track down a swimsuit. Pour yourself a drink. Then we’ll talk.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him, willing, for the moment, to play along. “And you’ll be right here when I return? I have your word on that?”

  His gaze slid off to the side. “Let’s make an appointment for next week.”

  As if. After meeting him and seeing the setup he had here, she was only more determined not to allow him another inch of wiggle room. His agent was right. The man was in serious denial. “You’ve got to get to work immediately, Griffin, or you won’t make your deadline. The first half of the book is due at the end of the month.”

  He ignored that, his gaze fastened on the label of the bottle in his hand. “Book doctor, huh? You know your way around vocabulary and grammar?”

  “Yes, though I do more than—”

  “So you really know your stuff?” he asked. “Can you spell humulus lupulus? Do you have a familiarity with Saccharomyces uvarum?”

  She held on to her patience. “Unless you’re writing a treatise on beer, specifically lagers, I don’t think either of those terms will come up.”

  He paused as if vaguely surprised, then he gave a slight shake of his head. “Fine. Let’s talk serial commas, then. Please state your views on their usage.”

  Really, the man could make a woman start to consider serial murder—beginning with him. “The serial comma, also known as the Oxford or Harvard comma, refers to the punctuation mark used before the final item in a list of three or more. It’s the standard in American English—”

  “According to who?” He bristled.

  “Whom,” she corrected. “And it’s according to The Chicago Manual of Style.”

  “But—”

  “Though that’s for nonjournalistic writing,” she went on, ignoring his interruption. “I’m aware reporters like yourself follow the AP Stylebook, which recommends leaving out the comma before a coordinating conjunction.”

  He was silent at that.

  She waited a beat. “Did I pass the test?”

  “Look.” He sounded exasperated. “I just want to be left alone.”

  She gazed around her, taking in the half-dressed beautiful beach people who were drinking his booze and crowding his deck as the sun slid toward the horizon. “Your need for solitude would be a bit more convincing if you weren’t surrounded by a crowd. If your guests didn’t call your place Party Central.”

  Something flashed in his eyes. “That’s none of your business.”

  Oops. Though clashes between herself and a stalled client were to be expected, downright hostility was not her friend. Jane scooched her chair closer, twisting it to face him. “Griffin…” she said and, like a good governess with a recalcitrant charge, put out a placating hand to touch his leg.

  Weird happened when fingers met shin. An electric spark snapped, a tingle shot up her arm, their gazes collided, veered away, crashed again. As yet another glow of heat radiated across her skin, she was paralyzed, still touching him, still staring at him. Confused, she couldn’t seem to pull away. Members of the opposite sex didn’t produce such strong physical reactions in her. She was above all that, she’d always assumed, her interest more in a man’s mind than in his…manliness.

  “Griff!” someone said in the distance, then became more insistent. “Griff!”

  “What?” He didn’t move. Their stares didn’t waver.

  “Sammy says he’s going to jump,” the voice answered.

  “Fine,” Griffin responded without emotion. “Tell him to watch the rocks.”

  “He says he’s going for the record. He says he’s going to beat you.”

  Griffin jerked. The movement broke Jane’s paralysis, and she snatched her hand from his leg. His head swung around to address the man who was standing right beside them. “What did you say
?”

  It was Beach Boy from the front door. Ted. He pointed to the bluff at the south end of the cove. Even from here, Jane could see a handful of men scrambling along a path up its side. “Sammy says he’s taking off from a spot five feet above your last leap.”

  Griffin glanced over his shoulder. “Sammy’s drunk.”

  Beach Boy’s curls bounced when he nodded. “It’s why he’s talking trash. But I think he means it. I think he’s going to outdo you this time.”

  “Outdo me? Like hell he will.” Griffin was already standing. Then he gripped the railing of the deck and swung himself over and onto the sand below. “Get your camera ready,” he advised the other man as he stripped off his shirt and ran toward the outcropping.

  Jane realized she’d spent too much time with English majors and MFAs. They preferred Frisbee golf and strolls through farmers’ markets. They didn’t splash through surf that rose to their knees and then ascend a steep hillside, the muscles in their backs shifting and their strong arms flexing as they reached for each handhold.

  They didn’t shout something indistinct and then hurl themselves off a jutting boulder into the roiling ocean.

  Several of Griffin’s party guests did just that, from various heights. Jane found herself holding her breath as each man launched himself into space. Her initial reaction could mostly be summed up by “Why?” but after the first couple of men made it back to shore, she could admit there was a certain…exuberance in the activity.

  Ultimately there were only two men left on the bluff. One, she guessed, was the drunken Sammy. The other was Griffin. They stood beside each other, the wind tugging at the legs of their shorts.

  “Griff should talk him out of it,” one of the partygoers lining the deck railing said. They all wore dark glasses or had their hands up to shade their eyes from the lowering sun. “He’ll have the record if he takes off from there, but Sammy’s just pickled enough not to realize that height means he has to jump farther outward into deeper water.”

  But if Griffin tried to talk sense into the other man, it apparently didn’t work. Those on the deck gasped in unison as Sammy bounded from the rock. The others followed his descent, but Jane kept her gaze on their host, who instantly scrambled even higher.

  “Is Griffin trying to get a better look at his friend?” she asked Beach Boy, who was still beside her.

  “No,” the dude said on a sigh, as Griffin stopped at a sharp nose of stone. “He’s upping the ante. Nobody’s ever attempted a jump from that height. It could be…” He didn’t finish, but the expression on his face did it for him.

  It could be dangerous.

  Appalled, Jane closed her eyes, squeezing them tight. Though she’d been concerned about her latest author’s uncooperative attitude and then his penchant for crowded beer bashes, she’d remained confident in her ability to help him mold his memoir. She’d been taught long ago that failure was not an option, after all. But clearly the task of aiding Griffin Lowell was going to be more complicated than mentioning deadlines and being available with red pen in hand.

  This man was more than a stalled writer. Clearly he was also an impulsive risk taker with an overblown competitive streak.

  Or a full-fledged death wish.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE TV WAS DRONING at a dull level when Griffin woke up, just as it did every morning. Without opening his eyes, he fumbled for the remote and edged the volume higher. It didn’t register whether the broadcast was news or cartoons or something in between, because it didn’t matter—the noise was only necessary to block out the voices in his head. He wasn’t schizophrenic, he was just hyper-memoried. They had the tendency to play in the background of his brain unless he supplanted them with the sound of twenty-four-hour news or hard-driving music or an alcohol-infused social gathering.

  Being Party Central had its benefits.

  And another man besides himself was reaping them, he realized as he made his way toward the kitchen a few minutes later. One of his surfing buddies, Ted, was sacked out on the living room floor, a beach towel thrown over him. In his hand, he clutched a bikini top.

  Griffin didn’t see a sign of the bottoms or the female body that the D-cups belonged to. He shrugged and prodded the guy’s shoulder with his flip-flop. “Hey.”

  Ted batted at the annoyance, thwapping the bikini strings against Griffin’s ankle. “It’s not a school day, Mom,” he murmured.

  Though Griffin could hear the television from here, Ted’s mutter sucked him straight to a sandbag-and-timber hooch in a remote northern valley of Afghanistan. Soldiers slept within inches of each other, and someone was always talking in their sleep. To their mom.

  Or to their demons.

  With a sharp shake of his head, he dislodged the thought and then jostled Ted again. “Kid.” The surfer was in the same age range as the nineteen-to-twenty-seven-year-olds with whom Griffin had spent his embedded year. Those young men had grown up fast. Griffin, at thirty-one, sometimes felt as if he was twice that after those three-hundred-sixty-five days.

  “Kid,” he said again. “Get up. Stretch out on the couch. Better yet, take a bed in one of the guest rooms.”

  Ted blinked and slowly rolled to a sitting position. He looked down at his naked chest, the beach towel and then the half a bathing suit tangled around his fingers. “Did I get lucky last night?”

  “Don’t know.”

  The other man lifted the fabric he held and stretched it between both hands. “I was dreaming about that librarian.”

  That librarian? Griffin tried not to scowl. Ted could only mean the small stubborn woman who’d arrived uninvited to the party. She was the only bookish female around last night. He’d done his best to ignore her, but she wasn’t easy to avoid, damn her pretty eyes. Jesus, now she had Griffin’s surf buddy thinking about her in his sleep!

  “You called her ‘Mom,’” he told Ted.

  “Nah. That was my second dream. In my first, you take her with you off the cliff, and her clothes sorta melt to nothing on the way down.”

  “Huh.” Griffin tried imagining it, but all he could picture was her mouth flapping at him. The mouth was pretty too, soft-looking. Tender. But it flapped all the same. You signed a contract. You’ve got to get to work.

  Ted looked from the bikini to Griffin. “Which reminds me. I took some good shots of your jump. And also of you pulling Sammy to shore. I think he drank as much seawater as beer last night.”

  “He puked up both.” Griffin felt guilty about it. He shouldn’t have let the guy take that leap. He’d tried reasoning with him, but he’d recognized the mulish light in his eyes. Griffin had never managed to talk his twin, Gage, out of anything when he looked like that. And Erica had worn that same intractable expression the last time they’d spoken.

  A warm furry body bumped against his knee, and he reached down to pet his dog, Private. “You need to go out?” he asked the black Lab. “Okay, I’ll let you take a turn in the garden before breakfast. But for God’s sake, stay off Old Man Monroe’s property. The last time you did your business there he threatened me with citizen’s arrest.”

  Private didn’t seem worried about their cantankerous neighbor or his owner’s fate, but just ambled through the back door, his craggy teeth in an anticipatory smile. As Griffin swung the paneled wood shut, a small blue espadrille placed itself in harm’s way.

  The canvas, embroidered with multicolored flowers, was attached to the librarian.

  Governess.

  Jane.

  He’d been so sure he’d gotten rid of her yesterday. After all, she’d been gone when he got back from his jump. “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked, using his body to block the opening.

  Her answer was to slip a venti-sized cup through the narrow gap, from a coffee place that was a twenty-minute car ride away. Crescent Cove’s isolated location meant you had to commute for your four-buck fix of fancy Seattle caffeine.

  “I thought you might like this.”

  He narr
owed his eyes at her. Her jeans were rolled at the ankle, and she wore a pale blue oxford shirt that seemed to leach the gray from her big eyes. They were as silvery as the morning overcast and looked a little spooky with her dark lashes surrounding them. Her mouth wasn’t scary, though. A rose-petal pink, it had the puffy, swollen look of one that had been kissed all night long.

  That was what was so arresting about her, he decided. It had caught his attention the day before too. Though she walked around all buttoned up, there was that contradiction of the making-out kind of mouth.

  It gave him this insane urge to check her for hickeys.

  Jane sent him a bright smile. “You look like a caramel macchiato kind of man to me,” she said. Then added, “With extra whip.”

  “Goodbye.” He didn’t give a damn about her toes.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” she cried, but her words turned muffled as he closed the door firmly between them.

  “I would have taken that caramel macchiato,” Ted complained, drifting into the kitchen.

  Griffin ignored the insistent knocking on the back door. “You don’t know this sort of woman like I do, Ted.” His instincts were on red alert, had been since he’d slipped off his eye patches to find her in his place. That silvery gaze had seemed to look right through him. He didn’t appreciate being that open. “You take her coffee, she takes your soul.”

  “I don’t know. She looks harmless to me.”

  “Her looks…” Griffin let the thought die off. He wasn’t going to get into Jane’s looks with Ted, who’d been dreaming of her naked. Griffin couldn’t really imagine there was anything interesting under those clothes she wore. He wouldn’t imagine there was anything interesting under there. She had the mouth, and the demands that came from it were all the reason he needed to pretend she didn’t exist.

  She’d stopped knocking.

  The relief he felt at that had him almost smiling at Ted. He clapped his hands together. “What are we going to do today?” The other man was a part-time county lifeguard. His leftover hours seemed to revolve around surfing and partying, both of which made him the perfect companion in Griffin’s eyes.