As she’d thought, he lived by his own rules, judging his conduct by some arcane code he kept to himself. No explanations, no defense, and let the chips fall where they might. By his private guidelines, he’d been wrong, and she could retaliate as she chose. He couldn’t have undercut her determination any more cleanly if he’d planned it.
Maybe he had. The idea insinuated itself into her brain. Going on her previous experiences with Detective Harlan, Molly decided she couldn’t put anything past him. He was devious, cunning and clever, too clever for her to keep up with. But like the truth she’d seen earlier in his eyes, she sensed a truth here, confusing though it was.
He really didn’t care whether she filed a complaint. He genuinely didn’t care if he lost his job. Regardless, he would stick to her like a burr on a dog until he knew who the killer was.
“So, Ms. Molly—” he arched his back “—are you going to make trouble for me?”
John Harlan was her enemy, but he was also her best hope for discovering the truth and saving herself. “I haven’t made up my mind yet.” But she had.
“Ah, you haven’t?” His shrewd smile disturbed her as he uncoiled from the chair and stood up. She had the oddest sense that he knew exactly what she was doing.
“No, but I’ll let you know what I decide,” Molly said in her best lady-of-the-manor voice, wanting to maintain any power she might have.
“Fine. In the meantime, give me that damned broom you’re waving around. You’re going to slice your feet open on all this damned glass.” He cracked another yawn. “You had yourself one hell of a temper tantrum, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” Molly wasn’t sure she could ever admit to anyone the degree to which she’d relished the crashing of glasses and banging of pots, but the contradictions she sensed in John Harlan told her he might be the one person in the world who could understand the wild anger that had spurred her as she’d whirled, out of control, through her kitchen.
She contemplated the floor. A pot had cracked off a corner of one of the tiles. “It’s worse than I remembered.”
Circling her waist with both hands, John Harlan lifted her easily onto the counter. “I’ll help clean up.”
“I’ll clean up my own messes, thank you, if you’ll just leave,” Molly mumbled. Embarrassed and uncomfortable, she slid off the counter, wincing as she braced her weight on her wounded hand. Before she could blink, she found herself settled back onto the counter, her hand in his.
He rubbed the wound with his thumb. “You should see your doctor about this.” He raised his eyebrow. “It’s deep. It could easily become infected.”
The hem of the robe flapped open, snagging on the bottom of his leather jacket. Carefully, he pulled the edges together, smoothing them down over her legs. His touch remained impersonal, but his quick intake of breath betrayed him.
“You confuse me, Detective.”
“Small wonder, Ms. Harris. I confuse myself at times. I reckon I’m having my own version of a mid-life crisis.” He patted her knee, but there was nothing sexual, nothing provocative in the light tap. Surveying the shards of glass on the floor and the sticky cocoa spots on the stove, he said, “Who’s been cleaning for you since you fired Camina?”
“Me.”
“Yeah?” He looked up at the high ceilings, the hall leading to the other rooms at the front of the house, the row of long windows. “It’s a big house. A lot for one person to keep up with.”
“Living by myself, I don’t have much clutter.”
“I reckon not.” He motioned to the kitchen, to her plain white robe. “No, you don’t look like a clutter-making woman, that’s for sure. Polished, no frills, stripped down for action like a racing machine. That’s you.”
Maybe he hadn’t meant the words to carry a second meaning, but they did, and Molly’s blood rushed to her face.
The bones in his face seemed to sharpen as he studied her, and all the banked energy and heat in his powerful body suddenly blazed forth. “I want you, you know,” he said casually, his tone as nonchalant as if he’d asked her for a glass of water. “And I’m ticked off with myself because I can’t forget the feel of your skin under my hands.” His palms seemed to shape the air in front of him and she shuddered. “So you see, you’ve already created a troubling situation for me.”
“What do you mean?” She whispered, afraid to disturb the delicate equilibrium of the moment, afraid to move in the face of his intensity.
“I can’t forget the taste of your mouth, Ms. Molly, that’s what I mean. And one taste isn’t enough, not by a long shot.”
The words hovered like early morning mist between them, just there. But she dropped her gaze, he swept the broom over a piece of shiny black glass that had been a soup bowl and the moment passed.
Something had changed between them, however, and she knew it.
The broom whisked a counterpoint to the rain beating against the shuttered windows. Glass tinkled as he swept it into the dust pan. He tossed his leather jacket next to her on the counter. The black leather, supple and expensive, smelled of cool air, rain and him, his elusive, masculine scent. Not cologne. Him.
His scent seduced her with a promise of darkness and a pleasure so intense it would border on pain. Against the spiraling tension in her abdomen, Molly drew her legs up onto the counter. She rubbed her arms where he’d held her. His scent lingered on her skin, rose to her. She knew her sheets would carry that faint scent. Like the cat that had wandered in during the night, rubbing against her legs, John Harlan had imprinted her with his scent.
Unlike the cat, though, the man would turn on her.
And the man wouldn’t be satisfied with a bowl of milk.
A line of sweat glued his T-shirt to his spine. As he squatted to sweep more glass into the dustpan, his unbelted jeans tightened over his butt. Muscles along his ribs ridged and flattened with his movements, and where the harness of his holster caught the side of his shirt, Molly glimpsed the corded muscles of his stomach, taut under his sleek, smooth skin.
Suddenly, as if the languorous sweep of her eyes had touched him, he looked at her.
Rocking on his heels, he considered her for a long moment, awareness growing in his darkening eyes with each quiet click of the clock on the microwave.
Neither of them had thought to turn on lights.
Against the windows and the side of the house, the rain beat a steady tattoo.
CHAPTER SIX
A gust of wind rattled the shutters.
John Harlan’s voice, low and rough, filled her ears. “I don’t like the situation any better than you do. But there’s something between us, whatever it is. We’re both adults, and if you’re honest, you’ll admit you’re as aware of me as I am of you. I’d like to think it’s a result of prolonged celibacy on my part. That’s what I’d like to believe, but you want to know something, Ms. Harris? Last night, out on your rickety old dock, I didn’t give two hoots in hell who you’d killed. And that’s why I have a problem. Because, like you said, I can’t give up until I track down Camina’s killer. It’s not in my nature.” He tilted his head. “If it turns out that you indeed killed her, and I haven’t been able to keep my hands off you, well, unlike being fired or taken off this damned case, that situation would present me with a…problem.”
She needed walls, doors, locks to give her breathing room, but she sought refuge in words, a pitiful substitute for locked doors. “You’ll have to exercise a bit of self-control, then, won’t you, Detective? Will you be able to manage that?”
He didn’t move, but she felt as if he’d crowded close to her and there was no room to back away.
If John Harlan really wanted to get to her, locked doors wouldn’t keep him out.
“I can. Can you?” He rose, his thighs bunching and flowing with his smooth movements.
Suddenly he was next to her, whipping a long strip of paper towels off the holder to her left and enclosing her in the triangle of his body. Lifting the faucet handle, he soaked the s
trip of paper, and his forearm, damp from the splashing water, bumped her knee.
“Of course I can.”
His comment had been a straightforward acknowledgment of the humming awareness of his body for hers, hers for his, and once more she found herself wondering what had happened during those lost hours the night before.
“Good. Neither of us will have a problem then.” His grim smile was a brief baring of his teeth as he turned and wiped the floor with the gray-printed paper towels. Sparkles of glass splinters shone against the paper as he wadded it up and opened the door under the sink to toss the paper into her waste basket. “You won’t cut your feet now.”
Molly kept her knees drawn up to her chin. She didn’t want any more accidental brushes against his lean form. She’d stay safe on the counter until he left.
His sideways glance as he took the dishrag and went to the stove acknowledged her protective posture. “Very cautious. Good for you. You might want to be even more cautious for a while.”
“What do you mean?”
With the burner grate in one hand, the soapy rag in the other, he faced her. “You’ve been so focused on convincing me that you didn’t kill Camina that you’ve ignored one or two points.”
Puzzled, Molly slid off the counter. “What?”
“It’s like this. Suppose, just for a second, that I’m convinced you didn’t murder her, okay?”
“All right.” Molly stooped to collect the pans in the far corner of the room, stacking them in her arms as she approached the cupboard. “Then my life returns to normal, whatever that is these days,” she added in an undertone that he caught.
“No. It doesn’t.” He stopped her with a grip on her elbow. “If you didn’t kill Camina, someone else did, someone who could have walked in right behind you the same way I did last night. You didn’t know I was there. Would you have known a killer was slipping along behind you? A killer who could have entered your house, stayed while you locked up behind him—or her?”
“Stop it,” Molly said as fear tiptoed up her spine and breathed ice down her neck. She’d already thought about everything he was saying, but hearing her thoughts spelled out in his even, factual tone gave credibility to her fears. “You’re scaring me.”
“Think about it, Ms. Harris. Locks keep things out. But not if you swing the door wide open and wander off. And you’ve done that at least once. I saw you. I saw you lock up behind yourself and go to bed—oh, not to sleep. You didn’t shut your eyes for quite a while after you lay down. But you didn’t know I was here, searching through your house, did you?”
“No.” Ice settled in her stomach.
“While you were—well, whatever you were, sleeping, unconscious, doped up, whatever—I could have done anything. I could have smeared blood on your walls—someone did, you know. I could have carried you downstairs and left you here on your floor. Anything could have happened last night, Ms. Harris. Anything.”
She fastened on the thought that had sustained her earlier. “But you’re still here,” she argued. “That’s why all the bolts and locks are fastened. If you’d left, one of the doors—or windows—would be unlocked!”
“Think so? People have been able to lock doors behind them. In some cases.” His voice had dropped so low and gone so soft that it rasped over her nerve endings like a sandy velvet glove, raising the hairs on her arms.
“I know so! People don’t pass through locked doors and windows. Not this kind of lock.” She hugged her arms to herself. “Not in a world that makes sense, not in a world that’s rational!”
“Ah, that’s the point, isn’t it? What if this isn’t a rational world? What if there are—” he searched for a word, lifted one shoulder and continued “—things, unlike magician’s tricks, that can’t be explained rationally? What then, Ms. Harris?”
“If I left this house the night Camina was murdered, no one came in behind me and left,” Molly insisted stubbornly. “No one could have. Not without leaving a door or window unlocked, not without some sign that he—or she—had been here.”
“If I accept that, Ms. Harris, and if the blood on the knife handle turns out to be Camina’s, that leaves me, and you, with only one or two possible conclusions, doesn’t it?” His grip tightened on her elbows.
She knew. At some level, she’d known from the first. “Either I killed her, or I saw who did and don’t remember what I saw.”
“Excellent. You get an A for the quick course in crime investigation, Ms. Harris. Murderer? Or next victim? Which conclusion do you prefer?”
“Oh, God,” she said, wrapping her arms tighter around herself. She’d thought she might be mad, might be a murderer, but she’d never considered the idea that she, too, might be a potential victim. “I have to think. I have to figure this out! Oh, God.”
“I hope that’s a prayer, Ms. Harris, because I think you’re going to need all the help you can get.” He dropped his arms. “Lots of help. Unless you decide that maybe the world isn’t so rational and that I—or someone else—can enter and leave your house at will. Do you find that you like that choice better, Ms. Harris?” Anger scoured his face. “Which is it—the lady or the tiger? Or the demon that walks by night?”
Hours after he’d left, his words still echoed in her mind. He’d made her go through her house, door by door, window by window, examining every possible entrance until they were both short fused and spider webs from the attic turned her pajamas gray.
Once, in the pantry off the kitchen, he’d stopped, the rigid line of his back making her uneasy as he’d stayed motionless, head tilted, looking around the small, old-fashioned room. Canned peaches and tomatoes, boxes of cereal and pasta, packages of sugar and flour, bottles of olive oil and Ovaltine neatly lined the white plastic racks on either side of the chest-high window streaked with rain. He brushed his hand across the bottles and packages, the cans, the lock with its bubbled-up layers of paint and rust. He rubbed flecks of old paint between his fingers.
“What is it?” she’d said, unnerved by his stiff movements. Like him, she stared at the homely array of supplies, the bin of onions.
“I don’t know. Something. Nothing, I reckon.” He took a deep breath, and the rainy light, dim in the confined space, shimmered over him, blurring him for a moment as she watched. “Has this always been a pantry? Was it ever an entry porch that was later enclosed? Perhaps remodeled?”
“No.” Molly traced a line of raindrops down to the corner of the window. Lifting her finger, she concentrated on another rivulet of drops merging, slipping down the cool pane.
“Are you sure?”
In the distance, thunder rumbled, mingled with the sound of rain spattering against the window, echoed her thudding pulse. “It’s always been a pantry. I put in new shelves, painted it again, that’s all.”
“You did the work?” He turned in a slow, deliberate 360 degrees. Air stirred around them with his movement, carried his slightly astringent scent to her.
“Reid helped. He and I painted the kitchen together, but he had to get back to the ranch before we finished this room.”
“The ranch?” Harlan touched a line of raindrops next to her finger. “That’s where he is now?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “He stays down there. The will split the estate evenly. He got the ranch and the farm in Costa Rica. I have this house and the investments.”
“How often do you see him?”
“When he can get away. Not often. He’s busy.”
Next to hers, his finger trailed down the window, matching her movements as the streaks of rain merged, separated, merged one last time, leaving his fingertip briefly joined to hers. Her finger burned. Heat ran up her arm, up her neck, burned in her lips.
Molly dropped her hand.
“Why didn’t you sell this house instead of staying here alone?” He flattened his palm against the window as she moved away. His broad hand and long fingers covered one of the panes, darkening the room as if a figure had stepped between her and the light.
“I might. Eventually. When I’m ready.”
When he left, walking out of sight and disappearing down the driveway to wherever he’d parked, Molly stayed at the door, listening to the sound of his car as the engine coughed and fired, waiting until the reverberation died away in the distance. She’d wanted to walk out the door behind him, follow him to town, seek out lights and people.
She didn’t want to be by herself in the silent house. Molly twisted the tie of her robe around and around her little finger. When she let it fall, it unwound in loose spirals, like the end of the yellow crime-scene tape blowing across her yard.
With his matter-of-fact statements, John Harlan had given her a framework for her scattered thoughts. As if he’d twisted the focus knob on a microscope, everything jumped into clarity. Murderer or next victim?
Or something else entirely?
She didn’t believe in demons.
She had no intention of becoming a victim.
The rain dripped steadily onto the gallery in front of her and onto the closed blossoms of the hibiscus hedge lining the driveway.
The wind had risen by the time she parked in the open lot in front of the medical building Paul shared with a group of three other dentists, a plastic surgeon, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, an obstetrician and the group’s pharmacy. Set back from the road, the medical center’s discreet and very expensive sign swung on its chains.
Under the banyans and live oaks ringing the parking lot, puddles shivered like crumpled foil in the wind, their surfaces flickering with light and clouds. Each office fronted onto the wide colonnade that circled the building. Curved, brick-red tiles topped the elegant, cream-colored columns. Leaves plastered the slick roof tiles and clumped in sodden piles at the bottom of the rain gutters, where steady streams of water flowed into the parking lot. Leading from the area, a portico lined with four-feet-high clay pots holding Ficus trees and low planters filled with vines and geraniums offered a gracious and reassuring entrance to the colonnade.
Hurrying through the puddles, Molly tried to steady her umbrella against the wind whipping it out of her grasp. She’d always thought that the building’s quiet stateliness was as good as an anesthetic for Paul’s patients. The heavy plantings and careful landscaping blocked the sounds of cars and passersby. Once in the colonnade, patients were screened from view, thus assuring privacy, whatever the medical services needed.
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