CHAPTER NINE
“So, boys and girls, is our chow ready?” Reid stepped off the bottom stair and ducked under the cross beam, resting his arms on it as he surveyed the room.
“Yes.” Stepping away from Harlan, Molly turned to her twin. In the alcove between the hall and the kitchen, the light threw shadows over Reid’s face. Was his expression a little calculating, a little too studied? She wanted to run over to her twin, throw her arms around him and tell him the horrible notions John Harlan had planted in her brain.
She didn’t. Checked as strongly as if the detective were still gripping her arm tightly with his agile, narrow fingers, she couldn’t move. The overhead light played across Reid’s familiar, beloved features. Her brother.
Reid took a step forward and the light angled obscurely across his face, casting it half in shadow, transforming her twin, her psychic link, into a stranger.
Molly didn’t like the way Harlan was altering her vision of the people around her. Making a sudden decision to ignore his influence, she contracted her muscles to move toward her brother.
The thought hadn’t found completion in motion before Harlan was behind her, so close that his knee pressed the back of her thigh, that small point of body contact an insistent heat that arrowed upward through her and kept her motionless.
“Did I miss something?” The air circulating from the fan ruffled Reid’s wet hair, lifted the brown ends turned dark with water. His grin was lighthearted, his gaze shifting from Harlan to her and back to Harlan, speculation gleaming in his light blue eyes. “Anything important happen while I was showering?”
“No,” Molly said, not moving.
“Could have fooled me. Sure looks like I interrupted a mighty important conference.” He ran his hands over his wet hair. Water flew and his arms sent long, spidery shadows creeping across the kitchen floor.
Reid would never harm her. He loved her as much as she loved him. And he had no more reason to kill Camina than she did. He certainly had no motive to kill their parents. Molly gasped. The idea was appalling, beyond belief.
“No, Reid, you didn’t miss anything. Detective Harlan was telling me he couldn’t stay for supper.” She pivoted toward him, severing their physical contact. “I’m sorry your beeper interrupted us. Reid was right, after all, Detective. You do have more important things to do. Maybe another time.”
“Don’t forget—”
She interrupted him. “I’ll think about what you said.”
And she’d think about the way he’d kissed her, too. Her mouth still ached. Maybe she was lucky she didn’t remember the encounter with him at the bayou. There had been power and hunger in the quick way he’d taken her mouth, something desperate in the hard pressure of his body against hers.
She tasted the loneliness she’d only sensed earlier, a loneliness so all-consuming it had rushed like a wave over her, engulfing her, sweeping her to a barren plain on the near side of a chasm too wide to be bridged. And he was on the other side, reaching out, calling to her with the touch of his body in a language she didn’t understand.
She understood the hunger, though, and she’d recognized the latent power in John Harlan before she’d let him through her door the first time.
Recognized it and feared it. Because he was a policeman and because…
Because there would be no holding back with a man like him.
He had lifted his head, releasing her, and as he did, she traced the corded muscles of his stomach, suddenly needing to be closer, yearning—oh, it had been only for that brief, immeasurable second—but yearning to throw him a rope across the abyss.
Instinctively she recognized that marriage to Paul had not prepared her for a man like John Harlan. Compared with Paul’s pastel blues and greens, Harlan was Chinese red and ebony.
She went to the kitchen door and unlocked it. “I’m sure I’ll hear from you.”
He rested his hand against the door. “You will.” He opened it. The moon, waxing full and silver, shone over his shoulder. Harlan’s eyes darkened, the gold deepening and glowing as he looked at her. He wanted to stay.
During the night when she couldn’t sleep, she would remember his loneliness, remember his unspoken appeal.
Interrupting the moment, Reid walked quickly to the counter and picked up the bowl. He pulled out a sauce-covered strand of pasta and swallowed it. “Can we eat?” he asked plaintively as he carried the bowl to the table.
“Eat,” Harlan said, never looking at Reid. “I’m leaving. As your sister said, I have business, and I find I’ve lost my appetite for spaghetti.” He looked edgy and uncomfortable. “Besides, I’d hate to disrupt a family reunion.” Glancing over his shoulder, he frowned and rubbed the back of his neck.
Reid yanked a tray of ice from the freezer. “Whatever. But I’m not waiting any longer, folks.” He popped the lever on the tray and plopped ice cubes into a tall glass. “Got anything worth drinking, Sissy?”
Distracted by Harlan’s reaction, Molly murmured, “Look in the pantry.”
With the metal cube divider in one hand, Reid shook his head. “Not unless I know where the beast of the bayou is. I last saw him skulking around your room, Sis. Did he come back down here?”
“No.” Molly opened the door wider, silently urging Harlan to leave. With him on one side of her, Reid on the other, she was pulled, her attention split in some fashion between the two men. “Is there anything else, Detective?”
Reid opened the pantry door and disappeared behind it.
“Molly—” Harlan’s voice lowered to a rasp “—lock the door behind me.” He shot a glance toward the pantry. “And lock your bedroom door, hear?”
His voice sandpapered her skin. “I’ll do what I have to do,” Molly said, despising what he was suggesting.
Rough and fast, he added, “Tomorrow, get a portable phone.”
She nodded. “I will. It’s a good idea.” She wouldn’t be isolated if the lines were cut. “Good night, Detective.”
For half a second, indecision flashed across his face and he tapped the edge of the door. Molly thought he might not leave after all, but he ran his finger along the dangling chain, nodded abruptly and departed.
Clicking the locks behind him, Molly unaccountably wished he had stayed. The chain was warm from his fleeting touch.
After Harlan left, the room seemed to expand, Reid appearing small and far-off, as if she had turned a telescope around to look at him. Like a thin gray mist, Detective Harlan’s presence hovered between her and her brother, tainting her joy at having him home.
Catching up on Reid’s news and filling him in on what had been happening took less time than she’d expected. They were both too tired by then to be coherent, and conversation went in spurts and non sequiturs. It was good to have him home, but she wondered why she’d stood at the doorway and listened to Detective Harlan’s quiet footsteps cross her veranda, why she’d waited for the rumble of his car’s engine before she’d gone to sit with Reid.
Shoving strands of spaghetti around his plate, Reid finally swallowed one last bite, said, “Sorry,” and gave in to exhaustion, leaving her to clean up. She heard him moving around restlessly in his room for a long time before he fell asleep.
She took the Luger out of the waste basket where she’d shoved it after Reid and Harlan had left her alone to cook.
Molly didn’t forget to check the locks before she went upstairs, and, although she made a face at her paranoia, she left all the lights on behind her.
When she reached her room, the cat was curled at the end of her bed, his unwinking gaze watching the head of the staircase. He stretched as she entered, arched his back and settled down, folding his front paws under his massive chest. His eyelids drooped to half-mast as he stared at her with the same sleepy-lidded gaze Harlan had fixed on her in her predawn kitchen.
The cat’s intention to stay exactly where he was couldn’t have been clearer if he’d spoken out loud. It was fine with her, as long as he didn’t leave
her room and decide to confront Reid.
For the first time in months, Molly shut her bedroom door and locked it.
She knew cats. She’d had a tiny gray female once, Ms. Riffraff, who flushed the toilet in the middle of the night until Molly would give in and play with her. “You wouldn’t have any trouble flipping the doorknob until you opened it, would you, buster?” She told herself she was locking the door because there was no reason to have Reid throw a conniption fit if the cat decided to leave the bedroom before morning.
“You’ll be fine for three or four hours, won’t you? No urge to be a midnight rambler? I promise I’ll let you out if you ask, okay?”
Coiling his tail around himself, the cat closed one golden eye, then the other, and rested his head on his folded paws.
She stuck the gun under the edge of the bed, the edge that faced her door, and crawled under her covers.
During the hours before morning, he worked his way up her bed. Drifting on the edge of sleep but not finding it, Molly faced her locked door, her knees drawn up to her chest. When she thought she’d never fall asleep and was ready to go downstairs to heat a cup of milk, the cat padded close to her, circling her and nudging her gently but insistently until she shifted and made room for him in the cove between her knees and chest. Kneading her hip, his broad paws flexing and pushing, he finally settled, curling up to her with his long, lithe spine a comforting weight against her.
Molly wrapped her arm around him and went to sleep, surrendering at last to the cape of her demon lover.
And she dreamed, oh, she dreamed such wonderful dreams. Safe and unafraid, she wandered down golden halls that led somewhere, somewhere she yearned to be. With the brush of a finger, she pushed open shimmering glass doors to sunshine and star shine and heat, a heat that coiled through her, around her, melting like liquid gold into the cells of her blood, dissolving her bones and beating in the pulse of her wrists, her neck, her heart until she thought she would die of the wonder and the ecstasy of the slow thrumming running through her, through her, pulsing.
Nahual. In his grandmother’s voice, the word wove through his sleep. Nahual, she’d said, over and over. Harlan stirred, tossing the light sheet off his sweat-glazed skin, and slept, a moan caught buried in his throat. Nahual.
When Molly woke up, the cat was facing her. His eyes were open, their golden gaze fixed on her, his silent purr vibrating against her breasts. His hooked nose was under her wrist, against the slash in her palm. As she opened her eyes, he tapped her chin with a paw, once, and waited.
Molly scratched his chin and patted him from head to tail. His body rumbled under her stroking. Not too hard, she thought ruefully, to understand the source of her dreams. “That’s enough for now, buster. I have things to do, places to go, a phone to buy.” Certainty ran deep and strong in her that she hadn’t been wandering through her house last night.
A line of sunshine showed under the edge of her door as she stretched lazily, dislodging him. He gave a low chirrup of protest and stalked disdainfully to the door. Rising on his back legs, he smacked the doorknob and looked back at her. The knob rattled as he banged it a second time.
“Hush up, you fool. You want to wake Reid?” Molly climbed out of bed, yawning. The wound on her hand no longer hurt, she felt great and the world outside her window gleamed and sparkled.
But Reid had already left. On the table, his note anchored under an egg-yolk-sticky plate explained that he’d knocked on her door, she hadn’t answered and he hadn’t wanted to wake her up. He’d try to finish his negotiations and stop back before he returned to the ranch. He’d scrawled “love ya, Sissy” across the bottom of the paper.
The sun rising over the bayou blinded her. Reid had opened the shutters. The dead bolt on the kitchen door was thrown and above it, the chain dangled from the second lock. Well, that was Reid for you. At least he’d closed the door after him and its push lock was in. Molly threw open the wooden door and stood at the screen. The cat wound between her legs, bumping her calves and making a pest of himself until she opened it. He sat upright at the edge of the door and flicked his tail when she gave him an encouraging shove forward.
He tilted his head, and the look he sent her was, at best, condescending.
Molly laughed. “Beast. Who crowned you king?”
From the veranda down to the bayou, the lawn was a brilliant green in the sun. Even the tag end of the crime-scene ribbon lost its power in all the bright sunshine and color. Yellow hibiscus, purple hydrangeas, pink morning glory—color everywhere catching her eye and filling her with delight after days of endless rain.
Her toes curled with pleasure.
The cat made up his mind, licked his paw and sauntered down the gallery steps to the lawn. The hedge along the driveway swallowed his lean, muscular form.
During that first day of sunshine, Molly half-expected Harlan to arrive with an arrest warrant. When he didn’t, she went about her errands. She wrote lists, she made phone calls and she bought a portable phone. She set up appointments with her customers, she bought groceries and she bought a 20-pound bag of dry cat food.
It was the best day she’d had in months.
When the sun dropped behind the horizon, leaving streaky pinks and greens against the sky, though, she went inside and banged her shutters tight against the windows.
Harlan phoned her while she was eating a grilled-cheese sandwich and told her that the lab reports weren’t in yet and wouldn’t be for a few days.
“Did you buy a portable?” Over the phone his Florida drawl was more noticeable, its sand buzzing in her ear and prickling down her spine.
“I hate to give you the satisfaction, but, yes, I did.”
“Good. That was smart.”
“Oh, thanks,” she said, pulling a string of cheese from the bread. “Golly, I’m so glad I have big, strong you to help lil’ old me.” The sarcasm slipped out, the result of too much sun and sleep and dreams. And, maybe, the result of the way he’d kissed her. It was sarcasm that bordered on flirtation and she flushed as she realized what she was doing.
“Smart mouth.”
Molly thought of how he’d made her mouth tingle, and she couldn’t answer him, bravado fleeing before the knowing in his gritty voice.
“You there, Ms. Harris?” At his end of the line phones rang in the background, and he raised his voice when she didn’t respond. “Not going to play?”
Sitting straight in her chair, she poked her finger through the sandwich. “Was there anything you wanted, Detective?” She made her voice as prissy as her Sunday-school teacher’s had been.
“Ms. Harris,” he chided, amusement running like honey over the grit of his voice, making it smooth and golden, “you have a way of walking right into these little double entendres, but you don’t really want me to answer that question, do you?”
The wire hummed between them, and Molly shifted on her seat.
“I could answer you.” Amusement vanished. “There are a lot of things I want. Taking you to bed is one of them. But you already know that.” He tapped a pencil against the receiver, its rhythmic drumming continuing as he talked. “Ms. Harris, most of the things I want, I can’t have. That’s life, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” She placed her knife and fork at right angles on her plate.
“You there by yourself?” Tap, tap. Pause.
“Yes.”
Tap.
Loneliness washed back and forth between them in those humming moments.
“I saw Reid leave.”
“You did?” She jostled her plate and the flatware slid to the table. “Why?”
“Why did he leave? Why did I see him? Which do you want to know?”
“Were you here when he left? Did you talk to him?” She hadn’t heard Harlan’s car. Her room fronted the driveway, and even with her windows closed, she should have heard him driving up.
“I don’t know why he left. I know what he told me last night. Perhaps he was telling me the truth, but I didn�
��t follow him to the cabin, so I can’t say for sure. I didn’t talk to him this morning because he didn’t see me. I…” he paused “…wanted to take another look at the dock, and morning seemed like a good time. Before I got tied up with paperwork. And if you’re wondering, he left around six. In a rental car.” Tap.
“You make it sound like a report.”
“It is. That’s what I’m doing. Typing and taking notes. Ms. Harris,” he said, his manner becoming more formal, “I need to ask you a question that’s probably going to make you slam the phone down in my ear. So let me get it out before you hang up, okay? And if you can bring yourself to tell me the answer, you’d save me a trip to the courthouse tomorrow. Could you find it in your heart to do that? I surely would appreciate it.”
“Go ahead.” Every time she let down her guard, he zipped in with the real point, drew blood and was gone. She sighed. “But drop the good-ol’-boy routine.”
“Of course.” A file drawer slammed, metallic and heavy.
“I’m waiting.”
“Did you make a will after your parents died?”
“Me?” Molly stood up and walked to the kitchen window over the sink. The cord trailed behind her, tautened as she crossed the kitchen, went slack, its coils pulling together, as she paced back. “I already had a will. I didn’t need a new one.”
“Hold your horses for a sec, okay?”
“All right.”
Quickly, his words rushed over the line. “Who’s your beneficiary?” Tap. Tap. Tap.
“You don’t pull any punches, do you?”
“I can’t.”
“Are you suspicious of everyone you know, Detective? Don’t you trust anyone? Not even people you love?” She wasn’t angry, merely curious. After all, he’d told her not to trust anyone, not to trust him.
A phone rang in the background. Someone yelled, and Harlan answered her. “Yes, I suspect everyone. Even my friends. My family.”
“That makes for a lonely life.” She thought she understood a little of what his life must be like.
Lover in the Shadows Page 16