“I’m used to it.”
Molly didn’t think so. She’d been overwhelmed by the desolation behind his hungry kiss. “Are you?”
She waited for him to answer, but he didn’t.
He zigged back to his question, ignoring her comment. “So who did you name in your original will?”
“Paul. Reid. My cousin in Texas, Susie Warrin. A bequest to Camina.” She swallowed. “A charity.”
“But you and Dr. Bouler had divorced before your parents’ death. Didn’t you need to update your will to include your inheritance from them?”
Molly twirled the cord around her fingers. Why hadn’t she changed her will? “I can’t remember what I was thinking back then, Detective. Paul and I divorced. Too much happened all at once after that, and I guess I didn’t think it was important to make a new will. For whatever reason, I didn’t change it.”
“Perhaps you should think about updating it, Ms. Harris. You’re a reasonably wealthy woman now. What with one thing and another.”
“You may be right,” Molly said slowly, “but it would be basically the same. Maybe more to the charity. I don’t know. Reid is all the real family I have left, and Paul is still my best friend. Susie and I haven’t seen each other in a couple of years, but she’s my father’s brother’s daughter. That counts for something. Who else do I have? It’s only money. It’s not important.” She thought of Camina and the earrings.
“It’s not important unless you need it, Ms. Harris,” Harlan returned softly. “Perhaps you need to think about who needs money.”
“Only Camina.” All the sweetness of the day was seeping out of her.
“Are you sure about that?”
“Paul has buckets of money. He’s so busy he can’t keep up with his schedule. Reid has all kinds of investors interested in his projects in Costa Rica, and the ranch supports itself. He sure doesn’t need money.”
“Ahh.” His sigh was long and drawn out. “Well. It’s been a long three days. Thanks.” His indrawn breath was a mere hiss of sound along the wire. “I really expected you to hang up, you know.”
“Yesterday I would have.” Her admission was painful. She didn’t enjoy thinking about Reid or Paul or Susie in the same breath with greed strong enough to drive someone to murder. “You sure you don’t want the name of the charity?” She managed a laugh. “Maybe someone on the board of the hospital has been shuffling numbers, running two sets of books. Anything’s possible in your world.”
“Well, in fact, it is. People have committed murder for money, for reputation, for territory. The name of the charity was my next question. I’ll send Ross to the hospital on a fact-finding mission.”
“I wish you wouldn’t.” Molly leaned over the sink and adjusted the bottom of the shutter.
At the far end of the gallery she thought she saw something moving. The cat. She pressed the shutter tight and walked back across the kitchen. Leaning against the counter holding the microwave, she faced the bayou.
“I know. But it’s my job. Speaking of which, Ms. Harris, you were very tricky last night. You thought fast, getting your brother and me out of the kitchen. I didn’t expect you to react that quickly. I meant to take your gun with me, you know.”
“That’s what I thought.” Molly tried to disguise the smugness in her voice.
“Proud of yourself, are you?”
“A little.” She grinned.
“Don’t get overconfident. You hid it, and if I’d had time to look, I would have checked—let me see…” He was teasing her. “Oh, I would have checked that wastebasket under your sink first.” When she kept silent, he added, “Gotcha.”
“Why didn’t you ask about it before you left? I was surprised you didn’t.” Molly took her dish and utensils to the sink and rinsed them, stacked them neatly in the dishwasher.
She was enjoying talking with Harlan. She could handle him over the phone. All that intimidating presence was muted by the distance—except for the sly way the sound of his voice sort of rumbled through her, buzzing across her skin and inside her, way, way down in her innermost self.
His answer was a long time coming, and while she waited, Molly realized she didn’t want him to hang up.
“That’s a good question, Ms. Harris. I don’t know why I didn’t mention the gun in front of your brother. The human mind doesn’t always work rationally. But then, you’re the one who doesn’t believe in an irrational world, aren’t you?”
“And you do?”
“Oh, yes, Ms. Harris. I most emphatically do,” he said, and hung up.
As the week passed, each day filled with sunshine, Molly permitted herself to believe that her life would right itself. Harlan called her every day. He said he was calling to keep her up to date on the investigation, but their conversations, if that was what they were—she herself thought that they were an elaborate minuet of approach and retreat—never lasted more than ten minutes.
She let the cat in every night and out every morning. Most of the time the animal slept at the foot of her bed, his large presence facing the stairwell, keeping watch over her.
Sometimes she slept, sometimes not. When she couldn’t, she walked through the upstairs halls, peering through the shutters at the world outside her house.
In that night world made silver by the waxing moon, she sometimes saw the shape of John Harlan walking around the perimeter of her property. His shadow blended and merged with the hedges, the trees, the corners of her lower gallery. He never rang her doorbell. He never knocked on the kitchen door and demanded entrance.
But she saw him.
And once, as she moved the shutter in Reid’s room, Harlan was walking up from the bayou and looked up sharply, his gaze drawn to the flick of the shutter and to her, caught between shutter and glass.
He moved closer, smoke in the moonlight, his dark form growing larger, his black shirt and pants and hair fading into the night. He stopped at the foot of the veranda.
The moon touched his pale face and left a silver glow that glittered in his eyes. He raised his hand slowly, so slowly that she couldn’t take her eyes from him, and with his palm toward her, he swayed his hand, outlining the shape of her in the window, moving his palm from her throat all the way down the center of her body.
Before she knew what she was doing, she pressed against the window, laid her hot cheek against the cool glass. Her white satin nightshirt was heavy on her skin, heavy over the heat of her blood roaring through her body and turning, like the tides to the moon, to him.
And the glitter of the moon in his eyes was the glitter of an increasing hunger that found its echo in her.
Silver and gold filled her sleep that night as she followed him in dreams, wandering through the gleaming halls behind him, his black shape vanishing and reappearing behind glittering glass, never close enough to touch, yet drawing her on.
Molly woke the next morning aching, aching as she had never ached and burned for anyone. She was feverish with need.
All day she raced from appointment to appointment, her body driving her into movement, and she found no ease for the fever that burned in her, filled her lips, swelled her breasts until they hurt.
She would have thought she was coming down with the flu, but she knew better. There was no cure for the fever that burned her to the bone.
On the fourth day, at noon, on a miracle of a Florida winter day, he came to her house with Ross Whittaker.
The low-slung sports car rumbled slowly up her driveway, and she heard it before she saw it. As he had that first time, he came to the front door and rang the doorbell. When she opened the door, she noticed his rigid posture, the silver-rimmed sunglasses masking his eyes. A thin silver watch on his wrist caught the sunlight.
“Detective?”
“Ms. Harris.” He tipped his head. Sunlight was lost in the darkness of his hair and clothes.
She needed to see his eyes. If she could see his eyes, she would know if he were going to arrest her. She gripped the door and wait
ed. “What is it?”
He hesitated. He was ill at ease. “There’s a problem. At your brother’s river cabin.”
She couldn’t begin to fathom what he meant. “Problem?” She shook her head. “What kind of problem?” She peered around him. “Is Reid with you?”
“No.” Harlan placed his hand over hers. “The cabin’s burned to the ground. We think your brother was inside when the fire started.”
“An accident?” she whispered, pleading for the only explanation possible in a rational world.
Keeping her grounded with his touch, he shook his head and shoved his glasses to the top of his head with his free hand. She’d thought it would help her to see his eyes. It made everything worse. “Someone was smoking and fell asleep?”
“No. The fire was set. It—” he touched his glasses, started to lower them, left them where they were “—was arson. Kerosene. Accelerants. It burned for thirty-six hours. There’s not much left of the building—some beams on top of the rubble. Where the ceiling crashed.”
“I don’t believe it. Reid must have left. He couldn’t have been inside!”
“Have you heard from him? Has he come back home at any time since he left?”
“You know he hasn’t been here. He hasn’t called me.”
“Oh.” Harlan touched his sunglasses.
“Someone could have broken into the cabin after Reid and his investors left.”
“That’s possible. Except his rental car is in the shed.”
Reid could have taken off and changed plans without telling her. He was thirty-four; he’d been used to functioning independently since he was thirteen and in military school. He might even have cancelled his meeting at the last minute. He wouldn’t have told her if he had. “Reid doesn’t give me his itinerary, Detective. He could have left with one of his friends. Maybe that’s why he left his car behind.” Her voice shook.
“We don’t know who he was meeting there, so it’s possible he left with one of his investors and intended to return for his car. We don’t know for sure about Reid, but the investigators have found torso fragments, some longer bone fragments. Someone was in the cabin. It may not have been Reid. We’ll know when the investigators finish. We’ve called in a forensic odontologist to help sift through the rubble. If any teeth are left after a fire this intense, we may get an identification that way.”
She wouldn’t accept that Reid, her twin, could have met disaster and she didn’t sense it. She couldn’t accept that Reid, with all his energy and enthusiasm, was gone, and that she’d never see him again. She couldn’t accept that the last memory of her brother she’d have would be that scrawled, “love ya, Sissy.”
The world couldn’t be that cruel. Life wasn’t that irrational.
CHAPTER TEN
“We’ll be there in a few minutes, Ms. Harris. Hang on.” Harlan whipped the wheel to the left and spun it back to the right, skirting a tree limb.
“You all right?” He steadied the car.
“Fine, thank you.”
“Yeah? Could’ve fooled me.” He shot her a quick look.
Maybe she only imagined the narrow-eyed look behind his silver-rimmed sunglasses.
Sitting tensely beside him as he drove the unmarked beige four-door, Molly tried to shut out her awareness of his frequent glances in her direction.
With each glance he crowded and confused her.
She was angry with herself for being aware of him, angry with him for riffling her nerve ends until she was vibrating inside, her emotions twanging and clanging to his glances, to his touch, until she wanted to lash out at him and tell him to leave her alone and let her grieve for her brother.
Since the day John Harlan had rung her doorbell, her emotions had played crack-the-whip with her, and she’d been the tail end, cracking back and forth, hanging on for all she was worth while her hands slipped free and she whirled crazily into the unknown.
He’d been one step ahead of her from the first minute she’d met him. From the beginning, she’d been driven to throw up walls against him, to resist him. She’d wanted to shield her thoughts, her feelings, her…Balancing her arm on the car door, she shaded her eyes.
She needed privacy to collect her thoughts and emotions.
Harlan saw too much. He understood more about her than she wanted him to.
He understood how close she’d come that night to running down to him. If he’d lifted his hand to motion her forward, she would have walked right out of her house and across the moonlit lawn to him.
Emotions dormant for too long had burst forth, going wild, and she’d felt alive, alive for the first time in…She took a deep breath. Maybe she’d never felt that alive, that frantic with need.
She couldn’t grasp how it had happened, but Harlan had made her feel again. He’d given her a glimpse of what life in the sunshine could be like after months in a gray, cold world.
And then, when she’d dropped her guard, he’d told her her brother was probably dead.
His news about Reid had been the emotional equivalent of a pitcher of ice water.
Gasping, her heart pounding, she’d surfaced, honeyed heat draining from her in the face of this latest catastrophe.
Molly closed her eyes. She wanted to hate John Harlan for taking away the numbness.
With each glance he reminded her of what had almost happened between them. He kept his distance physically, but she couldn’t keep him out of her head.
It was as if he were slipping inside her mind, opening doors and walking in on her naked soul.
They had unfinished business.
And, regardless of what occurred with Reid or with Camina’s case, she was beginning to understand that John Harlan had changed her.
Ross Whittaker sat in the back, behind Harlan. They were on one side of the line, she on the other. Cops. Civilian.
She was the outsider.
But as the thought flicked through her mind like the dry rattle of a diamondback, Harlan shot her a sideways glance and touched her elbow fleetingly with his right hand while he steered the car with his left. “I told you once not to trust anybody. No matter what happens, whether we find Reid or we don’t, you still can’t let down your guard with anyone. Nothing is ever what it seems.”
“I listened to you once. I was wrong.” She frowned and looked out the side window, avoiding him.
“We’ll see.” The car bounced and settled. He turned to concentrate on the road. His mouth was grim and tight-lipped. He was angry.
She didn’t care. In fact, she relished seeing the evidence of strong feeling on his austere face.
But he stayed on one side of the line, coldly dispassionate at the scene of other people’s pain.
Observer.
Cop.
She’d been on one side of the window, he on the other.
And it was because of him that she had actually doubted Reid for a few minutes in her kitchen the night before he left. John Harlan had planted that suspicion. Maybe if he hadn’t poisoned her view of her brother, those last hours with Reid wouldn’t have become strained and uncomfortable.
Molly turned to the window, staring at vines and scraggly clumps of grass along the road. She’d blamed her reactions on fatigue. They’d been the result of Harlan’s insinuations, though. She’d allowed herself to be carried along in the riptide of emotion he drew forth from her with every look, every touch, and she’d let herself think for a second that her brother had suddenly become a stranger to her.
Mesmerized by John Harlan, she’d been wandering in dreams while Reid had been out here in the woods dying.
Dropping her hand, Molly picked at the metal strip under her window. If Reid were dead, Harlan was partly responsible.
Because she’d listened to him and tuned out her brother, because she’d let Harlan’s suspicions become hers that last night, she bore the heaviest guilt.
Harlan had only been doing his job. He’d been playing cop.
She was the one who’d looked at Reid a
nd hesitated, letting those vague suspicions root her at the opposite end of the kitchen.
She was angry with herself, with Harlan, with fate.
And even while admitting that it was unfair of her, she blamed Harlan most of all.
After so many months of operating on automatic pilot, she could feel an explosive mix of emotions roiling through her like lava. Molly scratched at the metal on the car door.
Harlan had said she was like a volcano.
With a quick sideways check, she noted the tiny ridges of tense muscle along the side of his mouth. His glance met hers in a long, considering look that said he knew exactly what she was feeling. Thinking.
She was the one who looked away.
All right. She dug her fingernail into the gap between window and doorframe. All right. She was overreacting. She knew that.
Harlan hadn’t made her do anything.
No matter how much she told herself that she was wrong to react the way she was doing, she couldn’t stop herself. She couldn’t hold back the resentment licking through her like a line of angry fire moving forward toward a keg of black powder.
And even resenting him, Molly couldn’t stop her gaze from returning to the strength in his broad shoulders, the solid column of his neck where the glossy black of his hair was a straight line above the fabric of his charcoal shirt. He’d thrown his jacket on the seat next to her, and his scent, elusive and faint, surrounded her.
His lean hand, negligently guiding the car, was strong, and she found herself aggravated by the deftness with which he drove. Resenting his effortless skills used up her energy and kept her from thinking about her brother. She wanted Harlan to hit every pothole, lose command of the car, lose his polite reserve. She wanted to see him wracked by the kinds of emotions she was experiencing.
She wanted to rip past his powerful control, to see him without his mask. She wanted to see him as much at the mercy of his emotions as she was.
In a still, quiet part of her brain, she knew what she was doing, knew she was using Harlan and his strength to get her through the coming hours, knew she preferred resenting him to imagining what she would see at the cabin.
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