Lover in the Shadows

by Lindsay Longford

  “Good,” Molly said and brushed her hair back from her face. “Because I was as much responsible for what happened as you were.” Thinking through the urgency of her response, the rush of adrenaline that had slammed through her as she’d seen Reid’s abandoned car, she added slowly, “I used you, you know.”

  “Oh, you did, did you?” His voice was silky soft. “Used me for your pleasure—is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “Yes,” Molly insisted, trying desperately to be honest with him and to make amends for her earlier, unwarranted resentment. “I wanted what happened between us. I’ve had enough of grief and death. I wanted to kiss you. And I’m not sorry, either.” She stepped forward and tried to slide the top two smoke-colored buttons of his shirt into the buttonholes.

  “Ms. Harris, you are something else.” One side of his mouth lifted. “But don’t get the idea I’m easy, you hear?” Once again Florida sand roughened the easy smoothness of his voice.

  “Believe me, Detective, that’s the last idea I would ever have about you.” Molly bit her lower lip as she tried to button his shirt in the dusty shed.

  “Listen, I’m serious. I didn’t mean for this—” Harlan frowned “—this to get out of control.” He watched her shaky fingers twist the slippery buttons through the buttonholes and tried to ignore the quick graze of her fingers against his skin as she worked the pieces of slate firmly into place. Forcing himself to stand there under her touch took every ounce of his willpower. Tremors tightened and torqued inside him, shivered slowly to a halt.

  He took a deep breath.

  He’d meant only to distract her from what was happening. He’d understood the way she’d withdrawn in the car, understood, but hadn’t liked it, and wasn’t sure why not until he’d taken her mouth with his. He’d meant only a quick, casual hum of sex, not the swamping need that had taken him to the edge. He’d been out of control completely, and for the first time in his life.

  Out of control. The thought was terrifying. He couldn’t afford at this point in his life to lose control.

  Anything could happen. Anything.

  Nahual came the whisper. Harlan cocked his head and frowned.

  Molly hadn’t heard anything. Head lowered, she worked the second button through the silk-bordered hole. She finally looked up at him, her gaze holding his. In the triangle of her face, her delicate chin trembled, firmed. “I lost control, too. And I’m not sorry that I did,” she added stubbornly. “But it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just—” she raised her hands, searching for a word, but he refused to help her “—sex. Or the life force. I don’t know.” She stepped back. “Something.”

  “Oh, it’s something, it is, Ms. Harris. And I don’t know any more than you do what it means,” he lied, trying to forget the feel of her against him.

  She might not understand what had happened between them, but he did.

  And knowing, he longed to smooth the flyaway strands of her hair, to pull her close and keep her beside him through the long night.

  But it was impossible.

  Not for him the timeless, lovely twining together through night into morning, the waking up in luxurious heat and reaching out to find himself in her.

  It couldn’t happen, not for him.

  His control was slipping, day by day, and he couldn’t indulge the craving growing in him for Molly Harris.

  Nahual, his grandmother whispered, and he tilted his head, almost expecting to see her appear in front of him. He saw only the outlines and forms in the shed, the rental car, Molly’s bent head in front of him, the sweet curve of her neck within stroking distance.

  Afterward, when he drove up the driveway to Molly’s house, his skin crawled. The windows of the house were like hooded, secretive eyes, and he insisted on walking through the house with her, checking doors and windows.

  Though the hairs on the back of his neck rose as he paced through the rooms, he saw nothing to alarm him, and so he said nothing to her. At the front door he started to tell her he would stay the night. He even opened his mouth to say the words. “Ms. Harris?”

  “You’ll let me know if anything shows up when they X-ray the bags?”

  He shut his mouth tightly, holding in the words that would bring disaster on his head. “Yes. When. If.”

  “All right.”

  He wanted to stay and wouldn’t allow himself to, so instead he cautioned her, “Keep your portable phone handy.”

  “I will.”

  “Give me the gun. I can’t make you give it to me—but, believe me, you’re safer without it.”

  She’d hesitated. “I feel safer with it.”

  “It’s an illusion.” He held the screen door open and swung it to and fro. “Guns don’t make anybody safer in the long run.”

  “I’ll think about it. Maybe you’re right.”

  “I am. Your phone will do you more good than that gun.” With those words, he left.

  On the way home, Harlan stopped at a filling station, called Ross and told him to schedule a squad-car check on her house every hour during the night.

  Later, the picture of Molly’s even, white teeth against the pink swell of her lip was the picture that lingered in his head as he watched the reflections on his bedroom ceiling shift and flow. He imagined her satiny hair under his chin, catching against his rougher skin.

  Harlan turned on his side. The sheets tangled in his legs and, swearing, he jerked the top sheet free.

  He was sweating, his skin hot and damp despite the fan.

  The scent of Molly lingered in his nostrils, on his skin. He turned to the other side, seeking a cooler spot on the sheet.

  He wanted her.

  Sweat beaded along his forehead. He flexed his fingers and stretched out, letting the air from the fan waft over him, giving it a chance to dry the sweat and cool him.

  She had wanted him.

  Her body had told him that as it softened against him, and she’d been honest enough to admit it. She hadn’t turned coy or teasing. She had been straightforward about her feelings.

  When he’d gone through her house, checking it before leaving her, he’d almost let himself believe he could stay. He’d seen the acceptance in her eyes. She would have let him.

  The calves of his legs twitched and he stretched, arching his toes.

  The shadows on his ceiling blurred as the moon passed through the night sky. She would inherit whatever estate Reid had. Reid and Bouler would have inherited her estate. The hospital would get its part. And so would the cousin in Texas, Susie Warrin.

  Molly carried the gun with her into her bathroom and put it on the back of the toilet while she bathed. When she went to bed, she placed it carefully on the floor under her bed. She put the cordless phone next to her pillow.

  Through her closed windows she heard the hunting call of an owl.

  She couldn’t shed tears for Reid. There would be time for grieving when she felt safe. Until then, she would do what she had to stay alive and find Reid’s killer. To see the face that had taunted her with madness.

  Because of John Harlan, the miasma that had lain over her for most of the year had dissipated. She was determined never again to be a victim.

  Before he rang her doorbell, she’d spent a year in limbo, grief flowing through her and creeping slowly forward until she’d finally been encased in ice, feeling nothing, not pleasure, not pain.

  Nothing.

  She’d turned her home into a prison whose bars were grief-forged. She would have stayed there, too—falling deeper and deeper into that place of midnight ice where she was no longer herself—if John Harlan hadn’t showed up on her doorstep.

  Confronting her, not allowing her to retreat from him, he’d dragged her out of that limbo of black ice. He’d bullied his way past her door with his impeccable manners and not-going-to-take-no-for-an-answer attitude. Oh, he’d only wanted to solve the mystery of Camina’s murder, but he’d cracked the shell Molly had sealed around herself. He’d threatened her, irritated h
er and agitated her until she hadn’t been able to stay numb.

  He’d dragged her, kicking and screaming, back into the land of the living, because he’d forced her to see that she could spend the rest of what was passing for her life in a real prison with real bars made of steel.

  She’d created her own prison, but he’d made her see that she didn’t want to go back there.

  Harlan had forced her to see that life with all its pain and heartbreak and loneliness was better than the half life she was drifting through.

  After all the months of not sleeping, of not dreaming, of wondering if she were losing her mind, he’d forced her to see that she had to save herself, find the strength to face what was happening around her.

  And then, through the sheer force of his will, he’d pulled her to the window of her house and kept her there, pulled her to the brink of utter surrender and made her want to surrender to the hunger he evoked.

  Her hand on the cordless phone, Molly finally slept.

  He stirred, the hunting instinct flowing through him. Arching to his feet, he padded to the door. The night was rich with prey, the smells strong and powerful, drawing him into the night. Moving slowly, stealthily, through the night and the cool moonlight, he came to her. The grass was damp against his face as he neared the big house.

  The house shimmered with light. The moon turned the hedges into secret lairs. He cocked his head. Other predators were about in the moon-bathed night.

  Settling himself, he listened for a long time. The night grew quiet around him. He heard her turn in her bed, sigh. The moment of truth had come. He sensed it.

  Long, long ago he’d known that she was the one, and he’d waited patiently all these months.

  It was time.

  What would be, would be. It was out of his control now.

  Harlan was drenched in sweat when he bolted from his bed, his pulse racing and his heart banging against his ribs so hard he couldn’t catch his breath. Bending double and gasping, he touched his toes and arched his back.

  Moonlight banded his face and belly when he straightened and waited for his pulse to return to normal. He ran his hands down his sweat-slick body. Moonlight and Molly. Molly, alone in her house behind locks that weren’t keeping out the evil stalking her.

  He’d been dreaming about Molly.

  Moonlight bathed her face and she turned to it in her sleep.

  In her dreams she followed him, his indistinct form shifting and flowing through the corridors. Suddenly, like a rush of wind roaring through a tunnel, he whirled and came to her, his heavy cape swirling, concealing his shape and face. Luring her with promises of a darkness beyond sleep, a darkness beyond anything she’d ever known, he came, her demon lover.

  The sound at her front door jerked Molly out of a profound sleep.

  Disoriented, still lingering in her dream, she held the cordless phone in her hand.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Harlan was surprised to find himself on her doorstep.

  He shouldn’t have been.

  He’d known from the beginning that this moment was inevitable.

  Where the lawn gave way to overgrown bushes and cabbage palms, he heard the annoyed chatter of a raccoon. Moonlight lay across Molly’s yard in wide patches broken by shadows, and the grass down at the edge of the bayou moved gently in the night wind, a gray-and-silver flow of light. The leaves in the hibiscus hedges and on the vines growing over the gallery rippled as if something had brushed past only seconds earlier.

  He cocked his head. A scent of nastiness, faint and elusive, teased him. His nostrils flared. Old, that persistent scent? Or new?

  His eyes dilated in the darkness, but he saw nothing in the deep hedge shadows, the dark spaces under the veranda.

  A hunting night.

  Harlan wiped his hand across his face. His sweat was drying in the cool air, but the heat burned in him, incandescent and white-hot. He jammed his shaking hand into the pocket of his jeans.

  The chain on the lock rattled as she cracked open the door. “Hello, Detective.” One cheek was pink and creased from her pillow. Her face was soft and drowsy and unguarded in the wedge of space between door and frame.

  “Good evening, Ms. Harris.” The band around his chest ached. His body felt stretched and tight, too big for skin and bones, pummeled, as if he’d been beaten with a two by four and left by the side of the road. He flexed his fingers.

  “I didn’t hear your car.” She glanced down the driveway.

  “It’s—” he gestured vaguely to the road “—down there.”

  “Has something happened?” Strain showed in the corners of her eyes and the circles underneath, showed, too, in the lift of her chin. But moonlight lit her face with radiance, and in the light from the house and the porch, her hair glinted golden brown. “Have you heard anything about Reid? Do you know if—”

  “No.” He placed his palm on the other side of the door from hers.

  “No news?” Strain pinched the fullness of her bottom lip.

  “No. Not yet.” He wanted her to ask him in. She had to open her door to him.

  “This isn’t an official visit?” She gripped the door. Her knuckles were white and the sleeve of her nightshirt fell back from her elbow. He saw the tender curve of her underarm, the skin fine textured and delicate.

  “No.”

  White on pearl, the colors of Molly Harris standing in her nightshirt next to the wood and glass of her front door. Light to his darkness in this place where violence had burst through her etched windows, and he craved her with a longing beyond his understanding.

  “You’re off duty?”

  Words locked in his throat, he nodded.

  “I don’t understand. What are you doing here?”

  He breathed in the night air, let it fill his lungs, breathed out and found words after all. “Damned if I know, Ms. Harris.” He didn’t move. “Call it an impulse.”

  “An impulse, Detective?” Her face was sweet and inviting. Or perhaps it was the moonlight deceiving him.

  Down near the road, a stone in the gravel driveway shifted and crunched at the pressure of something moving over it.

  Harlan touched the knuckle of her little finger. “An irresistible impulse. I can’t stay away from you.”

  Her eyes widened and she inhaled sharply, but she didn’t move.

  “I couldn’t sleep. It’s winter, but I wake up hot, smothering with heat. Naked under the ceiling fan, and I’m burning up.” He stroked her knuckle. It was smooth, the small bones pressing against the covering of skin. He wondered if she had any idea how fragile she was. He hoped not. He did, though, and it terrified him. “I wake up dreaming of you.”

  “Do you?” She looked helplessly at him.

  “Yes. I can’t sleep without dreaming of you.”

  “I’m sorry.” Her social skills failed her, and he was amused.

  “Don’t be.” He smiled gently. “They were very pleasant dreams. I enjoyed them.”

  She jerked, her hand flew to her mouth and the chain rattled.

  The chain, no barrier at all, not really, stayed between them. If necessary, he could have been inside her house within seconds. But tonight, trapped in moonlight and shadows, he needed her invitation. She might not understand, not yet, but the real power lay within her. She had drawn him here. He hadn’t wanted to come, but he hadn’t been able to stay away. He’d fought against the need winding within him so tightly that he couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t stay away from her.

  He’d lost.

  He’d told himself he had to protect her.

  He hadn’t lied.

  What pulled him to her porch at this time of night, though, was more than the need to keep her safe. As a cop, he’d protected her with the resources at his command. He’d arranged for the patrol car to monitor her house.

  Her face was pink and creamy warm. “What do you want?” she whispered, as if a crowd were around them instead of night creatures and solitude.

&nb
sp; “Ah, that’s easy. What I want is simple. I want you, hot, wild, under me, over me.” His voice lowered, becoming guttural. “Me in you.”

  In the silence, he heard the satin shirt slide over her skin with her breathing.

  “But I’ll take whatever you choose to give me tonight. Nothing more.” He coiled the chain around his index finger, released it, and it shortened, grew taut again. “One night. That’s all.” He managed to smile.

  The scent of her, sleepy and woman-warm, drifted to him through the partially open door. He saw the answering loneliness in her eyes, which darkened to blue-gray. “You’re blunt.”

  He nodded. “I want you. As I said, it’s simple. I believe you want me.” Down at the bayou, water slapped quietly against the pilings of the dock and the silence lengthened. “Is that speaking too directly for you? Do I—” he shrugged, not finding the word “—offend you? With my bluntness?”

  “I’m not sure.” A vein throbbed, blue in the moonlight, at the side of her throat.

  “Ah. Well.” He yearned to trace that gently pulsing vein. It seemed he’d waited for her throughout eternity, waiting longer than she could ever imagine. “The real question is, what do you want?”

  “You told me I shouldn’t trust you.” Her voice had gone husky and shaky.

  Harlan shifted more fully into the light and gave her a clearer view of him. His sunglasses dangled from the edge of his jeans pocket. “It was good advice. You’d be smart if you followed it. Nothing has changed. But I keep reminding you of that, don’t I?” He knew his smile was rueful.

  Yellow porch light pooled at the entrance to her home. Warm, inviting in the space between them, a space no larger than could be crossed in two steps. But he wouldn’t take those steps, not yet, not until she gave him permission. If she chose to.

  Light trembled in her hair, across her smooth skin. She looked away, back at him and hesitated.

  He sensed the confusion and ambiguity in her, her need, and he wanted to end it for her.

  He could have seduced her at any point with words. He knew his power, and it took the last of his immense control to stay silent in the face of his hunger. He could have pretended that he had news for her. Oh, there were words he could have said that would have made her unlock her door and let him in.