He was nuzzling one nipple when the rasp of his trousers distracted him. He caught her hand before she managed to do more than brush her fingertips across his belly. When her other hand moved in, he grabbed it, too, and forced himself to sit back.
Both breathing heavily, they stared at each other a moment, then her expression shifted into a pout that would have done Daisy proud.
“You’re wicked underneath those angelic looks, aren’t you?” His voice was unsteady and hard. So was his body.
Slowly she smiled, and he wondered how he had ever thought her innocent. “Just seeing if I could tempt you.”
“All you have to do is breathe, sweetheart,” he replied. He loosened his grip, hesitated, then let her go. “You’ve got to get back to work.”
“I could close the shop for the afternoon. It’s one of the perks of being the owner.”
Oh, hell, yeah, she could tempt him. But he wasn’t ready for that—no matter what his body thought—and if he was, when he was, he wanted an entire night, and the next one, and the next.
Leaning so close that his mouth brushed hers again, he whispered, “Yeah, a couple hours until the kids get home isn’t going to cut it.”
She kissed him, nipping his lower lip, then pushed him away. “You’re right. Besides, I really can’t close today. I’ve got a class starting in half an hour.” Her fingers quickly rebuttoned her blouse, then combed through her hair. Her movements were efficient, her expression as normal as if nothing had ever happened...but her eyes were glazed, and her breathing was still ragged, and the air around her was shimmering with need.
As she stood, so did he, giving her a hand for balance while she put on first one shoe, then the other. Murmuring thanks, she went to the fireplace, picked up a small stone box and opened it, springing a false bottom and retrieving a key. She pressed it into his hand. “Lock up when you leave.”
“I don’t need—”
She made a show of skimming her gaze over his chest, his rib cage, his abdomen, stopping at his rather obvious erection. “Maybe take a few minutes,” she said with a grin.
He swatted her butt as she walked past. “You’re supposed to be impressed.”
“Oh, I am. I can’t wait to see more. You can bring the key back later. Thanks for lunch.” Still grinning, she let herself out.
Sean stared at the key. Several ex-girlfriends had wanted to trade keys, but he’d never given one or accepted their own. His apartment was the one place he could count as his and his alone. He didn’t want to come home from a long day and find someone had invited herself over, didn’t want the hassle of getting the key back when the inevitable end came, didn’t want control of his private time taken away by anyone.
But Sophy giving him this key... She was understandably security-conscious, yet she trusted him enough to give him access to her apartment.
Maybe he’d only engaged in hookups to this point. Maybe he’d always aimed for superficial. But like it or not, want it or not, he’d broken that lifelong rule.
He was as involved with Sophy Marchand as any man could be.
And they were about to go even further.
He tucked his shirt, cautiously did up the zipper and fastened his belt again. While his clothes were presentable, he needed a few more minutes of totally non-sexualized thinking before he went outside. He found the distraction when he passed the hallway. All the time he’d been in the apartment, he hadn’t crossed the threshold into the corridor—hadn’t gotten a tour of the girls’ room or made use of the bathroom.
Now he crossed that line, glancing inside the open bathroom door. The colors were clean, a lot of white, enough navy blue to keep the effect from being blinding, the tub and shower an all in one, a single sink, a small closet.
Offset across the hall, another open door led into the girls’ room. The trim was white, the walls pale green. The bedding was stripes, the same white and green with a few flowers in the background. Bookcases occupied space on two walls, painted white and filled with books and toys, a wicker dresser separated the twin beds, and a rug bearing a kids’-style rain-forest design protected the wooden floor.
One bed was perfectly made except for a missing pillow. The other was unmade, two pillows sharing space along with a stuffed monkey and a third pillow, crudely sewn, not much bigger than Sean’s hand. Above and below the small square safety-pinned into the middle was scrawled Tooth Fairy Pillow.
He sat down on the neat bed, hands dangling between his knees, staring at it. He’d made that pillow for Maggie when she was about Dahlia’s age. All the girls have one, she’d said after school one day, using the tip of her tongue to wiggle the tooth on the verge of falling out. He’d cut it from one of their mother’s old blouses, a white one that had long ago turned yellow with age. After letting her label it, he’d stuffed it with old socks cut into pieces and pinned it all together. Then it had been his duty to collect the lost teeth and replace them with money he swiped from Patrick’s wallet.
The odds of me staying here are between slim and none. If he were on his own, he could handle it. For all the people who cringed at the idea of a grown Holigan living in town, there were some he could count on: Sophy, Ty and Nev, Mr. Obadiah, Robbie and Anamaria Calloway, maybe Tommy Maricci, probably Charlie over at the hot-rod shop. A few good friends were all a man needed.
But with the kids...everyone in town would know where their mother was, what had happened with her. They would know she had never loved them enough to choose the life they needed over the one she wanted. Daisy and Dahlia would have a lot to live down.
Wasn’t it better to start off someplace new? The three of them looked so damn much alike that there would be no reason to explain anything about her mother. People would just assume they were his kids. They could start over with any new story they wanted.
But starting over new didn’t guarantee success.
Chapter 9
Sean lost track of how long he sat there, staring at that pillow, until a horn on the street out front jarred him from his thoughts. Standing, he smoothed the wrinkles from the bed, then headed for the front door. After letting himself out and locking up, he pocketed the key and took the stairs two at a time before walking to his car across from the shop. As he opened the door, a voice called from the sidewalk, cool enough to form icicles on the wrought-iron fence encircling River’s Edge.
“Excuse me. Do you know where to find a decent hotel in this place?”
He glanced up, meeting Special Agent Alexandra Baker’s gaze, then resisted looking back toward Hanging by a Thread. He already knew he couldn’t see inside the shop from here—he’d checked the last time he’d been across the street—and he didn’t want to draw any more of the wrong attention to the shop or Sophy. “Ask at the tourism office. It’s halfway down that block.” He pointed to the west.
“Where can we talk?”
“How about by phone?”
She showed zero response to his flippancy. “There’s a fast-food place across the river called Taquito Taco. Meet me there in five or ten minutes.”
He slid into the car as she walked off, cranking down first his window, then the passenger’s. Baker hadn’t given him any instructions about calling her, so he hadn’t. He figured she was keeping track of everything anyway, and obviously she was. He just wished she was keeping track long-distance. Didn’t he have enough complications in his life as it was?
She was walking toward the tourism office when he drove past on the opposite side of the square. Any casual observer would have thought he’d given her directions and she was following them. In fact, damn if she didn’t go inside the storefront that housed the tourism office.
He turned onto River Road, then west onto Carolina. He hadn’t been to the west bank of the Gullah since he’d come back. There had been no reason to cross the river when he’d lived there except to head to the next shabby excuse for a town ten miles away. All the businesses and homes had been on the east side; crossing the bridge was like entering no
-man’s-land.
Not anymore. Neighborhoods of expensive houses and condos dotted the waterfront both north and south of the bridge. Convenience stores, a dollar store, a few restaurants, a few other businesses and a motel under construction extended almost a mile along both sides of the road.
He parked at Taquito Taco, got a pop and chose an empty section of the restaurant where he could watch both the door and the Chevelle. The air-conditioning hummed loudly but wasn’t doing much of a job dispelling the heat. Overhead fans kept the air moving while speakers blared the current popular music. His tastes ran way more toward the classics—rock music, his car, Sophy. A classic beauty.
Given the effect she’d had on him a short time ago, no thinking about her now. He didn’t want to give Special Agent Baker the wrong impression. Didn’t want to get frostbite on his penis, either.
She drew more than a few looks when she walked into the restaurant, mostly from a pack of teenage saggy-pants gangsta wannabes across the room. She was dressed as casually as he’d ever seen—shorts, a sleeveless shirt, sandals—but there was nothing she could do to dress down her hair, more white than blond, her pale skin or her eyes that reminded him of hard fresh ice. She was a woman people remembered seeing.
He wondered how that worked with her job.
With a soft chicken taco and a bottle of water on a tray, she slid onto the bench across from him and turned her attention to lunch. She poured salsa on the open tortilla, then began scraping off the shreds of lettuce, carefully leaving onion, tomato, cilantro and cheese.
Figuring that could take forever, he asked, “How long have you been in town?”
“Since Monday. I’m staying at The Jasmine.”
Fancy place—an antebellum mansion turned into a bed-and-breakfast. He couldn’t afford a room there on his own and wouldn’t know what to do in such luxury if someone else picked up the tab.
“I get per diem and pay the rest from my own pocket. When I travel, I like to do so in style.”
He assumed the explanation was her way of assuring him the deal was legit. He didn’t care whether the DEA put her up in the priciest place in the state on the taxpayers’ dime. He just wanted her and Craig and the whole mess out of his life.
“What does Maggie know?”
“That Davey is more than just a two-bit meth cook. That he works for a major dealer on the East Coast that the feds have been trying a long time to shut down.”
“Is that all?” She took a bite of her taco and chewed it while studying him.
“That’s all she’s told me. We don’t get a lot of privacy when I visit her,” he added, sarcasm creeping into his voice. “I suspect she’s got names and maybe some details, because she’s counting on this to keep her out of jail.”
Without the slightest change of expression, Baker said, “Maybe it will.”
Masiela Leal had been levelheaded, polite, sympathetic about the kids and adamant about Maggie serving time for this arrest. Would Baker’s casual answer be enough to turn her tough, the way Sean knew she could be?
“You would help her avoid prison?”
“If she can help us nail Kolinski, yes.”
The good of the many took precedence over the good of the few, or however the line went. Letting Maggie off, helping her avoid punishment, setting her free... Sure, Craig would be in jail; a major criminal enterprise would be shut down...for the time that it took someone else to restart it. Maggie, in the meantime, would continue using drugs, continue to have no respect for herself or care for her daughters, and one way or another, accidental overdose or murder, she would die.
But as long as the DEA could count Craig as another notch in their convictions, it would be a fair trade.
“And what would you do for her? What would you offer to make it worth the risk?”
Baker swallowed another bite, then took a long drink of water. “Relocation, rehab, a new life.”
“You know, rehab is never successful unless the person wants to get clean. Clean for a while isn’t much of an enticement.”
“We can only do so much. The rest of it’s up to her.”
“Does relocation involve a new name?”
“Complete new identity for her and the girls.”
He would never have contact with them again. Wouldn’t know how Maggie was doing, whether she was taking care of the kids, whether Daisy or Dahlia needed anything. He wouldn’t know if they were making the right choices or if they followed their mother’s example into drugs and sex and crime.
The knowledge left a hollow place inside him, a worry—an ache—for the kids he hadn’t even known existed until the past weekend.
“What if she didn’t take the girls?”
“They’re kind of growing on you, aren’t they? Them and their foster mother.” Baker did something then that Sean had never witnessed: she smiled. It was faint, barely formed, a bit rusty, but definitely a smile. When it disappeared, her usual expression looked even more somber in comparison. “You know why guys like Kolinski carry out threats against witnesses or their families even after they’ve been convicted? As punishment to the witness and as a warning to anyone else who might ever think about ratting them out. If we move Maggie but leave the kids behind, how easy will it be for him to find them? A guy who will kill little kids because their mother informed on him—that’s a hell of a powerful warning.”
So all three of them would be out of his life. Be careful what you wish for.
“Of course, you could go with them.”
He stared out the window, toward the river and the town on its other side. Leave Copper Lake and never come back. That had been his goal since he was a kid himself, and he’d taken a pretty good stab at it. But now that he was back...
Don’t kid yourself, buddy. It’s not the town. It’s the people. It’s Ty and Nev and Mr. Obadiah. Most of all, it’s Sophy. To never see them again, never talk to them...how long would it take him to start resenting Maggie for it?
About as long as it would take her to score her first hit of meth.
“I’m not going into hiding.”
“You counting on your friendship with Kolinski to keep you safe?”
“I’m counting on convincing Maggie to keep her damn mouth shut.”
Baker smiled that cool smile again. “If your sister could be trusted to keep quiet, neither of us would be here, would we?”
She had a point. God, how the hell had he wound up in the middle of such a colossal screwup?
* * *
The school bus rumbled to a stop out front, drawing Sophy’s attention to the windows. A boy from down the street jumped off and raced toward home, then Dahlia slowly came down the steps. Her head was ducked, and she scuffed her feet across the sidewalk and through the gate. The closer she got to the steps, the slower she moved, but eventually she had no other choice; she had to climb up, cross the porch and come inside.
Had she had a fight with her friends? Gotten in trouble with the teacher? Been teased by kids who’d heard about her mother’s problems? Sophy took a deep breath and headed for the refrigerator. Food always made things better.
“Hey, Dahlia,” she called. “Come on back and have a snack with me. I’ve got grapes—” the girls’ favorite fruit “—and we can even splurge and share a bottle of pop.”
Dahlia shuffled to the back, dropped her backpack on the floor and sank into a chair. “Where’s Daisy?”
Inside Sophy winced. After her own bad day, did Dahlia really need to hear that her sister had been at a pool party the entire time?
“She went for a playdate with the daughters of some friends of mine.” She twisted open a bottle of pop, poured half of it into a cup, then carried both with the bowl of grapes to the table. “You want the bottle or the cup?”
“Cup.” But she didn’t take a drink or reach for a grape.
“How was school?”
Dahlia shrugged and grunted.
“What did you learn?”
“’Bout punctuation
.”
“Good stuff. You can’t write without it, though people continue to try.” The next moment passed in silence, then she gently asked, “Anything you want to talk about?”
Picking a grape, Dahlia inspected it closely as if a creature might leap out through its pale green skin and devour her headfirst. Apparently satisfied, she popped it in her mouth, chewed and swallowed. “I need to go to see Mama.”
“I wish you could.” Liar. “But the jail doesn’t allow kids to visit.”
“But I need to tell her something.”
“Maybe if you tell me, I can tell her.” It would be the quickest prisoner visit on record. In fact, maybe the jailer could be persuaded to just take her back to Maggie’s cell to save himself the trouble of getting her out and moving her to the visitors’ room.
Dahlia stared at her, somber, her gaze too troubled for a six-year-old. She was so thin, unsettled, her little bony shoulders hunched forward. After a moment, she muttered, “There was a man at school.”
The words were so far outside what Sophy expected that her lungs tightened and her stomach tumbled. It took effort to make her voice sound normal. “What man?”
Dahlia shrugged.
“Did he say something to you?” Please don’t make me pull it out of you one question at a time.
“He said, ‘Tell your mama we’re watchin’ her.’ I don’t think he was a very nice man. I need to go tell her.”
“There’s someone else we need to tell first, sweetie.” Sophy pulled her cell from her pocket and called Ty. “How’s my favorite detective?”
“I’m fine, according to Nev. How about you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m overreacting, but...” She told him what Dahlia had said, and all the humor disappeared from his voice. Okay, Ty was an experienced detective. If the incident worried him, she wasn’t overreacting.
“I’m at the station. I’ll be there in about two minutes. Stay on the phone with me. Had she ever seen the guy before?”
Undercover in Copper Lake Page 15