by Linda Wisdom
“Mitzi’s coming over here,” she murmured.
He gave a barely perceptible nod. “Let’s just play it by ear and see what happens.”
“Josh. Dr. Hunter.” Mitzi’s smile was bright, although it wavered a bit when she looked at Lauren. “I told Brian we deserved a special night out, although I’m sure he’d have been happier with McDonald’s or Carl’s Jr. I just thought I’d come over and say hello, and to let you know I’ve started going to that support group for abused wives Gail oversees. They even have a group for the children and it’s helped Brian see he isn’t the only child going through this. We’re going to make it,” she finished, with a great deal of confidence.
“I’m glad, Mitzi. I also heard you applied for Kim’s position, since she isn’t coming back after she has her baby. I hope you realize working for Ted isn’t all that easy. I’ve even heard he’s worse than me.”
“I thought a change of scenery would be good, since I’ve been a little too vocal when some of the sleazier clients get off. And I’m thinking of taking some night courses and work toward becoming a paralegal.”
“It sounds as if you have things pretty well thought out,” Lauren spoke up with a warm smile. “I admire you for wanting to push ahead.”
“Don’t. I was a wimp for so long, I’m still knock-kneed scared at going out completely on my own,” Mitzi confessed. “Josh will back me up on that. I wouldn’t have had the courage to go through with it if it hadn’t been for his helping me in the beginning and helping me find a good divorce attorney. Brian has been so much calmer with the threat of his father running in and snatching him up gone. Now he’s so confident I can do anything I put my mind to that I feel I can’t let him down.” She turned around. “Well, I’d better get back to our table before Brian gets worried.” She looked from one to the other. “Actually, I think the brave ones are you two. After what’s been going around the offices, I don’t know if I’d want to be the target you are, Lauren. From everything I’ve heard, she sounds awfully dangerous.”
“Mom! I’m finished!”
Mitzi turned red as her son yelled out her name again. “I have to go. Maybe if I take him out more often he’ll learn some manners. See you later.”
“I can’t imagine it’s her,” Josh said, when they left the restaurant and walked out to his car. “It doesn’t fit. Besides, I can’t imagine her leaving Brian alone at night. The two of them are too close. More so since the divorce.”
“If you’re desperate enough, there’s ways. But I agree with you after what she just said. Where she’s concerned, there’s something that doesn’t seem right.” Lauren wrapped her coat more securely around her shoulders.
“Admittedly, I like the idea of one less suspect to worry about.”
Lauren slid across the seat to sit closer to Josh as they waited for the car to warm up before he switched on the heater. “Only a few more days and hopefully it will be all over.”
“And then we have a long talk about what the future could hold for us.”
She had been sensing this coming for some time now. The attraction she’d fought and the one he’d pursued wasn’t about to be ignored. Each time she thought about it, she probed her inner defenses and discovered it wasn’t as intimidating as it used to be.
“Yes, and then we’ll talk as much as you’d like.”
“Do I get even a hint as to where we’ll be going? Or did you decide making two sets of reservations at two different places could confuse her? That you’ll end up going to one and I’d go to the other?” He felt a lot better to know she wasn’t going to put him off anymore.
“It was definitely meant to confuse her. Now I’m thinking of giving the first set of reservations to Kevin. I thought he might like to take his wife away for a couple days to a lovely resort and spa that caters to couples. They could enjoy a nice, relaxing weekend. At the same time, Kevin would feel he’s doing his job staking out the place. Especially if anyone familiar shows up.”
Josh chuckled. “Lady, the more I’m with you, the more I like, and right now I know I like your style. Sharon’s always bitching that Kevin never takes her anywhere, so it wouldn’t look odd if they were there. Especially since we’d be out of town anyway. Hopefully, our little friend might think we changed our minds and turned the reservation over to Kevin and Sharon so it wouldn’t go to waste. I’ve got to hand it to you, Lauren. Making two separate reservations was a pretty good idea. You’re turning out to be one sneaky lady.”
She teasingly ran her fingernail down his upper arm as she laughed along with him. “And don’t you forget it!”
As Josh drove to Lauren’s house, one eye was always glancing up into the rearview mirror. He still couldn’t believe they weren’t being followed tonight. He wasn’t trying to feel paranoid, but after being at Lauren’s house last night, even if Dana and Kevin were there, he’d expected to find a message from her on his landline’s voicemail. Nothing. And there’d been no indication she’d been inside his house. He wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved or frustrated. All he knew was that he was relieved she hadn’t tried anything more with Lauren. He was positive the memory of her lying in that hospital bed with her face covered with tiny bloody cuts would haunt him for a long time.
“All right, we’ve established you’re not going to divulge our destination. How about giving me a hint as to what to pack. Or what I can leave behind?”
“Dress warmly,” was all she would say before suddenly answering an unspoken question. “She isn’t back there.”
He jerked himself back to the present. “I didn’t think she was.”
“Yes, you did. Just as I have at times. Which is why I want to finish this farce before it gets totally out of hand. By our finishing it, we get to call the shots.”
“I also admire your nerve,” he complimented her.
“It comes from living with a cop’s macho attitude. You learn about the times when you can’t afford to back down. We’ve come to one of those times, Josh.”
Thoughts of her ex-husband still didn’t set well in his gut. “Yeah, I know.”
It wasn’t difficult to tell he didn’t look happy about something. She wondered if he was worrying about what was going on. She playfully ran her finger down his cheek.
“You could look on the bright side of all this.” She lowered her voice to a sultry level. “Just think about it, Josh, an entire weekend with me. Isn’t that something you’ve been angling for? What you meant when you talked about us getting away later on? Think of it,” she lowered her voice a bit more, “us, alone, no worries about cases for you, or autopsies and visiting crime scenes for me.”
“Something tells me you’ll get the better deal if you’re not going to be worrying about dead bodies.” Josh turned onto Lauren’s street and pulled up her driveway.
He had just helped her out of the car when a patrol car drove by. It slowed to a crawl when it noticed them. When the spotlight briefly blinded them, Josh lifted his hand in a wave. The two officers nodded their acknowledgment and drove on.
“Shows they’re on the ball.” Josh walked with Lauren up to her door. He stood to the side while she disarmed the alarm and unlocked her door, but held her back when she would have entered. “Let me go in first.”
Concern crossed her face. “You can’t think she’d do something?”
“I hope not, and I don’t intend to take any chances at this point.” He eased the door open and walked in. He was startled when the light went on.
“It was Kevin’s suggestion,” Lauren explained. “While a couple of main lights go on at dusk, a few others are on motion sensors.”
“A good idea.” Josh made a quick but thorough pass through the house.
“I’m glad I didn’t leave any clothes lying around.” Lauren refused to stay in the entryway and remained on his heels as he checked out each room, ending with her bedroom.
“Then it’s a good thing you haven’t seen my place. I’m not exactly known for my neatness.” He swit
ched on the bathroom light and checked it out also. “Everything looks all right.”
“How about some coffee?” She led him back to the family room. “I’ve got the coffee maker set up, so it won’t take long.”
“Sounds good.”
She walked into the kitchen and pulled cups out of the cabinet. “All right, have a seat and I’ll bring it in.”
Josh sat on the couch, glancing at the magazines on the coffee table and picking one up out of curiosity. He fanned through the pages, pausing a few times when something interested him. He glanced at the books on the lamp table.
“Forensics, studies of bones, decomposed bodies,” he muttered. “What do you read for enjoyment?”
Lauren carried in a tray holding a coffee server, two cups, and a bottle of Irish Cream. “Nancy A. Collins, John Sanford, Clive Barker, Stephen King.” She filled both cups with coffee, topped them off with a splash of Irish Cream, and handed him one.
“It sounds like a repeat of your work.”
She couldn’t wait until he started to drink his coffee before speaking. “We only drain the blood, Josh, we don’t drink it.”
It took him a great deal of effort not to spew out the coffee. He gulped and choked so badly he began coughing.
“Want me to thump your back?”
Josh rapidly shook his head, unaware his face was a bright shade of red.
“You did that on purpose, didn’t you?” He wheezed once he caught his breath. “You went for the shock value just for the sheer hell of it.”
“There’s a lot of coroners out there with a very sick sense of humor that rivals, if not surpasses, any cop’s,” she said matter-of-factly, as she sat down beside him. She edged off her shoes and tucked her feet up under her. “You know, one of my favorite movies is ‘The Sting’.” She lifted her cup. “To a successful con.”
Josh tapped her cup against his before taking hers out of her hand and setting both of them down on the tray. “Can’t be anything but, although I have a better way of sealing the deal.” He pulled her into his arms.
Lauren’s smile grew as she allowed him to settle her in his lap. She looped her arms around his neck and brushed her lips against his until his mouth opened. Tongues tangled as they tasted each other with the hunger that had been building for some time.
Free to explore each other without worry of unwanted watchers, they loosened each other’s clothing until Lauren’s top was free of her shoulders and Josh’s shirt was open.
“Now, this is more like it,” he mumbled, nuzzling her ear.
“There’s no beach.”
He obligingly blew softly in her ear. “That’s the ocean breeze. I’ll work on the water part later, when we have more time.”
“You know, Sophie’s wrong,” she sighed, running her fingers through the thick thatch of hair on his chest. She shivered when she felt him caressing the sensitive skin around her breast. “You’re not such an old guy, after all.”
“Believe me, I’m only too happy to prove it.”
Chapter Seventeen
“Exactly what does a woman take with her when she goes away with a man for the weekend and she has seduction in mind?” Lauren studied the contents of her closet, hoping something would jump out at her. This wasn’t the first time she’d wished for something similar. She doubted the long weekends she and Ron had taken during their marriage counted. Especially toward the end, when her idea of nightwear was a football jersey. She doubted it would be appropriate for what she had in mind.
She started to pull open the dresser drawer that held her sexier nightwear, but hesitated. She uttered a sound of disgust as she finally just jerked it open.
“Stop it, Lauren. She’s not the type to leave something disgusting in here. Well, she is, but hopefully, not today.”
She still carefully probed the contents as she pulled out a couple of nightgowns she felt would be more appreciated than a football jersey.
“It never hurts to be prepared,” she murmured, as she folded them and placed them in her suitcase while keeping one eye on the clock. Josh would be there to pick her up in about fifteen minutes, and as usual, she’d left everything to the last minute and was now running around, getting everything together. She quickly packed up her cosmetics and threw them in her bag. She looked at the clock again. “Damn!” She quickly pulled her hair back in a braid and dressed in dark wash jeans and a burnt orange sweater. She set her overnight case by the front door at the same time she noticed Josh drive up. She walked outside, noticing the early morning light had barely touched the sky. Her breath frosted in the cold air.
“Hi.” He greeted her with a good morning kiss. “All ready?”
“I probably forgot something. I always do, so I won’t worry about it.” She closed the door and set the alarm. “I was tempted to leave a note. Just in case anyone decided to stop by while I was gone. Too bad I don’t have a cat I could ask her to feed. Or maybe a python would be more fitting for her to cuddle up with.”
“Well, hell, why not a black widow spider?”
“If we’re talking about venom, I’d prefer something with a lot more kick.” Once settled in the car, Lauren linked her arms around Josh’s neck and pulled him toward her for a much warmer kiss than the one he’d given her.
When they finally broke free, Josh stared at her with glazed eyes. “Lady, I’d say that was hot enough to wake the dead.”
Her smile was equally dazzling. “Now you know why I chose pathology.”
Josh shook his head to clear it. “You are something. Now that we’ve gotten our hellos out of the way, you want to give me a hint? Are we going north or south?”
“North to a very nice bed-and-breakfast outside of Solvang. The place is owned by some friends of mine.”
“It sounds good to me.” He nodded his approval. “I haven’t been up there in years. Although I thought you’d choose something closer to the beach.”
“I thought we’d save that for later.” She couldn’t resist glancing around as Josh headed for the freeway. “I can’t believe she’s stayed quiet for so long. I swear this is making me more paranoid than when every time I walked in the door I wondered if I’d find evidence of her having been in my house.”
“I’m just glad there haven’t been any more flowers,” he told her. “Once I found out they had meanings, they bothered me almost as much as the other shit she pulled. But you know what I want to do?”
She slipped on her sunglasses against the sunlight now filling the car. “If it’s anything kinky, you can forget about it, Brandon.”
“Then you’re safe, because I left the handcuffs and other little toys home. But I do want to state that no mention of our hellish friend will be made from the time we leave the city limits until we return. Deal?”
That was something Lauren was more than happy to agree to. “Deal. But if you want me to be an agreeable traveling companion, all I ask is you hit the first Starbucks drive-through for coffee. I didn’t get a chance to make any this morning.”
Josh swung by the coffee chain and ordered two large coffees with espresso shots added to Lauren’s. “Anything else?”
She shook her head. “Just the caffeine. I live on coffee so much when things get hectic at work, I don’t feel normal if I don’t have my morning fix to give me a much-needed kick start.”
“I still can’t imagine your work getting hectic. It’s not as if your patients can get up and walk out on you if you’re running behind.”
Lauren grinned. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they did, since it does tend to get a bit chilly in the waiting room. They probably feel as if they’re fur coats put away in cold storage.”
Josh groaned. “That’s really bad.”
“You think that’s bad, you should hear what some of us used to pull during medical school. One guy liked to pretend to be a corpse and lay on a gurney for the first session of gross anatomy class. The minute they pulled down the covering, he’d blink his eyes as if he’d just awakened from a nap and
tell them the last thing he remembered was falling asleep upstairs in class.”
“So the moral was not to fall asleep in class?”
“Exactly.”
“You know, for a classy-looking lady, you have a very sick sense of humor and a strange idea of what’s fun.”
“Are you telling me you never pulled off any practical jokes in law school?” she challenged.
“There were days I felt I was lucky if I was awake enough to attend class, but we had one guy, Pat Hamilton, who was known to plant a mannequin holding a tape recorder in his seat during some of the classes.”
“The tape recorder was to record the class?”
He shook his head. “Nope, he had a hidden recorder for that. This one was strictly playback, and it played back the sound of a man snoring. We were always surprised he wasn’t thrown out.”
“Don’t tell me, he’s now a federal judge or something.”
He shook his head again. “Even worse. He operates a storefront law office in East LA where he likes nothing better than going up against the big guys. Quite a few big-name law firms have tried to persuade him to go with them, but he’s always turned them down. Says he prefers helping guys who can’t afford the kind of attorneys they need to sitting in a high-rise office where he couldn’t dare put his feet up on the furniture.”
“Sounds a bit like you with your distaste for wearing ties to court.”
“Yeah, there’re some who’re not too happy about that, so the day may come when I’ll have to give in and wear one of those nooses. That new judge cornered me in the hall one day and said the day I show up in his court without a tie would be a day I’d spend in jail along with a hefty fine.”
“Judge Burns?”
“That’s the one. Talk about a stuffy old fart.”
Lauren chuckled. “I had to testify in his court a couple days ago for the Winston case.”
“The kid who OD’d on speed and the parents are suing his best friend’s parents for knowing their kid sold drugs and not doing anything about it?”
She nodded.