Fugitive Heart

by Bonnie Dee

  She laughed as if he’d said something hilarious. “My boy Jakey and he were best buds.”

  Nick stopped pretending to watch the movie. He leaned close to Ames and murmured, “You said you were looking for your brother. Maybe this Jakey guy knows where he is.”

  She nodded and twisted her bottom lip with her fingers, drawing his attention to her mouth. Again.

  Ames picked at some grass and fiddled with it. She didn’t look at the older woman as she asked, “Mrs. Greely, is Jake still working at the Feed and Seed?”

  “No, honey. He decided to go back to school. He’s taking a few classes in business administration.” Beaming, the big woman plunked down on the edge of their blanket. “He’s finally doing something with his life—it took a while to recover from all those years of bad influences.” She covered her mouth with her hand and glanced at Ames. “Oh, sorry.”

  Nick pretended not to understand the older woman’s implication that Ames’s brother was a negative influence.

  “That’s wonderful,” Ames said after a noticeable silence. “Where’s he studying?”

  Nick hadn’t heard of the community college, but that was no surprise. He found it fast enough when he casually clicked on his brand-new phone. Head bowed, he shifted so his back was to the two women. They talked as he pretended to text messages but actually did a quick search about the community college.

  He pressed buttons and listened to Ames and Mrs. Greely. The subject soon shifted from Jake Greely to other town gossip. Only a couple of decibels lower than she’d been speaking, Mrs. Greely said in a hoarse voice, “Richard says that this guy went to bed with Jenny, just to…well, you know, get the Old Place. I’m sorry she didn’t tell you. Everyone knows you’re crazy about the house. It’s not like a real sale, though. Some hinky land contract deal, which will probably fall through.”

  Nick rolled his eyes. She must think he was deaf or brain-dead.

  “It’s fine, Mrs. Greely. Really, I don’t mind.” Ames spoke in her normal voice.

  “But are you seeing him? Sharing a blanket and all.” Mrs. Greely’s whisper was even louder than her regular voice.

  Ames shifted. “It’s fine,” she repeated.

  Time to save Ames from the annoying gossip. Nick twisted back to face the ladies. “Is there somewhere we can buy popcorn?”

  Ames immediately got to her feet. “No, but Billy’s ice-cream truck might be parked at the edge of the park.”

  Mrs. Greely pulled herself up, taking her time. “It is. You two go on and get a Fudgsicle. I’ll see you later.”

  It was a clear threat.

  As she strolled off, Nick looked down at his phone and acted slightly worried. “I just got an important message. I should probably go.”

  “I didn’t hear the phone buzz,” she said. “Never mind. That’s okay—you can go. I know you came to Arnesdale for a retreat. It was nice of you to come into town.”

  Her “don’t mind me; I’ll sit here in the dark” tone made him point out, “You didn’t like the movie anyway.”

  “True enough,” she said cheerfully. Not forced cheeriness. She shook out the blanket briskly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She stopped folding the blanket. “What for?”

  “I mean for running out on you like this.” He pushed back his cap and scratched his forehead. Why was he groveling?

  “It really is okay.” She enunciated each word carefully, as if he didn’t get English. “I have other stuff to do at home. You intrigued me, and I wanted to get to know you, but I will survive if you’re not interested.”

  “But I am.” The words came out before he could stop them.

  “I dunno, Sam. You do seem interested in my family, for some reason.”

  Damn. He would have to cancel any career plans as a spy. Before Ames could say more, maybe voice her curiosity, he took the blanket from her, dropped it on the ground and pulled her behind the nearest tree, one with a wide trunk that shielded them from the view of the gossips in the park.

  “I’m sure interested in you.” He’d distract her the best way he knew how. He didn’t want to scare the woman, only get her out of sight of the nosy neighbors and show her his interest. No lie that he wanted her—it’d be easy to convince her. He backed against the tree and pulled her close. She came straight into his arms, face raised.

  Her eyes remained wide open, studying him. “Hello.” She licked her lips, obviously nervous, but the sight of the tip of her tongue provided an invitation he couldn’t resist.

  “Yeah, hello.” He bent his head to kiss her.

  Her full, warm mouth was soft under his lips, and oh yes, she let him slide his tongue just a small way in. She tasted like cinnamon and apples. Delicious.

  He touched her back, slid his hands down her arms, then laced fingers with hers for a second before going back to explore her curves.

  The kiss deepened. He twisted his head and cupped her skull. Too bad gripping her ass and hoisting her up against his erection was out of the question, except, whoa, she seemed to be doing fine without his aid. Hell, yes, she’d turned into a needy, writhing woman, and if she didn’t stop with those breathy moans and that way of rubbing herself against him, oh God, he might eventually embarrass himself.

  Panting, he put his hands on her shoulders and held her off. “Okay. Okay.” He spoke just to give himself a verbal slap to wake up from the crazy desire.

  She was a shadow in the darkness under the tree. Her teeth gleamed for a moment in the flash of a smile. “Better than okay,” she murmured huskily, but then she pulled back. “My turn to say sorry.”

  “What for?”

  “I kind of launched myself at you.”

  He laughed. “Honey, that was some fine launching. Good thing we’re out in public, or we’d be blasted right out of our clothes and onto the nearest horizontal surface.” Although that might not be necessary. He could imagine taking her standing up, and groaned at the thought.

  Ames pounced and wrapped her legs around his hips. Their mouths met again.

  Nick rested his back against the tree at an angle and used his body to support her. He trembled, and not just from supporting her weight. The kisses were potent, but he wanted more. He moved his mouth to taste her jaw, her throat and the skin just at the top of the T-shirt. He slid a hand along the back of her thigh that curled around him.

  “Yeah,” she whispered. “It would be pretty good, but…” She slid off his body.

  He swallowed, nodded.

  She took a few steps away from him, brushing the front of her shirt and shorts. He wanted to grab her and start all over again.

  “You have to go, remember?” The disbelief in her voice wasn’t bitter, but he heard it all right.

  He grabbed her hand as she started back around the tree, probably to walk away from him. “I really do have to go, Ames.”

  Her full mouth gleamed in the dim light, swollen and damp from their kisses. “Okay. Come see me at the Back Porch sometime if you want to talk.” She waved a hand—those fingers that had just been so busy sliding through his hair, clutching his shoulders—and picked up the blanket.

  He’d been dismissed. She walked away, her sweet rear swaying. If she looked back, he’d wave, trot after her, maybe grab that hand again, but she didn’t.

  Chapter Five

  Ames wasn’t sure why she didn’t try harder to lure Sam home. They could have a conversation. Maybe drink wine. Perhaps get naked. She laughed out loud at that. A woman taking a man home wouldn’t exactly be labeled a skank—this wasn’t the 1950s, even if that decade took its time abandoning Arnesdale. But she’d have to field an awful lot of questions in town—especially when it was the mysterious New Yorker she dragged back to her lair.

  But that wasn’t the reason she’d left him at the park. Except during the few moments he’d relaxed enough to laugh or talk or kiss her with amazing intensity, Sam wore an air of impatient danger. She wasn’t the world’s most observant woman, but she
could tell he was trying to keep his face hidden when people came around. And he’d asked so many questions of his own every time someone came to the blanket. He seemed particularly interested in anything to do with Elliot. And he was from New York. Sure, it was a big city, as he kept telling people. But how often did people from New York show up in Arnesdale? And move into that house? And ask all about her brother?

  Too bad he kissed like nothing she’d ever experienced before—an amazing, skillful, gentle exploration that flowed into passionate hunger. And when she moved against him, oh yeah, she could tell his interest in her wasn’t feigned.

  And his breathy moan. Her insides clutched at the memory of that single, involuntary sound he’d made.

  But until she understood who Sam Allen was and what he wanted here, she was going to stay as safe as possible. Her sudden unreasonable, ravenous hunger for a man she didn’t know was frightening. She didn’t like the uncontrolled roller-coaster-drop feeling his kisses had given her. She had no intention of falling for a tall, dark stranger.

  She walked back to her apartment and wandered the rooms listlessly. No, she didn’t want to clean. No, she most definitely didn’t want to think about damned Sam Allen.

  After an attempt to watch some reality show about brides, Ames decided the best thing to do was to put down the remote and do something that would really engage her mind. She tried to work on a couple of web pages. But her brain wouldn’t stop harping on Sam and then on her brother.

  With a few clicks, she went back to the endless search for Elliot. He never talked about his social life, and her brother hadn’t mentioned a lot of names about his job as an accountant, but she recalled he’d talked about someone who’d gotten in trouble at work years earlier. Rossi.

  That last name was similar to Nick Ross, the name the detective had found for her. During her last search for that name she’d uncovered hundreds of possibilities in New York alone, and none lived near her brother’s apartment.

  With a sense of foreboding, she did another search on Nick Ross, this time adding an “i” to the name.

  When she did a search for images, she hit pay dirt. A series of grainy, out-of-focus photos popped up. Nick Rossi stood in the background of a group at the opening of a dance club in Manhattan. He wore a jacket, and his hair was short, well-groomed.

  Her heart beat painfully as she leaned close. He looked younger, but she could recognize those dark eyes, the lazy half-smile on the very attractive, familiar mouth—the one she’d recently licked and kissed. Sam Allen was Nick Rossi. No wonder why he was trying to hide. But why was he hiding here of all places? Hiding or seeking?

  He’d avoided everyone in town, everyone but her, and now she knew why. He had to be looking for Elliot and decided to use Elliot’s naïve sex-starved sister to find him.

  “No.” She said the word out loud. “Please. No.”

  With trembling fingers, she clicked on the source of the photo, a party from a long time ago. She traced the photo back, through a gossip column about fresh young faces at a nightclub, back to a Facebook page belonging to a woman named Sandy Marvin from Brooklyn, New York. Sandy claimed to love partying and clubbing, and, judging from the photos Ames found, she had big hair and legs to kill for.

  Sam Allen–no, Nick Rossi–wasn’t the only one who could go hunting.

  Ames decided to try to add Sandy as a friend and wrote a quick message to her via Facebook. “I noticed we have a friend in common in your pix. Nick Rossi. Could he currently be in Arnesdale, Wisconsin?”

  She hit send. Then immediately started another message. “Sorry to bother you again, but I wonder if maybe you have heard of my brother, Elliot Jensen? He’s been missing for a few months.” She deleted the second sentence. No need to spook the woman, after all. She substituted, “I’m currently trying to track him down. Thanks!”

  She grimly set to work discovering everything she could about Nick Rossi and then Sam Allen and she had almost no luck. Neither identity had a presence on the Internet. He’d never been convicted of a crime. Then again, who knew what names he used and how often? Ames gave up and went back to work.

  At about one a.m., when she should have been asleep, she still sat at her computer. As she updated the Shear Madness Hair Salon’s page, an e-mail pinged in her inbox.

  Sandy had accepted her friendship with a note. “OMG. You know Nick? And he’s in Wisconsin? OMG! I bet some of our homies will be psyched to hear that.” She had added a smiley face. “Don’t tell him I said hello tho. It’ll be a surprise.”

  She didn’t mention Elliot.

  Ames should have explored her new “friend’s” page at once, because when she took time to check few minutes later, Sandy had unfriended her. She must have done more than that, because now Ames couldn’t find any proof on Facebook that Sandy Marvin existed. The photos of Nick Rossi had vanished too, though a couple Sandy had posted were still in Ames’s computer memory. What was that about? A Facebook glitch? She doubted it. Her spine prickled with unease. Why would Sandy Marvin wipe away all evidence of herself?

  She wrote down the name of the nightclub before she or her computer forgot it and wondered if she should call. After all, they must still be open.

  Instead, she stretched out on her bed, thinking of how she could get Nick Rossi, aka Nick Ross, aka Sam Allen, to tell her everything. Maybe she could use her father’s shotgun to threaten him. That dangerous man would get it out of her hands before she’d manage to level it at him.

  No, she’d keep playing his game of pretend. Maybe it was time to contact the authorities again. They were sick of her nagging them about Elliot, but now she had more to hand over. The FBI might even be interested.

  Ross, Rossi. It had been dumb of her not to notice, but she wasn’t a trained professional. Why hadn’t that detective found this stuff out?

  She punched the pillow and tried to force herself to relax. She couldn’t do anything about Rossi in the middle of the night. But knowing that a man who could potentially tell her about her brother was living only a few miles away made it impossible to sleep. She felt sick at having spent most of the day with him, laughing and talking, telling him stories about her and Elliot, letting him into her life. My God, she’d kissed him! More than kissed him, she’d writhed against his hard body acting like a cat in heat. This twisted bastard knew all sorts of things about her, and she knew nothing about him.

  Ames threw back the covers and went to stare out the window. If she angled her body just right, she could… Well, she couldn’t really see her house, five miles away, but she could picture it there—with that New York snake coiled up and hissing inside it, probably with laughter at dumb hick Ames.

  Damned if she would call the New York police, who’d probably write her off as a nut job. First she’d find out all she could about Nick Rossi. He didn’t suspect she knew the truth about him. She’d play dumb and this time she’d be the one drawing out his secrets.

  It turned out Ames could abandon all her late-night plans to visit Rossi and get him to talk to her again, because he turned up at the Back Porch during her morning shift. It was her turn to open, so she’d been there since before sunrise. The sleepless hours of the previous night were starting to drag on her when Rossi walked through the door.

  Her heart did a flip, then banged against her breastbone at the sight of the handsome, horrible stranger filling the doorway. Was he a physical danger to her? She didn’t really think so, because they’d been alone in the woods yesterday and he hadn’t done anything besides ply her with questions. But if he knew she’d discovered who he really was, that might change.

  Ames pasted on a big, wide, good-ole-girl, waitress smile and met him at the counter as he slid onto a stool. “Mornin’. How’d ya sleep?” Good lord, she was affecting a Southern drawl as if she were a character in a movie. But Sam/Nick didn’t seem to notice.

  “Okay. That old house has a lot of creaks and groans.”

  “Oh, it’s haunted. I have no doubt of that. But
not in a violent Amityville kind of way. I think the spirits that walk there are more the weepy, how do I get to the other side? kind.” She grinned. How easy it was to make small talk with him as if she didn’t know anything. For one fleeting moment, she wished she didn’t know, wished she could go back to yesterday’s innocence. That was the worst part. She’d really liked Sam, but now she had to remember he was Nick Ross—no Rossi—the biggest clue to Elliot’s disappearance she’d found so far—and who might be behind her brother’s vanishing act.

  Ross smiled back, and she’d have to be dead not to notice the way his dark eyes shone with amusement, a shared moment of pleasure. “Well, I didn’t hear any moaning or ghostly whining, but I did hear plenty of claws scrabbling on the floors.” Some fellow vermin coming in for a visit? “You know the number of a good exterminator?”

  “Jim over there can take care of it.” She nodded at the large man wedged into his usual corner booth along with his buddies, Al and Dave, two other very wide men.

  Ross glanced at the booth, then back at her. “Listen, I’m sorry about last night. I wasn’t very sociable. Guess I was still tired from fixing the place up.” He lowered his voice. “And as for that…thing that happened under the tree…”

  Ames waved it away. “Forget it. Slate’s wiped clean. It was a heat-of-the-moment kind of thing.” Heated moment, indeed. Her body started to stoke again at the mere memory of the previous night’s kissing and groping and rubbing, and she had a hard time keeping her gaze from settling on Rossi’s mouth.

  How sick was it that she was still attracted to the dirty liar and possibly worse? She couldn’t let herself dwell on his real identity and what he might have done to her brother. She wasn’t enough of an actor to hide her response.

  He didn’t seem to notice her discomfort yet. “I’d like to make it up to you. When does your shift end? Can I take you out for a meal or coffee or something?”

  And grill me with more questions about my missing brother? Sure, why not. Ames turned on her waitress smile again. “Sure. Why not? One good thing about the early morning shift, I’m off by one. Give me some time to go home and clean up, and I’ll be good to go.”