Admit One (3 page)

“What are you doing here?”

Ah. The million dollar question. Mason hadn’t expected to return to Sweetwater until June, when he was to stand up with Tucker at his wedding. But the production he’d been contractually obligated to had wrapped, and while he couldn’t exactly say he was at loose ends, he’d…

Well. He’d simply felt the desire to come back. Actually, if he were being honest, it was more of a
need.
Part of that need, he knew, was due to the blue eyes currently watching him with a disconcerting mix of sympathy and suspicion.

“Paying a visit,” he said blithely. “Although I am forced to confess that this isn’t quite the welcome I’d hoped for.”

“If I’d known to expect you,” she said, suspicion edging out sympathy in her tone. “I might have rolled out the wagon rather than blacking your eye.”

“You didn’t black my eye.” Surely not. The woman was the approximate size of a tsetse fly.

She peered at him over the candle flame. “Wanna bet?”

“Look, it was a spur of the moment – ”

“I’d hardly call a transatlantic flight spur of the moment. And they have these things called phones? They work surprisingly well as a tool of communication.”

Mason scowled, which made his eye hurt. Bloody hell, maybe she
had
blackened it.

“I rang Tucker,” he said. He’d simply asked him not to say anything to Sarah – and therefore Allison – about his coming.

“Did you.” He watched her absorb that, saw irritation flit across her features. There was also a brief flash of hurt, and that was far less acceptable than the irritation. But before he had a chance to address it, her suspicion returned in full force.

“Why didn’t you say anything before I crawled into bed with you?”

“I was sleeping.” He thought that had been obvious.

“In the middle of a thunderstorm? And prior to this,” she flicked her hand to indicate the racket outside, “there was an ambulance in the parking lot. Don’t tell me you didn’t hear the siren.”

“An ambulance?” His heart lurched. “What happened? Are you alright?”

“Don’t change the subject,” she said, leaning back when Mason sat up with the intent of looking her over.

Mason dropped the towel, exasperated. “You say
ambulance,
indicating a medical crisis of some sort,
and I ask if you’re alright. How is that changing the subject?”

“You avoided my question.”

“What?” Fuzzy-headed as he was with both pain and fatigue, it took Mason a moment to recall what she’d said. “Oh for heaven’s sake.  You think I, what,
staged
this in order to lure you into my bed? I’m very good darling, but even I am not sufficiently talented to conjure a power outage as a prop. I was
sleeping. 
I tend to do that – and rather heavily, I might add – after that trans-Atlantic flight you so recently mentioned. A bomb could have exploded directly overhead and I likely would not have noticed.”

A bomb did explode just then, in the form of a massive clap of thunder that quite literally shook the rafters.  Allie jumped, hot wax spilling over onto her hand. Mason snatched the candle, sitting it safely aside. Then he pressed the discarded towel to the red splotch on her milky skin.

The skin, he recalled, that had only minutes ago been stretched, fully naked, against him.

Their heads bent close together, he could smell her rain-damp hair, the faint scent of toothpaste she exhaled on each breath. And because they were so close, he could hear the moment when her breathing sped up.

Whatever annoyance he’d felt fled, swept clean by sheer longing. Unable to stop himself, he lifted his gaze and found hers – wide and blue – on him.

“Allison,” he said, tightly bottled emotion causing her name to emerge huskily from his throat. “I –”

“Allie!”

This time they both jumped, her free hand flying up to knock him in the eye. Again.

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Allie repeated as he fell back on the mattress with a groan. Then she leaned over the edge of the loft, peering toward the front door, from which an awful pounding racket was emanating.

“Knock it off, Will!” she called back, hunching her shoulders when Mason groaned again. “I’ll be there in a second.”

With one last glance toward Mason, she disappeared down the ladder, her little black head shimmering in the candlelight.  He could hear her making her way toward the door, bumping into things along the way –he’d nearly forgotten that she was a bit of a klutz, his Allison – then opening it to admit Will bloody Hawbaker, Chief of bloody Police.

“What,” she said to her brother “is the problem?”

“You weren’t answering your phone.”

“I –” she stopped, seeming to consider. “I must have left it at the store. What’s wrong? Is it Tommy?”

Tommy?
And who in the bloody hell might
that
be?

“Tommy’s okay,” he heard the other man say, which enlightened Mason not one bit. “But one of the assailants got away, and I wanted to let you know. Not that I think he has any reason to come back around here, but better to be safe. Is something burning?”

“What?” Allie said.

Engrossed as he was in eavesdropping on their conversation, Mason belatedly realized that indeed something
was
. Looking around, he saw that in his haste, he had set the candle a bit too close to one of Sarah’s books. It hadn’t precisely ignited yet, but it was beginning to smoke.

He leapt into action, yanking the candle away from the paper, but not without spilling melted wax onto his own hand.
“Shite.”

There was a very pregnant pause below, followed by Will Hawbaker’s dry voice. “I wasn’t aware that you had company, Al.”

“Interestingly enough, neither was I.”

After a moment or two of indecision, Mason decided that there was no point in hiding in the loft, hoping Hawbaker would simply go away. Like a norovirus, once the man had shown up, you pretty much just had to wait him out, suffering through his presence.

Resigned, he crawled to the edge of the loft, and peering over, met the other man’s suspicious gaze.

“Hawbaker,” he said, and if the cop’s tone had been dry, Mason’s was positively arid. “How delightful to see you again.”

CHAPTER THREE

WILL
Hawbaker strolled up to the deli counter at Culpepper’s grocery, prepared to order his takeout sub.

“Afternoon, Willis.”

Ginger Parrish, wife of the high school principal, peered at Will from beneath her hair net.  How she managed to cover all twelve inches of her enormous black beehive without ever losing altitude remained a testament to the gravity-defying power of the Aquanet brand. Her eagle eye looked him over, and Will resisted the urge to make sure his shirt was tucked in. It wasn’t like her husband could still give Will detention.

“Gonna be the usual for you today?”

Will toyed with the idea of a meatball sub, but his morning had already given him enough indigestion. “Yes ma’am. Give me a turkey club on wheat.”  

“Slaw or chips with that?”

Will looked at the array of foil bags. “You know, Miz Ginger, I think I’m going to go pick out an apple instead.”

Will wandered into the produce section, and raised his brows. Tommy Culpepper was stacking neat rows of oranges into a bin, his blond head hanging over the fruit like a bright spot of sunshine. He looked up, two black eyes and a swollen nose clouding things a bit. “Afternoon, Chief.”

“Hey Tommy.” Will’d always liked the grocer’s son, so the smile he gave him was both sympathetic and easy. “I would say that I hope it looks worse than it feels, but having suffered a broken nose myself, I’m pretty sure it feels like shit.”

Tommy grimaced. “Pretty much.”

“Surprised you’re not taking it easy today.”

Tommy shrugged, then took his time stacking the last of the produce, and Will figured the kid had something else to say. Sure enough...

“I, uh, didn’t want to come out. In public, I mean. Looking like this.”

Will could understand. In a town the size of Sweetwater, news, once airborne, spread like pollen on the wind. The hope that everyone who saw Tommy’s shiners wouldn’t know that he’d gotten his butt kicked was pretty much in vain.

“But I didn’t want to do that,” the kid continued. “I didn’t want Bran to think that I might be, you know, ashamed. Or worried about what people think. Because I’m not. People think all sorts of things that are mostly wrong, or ignorant. I figure that’s their problem.”

Will nodded. The Sweetwater Playhouse had been in Will’s family for generations, but it had been shuttered for years while Bran, the last remaining Hawbaker with theater in his blood, left town for broader-minded pastures. That changed about six months ago, when the Sweetwater Players had once again begun performing, with Tommy Culpepper in a number of lead roles. That meant he’d spent a lot of time with Branson, which in turn led to speculation. It meant a lot to Will – and would mean even more to Bran – that Tommy seemed undaunted. Bran had taken the kid’s assault pretty hard.

“I appreciate you saying so.”

Tommy smiled and started to say something else until he caught sight of something over Will’s shoulder. A look of disgust contorted his face, causing him to wince. “I’ll see you later,” he mumbled, backing away.

Will glanced behind him, but all he saw was a pyramidal display of soda cases. Maybe Tommy had developed a sudden aversion to aspartame.

Shrugging it off, he headed toward the apples, admiring Bitsy Ferguson’s new baby along the way, mulling over what he’d learned from that morning’s interrogation of Jimmy Owen – essentially nothing, as the man had lawyered up – and wondering exactly how concerned he should be that Mason Armitage was back in town.

Not that he had anything against the Brit. In fact, he rather liked him. However, liking him on a personal level and wanting the man within fifty yards of his sister were two entirely different things. Allison was her own woman, of course, and could make her own –

Hell. He couldn’t even complete that thought with any degree of sincerity. Allison might be almost thirty years old, but she was still his baby sister. He hadn’t been able to protect her the last time she’d gotten her heart broken – and he’d still like to wring Wesley Norbert’s scrawny little neck for that – but he’d be damned if he just stood by and let her be taken advantage of by a man with more experience in his camera-ready eye tooth than Allison had in her whole body.  Will’d done a thorough background check of Armitage after he’d shown interest in Allie last year, and while the man’s professional credentials were impressive, his personal life had been… well, impressive in a different way, speaking from a strictly masculine perspective. It was hard to see pictures of the underwear model Armitage had been banging a while back and not want to give him a high five.

Or maybe slap him on the back. Before pushing him out the door. Far, far away from his sister.

He looked over the apples, gently squeezing a pair of granny smiths.

“Practicing your technique?” the vampire in Lily Pulitzer said.

Will looked up and there she was: blonde, beautiful, bloodthirsty. Too bad he didn’t have a stake. “Torie.” He smiled, but not nicely. “Some of us actually eat the fruit rather than use it to advertise for cheap sex.”

Her laugh was a siren song, luring innocent men to their deaths. “Oh, come on now, Willis. Surely you’ve let go of that silly grudge.”

Silly.
Grudge. 

The fact that she’d joined some kind of swinger’s club – an upside down pineapple in the grocery cart being one of their secret signals – while she was married to Will’s
brother…
no, that was no cause for hostility at all. Nor was the fact that she’d not only noticed Harlan’s drinking problem, but encouraged it whenever she could. Easier for her to
step
out when he was
passed
out.

And that little matter of introducing Harlan to the real estate developer who convinced Will’s brother to invest nearly everything his family had in a land deal – a deal which had gone bust when they ran into legal problems and then the market soured
…
well, in retrospect, of
course
the whole thing was silly.

“Fuck you, Victoria.”

“That offer’s still on the table.”

“I’d rather have sex with a –”

“Willis!”

Will reigned in his unpleasant reference to domesticated livestock and turned back toward the deli counter. “Sandwich is ready!” Ginger said.

“That woman hasn’t changed her hair since Carter was president,” Torie muttered.

“At least she has staying power,” Will replied.

“That makes two of you.” Torie’s tongue touched her pretty pink lips, like a little kitten lapping at some cream. “Or so I’ve heard.”

Will scowled, wondering if he’d had the bad taste to sleep with a woman who would offer Torie any sort of information other than directions out of town. He thought of his brother, of the mess his family’s lives had become in no small part due to this woman. And had to stop himself from picturing his hands around her neck.