Fire Raiser (9 page)

“Holly,” Cam purred. “Darling. You also know what I can do, and that I don’t need potions, lotions, notions, shiny rocks—or even, sugar lump,
you
—in order to do it. Or have you forgotten who I used to practice on?”

Lachlan discovered that watching Holly splutter with incoherent outrage was even more rewarding than watching her win. Stifling laughter as best he could while winking his congratulations at Cam, he wisely excused himself to go schmooze Mrs. Paulet—without whose support nobody in PoCo got elected to anything from prom queen to Congress.

“TWERP,” HOLLY SNARLED.

“Cleaned up your language, I see,” Cam remarked.

“Asshole,” she shot back at once.

“Now, that’s the Holly I remember.”

“I
will
tell him your real name—see if I don’t!” When he stuck out his tongue at her, she succumbed to a fit of the giggles. “Oh, knock it off! You look ridiculous when you do that.”

“Not the image of the savvy, sophisticated, ruthless attorney terrorizing all who dare to oppose him?”

“Dream on,” she advised, but he was no longer paying attention. She followed his line of sight to Evan, who was charming Mrs. Paulet. “My guy’s not bad, huh?”

“Not bad at all. A second ago she was playing hard to get, but look at how he’s got her leaning a shoulder toward him, just a little. The way he’s tilting his head as he smiles—Holly, that’s absolute art.”

“Oh, it’s nothing to do with art or craft. It’s all instinct. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it.” She linked elbows with him and coaxed him on a casual stroll around the edge of the crowded ballroom. “He’s male, she’s female. What he’s actually doing is flirting.”

“That’s what all politicians do: seduce the voters.”

“What is it about a Y chromosome that makes men think everything has to do with sex?”

“I said ‘seduce,’ not ‘consummate.’ It’s the allure of being around somebody powerful. Somebody who can convince you that he or she can get things done that you can’t. Your husband is quite obviously a powerful man. Of course, it helps that the guy’s a hunk. Nowhere near my type, but a hunk all the same.”

“I reiterate: men think
everything
has to do with sex!”

“And who was the one making salacious advances to her own husband not ten minutes ago? By the way, if you were thinking of doing to him what you were probably thinking of doing to him, it’s not illegal in any of the states—unless you’re in the military.”

“Huh?”

Cam gave a little shrug. “It’s a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for a soldier to have sex in any way that isn’t genital-to-genital intercourse.”

“We’re talking about a sexual position usually indicated by a two-digit number?”

“Yep,” he replied with a blithe and entirely fake smile. “
The Manual for Courts-Martial
says it’s unnatural. It comes under the general heading of ‘Sodomy.’ ”

Holly took a healthy swig of vodka. “Weren’t the sodomy laws repealed?”

“
Lawrence
v.
Texas
,” he supplied immediately. “Sex between consenting adults ain’t nobody’s business but theirs. But Article 125, the applicable section of the Uniform Code, means the military can prosecute. The results can be dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and confinement for five years—”

“—in a lovely garden suite at Fort Leavenworth,” she finished for him. “But gays are the only ones they apply it to.”

“Yep,” he said again, with the same smile. “When you sign the enlistment papers, do you also sign away all the rights stipulated in the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment? It would appear so.”

She thought some more. “Only until somebody challenges it in court. I mean, it’s discriminatory—not to mention hypocritical—to apply Article whatever only to gays and not to straights.” Suddenly she latched onto his arm. “Cam—”

He nodded. “And the penny drops.”

“It won’t be a court-martial of a gay soldier that will overturn Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. It’ll be when a married heterosexual couple gets prosecuted—”

“Like that’s ever gonna happen.” He lifted her hand and kissed her knuckles. “You wouldn’t have made a bad lawyer.”

“There’s no call to insult me,” she retorted at once. “So what brings you back home to Virginia?”

“Allergies. Have to breathe some home-cooked air for a while.”

Holly gave a knowing sigh. “Where’d you get kicked out of this time?”

“That was Lebanon, and it was a long time ago, and it hasn’t happened since. Actually, I’ve been over in Uncle Nicky’s part of the world, advising their lawyers on our laws so they can use the same twisted logic on their own laws.”

“And yet she is unconvinced of your cynicism,” Holly remarked. “How’s the democracy thing working out, anyway?”

“I don’t know, you tell me,” he retorted. “You live here.”

“If you came home because you’ve been missing it—I have to tell you, so have we.” She caught sight of Evan again, working the crowd. More: she saw the glint in his eyes that meant Cute Girl Alert. She recognized the young lady: with her newly minted real estate license, Shawntel had found Jamey Stirling his house last year. She was very cute indeed, with strawberry blond hair and her very own original, perky, twenty-six-year-old breasts. Holly smiled to herself and poked Cam in the ribs with one finger, nodding in Evan’s direction. “Watch and learn.”

Lachlan leaned over a little, just enough to indicate interest, not enough to intimidate with his height and heft. As Holly had known he would, he smiled a slow, almost lazy smile. The girl responded—a woman would have to be dead for three weeks not to respond to Evan Lachlan in predator mode—and canted a glance up at him through her eyelashes. He looked down her blouse, then into her eyes, then said something that made her smile. It wasn’t her professional smile—the one that looked borrowed from a synchronized swimmer. This one was real.

“You gonna let him get away with that?”

She didn’t take her gaze from Evan and Shawntel as she answered. “I enjoy watching an expert at work.” Evan’s smile had widened to a grin; the girl actually gulped. Holly stifled a snicker.

Cam’s tone conveyed honest confusion. “You don’t get even the least bit jealous?”

“And this would be productive how, exactly? He’s having a good time. Why should I spoil it for him?”

“Some men like it when their wives get possessive.”

“Some men like it when their wives indicate they remember their existence.” She shrugged and sipped at her drink. Shawntel was getting less than the full wattage of those hazel-green eyes; Evan had done his looking and was growing bored. Holly could remember the first time she’d been on the receiving end of the complete treatment—the grin, the eyes, the voice, the leaning in, the glance down her cleavage, plus the throaty chuckle and a quick brush of fingertips across her arm—and decided Shawntel probably wouldn’t have survived it anyway. Still without glancing at her cousin, she slipped her arm around his waist and said, “Okay, Cam-my-man, suppose I do huff my way over there and drag him off. This would embarrass me, annoy him, make her insufferably smug that I felt threatened. It would be admitting that she is, in fact, a threat. And that’s just not the way it is.”

“Well, no,” he mused. “I can’t see anybody you married being stupid enough to risk not being married to you. What I mean is that any man for whom you wouldn’t be enough isn’t a man worth having.”

“What an adorable thing to say!” She grinned up at him. “Although I have to admit it appalls me that I understood the way you said it.”

“I’m still not understanding
you
on this.”

“I know he’s a hunk, he knows he’s a hunk, everybody with eyes to look knows he’s a hunk. Flirting with other women only makes him more conceited than he already is—and that’s sayin’ something, believe me.” She laughed to herself as Evan’s head tilted slightly to one side, a posture that in anyone else would indicate careful concentration. But with him, when a corner of his mouth did that odd little quirk—yeah, he was bored, and just being polite, waiting for Shawntel to finish talking so he could escape. “Let me put it this way,” she told Cam. “How colossally stupid would somebody have to be to pay attention in public to someone they want to sleep with? It’s the ones they glance at sidelong—the ones they make a point of not noticing—that their partner has to worry about.”

“Most people aren’t that smart.” He paused. “Wait a minute. If they
were
that smart—”

“—that’s a whole ’nother kettle of worms, as Lulah would say. When it gets to the point of actively hoodwinking someone you’re supposed to love . . .” She shook her head. “That’s dishonorable, and just plain nasty.” She watched Evan extricate himself and saunter off to schmooze some more, leaving a misty-eyed Shawntel behind. Shaking her head, she was about to ask if Cam wanted to flag down one of the circling waiters for a drink when she felt him wobble a bit. “Cam?”

“Holy shit,” he breathed, wide-eyed gaze fixed on someone near the foyer doors. “Where did
he
come from?”

She squinted a bit, unerringly found the object of his shocked stare, and chuckled. Curling a hand around his elbow, she coaxed him gently toward the nearest waiter and snagged a glass of something. “Easy, Peaches. To quote the bard, ‘You’re leaving tongue-marks on the carpet.’ Or you would be, if this wasn’t a hardwood floor. Further, I know ‘you’d walk on your lips through busted glass if you could get next to that’—but what good would your lips do you then? Here, drink.
That
is Jamieson Tyler Stirling, Esquire, acting Pocahontas County District Attorney, and candidate in November for same. He’s thirty-four, B.A. from William and Mary, J.D. from Yale, and, as may be readily ascertained with a single glance, catastrophically gorgeous.”

“Is—is—”

“Come on, drink some more. That’s my boy. Is he gay? Oh, yeah. Is he single? Oh, very. Why don’t you go talk to him?” She considered his poleaxed expression. “Once you can form semicoherent sentences again, anyway. To continue: he likes motorcycles, The Glenlivet, and Linda Ronstadt—or maybe Warren Zevon, or maybe both. Hard to tell.” She waited. Cam just kept staring at what Holly had to admit was a gray-eyed, black-haired, no-man’s-eyelashes-should-be-that-thick walking invitation to sin. “How do I know all this, you ask? Well, you didn’t ask, but I’m going to tell you anyway. At this very moment he has a pair of leather gloves stuffed in the back pocket of his jeans—which fit him quite delightfully, I might add, and don’t tell me not to look, I’m married but I’m not dead. He just now picked up a glass from the tray with The Glenlivet bottle on it. And he’s singing along under his breath to ‘Poor Pitiful Me.’ Of course, the gloves could be just regular driving gloves, but please note that his hair is a mess, which could be either from the wind of a motorcycle ride or from taking off his helmet. I’m hoping the latter, as there
are
helmet laws in this county, and considering he’s the Acting District Attorney, he’s pretty much obligated to obey them. In any case, you see how simple it is, Watson, once I explain how it’s done.” She waited again. Cam stayed silent. “Plus when he’s not driving something from the county motor pool, he rides his Harley over to dinner at Woodhush. And he went shot-for-shot with us last month with Evan’s collection of single malts.”

At long last the poor man blinked. “He’s changed his drink.”

“Huh?”

Cam half-turned—as if that was all the physical movement he could manage, as if his body would not entirely obey him. As he spoke to Holly, his gaze kept slanting to his left, where Jamey Stirling was now being talked to at great and flirtatious speed by a brace of college-age blondes. “He used to drink Johnnie Walker Black. In law school. Yale,” he added, as if only now recalling the name of the institution. “It was at Yale.”

“I
know
where you went to law school!” she exclaimed. Grabbing his arm, she pulled, then yanked, and eventually he stumbled a bit and followed her. Out a side door they went, and around a corner of the verandah, and all the while she was talking. “You know him? You
do
know him! You have a history! You never told me about him.” They fetched up against the porch railing, and Holly glared at her cousin. “You never said a single word—”

“Yeah, I did,” he murmured, staring down into his glass. “I told you about him, kind of, a long time ago—it wasn’t anything. I mean, it was, but—not the kind of thing you talk about. Just—a thing.”

“Eloquent,” she snapped.

“Holly,” he pleaded.

Recognizing genuine distress, she relented. “I’m sorry. Look, do you want to get out of here? You can, you know. Nobody will mind.”

“No. It’s okay. I just—I was startled. I’m fine.” He slugged back the rest of his drink and glanced around for somewhere to put the glass, at last stashing it under a wicker chair. “He looks good,” he said helplessly.

“Yeah. And right now you look like crap on a kaiser roll. Let’s go for a walk.” Holly steered him resolutely off the porch, down the graveled driveway, and out onto the lawn—cursing her stilettos that sank into the grass with every step. When they were well away from the mansion and its floodlights, she picked a bench before a wall of azalea bushes, pointed, and ordered, “Sit.”

“Speak. Heel. Roll over. Good dog.” Cam settled onto the painted wood and leaned back, sprawling long legs. “Okay. And this is all I’m ever gonna say about it,” he warned. “Him, first-year, twenty-one innocent years old. Me, third-year, a jaded twenty-four. Him, trust fund and brand-new Mercedes. Me, three roommates in New Haven’s cheapest apartment building and a six-year-old pickup truck. Him, gorgeous. Me—”

“Hold it right there. You’re gorgeous, too, you moron.”

“Holly, anybody who looks at him—” He shrugged helplessly.

“Yeah, okay, I get the idea. He walks into a room and chairs beg to be sat in. Get to the real story.”

“The first time I saw him . . . all of a sudden I didn’t have any knees. I can still remember every damning detail, believe me,” he went on, mocking himself. “It was a weekend party at Harry and Michelle’s—they married after second year and spent the summer in her grandparents’ house—everybody went over to help paint the place, ’cause that was the deal they made, but they’d spent the summer in bed instead of working on the house—”