Irresistible Stranger (8 page)

She interrupted. “I get it. So what do you need first? An electrician to work on the power? Or do you need to move the equipment? Have to find a place? What?”

“It's sort of…all of the above. I need some straight information—from an electrician, a plumber—before I
can make a move. But every time I turn around, there's a dozen people, the police, Herman, the insurance investigator…my kids. The darned kids are so worried they can't stay out of it, but I—”

“Okay.” She lurched to her feet. “You stay here. Sit, drink some water, rehydrate, use your cell. I'll take care of the boys. Between the three of us, we'll run interference for you. You get done what you need to get done.”

He frowned.

She cocked her head. “What?”

“You pulled this last night and it was reasonably cute, but enough's enough. You're manipulating me. Handling me.”

She rolled her eyes. “As if I could. Relax, Griff. I'm not the manipulator type.”

She charged off, leaving him in the cool shade with the water, staring after her. She was right, of course. He'd never met anyone less of a manipulator type than Lily.

But something fishy was definitely going on. He could feel it. His stomach had de-clenched. The tic had disappeared. He'd lost the freaked-out feeling.

That woman was downright
dangerous.

But then he took another cool slug of water and hunkered down with his cell phone.

Dangerous.

Lily.

Pairing those two words created an oxymoron if ever there was one. He liked her. Possibly he way more than liked her. He was downright fascinated by how powerfully and unexpectedly he was attracted to
her—got a real click when they were talking. Got more than a click when they were touching.

But she wasn't dangerous.

She was in danger.

And he damned well better keep that priority on the front line.

 

By four that afternoon, Lily was blister-hot, savagely hungry, and having a terrific time. The boys, Jason and Steve, had worked with her like parts of a well-honed team. Initially, she'd sent them off with money to buy ice, cups, water. She'd scared up a card table from the business next door and set the whole thing up to work as a barrier between Griff and the bystanders. Those still curious could congregate, but they couldn't get to him—at least not without interference, and the boys were pit-bull-protective that way.

She had a feeling no one had trusted Jason with personal cash in…forever, because he counted back every penny of change, braced as if expecting her to accuse him of lifting a cut. When she praised both boys for helping to protect Griff, they both grew five inches—at least—and walked around with the posture of soldiers.

It was enough to give a teacher heart palpitations. Man, it felt good to see a beaten-down kid try on some self-esteem.

Okay, so maybe the afternoon wasn't all peaches and cream. The sheriff insisted on taking both boys aside, grilling them on where they'd been at every hour of the night before, and whether they could prove it. Herman Conner had pointed a finger at her and said, “Honey,
you and I are going to have a little talk later,” which put a mosquito in her stomach.

That wasn't the only icky part of the afternoon. Griff's fire had lowered her popularity points, and it wasn't as if she had been batting a thousand before last night. Still, being out and about was a way to talk with people. Listen. Ask questions. She discovered others who'd known her mom and dad—and others who'd worked at the mill before it closed.

A hefty truck pulled in the back alley and started loading out what was, she assumed, Griff's fancy equipment. A few guys hung with him for a while, scuffling the dirt, hands on hips, jawing plans and problems. By the time the truck rumbled off and Griff aimed for her, she was being confronted by three redheads.

She'd already met Mary Belle—the buxom redhead who ran Belle Hair—at the grocery store. But this afternoon she had her two daughters with her, not that that relationship needed explaining. The teenagers looked just like their mama—lots and lots of eye makeup. Major breasts, displayed in sweetheart tees. Heaven knew what hair color they'd all been born with, but new-age red was obviously adopted as their family color of choice.

“Lily, sugar, I wish you'd let me do something about that hair,” Mary Belle told Lily.

“I'm dying to get it cut. I just honestly haven't had time,” Lily said, which was 95 percent true. The only holdback was a sincere worry what Mary Belle might do with a pair of scissors.

“I could give you some real style, honey. Jazz you
up some. You need a little more…” Mary Belle made a motion with her hands “…style, if you want to appeal to a man like Griff.”

“Pardon?”

“It's all right, Lily. I hear everything in the salon. No point in trying to keep gossip from me. And bless his heart, I tried to catch him myself—when I was between husbands, anyhow. Never did work, even though I know he wanted to try.” Mary Belle cocked her head. “Anyhow—y'all give me a call in the morning, I'll get you in, and that's a promise. I'll do you myself. Trained in Savannah, you know…well, hello, handsome.”

Griff came up behind them, greeted Mary Belle's coy flash of eyelashes and inviting smile with his usual Southern boy charm. But Lily had long figured out he could flirt in his sleep; it didn't mean anything beyond an unshakeable kindness to women. Behind the courtesy, though, she could see the tired circles under his eyes, the smudges of dirt that tracked his clothes, dusted his shoes. He was one wiped-out cookie.

Still, he looked better than earlier, when she'd worried he was absolutely at the end of his rope—even though he'd denied it to the death. She wouldn't make
that
mistake again, suggesting he had human qualities, like anger and frustration. Those sharp edges were definitely gone. Now he just looked as if he could crash the instant he sat down—if given the chance.

Lily had been thinking about that all day. Whether she was going to give him that chance to rest.

Or whether she was going to do something she'd never
done in her life. Take a petrifying risk. Hurl good sense to the winds. And make love with a man for no reason beyond that she terribly, totally, irrevocably…

Wanted to.

“S
o you finally get to escape from here?” she asked him.

“
Finally
is the operative word.” Griff couldn't believe she'd stuck it out through the whole afternoon.

“Hey! Quit looking at me! I'm wilted. More than wilted. Hair went flat, clothes went wrinkled, the whole body went droopy.”

“You're kidding, right?” She looked beautiful. The more he was around her, the more he was becoming addicted to the fresh cheeks and huge, dark eyes, and all that thick, silky hair. She wasn't just beautiful. She was damned close to impossibly appealing. “Wait a minute. You weren't listening to Mary Belle, were you? Promise me now, you'll never let that woman get near you with a pair of scissors.”

She chuckled. “I'm desperate for a major trim, but
I'm an easy cut. Otherwise, that woman's sense of style would be more than a little…daunting.”

He laughed—for the first time all day. And realized that his neck and shoulders were unknotting for the first time all day, too. He steered her under the overhang, for the shade, aiming for his EOS. “Thanks for hanging out this afternoon. Couldn't have been fun. I owe you.”

“Yup, you do. I expect diamonds and rubies and stuff. But for right now, I have a more immediate plan.”

“What?”

“You drop me off at the B and B. I'm going to shower and crash. You go straight home, turn off all phones, and crash yourself.”

He waited. “That's the whole plan?”

“Well, maybe you should also lock your door so nobody can bug you.”

“Hmm. I have a different plan.”

“What?”

They reached his car. He clipped open her door. “I drive you to your B and B. You get a change of clothes—like a swimsuit, a towel. We go back to my place. We can either shower first, or skip the shower and head straight for the hot tub—but I have in mind putting ice cubes in it. Have something ice-cold to drink. Followed by something ice-cold to eat.”

“All right, all right, all right. You can have me. Body and soul, and skip the rubies. Just the words
ice cold
are enough to bring sentimental tears to my eyes.”

“You're easy, Lily.”

“Yeah. I've been told that before.”

He'd bet the bank she hadn't. He'd bet the bank
there'd never been one thing any guy had ever found easy about Lily…which might be part of the reason he was so damned mesmerized.

 

At the B and B, she only took a few minutes, flew out the door with Louella flapping on her tail, urging a plate of cookies on her, talking nonstop, waving wildly at him.

He only had eyes for Lily. She dropped a sack in the backseat—big enough to hold a bathing suit and changes of clothes. But somehow, in those few minutes upstairs, she'd turned into another woman. The shorts had been replaced by a sundress, all white and yellow, the daisies at the hem fluttering around her knees.

Her legs were bare.

Her eyes were softer than chocolate.

Her lips were noticeably free of lipstick.

And she'd pulled up all that thick, silky hair with combs.

“What?” she said, when she piled in and yanked on her seat belt. Instead of starting the car, she'd caught him looking at her.

“Nothing. Just wiped out after that long day,” he said, but tiredness was the last thing on his mind. He kept trying to remind himself that she was a teacher. Not that teachers couldn't be gorgeous, but it was hard to think of them as femme fatales. And that was just it. She wasn't. He could readily picture her in front of a bunch of kids, laughing, scolding, hugging the little ones, playing games. Not seducing guys. Not making guys melt at her feet just for a smile.

Yet somehow, there was something in her eyes, the way she looked at him, the way she smiled at him—that messed with his head. Was
still
messing with his head.

He had to make another stop to pull off the rest of his evening plan, but within an hour they were back at his place. The hot tub was set on lukewarm, the pool jutting over the hilltop. She emerged from her shower with a towel concealing her suit, and immediately saw the spread on the patio table. Plates and bowls were set in a bed of ice. Fresh shrimp with a sharp red dip. Chilled chardonnay. A plate of cheese, crackers and caviar. Lime sorbet in a sterling icer. Fresh peaches. It wasn't exactly a normal dinner, but the food was all bite-size, no fuss.

“That's it,” she said. “I'm in love with you. I know, I know, that's what all the ladies say.”

“It is. I can't help if I'm wonderful.”

“Yeah, that's your press all right.” She plopped the towel on a lounge chair, touched a bare foot to test the temperature in the tub, and then sank in with a groan loud enough to wake the sky. “Speaking of your press, though—I heard under the table that you're some kind of high-brow math whiz.”

There, for a moment, he felt reassured. She wasn't perfect. In fact, when she started prying and probing and using that weird intuition of hers, she could be downright annoying. He didn't have to worry about a permanent attachment to a woman who just never let anything rest. Right? “Hey, I already confessed I had a degree in math.”

“Yeah, but you never said you used it to do really top-secret, fancy work.”

“Who told you such an outrageous story?” Apparently, he wasn't supposed to notice how fast she'd dipped that curvy figure out of sight. He could pretend when he had to.

“I never kiss and tell. But I picked it up from a lot of sources. There was a tall, gray-haired woman—your insurance agent? I heard her talking about making sure all your math computers were extra-protected at home, that maybe you needed more coverage or security for your work in progress. Then one of the kids—I think Jason—was telling the other boy who works for you about how you were going to cure ‘really, really bad diseases' with math. How you were working for somebody in secret—”

“Sheesh,” he said disgustedly. He popped a cold shrimp in her mouth, handed her a sweating-cold chardonnay, and slipped into the water himself. The lukewarm water hit his battered, knotted muscles like a balm. Still, he turned a scowl her way.

“It's all right, Griff. Don't worry. I'm just a lowly teacher. I didn't understand anything, really.”

“You managed to add two and two and come up with different answers than almost anyone knows around here.”

“Why is it a secret?”

Another reassurance, he thought. She wasn't just smart. And nosy. She could be downright relentless—so relentless that he couldn't think of a single way to avoid answering her. “If someone was working on, say, a
hopeful new medicine—a drug that could cure a serious type of disease—then that medicine could conceivably be worth a lot of money. So it might make the most sense, security-wise, for the computations and analyses, and all the trick problems associated with mathematically testing the possibilities, to be done off-site. It's mostly computer work. Calculations, probabilities, that kind of thing. There's no reason it has to be done in an office or inside company walls. In fact, it's probably better done in a private facility, where there are no distractions in sight, no one tempted to steal it.” He looked at her. “Particularly if no one has a clue where such work is being done.”

She took a bite of the cracker mounded with caviar, grimaced, gulped down some wine, and aimed for the tray of cheeses. “It's just hard to grasp,” she admitted. “That your ice-cream parlor is such a front.”

“It's not a front.” She'd offended him again. Not just because his ice-cream deal was real, but because a “front” implied gangster-type behavior. Like he had something to hide that was wrong.

“Okay, okay, bad choice of words,” she said gently. “It's still difficult to grasp. You're so adorable, it's just really hard to think of you as being geeky.
Major
geeky.”

Okay. He'd had enough of her playing with him. He'd stuffed down enough food, had quenched his thirst, was de-stressed from the frustrating day. He had more than enough energy to tackle her now. “You said you'd had quite a morning, that something happened…”

“It did.” There, that wicked grin of hers faded out. She leaned her head back, sank in water to her neck. “I
talked to Mr. Renbarcker—the man who owned the mill back when?”

He listened—to how she'd managed to discover Webster Renbarcker was in town, how she'd located him, what he'd had to say. He watched her face, watching her expression lift on hearing what a good man her father was, what good care he'd taken of the sick mill owner.

“And that's just the thing, Griff. Mr. Renbarcker was positive my father would never have set a fire. My dad loved the mill, loved him, loved us. Mr. Renbarcker talked about how my dad was prepared to stay to the end, that he'd socked away a financial safety net…. So it doesn't make sense that my dad felt such despair when the mill closed. He
knew
it was going to close. He
knew
how sick Mr. Renbarcker was. There was nothing to throw him into a depression. If anything, he no longer had to feel responsible, but was finally free to go on and do something else.”

By sheer strength of will, Griff refrained from adjusting the shoulder strap of her suit that had accidentally sneaked off her shoulder. On the serious subject at hand though, he felt he had to caution her. “Your dad still could have accidentally set that fire, sugar.”

“Well, the first thing that mattered to me was clearing his name, getting that cloud off his reputation, that he'd be a man who'd set a fire for money. But the second issue, about whether he could have accidentally set it—that's just a plain
no.
My dad was a total perfectionist around his wood shop. We girls were never allowed near the varnishes or chemicals. He didn't have a careless bone
in his whole body. There could be no accidental fire, not with my dad.” She sighed, leaned her head back. “But I realize that I can't prove that.”

“But that's all right, isn't it? You didn't come thinking you'd find information that would lead you to a court of law. I think you came to prove in your own mind what happened. That the fire wasn't your father's fault. And it sounds as if you're doing exactly that.”

“I am. And it couldn't feel better. I always believed my dad was a hero. That's what he
was,
Griff. A terrific man. You'd have liked him, honestly.”

“I don't doubt it.”

What a night it had turned into. The sucking heat of the day had finally eased. The sky was deepening, darkening. Even the birds had gone silent, and stars buttoned the sky with fancy silver studs. It was a night to romance her, not dwell on troubling subjects…but he liked it that she trusted him enough to talk about this. “Lily, I'm really surprised that you three sisters were separated.”

“There wasn't a choice. No one could take all three of us.”

“I understand how suddenly adding three children could be a financial burden for a foster family. But I've lived here for several years now, long enough to know folks. Even if you had to be separated, fostered in different homes, I'd think an effort would have been made for you to stay in Pecan Valley. Your home. Instead of being shifted all over the country. I'd think normally, that a social service agency or court would think it best to keep you around people who knew you, where you
didn't have to be uprooted from schools and friends and all.”

She considered. “I don't know. As a little girl, I didn't think of it as a question. It's just the way it was. But Sophie and Cate and I all felt the same. Because of that fire, we not only lost our mom and dad, but each other. It was…traumatically lonely. I'm not kidding.”

“I don't doubt it—and that's just the point. This is a community that comes together. Yeah, there are weird folks, just like anywhere else. Plenty of problems. But it's hard for me to believe that the authorities didn't try and keep you three together.”

“Maybe they did, and I just didn't know. Anyway, that's water over the dam. And there's something else I want to bring up with you.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

“It's a little…awkward.”

“That's okay.” He didn't know what she was going to say, but he was increasingly troubled. Nothing was adding up. There seemed no explanation—or source—for the buzz of gossip blaming Lily for the current fires, for her being “like her dad.” There seemed more and more unanswered questions about the fire from her childhood—and no explanations at all for why there'd been two arson fires since she came back to town.

The more that happened, the more Griff felt he was missing something. That Lily was missing something. And that, if this situation escalated any further, someone could be hurt—or killed, just like in that long-ago fire.

They had to figure out what was going on.

He leaned forward, thinking to turn off the jets of
water. They'd both been in the tub long enough to be waterlogged. He was thinking about fires and problems, thinking about what awkward thing she was going to spring on him—when suddenly, in a swoop of water and slick, warm arms, she slid against him. Bared her neck to press her wet, soft lips against his.

An explosion couldn't have startled him more.

Slinky as a mermaid, she folded herself against him, water lapping the tops of her breasts when she slip-slid onto his lap. Her left hand slowly stroked up his arm, feeling the slope of his shoulders, then sliding around his neck. Her next kiss was a naked offer. An invitation.

His brain was sucked under so fast he couldn't remember how to breathe. “Hey,” he managed. “What started this?”

“You were frowning,” she said. “And I decided you'd had enough to frown about today.”

“I can't argue with that.”

“I'm sick of trouble and worrying. I've been knee deep since I got here. I'm tired of it.” Her voice didn't sound remotely tired. She nibbled down his neck as she continued to…
discuss.