Just Fall (4 page)

“Did you really?”

She looked at him with amused affection. “No. I told the registry associate that I couldn’t possibly commit to anything without my fiancé and put the whole thing on hold.”

“Do you want to change your mind?”

“What, and actually register?”

He nodded.

“God, no, sweetheart. Like I said, playing house. We’ll still ask for donations to the foundation.”

Rob’s eyes skimmed the room again and he wondered if his mind had been playing tricks on him earlier. And even if it hadn’t been, if it had been Quinn, couldn’t it be pure coincidence? He frowned. He knew better than that.

“Rob? Are you okay?”

He shook it off. “Sorry. Just thinking about candelabras.” He smiled at her.

She smiled back. “Well, we certainly won’t get one if they make you look so worried. Let’s go home.”

Still later. Ellie was astride him. He thrust powerfully up into her and she rocked back, gasping. They were slick with sweat. Her nipples were rose pink and tight. He gripped her slim hips and pulled himself into her deeper, then flipped her, so she was suddenly underneath him. He withdrew slowly, teasing, then plowed into her welcoming body with a grunt of pleasure. Her hands raked across his back. Again he thrust. And again. She came with a deep cry, and he let himself explode into her. She held him tight as his prick pulsed inside her, quivering, then turned her head, burrowing the side of her face into the pillow.

“I love you.” She uttered it low and hoarse.

“I love you more.” He breathed it into her ear with tender care. Softly kissed the hollow of her throat.

Ellie sits at a beachside hotel bar, far away from the Grande Sucre. A tropical cocktail sits before her, not her first. The cheap sarong, she’s rocking as a dress. Somehow she’s made it look expensive. The gauzy scarf, she’s loosened, no longer a tight turban. Tendrils of her soft, shiny blond hair escape, effortless, calculated. The weird white zinc lips are gone. Her lips are now painted red; her eyes are bright, lashed with mascara. She’s made an effort.

She looks the part of a beautiful young woman on vacation sipping drinks and just maybe, idly, looking for a little trouble. Only if it’s “worth-it” trouble, not a sure thing; whoever “he” is, he’s going to have to work for it. Ellie’s learned that a little studied indifference can inspire a surprising amount of interest.

And she knows just what she needs. For tonight at least. A place where she can sleep without having to use her passport or credit card. Anonymity. And rest. She needs time to think and sleep, and re-fucking-group because people,
police,
are going to be looking for the blonde who left a dead man in her room and stole a convertible from the valet of the Grande Sucre Hotel. Fleetingly, she thinks about the car, abandoned with the keys in and the motor running on a Soufrière side street. She hopes it’s been picked to pieces by now.

Ellie eyes a man at the end of the bar. He wears his deep tan well; his blue eyes are a little watery from sun and sea salt and dirty bananas (rum, coconut cream, crème de cacao). No wedding ring; better, no wedding ring tan line. Ellie has come to truly value simplicity. She catches his glance at her. She makes an elaborate show of unknotting her scarf, shaking loose her silky blond hair.

The smile on her face is genuine, if born not of her interest in him (as he so readily believes) but in the delight of how easy it is to snare his attention. This is a new skill for Ellie, honed in recent days out of pure survival. The woman who always prided herself on being direct, intellectual, a whole person, not a
girl,
has discovered the technique of seduction. It is just a
faster
line from A to B. She was shocked at the deep simplicity of its mechanics. Also relieved, amused, and a little annoyed for having waited so long to put this particular technique in her arsenal. Memories flash through Ellie’s brain: smiling at the man at the airline desk as she negotiated successfully for her standby seat to the island; the gentle graze of her fingertips across the knuckles of the St. Lucia customs official; her slow saunter through the lobby of the Grande Sucre, Carter Williamson, her soon-to-be victim, trailing behind her.

The man at the end of the bar rises. Makes eye contact. Ellie drains her glass, tilting back her neck to swallow the dregs.

“Buy you another?”

Several cocktails later, Ellie laughs at something the tanned man has said. Truth is, she’s hardly paying attention. The cues of seduction are absurdly easy to read and she’s on autopilot.

She thinks of Rob, of the safety and comfort and protection inherent in their private little bubble (now so rudely popped). She wonders if she will ever see him again. She wonders if he’s dead.

Ellie drains her drink. She senses the tanned man needs the encouragement and so gifts him with a smile and a giggle. He signals for another round.

“My name is Harry.”

She offers him her hand in a demure way. A slight dip of the head. Then a lift of the eyes. Direct into his. She takes note of the one large black fleck in his gray eyes. Before dipping her lashes flirtatiously.

“I’m Lauren.”

Ellie carried the last of the boxes labeled “kitchen” and set it down on Rob’s granite countertop.
Our
countertop, she corrected with a smile. She was thrilled. Rob had suggested they move in together soon after he proposed. He saw no reason to wait, he had told her, and every reason to start their lives together. So she had negotiated an early termination of her lease. Rob had taken care of the rest: hired movers, insisted on paying for them, consulted her on which sofa they should keep, which television, which coffee table. He had arranged the sale of the superfluous items and started a joint checking account with the proceeds. The first thing they had purchased together was a new bed crafted from sturdy dark maple, along with all new sheets and a luxurious plum-colored silk comforter. The bed’s delivery had been scheduled to coincide with Ellie’s move-in date, which she took as practical, but also a romantic gesture marking their new life together.

So what if Rob had seemed a little distracted lately? A little distant, as if he had drifted away to a place she couldn’t quite reach. Not always, but there were definitely moments. When she tried to peg exactly when the shift had occurred, his remove seemed to coincide with the day he had met her parents before the two of them larked off to pretend to register for wedding presents.

Did he not like her parents? Plenty of people didn’t like their in-laws. So what? Lord knows she had enough of her own issues with them (her mother so controlling, her dad far too passive). Was Rob afraid to tell her he didn’t like them? She tried speaking disparagingly about them a couple of times (quelling the small nibble of traitorous guilt this engendered) in an effort to get him to come clean, but he hadn’t risen to the bait.

Or had pretending to register made their impending marriage more real for him? Was he getting cold feet? Ellie couldn’t help it. She fretted she would be left again. People always seemed to leave.

But every other aspect of their planned wedding and moving in together had proceeded without a hiccup. She had racked her brain to see if it was something she had done or said, she even asked him outright one night, gathering her courage and steeling herself for a painful answer, but he assured her it was work, nothing to do with her.

She comforted herself that at least she was asking the questions. There was no way she was turning a blind eye this time. She was vigilant and alert.

Now she watched as Rob methodically turned over every coffee mug in the cabinet, making sure the open sides faced down onto the shelf. Amused, she asked, “Is that really necessary?”

“It is,” he replied. “If you leave the cups facing up, they collect dust, and then you’re just including dirt in your morning wake-me-up.”

“How much dust could possibly collect?” she teased. “We don’t have that many cups, so it’s not like any of them are sitting on the shelf for that long—they’re in constant rotation.”

“How much dust do you want to drink?” Without waiting for a reply, he continued, “ ‘None’ is the correct answer.”

“You’re kind of a nut, aren’t you?” She asked it with affection.

“Yes, but I’m your nut,” he replied, grinning.

He began chasing her around the apartment. In and around the half-unpacked moving boxes, the furniture that was still in temporary positions, the garbage bags that held the last few items Ellie had packed up from her apartment—a haphazard tangle of her flatiron and cosmetics, the pile of rarely worn winter sweaters she had almost forgotten to pull from the deep recesses of the closet, the now half-empty jumbo pack of paper towels that had been purchased to help her efforts to leave the old place clean enough that her landlord wouldn’t ding her on the security deposit.

Round and round they went, Ellie shrieking with glee, until finally she slowed long enough to allow Rob to catch her and throw her onto the sofa, both of them breathing heavily and laughing. Rob asked, “You let me catch you, didn’t you?”

“You’re so smart,” she said. “It must be why I love you.”

“And here I was thinking it was my fine ass and big guns.”

“Well, actually, you’re right. It’s the guns. And the ass.”

“What? I’m just a piece of meat to you?”

“Exactly right. I only praise your mind so your fragile male ego doesn’t collapse.”

“Oh, is that right?” And with that, he began to tickle her relentlessly, despite the pleas for mercy that rose and fell over her giggles. Only when she was gasping for breath and her eyes streaming tears did he stop, kissing her lightly on the tip of her nose.

Rob shifted himself to a seated position and pulled her onto his lap. She leaned her head into his shoulder and sighed deeply, a sigh born of contentment and the all-abiding release a spectacular laughing fit can provide.

“How did we get so lucky?” she asked, her voice soft, as she lifted a hand to stroke his cheek.

“We must have been very worthy souls in our last life,” he replied. “People like Mother Teresa or Gandhi, who sacrificed so much personally to help fellow members of humanity.”

“Are you comparing yourself to Gandhi?” Her nose crinkled to hold back her laughter.

“Not me. Past-life me. And I could compare you to Mother Teresa except that you have a way more developed sense of style. And I don’t think she reached quite the level of perfection you have with a blow job.”

“Oh, is that all I am to you? A good BJ?”

“Exactly right. I only praise any of your other qualities so your fragile female ego doesn’t collapse, but at the end of the day, it’s all about the BJ.”

“Maybe I better give you one, then. You know—just to keep our equilibrium.”

She smiled slyly at him as her fingers worked the zipper of his fly open.

“Who am I to argue with maintaining equilibrium?” he asked as her head descended.

His eyes closed and his head dropped back as her mouth found his cock.

Detective Lucien Broussard of the Royal St. Lucia Police Force begins his day with the dream. The dream is always the same. In the dream, he is asleep. In his sleep, he hears the sound of a child crying. Lucien tries to wake up, but his body feels heavy, immobile. He can’t open his eyes; his eyelids are weighted. He finally wrests his leaden hands up to his eyes and pries his eyelids open. When he does, he realizes he is blind. His eyes are open but he still can’t see.