Live and Let Love (25 page)

He was certain she knew what she was doing as she massaged the stain remover into
his crotch, lightly touching his family jewels as she lifted the fabric of his pants
away from his skin to more vigorously attack the stain. Resting her hand against his
inner thigh, temptingly close to his balls.

All innocent, and incredibly erotic to a man who’d been way too long without his wife.

She rubbed and dabbed. Clung to his thigh with fingers that innocently massaged. Leaned
in so close she could have kissed his lap, until he thought he might start panting.

Okay, he’d screwed up with this maneuver and given her the tactical advantage.

However, if the way her pupils were dilated when she looked up into his eyes was any
indication, she was feeling things, too. “There. That should do it.”

No, that didn’t do it. And no, he wasn’t going to lose his resolve and do it.

“I think this is the best we can expect. Hopefully the cleaner will have more luck.”
Looking at him like that, she was so totally tempting and begging to be kissed.

Jack leaned down, feeling as if he could simply fall into her kiss when Spookie barked
and pawed his leg, begging to be picked up and saving him from certain temptation.

Willow frowned at the dog. Yeah, she was trying to tempt Jack into a roll in the hay.
Not today, damn it.

“You belong back in your room,” she said to the dog.

“Oh, she’s fine. I like dogs.” He reached down and scratched Spookie behind the ears.

Willow rose slowly and set the stain stick on the tablecloth. “Let me just clear the
dishes and make some coffee to go with dessert.” She shot Spookie a warning look,
grabbed the offending plate and her own, and headed for the kitchen.

Jack gave an inward grin, grabbed the two wineglasses and the pea salad bowl, and
headed for the kitchen with Spookie on his heels. All the DNA was long gone from that
wineglass, but he was going to give Willow a scare anyway. In the kitchen, he set
the salad bowl on the counter and went to the sink.

“Just set those on the counter,” Willow said.

Maybe it was only him, but he detected a note of worry in her tone.

“I’ll hand wash them later,” she added.

He set them on the counter, pushed up his sleeves, and turned the water on. Before
Willow could stop him, he rinsed his wineglass thoroughly, making a show of running
the dishcloth around the rim. “You cooked; the least I can do is help clean up.”

Willow spun around from where she was loading the dishwasher and grabbed the glass
out of his hand. “No, absolutely not. You’re my guest. No helping out.”

She grabbed his shoulders, spun him around, and pointed him to the living room. “Please,
go make yourself at home. I’ll just be a minute in here. I want to get some of the
pans soaking. The rest can wait.”

He hesitated.

“I insist,” she said.

Oh, what the hell? He would have liked the pleasure of running the pea salad down
the garbage disposal, but he acquiesced.

He watched her from the living room as she grabbed the drinking glasses and set them
aside. He imagined she was just itching to get his glass wrapped up and mailed off
to Drew’s DNA lab. Well, the joke was on them.

His phone buzzed. He pulled it out of his pocket. The screen lit up with a video security
feed from the guesthouse. You had to love a smartphone. He’d programmed it to alert
him to any intruders.

Oh, look, there was Kennett creeping around the place.

Jack remotely armed his defense mechanisms. If Kennett so much as pried open the door,
he’d be a dead man. Which would make Jack’s job that much easier.

The equivalent of an anvil would drop on Kennett’s head—the horseshoe Aldo had hung
above the door for luck. And not the actual horseshoe, a replica made of tungsten,
which was twice as heavy as lead or steel. Jack had had Emmett overnight it to him
and hung it himself for luck just this morning.

Kennett being killed by a symbol of luck seemed like poetic justice and great irony
to Jack. It would look like a total accident. And Kennett would look like a jealous
bastard.
Job well done, Jack.

But the Rooster didn’t try the door. He got out a jackknife and used it to pin something
to the guesthouse door. Jack got the feeling that whatever motivated Kennett to pin
his missive to the door wasn’t honorable.

Willow walked into the room, carrying two apple dumplings covered with sauce. Jack
didn’t like large mounds of cooked apple. Call it an idiosyncrasy of his. And he was
willing to bet the piecrust that covered the dumplings was laced with cheese. The
thought made his stomach turn. Jack began to reassess his long-held belief that he
liked cheese. For a guy who professed to love cheese there were many applications
of it that he outright detested. And Willow had just exploited every one.

He quickly cleared the screen of his phone before Willow reached the sofa.

“Something important?” she asked as she handed him a bowl with a beautifully done
dumpling and a paper napkin.

The dumpling looked as if it had come right out of an issue of a cooking magazine.
Willow’s pastries were always things of beauty. This one even had a sprig of homegrown
dried lavender artistically laid on top of it.

He’d love to photograph it. But he wasn’t eating it. No way.

She stood over him with the other dumpling for herself in her hand, silhouetted and
backlit so that he could see her curves through her shirt. Her dark nipples budded
and bounced enticingly near his face, begging him to reach up and stroke them.

Her voice was a gentle purr. Her perfume wafted toward him, heavily laced with pheromones,
no doubt, because every pore in his body reacted to her.

He had to get the hell out of here. Now. Before he did something really stupid and
reckless. Because he was losing his will to fight temptation. And he had to get rid
of that note Kennett had left and do possible damage control before anyone else saw
it.

“Those look delicious and tempting.” He nodded toward the dumplings, but he was thinking
of her breasts. “But I have to run. Emergency work situation. Big PR problem for a
client. Damn the cell phone era. We’re never out of touch.”

She kept smiling, but disappointment clearly clouded her face. He wondered whether
she was more disappointed that she wasn’t able to seduce him or to get him to eat
the cheese-infested dumplings?

She straightened. “I’ll just wrap this up for you.”

He watched her walk off toward the kitchen, his body aching and his heart constricting.

He was doing the right thing, wasn’t he? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

*   *   *

Willow watched Con’s taillights as they disappeared down her driveway. Part of her
was achingly disappointed—she’d scared him off, failed to seduce him, and she’d been
looking forward to a good tumble and release. She wouldn’t hear her tiger chuff, but
at least she had his glass.

That man was Jack, her Jack. He had to be.

How convenient that he’d spilled his dinner in his lap. She’d taken a few liberties
with the cleanup. She would have loved to take about a dozen more seductive, indecent
liberties. She almost had him when she stuck her breasts in his face as she delivered
the dumplings.

But business called. Spy business?

She was still wondering what Jack was up to in Orchard Bluff. If Con was indeed Jack.
Which she was convinced he was. Other than seeing her, what
could
he be up to? What could possibly happen in Orchard Bluff?

It really didn’t matter now. As disappointed as she was by Con’s sudden departure,
she now had her proof.

She ran to her bedroom and grabbed the packing box she’d stuffed with popcorn for
packing cushion earlier. She took it to the kitchen and carefully, lovingly, put the
water glass Con had used in the collection bag, wrapped it in packing paper, nestled
it among the popcorn so that no damage would come to it, taped it up, and put the
mailing label on it.

Then she grabbed her coat and keys. Drew had given her instructions on where to take
the package and who to see to guarantee it would go out immediately.

You had to love spies and their networks that never slept.

*   *   *

Back at the guesthouse, Jack deactivated the deadly horseshoe. He would have done
it before he left Willow’s, but it only took him a minute to get back. There wasn’t
time for anyone else to accidentally spring the trap.

Unlike Kennett and his SMASH ilk, Jack abhorred collateral damage. He didn’t tolerate
it. Which made his kills harder to orchestrate and carry out.

Jack got out of the car in front of the guesthouse and walked to the door. Sure enough,
there was the knife with the note pinned beneath it to the door.

The Rooster had a touch of the dramatic in him.

Jack pulled the knife out of the obviously once crumpled and now smoothed out note.
Kennett was recycling either paper, or threats, or both. Very eco friendly and organic
farmer–like of him.

Jack whipped out his penlight and shone it on the note.

Huh.
That geometric design Willow had talked about—the Flower of Life. SMASH’s calling
card. Obviously Kennett’s copy.

Jack mulled over the various meanings of Kennett’s message to him. It could be,
You’re a dead man.

It might mean,
I know you’re Sariel.

Or it could be,
I know you’re the SMASH assassin who’s after me and I have your number.

Most likely it meant at least two out of the three. Kennett had good reasons to kill
him: One, he thought Jack was out to kill him, guilty on that count; Two, killing
a rival SMASH assassin, if that’s what Jack turned out to be, would prove Kennett’s
worth and prowess to RIOT and maybe get him off the shit list; and finally, killing
Sariel would cover up his initial mistake.

None of this boded well for Jack.

Jack shrugged. Fine with him. This was now out-and-out war.

He’d wanted to kill Kennett quietly, staging a small accident that would allow Kennett
to keep his dignity here in the community. Nothing that aroused the citizens of Orchard
Bluff to the danger that had been in their midst. Hell, he’d been willing to let them
bury Kennett in the local graveyard.

Now, however, a bigger, better plan formed in Jack’s mind. He was going to blow Kennett
to kingdom come. In his bomb shelter. The irony appealed to Jack.

But first he had to get into that bomb shelter and scope it out. He had the feeling
it was the Rooster’s command center.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Shiloh burst into the shop on Tuesday morning with pink cheeks and her clean apron
in hand just minutes before they were scheduled to open. Willow watched her push her
way through the cluster of women that had begun forming at the door fifteen minutes
earlier. Holding their steaming mugs of coffee and tea in the crisp October air, they
looked like an innocent lynch mob ready to pounce on Willow. But why? That was the
question Willow wasn’t really sure she wanted to know the answer to. She had a bad
feeling, a really bad feeling, about what was in store for her once she opened.

“We’ll open in five.” Shiloh’s breath rose in a puff through the air, coming out in
energetic bursts with her words. “Just give us five.”

Shiloh slammed the store’s door behind her, locking the crowd and her frosty breath
out with a decided click. She leaned back against the door as if to brace it against
a marauding mob of women. “Have you looked outside? What’s going on out there? Why
are the town’s big six gossips out there, waiting to pounce?”

“Yeah, I’ve seen it. Lettie arrived a quarter of an hour ago. She came with Dottie
Lundgren.”

“Jeez,” Shiloh said. “What did you do to upset the Town Grump?” Her tone indicated
Willow was in big-time trouble.

“No idea.”

Shiloh glanced over her shoulder out the small window in the door. “That group is
out for blood. Individually, they’re good at terrorizing. As a group”—she shuddered—”they’re
like watching a
Saw
movie. They’re scary and they have psychological torture down to an art form.”

“I’ve been up since dawn turning sugar, butter, sea salt, and cream into sweet salted
caramel. We’ll kill them with kindness and sugar if they cause any trouble.” She looked
past Shiloh out the window at the group of gossipy women at her door. “I have no idea
why the Visigoths are attacking. They should be at Ada’s having their morning coffee,
not taking it to go. Isn’t coffee supposed to calm the savage beasts?”

What in the world
was
going on out there with those six? They never varied their morning coffee routine.
Willow had a bad feeling. Strange things had been happening since Con had come to
town. She thought she was the only one who’d been affected. Now it looked as if someone
had put something in the apple crop. The entire town must be going crazy.

Shiloh winked at Willow. “That rumor that the Food Network is featuring your candy
on one of their shows hasn’t been resurrected again, has it?”

Willow laughed and shook her head. “You’re not still blaming Ada for that? She was
just joking that we could use a visit from a Food Network star to perk things up around
here and boost sales. I don’t know who overheard, misheard, and started the brushfire
by spreading the rumor. I wish I could find the culprit. I’d hire them to do my advertising.
Never hurts to have a bigmouth on your side.”

“Odds are it was one of those six.” Shiloh frowned. “Something has them going.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m as perplexed as you are.” Willow peeked out the window again. “What
do you think they want?”

“Besides sweets? No idea. I know what I wanted—a decent parking space. They took every
one. I hate parking on the street. I almost parked in the Villa’s lot. But you know
how Aldo hates it when you park and don’t buy a lasagna.”