Beachcomber (30 page)

“Yeah, well, pessimists live longer.”

She yawned in a deliberate attempt to distract herself from how much she was starting to like him. Unexpectedly, the yawn turned into the real thing. She lifted a hand to her mouth too late, then sat there blinking at him in surprise through lashes that suddenly felt as heavy as anvils.

He grinned, and passed her the flashlight.

“Here, hold this for a minute, would you? Block most of the light with your hand.”

Luke kept his grip on it until her hand replaced his over the lens, then stood up. He looked very tall with
her kneeling at his feet and the sea and the sky forming a dark backdrop behind him, and she was just absorbing that fact when he unfurled the blanket in his hands and gave it a shake.

“Here, help me spread this out, would you?”

She had to turn the flashlight off to comply. No way was she leaving it to shine at full blast, no matter what he said.

As it turned out, the darkness was only a slight inconvenience when it came to spreading out the blanket. It was made of Polartec, she discovered when she touched it, and in short order they had it stretched out so that it covered an area about the size of a double bed. They were both crouched on the sand at the foot of the blanket when they were finished.

“So, you want to get naked?” Luke spoke out of the darkness beside her just as Christy started to unfasten her sandals.

“What?”
She could barely see him, of course, but she sank back on her haunches and glared at the dark shape of him nevertheless. Given their recent history, the question was both loaded and tactless. Earlier, she had been ready, willing and able to get naked, and he knew it.

“We’re both wet. If we try to sleep in our clothes, it’s going to be a long, clammy night.”

“You know what? There are worse things than clammy.”

“Like pneumonia?”

“It’s too warm out for us to get pneumonia from sleeping in wet clothes.”

“So as far as you’re concerned naked’s out.”

“Definitely.” There, that was at least a scrap of redemption for her wounded pride.

“Okay, so keep your underwear on.” The barest hint of a teasing grin was there in his tone. He moved and, to her dismay, Christy saw his arms move and heard the swish of—she was almost sure—clothing slithering over skin.

“What are you doing?” Indignation laced her voice.

“What do you want, a play-by-play? I just took off my shirt. Now I’m taking off my shoes. When I get them off, my socks are coming off, and then I’m going to take off my jeans.”

“I thought we weren’t going to do naked!” The thought of him sitting there beside her without his shirt was annoyingly disturbing. She had a brief but vivid mental picture of just how hot he looked shirtless, then banished it from her mind. No way was she letting herself go there.

“I’m keeping my underwear on. They’re not that wet, anyway.”

“Well, I’m not. Sleeping in my underwear, I mean,” she clarified hurriedly.

“You do what you want. But we’re going to have to wear these clothes tomorrow, and they have a lot better chance of drying out a little if we hang them up so they can get some air. Anyway, if we lie down on the blanket wet, we’re going to end up sleeping on a wet blanket, which is never good.”

“What if he finds us and you’re in your underwear?”

“Believe me, being in my underwear is not going to stop me from doing anything I would do with my clothes on.”

Christy saw him move, and heard his zipper being lowered. Ridiculously, her heart skipped a beat. Ignoring the mindless thing, she sought for some way to express her dismay.

“Look, I’m just not comfortable with this.”

“What, are you worried that I’m getting ready to jump your bones?”

“No!”

“Good, ’cause I’m not.”

That blunt statement caused her to stiffen. Deflating her opinion of her own sex appeal was getting to be a real specialty of his.

“Look,” he added in a long-suffering tone as he stood up and she could hear and faintly see his jeans being pushed down his legs. “It’s dark as hell tonight, we can barely see a thing, we have a blanket to put over us and you can sleep way over there against the rock for all I care. But if you’re smart, you’ll strip.”

He moved. She heard the slight scrunch of compressing sand, and then he was back, stretching out at full length on the blanket with a sigh.

“Comfy?” she asked with bite.

“You wouldn’t believe.”

Fuming, Christy thought the matter over, and to her irritation concluded that he was right. Removing her sandals, she cast a baleful look in his direction—wasted, of course—and pulled her T-shirt over her head, then quickly shimmied out of her shorts. Her bra and panties
were thin white nylon and were practically dry. No way was she coming out of those.

“I spread my clothes out over the rock. I think there’s still a little room up there.”

If he’d sounded smug, she would have chucked something—like one of her dirty sandals—at him. Lucky for him, he didn’t.

“Thanks for the tip,” she said with what dignity she could muster, and did as he suggested. The tide was coming in now, and the ocean was only a few yards away. Turning, she could see the foamy white line of the surf curling against the beach.

“You planning to join me any time soon?” His voice was dry.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, not wanting to get too far away from him but needing to take care of a sudden pressing personal need. That done, she took an extra minute to rinse off in the ocean. Under other conditions, she would have truly enjoyed the feel of the warm water surging around her feet.

“Feel better now?” he asked when she dropped to her knees at the edge of the blanket. He had spread the second one over himself, she discovered, and he flipped back an edge of it now to let her in.

She realized that he had been able to see her dark shape against the pale sand, and hoped fervently that that was all he’d been able to see.

“Mmm,” she said, brushing sand from her feet.

Then she crawled up the blanket, careful not to touch Luke, which posed some small degree of difficulty as he seemed to be taking up way more than his
fair share of space. She ended up lying down just about as close to the rock as she could get. Curling on her side with an arm beneath her head, tucking the blanket around herself, she discovered that she was actually almost comfortable.

“Want a drink?” He passed her a bottle of water.

“Thanks.” She raised her head and chugged some, then screwed the lid back on and set it in the sand above her head. Then she settled down again.

“Night,” he said.

“Night.” Christy closed her eyes. But with the best will in the world, she couldn’t help being aware of Luke lying just a foot or so away. She could hear him breathing. She could hear the scrunch of sand when he moved, see the outline of his near-naked body. She could …

Put him out of her mind.

She tried listening to the soothing sounds of the surf, relaxing her muscles, doing her best to drift off. Exhausted as she was, though, she discovered that she was still too wired to sleep. She was scared of what might lurk in the dark on the other side of the rocks. Heck, she was scared of what might lurk in the dark on
this
side of the rocks. Her throat ached. Her stitched-together shoulder ached. Her legs ached.

And he was hogging the blanket.

She turned over, tugging the blanket with her.

He tugged back and the whole front of her body was suddenly exposed.

“Quit hogging the blanket,” she whispered, pulling it back over herself.

Luke sighed and said, “So if we’re not going to sleep,
you want to go ahead and tell me what happened after we said good night in your cottage?”

Now
there
was a tactful way of describing how they’d parted.

“I left,” Christy said a tad coldly.

“Why?”

“Because I was scared. Because I didn’t want to be alone.”
Because you turned me down.

“Figures. You know, I kind of guessed those were the reasons you came on to me like you did.”

Christy almost choked. “I did not …” Okay, call a spade a spade. “All right, so maybe I did come on to you. And maybe those were the reasons.”
At least the primary reasons. In the beginning.

“I don’t think there’s much maybe about it.” Luke’s voice was dry.

“Is that why you took off? Because you suspected I had ‘ulterior motives’?” Christy tried to keep her voice light as comprehension dawned. Understanding the ‘why’ behind his behavior should lessen the humiliation factor, but that only worked as long as he didn’t guess just how much his rejection had stung.

“Partly.” He moved, and his hand brushed her leg. Christy hadn’t realized that he was quite that close.

“Partly?”
Partly
was not an answer.

“Yeah, partly. So you left the cottage under your own steam, right? Heading for where?”

“The Silver Lake Inn.”

“Then what?”

Christy told him the whole story.

When she finished, ending up with how, when she’d
felt the stun gun press against her neck, she’d thought she was about to get her throat slit like Elizabeth Smolski, he swore under his breath. Whether she’d shifted positions or he had, Christy couldn’t be sure, but she was now so close to him that, lying on her side, her bent elbow and knees brushed against him whenever either of them moved. If she hadn’t been afraid he’d think she was coming on to him again, she probably would have moved closer yet. Having him near was comforting. Or something.

“So what you saw was a white pickup truck with some kind of writing on the passenger side door,” Luke said in a reflective tone after a moment. “Was the writing in script or block letters?”

Christy frowned, trying to remember. “Script, I think,” she said, surprising herself. “Although I couldn’t begin to tell you what it said.”

“One line or two?”

“Two.” Christy surprised herself again by remembering.

“Any glimpse of a license plate?”

“No. It was too dark. And he never got in front of me.”

“Did he say anything besides ‘Hi, Christy’?”

“No.”

“You’re sure he’s the same guy as before? Burly, between five-nine and six feet, dark complexion, dark eyes, probably dark hair?”

“Yes.” Oh, yes. She was sure.

“That’s good. We’re getting somewhere with this. We’ve got a general description of the guy and placed him in a white pickup truck with something written in
script on the passenger door. To begin with, there can’t be that many people on Ocracoke who own a vehicle of that description.”

“Maybe he doesn’t live on Ocracoke. Maybe he’s just visiting.”

“Good point.” Luke was silent for a moment. Christy got the impression that he was pondering the possibilities. Then he continued, in a slightly different tone, “Your theory is that the guy wants to kill you because you saw him on the beach right before he killed Elizabeth Smolski, right?”

“Why else would anyone want to kill me?” If her voice was faintly hollow, the softness with which she was speaking coupled with the pounding surf was enough to disguise it, she thought.

“You tell me.”

“That has to be it,” Christy said firmly. And never mind the other, and to her mind even stronger, possibility. To distract him, she added in a mock indignant tone, “You sure ask a lot of questions.”

A beat passed.

“Hey, that’s what us lawyers do.”

“Actually, it’s usually the police who ask all the questions. We lawyers just argue about the answers.”

“Whatever.” He dismissed her attempt at redirecting the conversation with a verbal wave of his hand. “Whoever he is, you realize that he’s serious about wanting to kill you. You’ve had two close calls in three days.”

“Don’t remind me.” Christy shivered. He must have felt her body quake, because he reached over to curl a
hand around her arm. The warm strength of that hand was both comforting and compelling. She was discovering that she really, really liked men with big, square-palmed, long-fingered hands.

“Are you over being stupid yet?” he asked mildly. “Because if you are, come here.”

He tugged on her arm, and, thoroughly disarmed by the charming invitation, she abandoned all pride to scoot closer. He wrapped an arm around her, gathering her close. His body heat enveloped her, far more warming than the blanket. He was wearing boxer shorts, she discovered with interest, that were only faintly damp around the thighs. The rest of his body was dry, and warm, and naked.

Disturbingly naked.

Intoxicatingly naked.

A mature, intelligent woman, driven as a result of circumstance to lie in such close proximity to approximately two hundred pounds of seriously buff male, would no doubt be above entertaining carnal thoughts while enduring the experience.

Unfortunately, she was not that woman.

By the time they were settled comfortably, carnal thoughts were as thick in her head as ornaments on a Christmas tree. She did her best to suppress them, but with indifferent success. The rush and hiss of the surf coming in, the darkness of the sky and sea, made her feel as if they were marooned on their own little island. Her body heated everywhere they touched—and they touched practically everywhere. Her head was on his shoulder, both his arms were around her, and the blanket
was tucked snugly around them, keeping the rising breeze at bay. Her breasts in their flimsy nylon covering were pressed tight against his side, and her smooth bare legs snuggled against the long, hair-roughened muscles of his. Her arm was draped across his chest, and her hand rested against the satiny smooth skin just below his left pec. It was all she could do to keep her fingers still.

If she moved her hand up just a little, she would find his nipple. If she moved her hand toward the center, she would encounter the wedge of hair in the middle of his chest. If she moved her hand down, way down …

Okay, cut it out.

Fantasizing about Luke was a really, really bad idea. Especially given the circumstances. Especially given the fact that he had already turned her down once tonight.