Deadline (21 page)

I
t certainly wasn’t the worst sight that had ever greeted her first thing in the morning. Dawson, his back to her, was bent low over the countertop, watching freshly brewed coffee as it dripped into the carafe.

“Can’t brew fast enough?”

He straightened and turned around to face her as she entered the kitchen. “Not nearly fast enough, and this is the second pot.”

“How long have you been up?”

“A few hours.”

“
Hours
?
Did you get any sleep?”

“A few minutes.”

“The sofa is too short for you. You should have taken the bed when I offered.” She had also offered him Stef’s room, which he’d declined.

“I wouldn’t run you out of your bed. Besides, it wasn’t the sofa keeping me awake.”

“Nightmares?”

His gaze moved over her, causing fillips of sensation everywhere it lingered. “General restlessness.”

“Me too.”

He arched his eyebrow with interest.

Quickly, she went to the cabinet and opened it to get a coffee mug for herself, but her movements were arrested when he crowded in behind her, trapping her between him and the counter.

Pushing her hair aside, he nuzzled her neck behind her ear. “What did I ever do to deserve this?”

Her head tipped toward her shoulder as his mouth applied damp pressure to the side of her neck. “Deserve what?”

“Two mornings of you showing up, fresh out of bed, looking all rosy and warm, like you’ve either been well fucked or are about to be, and making me crazy wanting to be the man who’s given you that look.”

She offered up no resistance when he turned her and drew her to him. Being held flush against his torso made her weak with longing to be skin-to-skin. One of them, maybe she, made a throaty sound of both hunger and appeasement when their mouths came together in a blatantly carnal kiss. Several times they changed the angle of their heads, but they didn’t break contact until he withdrew so his lips could nibble at hers.

Those sweet pecks tingled and delighted and excited, especially when paired with the prickle of his scruff. His hands moved over her back, their possessiveness tempered by the syllables of longing whispered against her lips.

Bending his head lower, he pushed aside the strap of her tank top to give him access to her collarbone. But even as she sighed with pleasure, she plaintively murmured his name.

“Hmm?”

“We can’t.”

“I know.” But he didn’t stop at her collarbone. He continued down, placing soft kisses on her chest.

“Really,” she said weakly.

“I know.”

Through the thin cotton tank top, his hand cupped her breast and pushed it up to swell above the neckline. He rubbed his rough cheek against it, then turned his face into the plumpness and kissed it open-mouthed. Hard with arousal, he fit himself into the V between her thighs. The sensation was so intense, she gasped.

“Dawson, we can’t. I mean it. We can’t.”

He went perfectly still, then raised his head and looked down at her. His eyes were glazed with passion, but he gave a slow nod, released her, and moved back a step. They stood there, breathing unevenly, staring at each other.

Finally he said, “Afraid the people guarding you will see us?” He gestured toward the window above the sink.

“That, yes, but…” She swallowed. “I wouldn’t even if they weren’t out there. I wouldn’t with the boys in the house. I know it’s old-fashioned, laughably old-fashioned, but I made myself a rule never to…It wouldn’t have happened the other morning, either. I’d have come to my senses before it got that far. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s
not
okay. I know it’s not. But I have to think about how impressionable the boys are. Even—”

He stopped her by reaching out to slide her strap back into place, then put both hands on her shoulders. “I understand.”

“That’s very decent of you.”

He gave a lopsided grin. “Yeah, I’m a rock.”

She smiled. “You agreed that we had to stop.”

His grin faded as he removed his hands from her shoulders. “But not because of the boys.”

“No?”

He shook his head.

“Then why?”

He looked away from her for several seconds. When his darkly ringed eyes came back to hers, he said, “Because I won’t subject you to me.”

Dawson collected his socks and boots from the living room where he’d left them on the floor near the cursed sofa and took them upstairs to the bathroom designated as the boys’. By the time he had showered and dressed, their beds were empty. Following the sound of their voices, he went downstairs to the kitchen to find the family and Headly gathered around the dining table.

“Look, Dawson, doughnuts,” Grant chirped. In the center of the table was a large white box from which Grant picked out a doughnut frosted with pink icing and covered with sprinkles. He passed it up to him.

Amelia said, “Grant, you should have let Dawson choose which one he wanted.”

Because of Grant’s handling, the icing had smeared and some of the sprinkles had shaken loose, but not for the world would Dawson have refused it. “Just the one I wanted. Thanks, buddy.” He ruffled the boy’s hair as he took a big bite.

“He brought them,” Hunter said, pointing to Headly. “His name’s Mr. Headly.”

As observant as a hawk, Headly was leaning back in his chair and sipping from a cup of coffee with a casualness that Dawson knew was phony. He missed nothing, possibly not even the faint whisker burn on Amelia’s throat.

“Mom doesn’t let us have doughnuts for breakfast except sometimes on Saturdays. But she said it was okay today since Mr. Headly already brought them.”

“Then this is a treat.” Dawson licked the icing and sprinkles off his fingers.

Up to that point, he and Amelia had avoided looking directly at each other, an avoidance also noticed by Headly. Now, still not quite meeting his eyes, she offered Dawson coffee and started to leave her place at the table.

“I’ll help myself.”

He filled a mug with coffee and leaned against the counter to drink it while the boys finished their doughnuts. When they were done, Amelia sent them to wash their hands and faces. “Just what they needed,” she said, looking askance at Headly as she wiped the table with a damp sponge. “A sugar high.”

He chuckled. “We’ll figure out a way to let them run it off later.”

“Thank you. I would appreciate that.”

“In the meantime, the three of us need to talk.”

Amelia said, “Then I’d better figure out something to entertain the boys.”

Everything that she’d packed into her car the day before had been unpacked and put back in its proper place. While she was settling the boys down with a DVD on the TV in the living area, Dawson joined Headly at the table and assessed the doughnut inventory. “Any with Bavarian-cream filling?”

“Sorry, no.”

“Then this will have to do.” He selected a plain glazed.

“How’d it go last night?”

The question immediately put Dawson on the defensive. “How’d what go?”

“Did you get the shakes?”

“I told you. I’m not a damn addict.”

“Any nightmares?”

He rolled his shoulders in a gesture that could have meant anything or nothing.

“Only because you didn’t sleep at all.”

Dawson silently endured Headly’s appraisal of his haggard face and the dark circles under his eyes.

“If she ever sees you looking normal, she might not be attracted. It may be the zombie effect she finds appealing.”

Dawson finished the rest of the doughnut, asking around the last bite, “Haven’t you got more important things to do than to try and piss me off?”

“What’s giving you nightmares?”

“I don’t recall telling you I had nightmares.”

“You didn’t deny it, either.”

Dawson folded his arms over his chest, letting his body language speak for itself.

But Headly wasn’t through with him. “When are you going to tell me what happened to you over there? Why are you afraid to fall asleep?”

Dawson mentally counted to ten, then repositioned himself in his chair to signal a change in topic. “Have you talked to Eva?”

“This morning.”

“How is she?”

“Worried.”

“She knows you don’t eat right when she’s not around.”

“Not about me, about you.”

“Then she’s worrying for nothing. How many times do I have to tell the two of you that I’m all right?”

Headly took a deep breath, blew it out. “I shouldn’t have sent you down here.”

Dawson snorted a laugh. “Too effing late.”

“I know.” Headly looked at him meaningfully, then glanced over his shoulder toward the living room where the boys could be heard arguing over which movie they would watch. “How is she?”

“She slept alone, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“It isn’t.”

Dawson knew the more defensive he was, the more Headly would browbeat him, so he addressed his question about Amelia without reading a subtext into it. “She’s brave. Tougher at the core, I think, than she appears on the surface. Steelier.”

“I’m afraid that before this is over, she’ll need to be.”

Before Dawson could ask what that remark portended, Amelia rejoined them, expelling a breath as she sat down. “Be concise, Mr. Headly. Buzz Lightyear will pacify them for only so long. I promised them playtime after the movie.”

“Can’t blame them for wanting to play outside.”

“They want to play with Dawson.”

Headly turned and looked at him expectantly, obviously waiting for a comment. All he said was, “You’d better get started. You’re wasting valuable time.”

Headly snuffled as though to say that Dawson was dodging an issue, but that for the moment it had to wait. “Okay, here’s where we are. Bernie was conveyed to the mainland on the ferry late yesterday evening.”

“He said he was driving to Charleston.”

“Well, he didn’t. Not in that car, anyway. They found it parked in a public lot just a few blocks from the ferry pier. No sign of him. We’ll keep an eye on the car, but my guess is that he abandoned it.”

“Why do you think that?” Amelia asked. “He doesn’t know his true identity has been discovered.”

“The car’s license plate was bogus. It’s been a few years since Michigan used that design, but few people down here would notice. Carl did such a good job of altering the year of expiration that it was undetectable from a distance. Plus, the VIN number has been scratched out so that it’s unreadable. No prints inside the car. None on the door handles. He wiped it clean.”

“Is the parking lot attended?” Dawson asked.

“No. Only monitored by meter maids. You park, feed bills into a metal box or use a credit card. The box spits out a receipt you leave on the inside of your windshield. His was good for twenty-four hours, and, from the time stamp, we know he was back on the mainland for forty-seven minutes before our band of brothers launched our raid on this house last night. He got a good head start.”

“Security cameras?”

“Several on the pier. We have him driving off the ferry. That’s it. The bags and boxes you saw him loading into the trunk?” he said to Amelia. “All empty. They were for show.”

“The bad hips, too, in all likelihood,” Dawson remarked sourly. “Nice touch, though.” He hitched his chin in the direction of the house Bernie had occupied. “What about that?”

“Techies are still gathering evidence, but so far it hasn’t yielded anything substantive. Full of fingerprints, of course, but I doubt any of them will be Carl’s.”

“He didn’t walk around wearing rubber gloves.”

“I’d bet my left nut—excuse me, Amelia—that we don’t find a print that matches. Don’t forget, all we have is a print for the middle finger, left hand.”

“Hair in the shower drain?”

“Gathered. Skin cells off the linens. But we don’t have Carl’s DNA. Believe me, if he was easy to catch, I’d have caught him.”

“What about his house in Michigan?” Amelia asked.

“No such house number or street.”

She was amazed. “But I sent Christmas cards. They never came back.”

Headly raised a shoulder. “All I know is, the house address doesn’t exist and neither does the e-mail address he left with Miss DeMarco to give to you.”

Dawson said, “There must be a record of his leases for the house next door.”

“One would think. We got the manager of the rental office out of bed late last night to serve the search warrant. He was obstinate at first, didn’t want to divulge personal information on a repeat client. But after some arm twisting to the tune of ‘obstruction of justice,’ he told us that Bernie Clarkson always paid him with a money order.”

“Like you buy at Seven-Eleven?”

“Exactly like that. I asked the guy if that hadn’t seemed odd to him. His answer, ‘He was from Michigan.’ As if that explained why he didn’t pay with a credit card or check. Anyhow, the little old man from the Upper Peninsula didn’t leave a paper trail.”

He focused on Amelia. “Did he always come alone?”

“Yes. The first summer he spent here—”

“2009.”

“That’s right. Jeremy was overseas. Grant was just a baby. I stayed the whole summer out here. Dad came off and on, but I spent a lot of time with Bernie because we were both lonely. He was grieving the recent death of his wife.”

“That’s what he told you. Doesn’t mean that Flora’s dead. Did he ever show you a photograph of her?”

“No. Which, now that I think about it, was odd. He talked about her with affection.”

“Did Jeremy ever meet so-called Bernie?”

“No. Even after he mustered out, he rarely came here. He couldn’t take time away from work. On one rare occasion when he did spend a few days, I invited Bernie to join us for dinner, but he excused himself, saying he didn’t want to intrude on our family time.”

“He declined because they were afraid you’d notice a resemblance.”

“I doubt I would have,” she said. “I see nothing of Jeremy in the Wanted-poster photograph of Carl.”

“I wasn’t struck by a similarity, either,” Dawson said. “I was totally taken in by Bernie.”

“Don’t beat yourself up,” Headly said. “That’s a lousy picture on the Wanted poster and it’s over forty years old. Carl was just launching his criminal career then. He must look a lot different now.”