Freefall (6 page)

Word spread like wildfire. As it always did. Although it was the middle of the night, when everyone should've been home in bed, and the body had been found out in the middle of nofuckingwhere, a crowd had begun to gather.

And wasn't he discovering that was part of the fun?

For too many years he'd kept his secret close. Which in its way had been a thrill. But recently he'd begun to consider the unpleasant thought that he really wasn't getting the star attention he deserved.

David Berkowitz had been a pudgy nobody until he heard the Son of Sam and kept New York City under siege for thirteen months. And before his execution, pretty boy Ted Bundy had not only become a media darling but had gained even more fame when he consulted with authorities on the Green River Killer case.

Dennis Rader, aka the BTK Strangler, had ended up the most famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) Cub Scout leader in Boy Scouts of America history. The Zodiac Killer had made international headlines, and people were still writing books and making movies about Saucy Jack the Ripper.

But none of those serial killers had ever—in their darkest, sickest fantasies—come close to his body count.

Which was one of the reasons he'd decided to up the ante.

Show off his work a bit.

Let the local yokels discover that there was—boo!—a spooky monster in their midst.

Let them sweat.

Let them wonder which of them would be next.

After all, he thought, rubbing his hands together, killing was his business.

And business was good.

Although she'd been exhausted when she fell into bed, Sabrina slept only in snatches. And whenever she did manage to drift off, her dreams were filled with dizzying, tilting images of blinding flashes, shattered statues, bloodied bodies, and rain falling on gardens of stone cemeteries.

The scenes shifted, constantly changing, like the facets of a too-dark kaleidoscope, all punctuated by the ear-splitting screech of stone on stone.

Clawing her way out of a nightmare where rescuers drilling away at the fallen stones failed to reach her in time, where her spirit was floating above her broken and lifeless body, she jerked bolt upright in bed and pressed her hand against her heart, which was pounding at least twice as fast as the hammering she could still, strangely, hear.

"It was just a dream." Drenched in sweat, she'd kicked off the damp sheet; her nightshirt was tangled high around her thighs and clung wetly to her body. "You're okay." Her lungs burned as she drew in a deep, ragged breath. "You are
not
dead."

The sun was laying down buttery yellow bars across the bed and floor, reminding her that she'd opened both the shutters and the curtains last night.

Not that there was anyone around for miles, but still…

She glanced across the room toward the window.

And screamed when she saw the stranger looking in at her.

Christ! Smooth move, Tremayne
. Zach cursed himself. Scaring a woman who'd recently had a hotel blown up from under beneath her.

But from what Line had told him last week, Sabrina Swarm wasn't due to arrive on the island for another seven days. So how the hell could he have been expected to know she'd shown up a week early?

Or had she?

Maybe he'd had another blackout.

But one that lasted an entire week?

He might not be all that sure about the timeline, but the one thing he did know was that he wasn't helping the situation by staring into her bedroom window like some Peeping Tom pervert.

He slid the hammer into the loop on his tool belt, went back down the ladder, and tried not to notice that his hands were shaking like a damn leaf.

He blew a long breath through his teeth. Tried to figure out his next move. Tried not to remember when his—and his team's—lives had depended on his ability to make split-second decisions in chaotic conditions.

O-kay. The good thing was that she'd been wearing an oversized soccer shirt. So they wouldn't have to deal with her being embarrassed about him seeing her naked.

The bad thing was that the purple shirt had clung to her body like a second skin, leaving very little to the imagination. Not that he minded, since the body in question, while thinner than it needed to be, still looked pretty damn fine.

Even so, Zach suspected she might not be too pleased to have some guy on a ladder checking her out.

Not that he had been. Not really. Sure, in that frozen moment of surprise, he'd looked. But it had been knee-jerk, instinctive response. The kind any guy might have when presented with a woman sitting in the middle of tangled sheets.

Still…

He dragged his hands down his face. Wondered if he should drift away and deal with this tomorrow.

Or next week.

Or hey, how about next year, by which time she'd be gone and the entire stupid incident would be forgotten?

Reminding himself that he'd never been one to run from a situation, Zach held his ground.

And waited.

He did not have to wait long. The huge front door, which everyone on the island knew had come from some crumbling old castle in County Clare, flew open.

She'd thrown on a pair of low-slung jeans that swam on her and a T-shirt the color of ripe raspberries that stopped two inches above the waist of the jeans and revealed a faint line of ribs. Her narrow feet were bare, her toenails unpainted.

She might have just gotten out of bed, but her eyes were wide open. And dark with fear. Which would be understandable even if she hadn't been a recent victim of a terrorist attack.

From the way her fingers were curled around the handle of that big iron skillet, Zach had the impression that she wasn't planning to invite him in for hotcakes.

"Who are you?" Her knuckles whitened. "And what the hell are you doing here?"

She shifted, blocking the door.

Yeah, like a five-foot-four woman who looked as if the faintest gust of wind would blow her out to sea could stop him from getting into the house if that was what he wanted.

Deep purple smudges, like bruises, shadowed the skin beneath her eyes. Except for the stripes of hectic color along her cheekbones, her too thin face was as pale as snow.

"And why were you looking in my bedroom window?"

"I'm Zach Tremayne."

Guilt turned in his gut for having frightened someone who looked as if she'd already been through too much. Actually, up close, she looked as if she'd been to hell and back, which, if what people were saying about what had happened to her in Italy was even halfway accurate, she pretty much had.

He could certainly fucking identify with that.

"And I'm fixing your roof. We had a frogstrangler of a thunderstorm last week that brought along a lot of hail damage."

He didn't see any reason to mention that the booming thunder, too reminiscent of enemy mortars, had kept him awake and on edge all night.

She glanced up at the roof in question. "The shingles are slate."

"Slate that's over a hundred and fifty years old." He was both surprised and unwillingly intrigued that she was turning out to be tougher than she looked. "The stuff lasts a long time, but it's well past needing to be replaced. As for looking in your window, that was an accident. From what I heard, you weren't expected for another week."

"My plans changed."

She was still jittery. But the knuckles on the hand gripping the skillet were no longer white.

"Zachariah Tremayne," she murmured, more, he thought, to herself than to him. Eyes the color of new spring leaves, frosted as the name sank in. "I thought I heard you'd gone off to California and become a Navy SEAL."

"You heard right."

After his father had broken his back falling from a roof, Zach had dropped out of the Adminal Somersett Military Academy and come home to run Tremayne Construction. Once John Tremayne was back on his feet, Zach had taken off for San Diego rather than returning to school.

"So how long were you in the service?"

"One day too long."

Because it was far from his favorite subject, and more because it had been a very long time since he'd experienced this quick, instinctive tug of a man for a woman, Zach indulged himself with a slow, once-over glance.

"You've grown up, New York."

The glasses that had once nearly covered up her small thin face were gone. Her hair had darkened from flyaway corn silk to a rich, warm honey, and her mouth, which had always seemed too large, now seemed just right. In fact, if it hadn't been pulled into such a tight line, it would probably have been a hell of a lot better than just right.

"That would be inevitable, given that I was sixteen the last time I was on the island." She folded her arms. "So, what's a big bad SEAL doing repairing roofs?"

Hadn't his father been asking the same damn question for the past six months?

"Someone needed to do it before it starts raining inside, which probably wouldn't be all that good for Miss Lucie's antiques."

Christ, he got tired of explaining himself to everyone on the damn island. Which made him wonder if he'd made a mistake coming home. But it wasn't like he'd had a helluva lot of choices.

The pitiful fact was, after that debacle in Afghanistan, the former hotshot Navy SEAL who'd received a Silver Star for "extraordinary heroism while engaged in action against an enemy of the United States" had nowhere else to go.

"Now that I'm back to being a civilian, working with my hands gives me something to do while I'm weighing my options."

He wondered if that answer sounded as lame to her as it did to him.

From the way she narrowed her eyes and swept a look over him, he suspected it did.

Her gaze drifted to the white pickup parked on the circular brick drive, TREMAYNE GENERAL CONTRACTING SINCE 1917 had been painted on the side of the door in stark, no-nonsense black letters.

"You're working for your father?" She didn't bother to hide her incredulity at that idea.

"Yeah. For the time being, anyway. Though I'm not sure I'll ever live up to his standards."

Her eyes warmed a bit at that, and he thought he saw a hint of a smile touch her lips.

She'd always had a soft spot for his dad.

Zach remembered her first summer on the island, when she'd been all long, skinny legs, pigtails, and Coke-bottle glasses, trailing after John Tremayne, who'd been upgrading the bathrooms and shoring up tilting chimneys.

Normally, for a twelve-year-old boy, an eight-year-old kid—especially one of the female persuasion—wouldn't have garnered a second look, but that hadn't stopped Zach from recognizing a little girl desperate for a father figure.

"I remember when he replaced the banister." Although he knew she'd grown up in boarding schools in New York, Maine, and Switzerland, Zach could hear the faintest trace of Lowcountry South in her soft tone. "His work was fantastic. Even better than the original."

"He's always said sawdust runs in his veins."

Although construction work was something to keep his mind occupied, Zach didn't enjoy it enough to think it also ran in his, as it had in his father's, grandfather's, and great-grandfather's before him.

"He also liked working at Swannsea because whenever there was a choice, Miss Lucie went with restoration as often as she could, rather than renovating or just gutting things."

"How is he?"

"Same as ever. I swear, he'll still be up on a ladder swinging a hammer when he's ninety. In fact, ever since he heard you were coming back home, he's been wondering if you're going to continue with the plan to expand the house."

"Expand Swannsea?"

"Miss Lucie never told you she was planning to add a twelve-hundred-square-foot sunroom to the east side?"

"No."

"Well, I guess I'll let Titania fill you in."

"Titania?"

"She and Miss Lucie had been planning some changes." Zach belatedly remembered his manners. "I'm real sorry about your grandmother."

Her eyes shuttered over. She lifted a dismissive shoulder.

"So was I." She took a deep breath and went somewhere deep inside herself. "Well, I'd best leave you to your work."

She didn't slam the door. But she came as close as good manners would allow.

Zach blew out a breath as he heard the lock snick on the other side of the heavy plank door. "Glad that went well."

Damn, damn, damn!

Sabrina had expected people to talk. She'd known when she decided to return that unless someone on the island was having a hot, illicit affair or a messy divorce—or even juicer, both an affair and a divorce at the same time—that the story of what had happened to her in Florence would probably rank at the top of the list of popular topics to gossip about.

She'd assured herself that she was prepared for that. Especially since, as Zach had pointed out by calling her by the name of the city her artist father had escaped to at twenty-one, despite the fact that her Swann family roots sank deep into the rich loam of the island, she'd always been a relative outsider.

But, she realized as she sagged back against the old oak door, Zachariah Tremayne had caught her totally off guard. Just as he'd always done.

Bad enough that he could look so impossibly hot in that snug T-shirt and faded jeans worn to white in some distractingly interesting places. Worse yet that she'd discovered that male sweat could, indeed, be an aphrodisiac.

He was, incredibly even better-looking than he'd been back when he was raising hell all over the island. He wasn't all that tall—she'd guess around six feet—but if he was carrying an ounce of fat on that lean, rangy body, he was certainly hiding it well.

His hair was as dark as midnight over the marsh, luxurious waves in all the right places. The perfect length to avoid being too shaggy. The perfect thickness to grab onto and not let go.

No! Do not go there!

His eyes defied description. They were a compelling, kaleidoscopic combination of slate gray and blue, with a touch of hazel around the rim. She'd always thought the shadow-of-a-beard thing he had going on his manly jaw looked contrived on movie stars, but on him it looked just right.

Better than right.

Put the man on a recruitment poster, and the navy wouldn't have any trouble meeting its quota.

He'd seemed more disciplined than the reckless heartbreaker she recalled. Which was a bit of a surprise—although she knew nothing about SEALs, she would've guessed them to be the cowboys of the Special Forces.

Oddly, he had seemed almost too self-controlled. No longer the bad boy who had so captured her unwilling attention that summer of her sixteenth year, today he'd been unfailingly polite, except for that quick glance when he'd checked her out.

But still, if you looked closely enough—and, dammit, she had—Zach had
warrior
written all over him. From the square jaw you could park a tank on, to the rigidly denned row of muscles beneath that sweat-soaked T-shirt, to the ropey sinews of his dark arms.

So what was he doing working as a handyman?

Perhaps he'd been wounded and had to leave the service. He certainly looked healthy enough, though. She hadn't seen anything that would've made him unfit for service.

Not that she'd been looking.

The hell you weren't.

She blew out a slow breath. Okay, so he was even sexier than he'd been at nineteen. Which was why, when those smoky gray eyes had skimmed over her, he'd started her tingling in places she'd forgotten
could
tingle.

She wondered if he remembered the way she'd thrown herself at him her last night on the island. Hoped that he'd had so many girls before her and women after that humiliating night that he wouldn't remember that she'd flung herself into his manly arms and kissed him with all the fervor of the crazy-in-love sixteen-year-old she'd been then.

The next morning she'd left the island for her freshman year of college, and he'd probably never given her or her inept seduction attempt a second thought.

Sabrina only wished she could say the same thing for herself.

She slid down the door to the floor, drew her knees up to her chest, and wondered why on earth one woman would have needed any more room.

The house was not only already the largest on the island; it was one of the largest in the state of South Carolina. Granted, there didn't seem to be a single flat surface in Swannsea that wasn't cluttered up with tacky Lowcountry souvenirs, knickknacks, and genuine antique collectibles, but if you cleaned the place out, there'd be more than enough space.

Surely the construction wasn't merely about making space for yet more bric-a-brac. So what was going on? And how could she have become so caught up in her own life that she'd hadn't even thought to ask about her grandmother's?

You can sit on the floor and hold your own little pity party from now until doomsday, darling
, the familiar voice scolded.
But it isn't going to change a blessed thing. So, you might as well get off your butt, drive into town, and carry on with your life
.

"Good advice, Gram."

Breathing out a long sigh, Sabrina stood up.

She would take a shower, get dressed, drive into the village, and get on with her life.

Not that Sabrina had any idea what that life had in store for her. But getting off her butt was at least a start.