It Must Be Magic (19 page)

“He’s just persistent.”

“He’s a pest.” Kate gave an evil smile. “And I have the perfect insect repellant.”

KATE ENDED UP CALLING
JOE
at his office to tell him to pick her up at her condo. She left at five o’clock. Lili still didn’t know what the “insect repellant” would turn out to be.

Tanner was only five minutes late picking her up, but it was after seven by the time they made it to the amusement park down at the beach.

The Boardwalk was jam-packed, awash in bright lights and alive with sound. The spicy scent of mustard, ketchup and greasy fries wafting on the cooling night air made the taste buds twang.

Lili loved it all.

“Dad, can I have some cotton candy?”

Erika grabbed Tanner’s hand and pointed to a food stand brimming with pink and blue spun sugar. Her bright fuchsia pants matched her windbreaker. Blond pigtails sprouted from the sides of her head, with fuchsia baubles holding each end in place. The smile on her face was beatific. She had three fawning adults whose only function at this moment was to please her.

Lili adored the little girl. For once, Erika actually seemed like a girl instead of a grownup hiding in a child’s body. The Boardwalk was good for her.

“Cotton candy is bad for your teeth,” Tanner said patiently.

“Aww, come on, Dad. Just this once. It’s a special night with Lili here, too, and you say everything’s okay if it’s done in moderation.”

Aww, come on, Tanner.
Lili bit down on the words. It wasn’t her place to interfere.

Tanner smiled. “I suppose you’ll want a hot dog and French fries, too.”

Erika bounced on her tennis shoes, and her pigtail baubles bounced, too. “Only a hot dog. So I won’t feel sick tomorrow.”

Tanner fished a bill out of his pocket and handed it over. She skipped away, leaping through a break in the crowd.

“Hey, what about me? I want pink.” Roscoe skipped over to Erika’s side. He was as much a kid as his granddaughter.

“Get one for Lili, too,” Tanner called out.

“It’s bad for my teeth.”

Tanner tipped his head. “But it’s a special night.”

Her heart turned over reading too much into his smile and the light in his eyes. They hadn’t talked much in the car after he’d picked her up. She figured he’d had a hard day, rushing around trying to get everything done so he could leave on time, which for him meant leaving earlier than usual.

She’d foregone asking him again about Fluffy. Kate had made her realize something all over again. While she might not open her own animal-whispering business, she would keep talking to animals. She had to tackle Fluffy no matter how Tanner felt about a sniff test. She
had
to. Tonight, however, was for Erika. She’d take care of Fluffy tomorrow.

“Can I have a hot dog, too?” She tried for a light, teasing tone. He’d bought a huge roll of tickets, and they’d all bumped each other silly on the bumper cars. Lili had made sure she rammed Tanner’s rear end a couple of times for good measure.

“Only if you promise not to be sick tomorrow.”

He didn’t stop looking at her, a slight furrow between his brows. For once that prolonged perusal didn’t make her feel like a bug. Still, she couldn’t figure it out.

She’d opened her mouth to ask, but Roscoe shoved a stick of blue cotton candy into her hand.

Erika’s lips were already pink and sticky as she licked a bite off her finger. She rolled her eyes and cooed, “Oh, Dad, that’s so good.” She held out a clump of the pink fluff. “You sure you don’t want some?”

“I prefer blue.”

Roscoe and Erika had pink. Only Lili’s was blue. She held out the paper stick. “Here. Pull a piece.”

Erika grabbed her grandpa’s arm, leaving a pink smear. “Grandpa, will you win me a stuffed animal?”

Roscoe let himself be dragged off to a booth filled with dolphins, starfish, octopuses, fish and a huge stuffed shark.

Lili still held out the cotton candy.

“I don’t want to get my fingers sticky,” Tanner said, his voice oddly low. “You do it.”

His gaze locked with hers, and even amid the bright lights of the Boardwalk, she could swear his eyes darkened. A young boy jostled her arm and Tanner reached out to steady her.

“Please, may I have a piece, Lili?”

She tore off a chunk of blue fluff and held it out. Her heart beat in her ears, drowning out the laughter and screaming. Tanner guided her hand to his mouth and sucked the spun sugar from her fingers. Then he sucked her finger, swiping it clean with his tongue. Her body heated, her cheeks flushed and she dizzied with the way his eyes never left her face as he licked the last of the stickiness from her thumb. He’d looked at her that way last night as he’d buried himself deep inside her.

Lili thought she might hyperventilate.

“That was good,” he whispered.

Lord. He was a devil. She couldn’t think straight. Maybe he’d done it to wipe the thought of murder, bodies and Fluffy’s sniff test right out of her mind.

Then again, maybe he couldn’t help himself.

“We should watch Roscoe win a shark.” Almost mesmerized by his gaze, she flapped her hand halfheartedly over her shoulder.

And smacked a man right in the face.

It snapped her out of her hypnosis. She flipped around, her hand to her mouth. “Oh, my God, I’m so sorry.”

“That’s quite all right, Miss Goodweather.”

Lili gaped. Joseph Swann looked as good in a long-sleeved rugby shirt as he did in a three-piece suit. And a little less stuffy. Especially with that woman hanging on his arm as she tottered on impossibly high platform shoes.

Black eye shadow caked her lids, and her lashes were so heavily mascaraed that they stuck together a moment when she blinked. She’d powdered her face white, then slathered on oodles of black lipstick. The only natural color was her blond hair piled on her head and strapped together with a black slinky. Her full breasts practically fell out of her low-cut top and her skirt almost bared her…Lili snapped her eyes back to Joe.

“Where’s Kate?” She didn’t mean to blurt it out, but the question spilled from her lips of its own volition.

Joe smiled with one half of his mouth and slid a sideways glance to the woman at his side.

Lili suddenly saw Kate’s blue eyes shining out of all that black mascara and eye shadow. Oh. My. God. Lili couldn’t find a word to say as Kate raised her hand, clasped in
Joe’s,
waggled her fingers and towed Joseph Swann away.

She couldn’t find her voice for at least a minute. And
that
had never happened to Lili.

“W
AS THAT YOUR BOSS?”

Lili looked a little dazed, her lips parted, her eyes following the woman in Goth. He could swear her boss’s name was Kate, but the Goth woman had been far from what he’d expected.

“I don’t know,” Lili whispered, staring after the couple.

She was stunned, but then so was he after licking cotton candy from her fingers. The impact rode his vitals, though he couldn’t say what had possessed him.

Not true. He knew. Lili possessed him. Images of her had flitted through his mind all day. If he closed his eyes for even a moment, he could hear her breathy voice urging him to orgasm. He’d left work on time as much to see Lili as to keep his promise to Erika about tonight’s outing.

He had to admit he hadn’t seen his daughter this animated in a long time. She and Lili had taken ferocious delight in ramming his bumper car, Erika’s laughter ringing out above the cacophony. She’d bounced on her toes with childish excitement as they waited in line for the next ride, the next thrill. She’d skipped ahead, then rushed back, grabbing his hand, telling him to hurry.

Maybe he had pushed her too hard for too long to be the best, to be studious, to plan for the future. She’d forgotten how to be a child. Lili could show her. Lili was good for her. The thought that Lili was good for him wrapped around his heart.

Lili finally tore her gaze away as the bizarre couple melted into the crowd. “I should have introduced you.” She put her hand over her mouth. “But if it wasn’t her, that would have been embarrassing.”

Embarrassing was the way he wanted to lick another fluff of spun sugar from her fingers. She plucked a piece absently, crunched it down and sucked it into her mouth without a clue as to how it made his jeans tighten.

Which wasn’t good with his daughter around.

Erika came barreling through the throng, her pigtails flying. “Dad, Grandpa didn’t win anything.”

Roscoe sauntered from amid a group of gangly teenagers, his hands in his pockets. “It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. And I was good. Did you hear them cheering for me?” His eyes twinkled.

Tanner had never realized his father’s eyes could twinkle. Or maybe he’d forgotten over the years. Lili was teaching him to see life through a different set of lenses.

“Grandpa got so close, everyone was shouting for him to win.” Erika opened her palm. “And look, the man gave me a keychain as a consolation prize.”

It was cheap plastic, a globe with seahorses swimming in it.

Don’t confuse efforts with results.
It suddenly had a totally different meaning, a negative connotation he’d never heard before. Roscoe hadn’t won a big stuffed shark for Erika, but he’d given her something more important. He’d given her himself. He always had.

“He gets an A plus for effort then, doesn’t he, kiddo?” Tanner ruffled Erika’s hair and tried not to see Roscoe’s gape or Lili’s widened eyes.

Erika grabbed Tanner’s hand, her fingers sticky with sugar, and pulled. “We have to get in line for the roller coaster.”

“I’ll sit this one out,” Roscoe said.

“Grandpa,” she squealed in disappointment.

“Those darn roller coasters joggle my brains and rattle my bones. Lili can sit with you.”

“That means Dad will have to sit all alone.”

“He’s a big boy. He’ll bear up under the pressure.” Roscoe sat on a bench along the railing over the beach, waving them off.

Erika chattered the entire ten-minute wait, pulling herself up against the windows to see the coaster rattle by, shrieking with laughter as the grandstand shuddered.

Cocooned by the noise level around them, where no one could hear a word above the roar and the screams, Tanner raised Lili’s hand to his lips. She widened her eyes in question, and he leaned down to whisper in her ear. Just two words. “Thank you.” He drew in a deep breath of her sweet scent before pulling back.

He didn’t know if she could even hear, but something shimmered in her eyes. She glanced at Erika, then she smiled, a tiny curve of her lips.

“Magic,” she mouthed, and he read her perfectly.

Finally, it was their turn, and they were first in line for the next coaster. Erika ran down the gangway to the front car, the best car, and shouted for Lili to join her.

Tanner sat in the seat behind, alone until a kid of seventeen or eighteen clambered in. The attendant, a teenage girl, checked their safety bar with a dreamy, high-school, puppy-love look at the boy. She didn’t give a whit about Tanner, the old guy; he could have fallen out for all she cared.

The stark worship in the young girl’s eyes was precisely how he sometimes caught himself looking at Lili. The awareness was as frightening as it was staggering. His feelings for Lili had gone far beyond lust. He was comfortable with lust. Lust was controllable, and there was a finite end to it. He didn’t know what the end to
these
feelings for Lili would be.

But he for damn sure loved sitting back here as she and Erika put their heads together and giggled like children.

The car jolted forward, and the kid next to him put his hands in the air before they’d even fully taken off. Then Erika and Lili raised their hands. His daughter started screaming the second they entered the first tunnel and hit the incline. And she didn’t stop.

A month ago, even a week ago, he might have leaned forward in his seat and told her to keep it down. Now the sound of her laughter almost made him weep with joy.

Their car burst from the tunnel into starlight and the dazzle of the Boardwalk a hundred feet below. They started down the first pass, Lili’s unbound hair whipping behind her, Erika shrieking, both with their hands waving in the air.

Next to him, the boy did the same.

Put your hands up, Tanner. It’s so much better when you don’t hold on. Let go, Tanner.

He let go, falling into the memory as if it had been waiting at the top of the roller coaster for him all these years.

Their first date. Karen and his. They’d ridden the roller coaster on a drizzling Valentine’s Day. He’d been upset that the date wasn’t turning out the way he’d planned. She’d loved every minute. With no one waiting in line and being the only two crazy people in the world willing to brave the weather, the attendant never stopped the coaster, simply waving them through again and again until they were soaked to the skin, laughing, hoarse from screaming at the top of their lungs, bodies weak and wobbly from the constant jostle and rattle. His heart beat with a joy he’d never known, and he fell in love on that roller coaster.

He could smell her beside him, her rain-wet hair, her gentle perfume, Eternity. Fresh yet sweetly erotic. He could hear her peals of laughter. She sounded like Erika. He could feel the slam of his body against the car’s seat, the ripple of pleasure-pain along his spine, the thrill of the ride, the excitement of having her at his side. He remembered everything.

Let go, Tanner.
He had. For the first time in his life.

The train pulled into the station, and Tanner opened his eyes to the present. Disoriented by the memory and the glare of overhead lights, he climbed from the car unsteadily, then held his hand out to Erika.

She bounded out without his assistance. “That was great, Dad. Can we go again? Please, please.”

He smiled because it was all he could manage and held out his hand for Lili.

Leaning into him, she whispered, “Did you have fun?” Then she pulled back to look into his eyes as if she didn’t believe he could have. As if he weren’t capable of it.

Lili was like Karen. She would always know how to wrest from life what she wanted. If by some quirk she couldn’t, she’d enjoy to the limit what she did get.

He ushered them out ahead of him, down the ramp to the picture gallery. Erika bounced excitedly on the railing, pointing. “Dad, look, that’s us! Can we get it?”

Erika’s mouth was wide with a delighted scream, her arms a blur. The camera had caught Lili from a side view, a smile on her lips as she turned to look back. At him.

Then his picture flashed up on the screen.

“Yours sucks, Dad. I don’t think we should get that one.”

He forgot to correct Erika. His arms were in the air, but his face was simply…blank. No expression whatsoever.

He felt blank. For years, all he’d remembered of Karen was that last fight, then the phone call. He’d felt only anger and grief, until he’d banished all thoughts of her so he wouldn’t go crazy. In the process, he’d forgotten everything else, the good times, that first date at the Boardwalk, all of it.

Erika tugged on his hand. “Dad?”

Without a word, he handed a bill to her.

Lili touched his arm. “Are you all right, Tanner? You’re white as a sheet like you’ve seen a ghost. The roller coaster didn’t make you sick, did it?”

Yeah, it did. He made himself sick. He’d spent ten years forgetting the good things and hanging on to the bad. He’d coasted through every relationship since, never once introducing his daughter to the women he dated, never dating anyone longer than three months. So he wouldn’t have to feel the bad stuff again. He also hadn’t felt any of the good stuff, the highs, the euphoria, the joy.

Until Lili.

Her hair was a windblown mess. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes alight, a tiny smudge on her cheek. Tanner rubbed it away.

“No, I’m not sick,” he said, letting his gaze wash over her, drinking her in.

A kid bumped him into her, and he held her arm.

Let go, Tanner.

He had let go, and for a while it had been perfect.

The problem was that everything perfect ended. For the first time, he realized he didn’t want to see it end with Lili.

T
ANNER DROVE HOME IN SILENCE
while next to Lili in the backseat, Erika chattered the whole way. Full of excitement, she’d fall asleep the minute her head hit the pillow.

Lili listened to every word and smiled. Well, almost every word, when she wasn’t wondering what had happened to Tanner on the roller coaster. He’d been sweet and fun, giving Erika everything she wanted, something Lili was sure the child wasn’t used to, but she’d taken full advantage. Yet from the moment the ride ended, he’d drifted in another place. Only Erika had been able to call him back and only for a short time before he disappeared again.

What was he thinking about?

The car rolled into the drive, crunching over the gravel, and they all climbed out. Erika threw her arms around Lili’s waist and hugged her. “Thank you. That was so fun.” Then she hugged Roscoe, and finally her dad. “That was the best.”

It was almost as if she couldn’t get over Tanner taking her to an amusement park. Maybe he’d never done it before.

Tanner spoke for the first time in…oh, about an hour. “I’ll help Lili settle the cats.”

“But —” Erika started.

He covered her mouth. “We’ll be back in a bit,” he finished for her. “I want to make sure nothing’s happened at her house while we were gone.”

Tanner didn’t see, but Lili couldn’t miss Roscoe’s raised brow, just as his son pulled her through the hedge.

“Where’s your key?”

She fished the back-door key out of her skirt’s deep pocket and gave it to him. She hadn’t carried her purse, not wanting to lose it on the roller coaster.

“You don’t have to do this. I’m sure nothing’s happened to the house or the cats.” She wasn’t
sure,
but neither did she get a bad feeling as she had the last time. There weren’t any furry bodies huddled on the porch, either.

“You should have left the light on.” He fumbled with the latch in the dark. “Burglars stay away if there’s light.”

Then he was in, pulling her with him and shoving the door closed with his foot. He didn’t turn a light on, but simply pushed her up against the wall and took her mouth in a mind-numbing, bone-melting kiss.

When he let her lips loose, and she could breathe again, all she could say was his name.

“I’ve wanted to do that all night,” he murmured.

Then he took her face in his hands and kissed her again, gentler this time, sweeter, but somehow hotter. He licked her lips, nibbled, angled his head and took her with his tongue. Lili sifted her fingers through his hair and held him to her.

Einstein sneezed in the dark. Tanner rested his forehead against hers, his breathing harsh, his chest rising and falling and the unmistakable imprint of his hardness against her belly.

“What’s Einstein saying now?” he whispered.

“She’s not saying anything.” Lili heard the pad of kitty paws across the kitchen floor and through the hall door.

“Good.” He held her face. “Because I don’t want her interfering and telling you not to do this.”

“Do what?” she whispered.

“Make love with me. Right here, right now.”

“
Right
here?”

“Yes.” He swooped in for a quick taste of her mouth. “I want you. It’s wrong time, wrong place, again, and we don’t have much time, but I need you. Now.”

Need. Not want. Need.

He captured her lips in a long taste, not allowing her to answer. Yet she answered with her kiss, opening to him, letting him take her. He unzipped her fleece jacket and roamed beneath to her breasts, molding them in his hands, bringing her nipples to peak. Lili looped her fingers through his belt loops.

He plucked the buttons on her blouse and found her bare skin, then dipped down inside her bra. An electric shock raced down to her center at his gentle pinch. Then he grabbed her hand and held her palm to his erection.

“It hurts,” he murmured. “Rub it and make it better.”

She needed to ask why he wanted her
now,
after something had hit him on the roller coaster and turned him into an automaton for the rest of the night, but her fingers curled in the material of his pants, and she didn’t want to give this up.

She’d ask him later. After. Maybe.

He groaned into her mouth as she caressed him, then he pushed beneath her hand, undid his belt and popped the snaps of his jeans.

“Take me, Lili. Please.”

She’d never had a man want her this way. Leaning her head back against the wall, she watched him as she delved beneath the elastic of his briefs.