She's Gotta Be Mine (4 page)

And to top it off, the town even had its very own serial killer.

Did serial killers like lasagna?

* * * * *

Bobbie revolved in front of the cheval mirror in her new bedroom, assessing her body from every possible angle. With her pushup bra, if she stood just so, at a slight angle in relation to the object in front of her, her breasts could pass for C-cup instead of B. At least on a good day with the sunlight behind her creating a nice shadow.

Maybe she shouldn’t have cut her hair. Men liked long hair, didn’t they? She sighed. Warren did, as evidenced by the Cookie Monster. True, the picture he’d shown Bobbie was from high school, and the hair style might have long since changed. But somehow Bobbie didn’t think the Cookie Monster had to worry about her face being dragged down by the length of her hair.

God, was her butt drooping? Hind end towards the mirror, Bobbie hefted the jeans, noticed a slight lift, let them fall again. A squeak escaped as she saw, indeed, that her butt had dropped. Not by much, maybe half an inch, tops. But it was no teenage rear end and hadn’t been for twenty years.

The afternoon sun crept across the white eyelet bedspread. Bobbie flopped down on it, stretched her legs out. Forty years in man time didn’t mean much, but in woman time it meant the need for facelifts and butt tucks. At least it did if you weren’t loved.

Bobbie turned her head on the pillow, the sweet fragrance of baby powder and gardenias fluffing out around her, despite the fact that she’d put on fresh sheets. Mrs. Porter’s essence lingered, smelling like a grandmother. Lying on the bed with the sun across her face, the laughter of children coming home from school, and the indestructible imprint of Mrs. Porter on her pillows, Bobbie decided there were probably worse things than butt drop. Things like thinking about Warren and the Cookie Monster.

But where Roberta Spivey might give up, Bobbie Jones was a force to be reckoned with.
Bobbie
had a lasagna to deliver, and a serial killer to seduce. After all, a cookie was just a snack while cereal was a whole meal.
Take that, Warren.

Five minutes later, lips glossed, foil-wrapped lasagna in her arms, Bobbie crossed the street. The picket fence was no longer white, but bleached through lack of interest. Its latch broken, the gate swung open at her touch.

Stopping beneath the sheltering limbs of the first big oak, she shivered. Gee, it was colder on this side of the street, and she got the feeling it wasn’t just being in the shade. She stumbled over a root that had broken through the front walk. As she climbed the steps, they creaked and squished beneath her platform shoes, the wood of the porch old and rotten.

Lifting the lion’s-head knocker, she let it fall back to the door. And waited.

No one came to the door.

Anxiety washed over her in waves. Didn’t he know that she’d had to work herself up to this? How could he not be home?

She knocked again. The sound echoed uselessly. No one was going to answer.

Blast him. Had he seen her from the upstairs window and deliberately ignored her? Okay, she was putting too much into it. Warren had always said she
catastrophized
everything, interpreting every nuance, when there really wasn’t any nuance at all.

“Who cares what Warren always said,” she whispered, the lasagna warming her arms. “Warren’s gone.”

She turned the corner of the wide wraparound porch. They didn’t make houses like this anymore.

And boy, they didn’t make men like that anymore either. All those beautiful muscles working and rippling as he dug a hole in the backyard. Her eyes went wide, her lashes fluttered, and her heart kicked up the beat. The lasagna, nestled against her breasts, overheated her body.

The serial killer’s naked chest gleamed in a patch of sun in the backyard. Skin bronzed and hairless—thank God, she wasn’t partial to hairy chests—pectoral muscles flexed as he stamped a shovel into the ground. He worked the base with a foot encased in black leather work boots. His jeans hung low on his hips. Bobbie licked her lips, then raised her gaze to his face.

Her heart stopped. Devil-dark hair hung in his eyes. His face was all sharp angles and strong lines. His jaw tensed as he gave the shovel one more stomp before pulling back on the handle and lifting dirt. His arms bulged.

Heck, everything bulged.

Bobbie’s eyes followed a trickle of sweat running down the center of his chest.

So this was what women got out of watching construction workers. If she hadn’t had an arm full of lasagna, she would have fanned herself.

A door slammed next door. The serial killer looked up and over as a flurry of white fur pounded against the other side of the fence.

“Don’t start with me, you little runt, or you’ll be next.”

Surely he wouldn’t do anything to the little dog. He wasn’t really a serial killer. Was he?

No, not with a voice like that. It was pure sin. Like warm syrup running along her nerve endings, it begged to be licked off.

The dog yapped, a series of high-pitched sounds that grated like nails on a chalkboard. So much for her warm, syrupy feeling.

The serial killer threw down his shovel and reached for a small, wrapped bundle lying at the edge of the hole he’d been digging. He leaned down to set it in the...oh my God, not a hole, but a grave. And that little bundle was some poor dead animal.

She must have gasped because he looked up, right into her startled eyes. Now she knew how Jimmy Stewart must have felt in
Rear Window
when Raymond Burr caught Jimmy watching him dispose of his wife’s body parts.

Chapter Two

The woman from across the street edged along the side porch with some silver-wrapped casserole thing clutched to her chest like a shield. Nick stuck his thumb through a belt loop.

Oh yeah, she’d heard the stories about him. No doubt. So what the hell was she doing in his backyard? The good ladies of Cottonmouth wouldn’t come within a hundred feet of his house, let alone venture onto his property. Maybe she was like those women who wrote letters to killers in prison, even married them. The allure of the bad boy. Or maybe she was just pure whacko.

But a hot little whacko if ever there was one. Easing down the rickety porch stairs, she stepped closer, into a scrap of sun, her red hair dancing with brilliant prisms of light. Surely that color could only be factory born and bred, but he’d never been one to scoff at man’s ingenuity.

Next door, the mutant mutt’s barking continued, slightly higher, slightly louder, and a whole hell of a lot more irritating. “Princess, I’m warning you...”

“Don’t you like dogs?”

“That’s not a dog, it’s a rodent.” Actually, he did like dogs, even had one when he was a kid. A real dog, a malamute named Dodger, who had barked instead of yipped.

“I have to admit that Princess”—she looked to him to verify the name—“does have a nerve barking at you in your own backyard.”

Would
ya
listen to that? Someone in this town actually agreed with him. Call
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
. Call the
Guinness Book of World Records
. “Maybe you should make sure Princess hears that.”

The gutsy woman eased her death grip on the foil-covered offering and dared to take two steps closer, braving the supposed killing fields. She wasn’t young, probably around his age. Tight jeans and form-hugging sweater testified to good genes or a health club membership. Toes and nails painted to match suggested a woman out to make an impression. So again, why in the hell was she in
his
backyard? A woman like her could do better than the local bogey man.

Nick picked up his shovel deliberately and began dumping dirt on top of the sheet-shrouded cat.

“What are you doing?”

“Burying a cat that got on my nerves.”

He looked up to gauge her reaction. A step back or a step forward? Only her arms moved, balancing the casserole against her midriff and, in turn, accentuating a very nice pair of breasts. And a telltale impression on the ring finger of her left hand.

“Did it meow too loudly outside your window?”

“No, it showed up dead in my yard. I really hate that. The smell, the insects it attracts.” Not to mention nosy neighbors. He’d make an exception for this one; she was far too delectable to send away with a pat on her rump. The thought of cupping that butt made his hands twitch.

“It just ‘showed’ up? Or did you bludgeon it to death?”

He almost smiled, then shrugged instead. Why the hell bother to explain? He found himself doing it anyway, simply because she was only the second person to voluntarily walk into his yard in the year since he’d come home. That deserved something. “If I was inclined to
bludgeon
small animals, I’d start with Princess over there.”

He tamped down the earth over the now filled hole. Maybe he should start marking the little graves so he didn’t accidentally dig one up.

“So, you don’t actually kill them.”

Ah, the serial-killer bit. He couldn’t resist feeding the gossip just to see her reaction. “Animals or humans?”

Her eyes widened, their color a luscious green that complemented her hair. All his fantasy women had green eyes. He wondered if he could duplicate her exact shade on canvas.

“Either,” she said, a hint of a quiver in her voice.

She’d make sounds like that in bed, he was sure, moans to drive a man over the edge. He leaned on his shovel, let his gaze drift over her breasts. “What do you think? Do I look like I kill cute little animals or sweet young girls? Or both?”

She chewed her lip. He almost offered to help her with the task. Her taste would be...spicy, like the color of her lipstick. Red-hot. Tongue sizzling.

The crazy woman smiled then. Like she’d just won the lottery or he’d said the secret word, whatever the hell it was. “I just moved in across the street. I’m Bobbie Jones.” She thrust the foiled dish at him. “I thought it would be neighborly to bring you a lasagna.”

When other people brought him things, it was usually
roadkill
he had to bury in the backyard. “Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around,
I
bring the new neighbor the lasagna?”

She tilted her head. “Men don’t cook.”

“You think they live on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?”

“Something like that.” Hungry green eyes fixated on his naked chest. She licked her lips. His jeans got tighter.

The last time a woman came bearing gifts, with that same predatory look in her eye and lies on her lips, her husband had tried to pound Nick into the dirt; he didn’t relish a repeat. He let the shovel fall to the ground beside him. “You divorced?”

Her full red lips clamped together. This time she chewed the inside of her cheek. Finally she murmured, “Not yet.”

“Planning on making your almost ex-husband jealous by hanging around me?”

No response, which made the answer fairly
fricking
obvious. Shit. You win some, you lose some.

Seconds passed. Princess stopped barking. Neighborhood noises faded into the background. The awkward silence stretched between them until something or someone had to give.

She pushed the lasagna at him. “Bake it at three-fifty for thirty minutes. And you should probably let it sit for another ten to set. That’s what I always do.”

He should have let her go then. It would have been the smarter thing to do. But he’d never been particularly smart when it came to women. “You left a mark on your sweater.”

Her eyes followed the line of his pointing finger. “Oh.” Then she looked back up to meet his gaze. “Do you have a sponge I could wipe it off with?”

If the mark had been on her skin, he’d have licked it off with his tongue. “Looks like something you need to take your sweater off to really do a good job.”

She gave him a wide-eyed look as if she were a mouse in a trap. “It would be polite to introduce yourself, you know.”

“Before or after you take off your sweater?”

Bobbie Jones flushed like a schoolgirl and shook her head, curls bouncing softly, gleaming red and gold in the dappled sunlight. He thought again about sketching her. Naked.