Stone Kissed (10 page)

***

Delia was late getting to the hospital. She tried to scuttle past St. Francis, but he was having none of it. The old cleric whistled. “Ooh, la la! Would you look at that?” His bird chirped.

“You’re a monk. Act like one.”

“You’re a woman. It’s good to see you can dress like one.”

“It’s a warm day.”

“Which explains the dress.”

Delia smoothed her hands down the A-line skirt of the strawberry-pink silk sundress she’d bought three years ago, when she hoped she might have a second date with a reasonably pleasant man from the online service. He hadn’t called again.

Delia forced a smile up at Frank—and saw a flicker of movement in his face.

No. No, no, no. Last night the leaves on Brogan’s cheeks hadn’t curled in and flattened back out while he lambasted her yet again about Grant. The tip of Bert’s long silvery left ear hadn’t twitched early this morning when she opened the door to leave. When she touched it, it was solid, cool and positioned exactly as it should have been. And Frank’s mouth hadn’t moved.

“It doesn’t explain the jacket, though. It’s hideous. Take it off.”

“I won’t take it off. It’s a designer blazer.”

“It makes you look like a sack of blueberries. Take it off. Leave it in the St. Vincent de Paul box. How is he by the way?”

“Grateful, unlike some I know.”

“His piety is an act.”

“How would you know?”

“We were in the warehouse together back in ’forty-eight. It was awful, I don’t mind telling you. Pitch black all the time and him constantly praying and whining. He was a prig back then and I doubt he’s changed.”

There it was again. Delia scanned the courtyard, then laid her jacket over the back of the bench and hiked up her skirt. She climbed up to examine Frank’s face. Tilting her head, she saw it again, the merest flash of gray on gray. She opened her eyes wide, checking her vision in the empty blue sky over the statue’s shoulders.

“I must be getting floaters,” she muttered.

“I told you to get some sunglasses.” Grant’s voice reverberated through her and she lurched, clutching the back of the bench with one hand and St. Francis’s folded sleeve with the other. Grant’s warm hands spanned her waist. His breath brushed her ear. “What are you doing, Delia?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

Frank hadn’t warned her. The statues were supposed to warn her when someone was coming. She would have been caught up short dozens of times over the years if they hadn’t understood their duties as sentinels in these conversations. She glared at St. Francis.

His lip twisted. The old monk was smirking at her.

“It looks like you’re talking to this statue.” Grant rested his chin on her head.

“It’s my thing.” It was too late to deny it. He’d caught her at least once before. The line between eccentric and crazy was a fine one, and denial put you over it. She had no idea how long he’d been standing behind her, but no matter how she spun it, a one-sided conversation about fashion with a statue pushed the boundary line.

“And what were you and the good saint discussing?”

“He told me to ditch the jacket.” She clenched her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut. How did Grant do this to her? How did he draw these words, these feelings from her when she’d spent so many years training herself to bottle them up? “Listen, I still need to see Father. You can stay here and chat with this…lawn ornament yourself, or you can come up.”

“That was hardly called for,” St. Francis complained.

His mouth had moved.

***

The tubes were out of Vernon Forrest’s mouth. His face looked almost normal, if you didn’t count the massive scarring and the missing left ear. According to Lars’s research, they could do some amazing things with skin grafting. Grant and Bustamante had already discussed the best plastics people in the region and decided which doctors to bring in. He didn’t tell Delia because she’d get worked up. It was best to keep her focused on the house.

She was about to get worked up again, but it couldn’t be helped.

Forrest’s one good eye was wide and moist, made larger somehow by the lack of eyelashes framing it. He’d obviously been waiting for Delia, and his face lifted to hers as soon as she crossed the threshold in front of Grant. The slash of his scarred mouth was open and slack, and the ridges where his lips should have been looked dry.

Delia reached for the tube of lip balm on his side table and painted it on. “How are you feeling?”

Vernon grunted deep in his throat.

“Brace yourself. We have a visitor.” Stepping to the side, she let him see Wolverton.

Grant nodded at Forrest, who scowled with half of his face.

“He’s here to oversee my overseeing of the renovation of the house. His house, you know.”

Grant understood her bitterness toward him. But she was angry at her father too—he heard it in her voice. She maintained Forrest’s innocence, but she had her own doubts. Delia was investing her time and energy in a man whose neglect had cost her home and her business. Sure, Forrest was debilitated almost beyond recognition and in pain. But he was a poor liar, a probable arsonist, and he’d robbed Delia of her heritage. She had a right to her anger.

“What’ll it be today, Dad? Mathis or Judy?”

His eyes flickered. “Shoo-dee.”

Delia bent over alongside the hospital bed to pull up the tethered remote.

“How long have you been talking, Forrest?” He asked the easy question first to open an easy conversation.

Delia glared over her shoulder at him. “I told you, just a few days. It hurts him to talk.”

Grant kept his eyes on her father, who lifted his chin. Pain or not, Vernon Forrest was a grown man. Grant changed his tack. “What do you remember?”

Delia placed her small graceful hand on her father’s forearm. “Grant,” she pleaded.

“Why did you set the fire?”

“Not me,” Forrest rasped.

“Right.”

“Shut up, Grant!”

He paused and looked at her, remembering the last time she’d told him to shut up—the only woman in the last fifteen years who’d ever dared. She remembered too. Her eyes flashed hot, then she pursed her lips together. He leaned into her.

What was wrong with him? He had a goal and he couldn’t let her distract him from it. “What did you have to gain, Forrest?”

The old man’s jaw quivered, and his head dropped. Delia smacked Grant in the center of his chest. Reflexively he caught her hand and pulled it back in to warm him.

“What the hell are you doing?” She attempted to pull her hand free. “He can hardly defend himself.” She was quaking before him, furious, her eyes filling with tears. “He’s not the same. He will never be the same.”

He looked at the scarred and broken figure huddled on the hospital bed. The best-case scenario for Vernon Forrest was a narrow little life in Delia’s narrow little apartment building. He wouldn’t work again. He certainly wouldn’t set any fires. All he had left was Delia, her loyalty and her…love?

She loved her father, whether he was worthy of it or not.

Grant’s years with his grandfather had beaten the last drops of sentiment out of him. But the ground would open up and swallow him before he would let anything happen to Randi. He would stand back-to-back on a battlefield with Lars until the hordes around them swallowed them both whole. He saw the same ferocity and intensity in Delia’s eyes. Like water down a wall of stone, Grant’s resentment toward Forrest flowed away.

“Forrest.” He stepped forward, waiting until the man made eye contact. “You’ve had a rough ride. What’s done is done.” Delia cuffed him once more and he looked at her in confusion.

“Wolverton.” The old man lifted his jaw and the cut of his lips split open. “Don’t remember. Sorry.” He coughed the last bit out, and kept coughing.

“Go away! Why won’t you ever go away, Grant? It makes me crazy how you’re always here. Always hovering. Just let us be.”

Her words crawled in deep, burrowing into a dark place he’d boxed safely shut. “We have a reservation,” he said, and wished he hadn’t. To his own ears it had sounded like pleading.

“I am not going with you. You’ll have my report tomorrow afternoon.”

“Now, Delia…”

She shook with anger. He remembered the way she’d quivered and melted beneath his palm. The low, fierce hunger he’d thought he’d kept safely in check roared within him, demanding he step forward and take her, to drink her fiery sweetness into him.

But she stood between him and her father as if he were the enemy who needed to be shoved away, shut out. They were a family of two and Grant didn’t belong. Pain clawed into his chest.

Jesus. He was losing it—Forrest really had gotten to him. Both of them had.

He was a rational man, and she was overwrought. He’d get no reasonable work or conversation out of Delia tonight, or anything else he wanted, without resorting to less-than-honorable strategies. He turned to leave. “St. Francis is right. You need to ditch the jacket.”

***

He didn’t slam the door to his suite out of respect for its age. But he jerked off his T-shirt as soon as the lock snicked shut. He reached for his button fly.

“Whoa, there. I
so
don’t need to see that.” Randi sat up on the floral print loveseat, her chignon askew and her cheek bearing the red imprint of the lumpy sofa pillow.

“What are you doing here, sis?” Grant snatched the shirt up from the floor and forced himself to take a breath. It wasn’t Randi’s fault he was so frustrated.

“I decided to see what was luring you away from the city. So when do I get to meet Delia?”

“It’s the house, Randi. Just a house.”

“We don’t need another house, Grant.” Her voice was gentle, kind, maternal. He blinked at the disheveled redhead standing in front of him, sliding her feet into a pair of heels. She was almost as tall as he was. Her face had thinned out over the years—the ruddy, chubby cheeks he saw in his mind’s eye had been replaced with elegant planes, softly enhanced by the merest sweep of blush.

“You have to see the place, Randi. It’s perfect. It’s the perfect home for us.”

“Georgetown is my home.” As he stepped forward, she lifted her palm to block him. “It has been the perfect home. And Grandpa Wolverton’s townhouse was the perfect home. The trailer was the perfect the home.”

“You don’t remember the trailer.”

“Yes, I do. I remember Mom. I remember the ‘uncles.’ I remember sleeping behind the bleach bottles under the bathroom sink.” Her words battered him. He’d been so stupid to hide her behind bottles of poison, but they couldn’t both fit in the trailer storage bench. “I remember when you got the cigarette scars on your chest. And I remember being relieved when you finally grew hair over most of them.” She laughed. She actually laughed! How could she laugh?

“You took care of me then, and you always have. But if you bought this house for me, then sell it. I’m finished moving, finished following you. I want to stay in the city. I’m twenty-seven and I need to make my own life now.”

It took everything in him not to grab his sister and pull her back. She held his gaze and stared him down. This wasn’t the Randi he knew—sassy but submissive. This independent creature with her arms folded wasn’t merely defiant, she was determined.

He had to calculate his next move. He’d made missteps with Delia tonight. His usual ways of doing business, with the direct, forthright toughness Grandfather had both modeled for and demanded of him, were not working with these women.

“Come see her, Randi. She took a bruising in the fire, but she’s magnificent.”

“It’s just a house. It’s not a ‘she.’ You talk like a man in love.”

He saw Delia’s hurt face as he left the hospital room. The shame bottled up in his shoulders washed into his chest.

“Listen, order yourself some pizza.” He pulled cash out of his wallet and dropped it on the table. “There’s something I’ve got to do.”

Randi grabbed the cash and shoved the wad back into his palm with both hands, folding his fingers over the crumpled twenties. “You go ahead. Now I’m going see this house that has you all a-flutter.”

He stopped in the door. “I don’t flutter.”

Her laugh was loud and hearty. It gave him hope to hear it. This was his Randi—cheerful, warm and upbeat. She would come around without him having to get heavy. But he would have to figure out his strategy later and check with Lars to see if he had any insight into this new insistence Randi had about living on her own. Lars had been overseeing her security for the last few years, but his reports about Randi’s friends and movements had been awfully thin of late.

Right now, however, Grant had a woman to…woo. It was a novel concept, but it still boiled down to making a deal and closing a sale. Delia belonged in his bed and she needed to feel safe there. If he could make ninety-seven-year-old society matrons smile while they signed their properties over to him, he could convince Delia he was no threat to her father.

Delia’s apartment complex was convenient to the hospital but rather run-down. She spent so much time at Steward House, Grant figured she only went home to sleep. He was more than a little curious to see what her new home looked like, and what it might tell him about her.

She was still wearing the strawberry-ice-cream dress when she opened the door, digging frantically in the battered brown bag that served as her purse. She didn’t look up. “Please set the pizza on the counter. I know I’ve got cash in here somewhere.”

“You have a peephole. Use it.”

Her eyes widened as she looked back at him, her mouth agape. He stepped in. The futon he recognized from the city, and the foliate mask snarling at him with a gaping maw. In the corner stood a plinth with…wait. That one looked familiar, as did the dancing figurine on the counter.

She screwed her eyes shut, whispering, “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

He’d been a fool. An utter and complete fool. He’d worried about her safety in this dive, but she was the criminal. And now she was telling him to “shut up” yet again. The thieving little liar had gall.

“Do you care to explain why you stole my statues?”

***

Grant’s grip was gentle but firm as he pulled her by the elbow out from behind the door. He locked his arms around her in a parody of a hug, but she knew it for what it was—absolute restraint. He glowered down at her, letting her see every flame of his fury, preventing her from backing, crawling, creeping away to a safe place.

But Delia didn’t want to go anywhere else. Her desire for him overrode her urge to flee. The fire in his face radiated through thickly corded arms, down the hard planes of his chest to the hot pressure of his erection against her lower belly. Heat descended through her, swirling and pulsing in her core, warming and weakening her thighs. If he slid his hand down even an inch to the divot at the base of her spine, she might come right then and there.

Her traitorous arms wrapped around his waist. With brilliant clarity it struck Delia she had another diversionary tactic in her tool belt—and this time it might actually work. With a newfound sense of recklessness, she cupped his ass, pulling him into her and lifting her face to his. She answered him with absolute honesty. “No. No I don’t care to do that at all.”

His lips crushed her, devoured her. She devoured him right back, ignoring the gleeful giggles of the shepherdesses on the counter, ignoring Romana’s cautionary mutterings, ignoring Brogan’s outraged roar.

Grant lowered her to the futon, his mouth still exploring hers. He drank from her and she drank from him but she couldn’t be sated. She was nothing but wave after wave of pure heat and sensation. The thin layer of pink silk fell away from her shoulder. The pad of his thumb flicked away the thin cotton fabric over her nipple as he laid her prone on the sofa, and she pleaded into his mouth.

When he pulled back from her lips, she gulped, “Aw, no.” His mouth lowered to that self-same nipple, sucking it in deep and her hips bucked in the air above his lap. His denim-clad thigh nudged her knees and she opened them gladly, as widely as the narrow cotton cushion would allow.

“I’ve got a bed,” she gasped. “Got a bed!”

Without another word, he hoisted her, and she twined her fingers around his neck. His silver-blue eyes speared her and she drank him in, amazed at this moment—this one, right here and now. He was carrying her to her room, just as she’d dreamed he would.

“Shut the door,” she begged.

Grant slammed it so it bounced on its hinges, but he laid her gently on her unmade bed. He straightened, standing over her as she spread her arms joyfully, eager to receive him. She stared pointedly at the button-fly on his jeans, but instead of reaching to unsnap them, he dropped his arms to his sides. “What are you doing with my statues?”

Delia closed her arms across her naked chest and rolled to her side. The curtains were drawn, and from this angle she saw clear blue sky of late April and a few wisps of clouds. That one there—it looked a bit like a teapot, didn’t it?

“Delia,” he called her back, his voice cutting through the clouds in her gaze and the rising clamor in the next room. “Who’s your fence?”

“It’s cold in those storage lockers. Dark. They’re better off here.” Tears welled in her eyes. Tears would make everything worse.

I’ll give you something to cry about,
said a familiar voice that was really, truly locked in her own head. The man who said those things was gone. She’d said as much to Grant, and in the saying of it, knew it was true. A frail and humble creature had taken her father’s place—one with a round-the-clock obsession with court TV shows and a newfound aversion to gelatin-based desserts.

“You think Father will get his voice back?” she asked the clouds, but Grant answered.

“I doubt it. Bustamante said he’s lucky he can still talk at all.”

She didn’t know what to do with her resentment. The cold, cruel, distant father was gone. But Grant was here—bossy, arrogant, irresistible. She turned her anger toward him.

And he chopped the feet out from under her. “I owe you an apology. Your relationship with your father is none of my business. He needs you. You’re doing the right thing. End of story.”

Grant Wolverton had said he was sorry. Instead of feeling vindicated, however, she just felt lost. The first tear leaked out, washing with it all pretense of pride.

“Why do you care, Grant? You’re here for the house, so why are you in my apartment? You have everything you want. Why do you keep leading me to believe you want me?”

The teapot cloud had become a lyre. Grant’s fingers stroked the hair above her ear and she closed her eyes, squeezing out two more tears nestled there. The covers rustled and the bed sagged as his shadow loomed across her. His lips brushed her earlobe, her cheek, her neck.

Delia gave up completely. She turned to him as before, reaching for his arms to pull him to her. To her great relief, he came. She reached for the button of his jeans.

Although the voices swelled in the next room, although the doorbell rang and went quiet again, she blocked out the sounds, tuning in only to Grant. Their loving was silent, languid and slow. She tasted his shoulder, his chest, his thigh. She stroked the curve of his flank, marveling at how the muscles tensed under the feather strokes of her fingertips. She spread her fingers wide, sliding them through his curls, marveling at the difference in textures among his head, his chest, and his groin.

And he caressed her, running his hand up the side of her ribs, running his tongue down the shallow valley between her breasts, running his fingers up her drenched folds. His body covered her completely, tenting over her as he explored her neck, kissed her eyelids and nipped her belly. Then he stood and she panted softly, waiting, worried. Was he leaving now? Good God, he couldn’t leave her now.

But Grant smiled, a slow, wicked smile, and knelt at the foot of the bed. Delia yelped as he grabbed her ankles and tugged, pulling her over to the edge so her feet and lower legs dangled, so his chest rose between her thighs. She clenched them together instinctively, but he was broad and brawny and decidedly in the way. As she reached down between her legs to cover her dark curls with her hands, he took each wrist and pulled them open, tucking them under her own thighs.

“Don’t move them, Delia. Don’t move your hands. Do whatever else you want, but your hands stay put.”

Delia watched his mouth as he lowered to her. A flick of the tongue and she pulsed up. And then another. His warm palms pressed apart her inner thighs and his thumbs peeled her open like magnolia petals. With one long, slow lick, he sent her over the edge. She didn’t have time to be embarrassed because Grant was relentless. She came and came, twisting and writhing, barely noting his triumphant laugh as her palms slid free of their moorings and her fists beat the bed. Her arms flailed, and she protested without breath, “Can’t take it!”

But he ignored her, and she came one last time, her mind exploding like a star and her body throbbing with helpless delight.

Grant gave her no time to recover. He plunged into her, splitting her into shards of light once more. She rose to him in a sudden burst of renewed passion, meeting each thrust with her own hardest, darkest desire. She squeezed her deepest muscles and held him there for one endless moment, her arms locked around his back, still, in the most secret place within her. Grant shuddered as he came, too, his final thrusts filling her with a sense of being cleansed from the inside out.

He slowly came to rest atop her, warm and heavy and reassuring, like a thick down blanket in the dead of winter. She felt his heartbeat pressing into her breast. She felt his breath on her temple. His lips moved against her forehead. “Delia.” His voice was gentle and dark and warm. “Answer my question.”

Fantasy Grant had known and admired her rapport with statues, but he’d long since faded into a pastel watercolor haze. She didn’t miss him, because real Grant was so much more than she had ever imagined or hoped for herself. Real Grant, however, lay next to her in a rapidly cooling bed, and he was absolutely ruthless. She had to be very careful what she gave him.

“I didn’t steal your statues.” She hesitated at his soft snort. “I didn’t. If you look at the inventory I sent back with Travis and Ralph, you’ll see I marked them for environmental storage.”

“Here.”

“I keep the temperature at a constant sixty-nine and run a dehumidifier.” She knew how lame it sounded even as she said it.

“They’re marble, Delia. And granite. Not wax.”

She rolled away from him and sat up, reaching to floor for her shirt. “They’re all here, Grant. Compare them to the inventory and you’ll see.”

“I will.” He hesitated. “You really talk to them don’t you?”

“Doesn’t everyone?” She opened the bedroom door for him, picked up her sketch pad and lifted her chin. “I’m taking a shower. You know the way out.”

***

The first time she’d left him. Now she thought to kick him out. But he wasn’t going anywhere. Because he wasn’t foolish enough to trust her inventory now, Grant pulled the sketch pad out of a dresser drawer she’d shoved it into and flipped for a blank page to list what she’d stolen. He paused over the first sketch in her pad. Vernon Forrest lay in his hospital bed, his fire-ravaged gaze on the television above him. The charcoal lines were spare, but in her simple drawing Grant saw Delia’s father as the embodiment of brokenness and pain.

Grant flipped a chunk of pages to the sketch of his kitchen she’d copied for Evans and Braun. Delia had mapped in the appliances, scribbled color samples on patches of the wall and floor. The lines of the sketch looked different, and it took him a moment to figure out why. She’d drawn in a Green Man on the wall next to the back door.

He stepped into the living room to check—it was the same, or almost. The foliate mask on her counter had the same configuration of leaves surrounding its face, but its eyes were narrower and Grant could see more teeth. The figure in the sketch was softer, less severe. Grant reached his finger toward the real stone face and then curled it back into his palm.

“What are you doing with that?” Delia’s dark hair hung in long wet strands down her neck, and her eyes flashed like emeralds in moonlight. She held a white bath towel to her pink, freckled breasts with one arm, and with the other she lunged across the room and snatched at the sketch pad. Grant lifted it above her head. “Give it back!”

As he lowered the pad to give it to her, another page flipped open.

“Good God.” He twisted away from her, holding it over his head. In front of him lay a naked man—
him.
She’d drawn him lying on his stomach, one arm tucked under his pillow and the other draped across a shadow in the bed where somebody—
her
body—had lain. Heat rushed to his groin and to his face. He remembered the moment he’d awakened in his cold, empty bed, frustrated and angry. But the man in the picture was asleep—alone and vulnerable, his arm embracing an empty gap.

“Grant?”

He shoved the pad at her and opened the door.

“Monday,” he ground out. “Full report.”

***

“She’s delusional.” Grant bit into his trout. The kitchen at the Apple Tree had already closed by the time Randi convinced him to get out of Blossom’s Folly and walk downtown, but from her vantage point washing glasses behind the bar, Myrna had seen them walk in and barked back into the kitchen to throw Grant’s fish on the grill. “She talks to statues, Randi. They tell her what to wear.”

Randi dabbed at the corner of her mouth with her napkin. “It hardly makes her crazy. Eccentric, maybe. But not crazy.”

“Nope. Delia’s not crazy,” Myrna called from behind the bar. She wiped another glass and set it upside-down on a dishtowel. “She’s a witch.”

“Oh, come on,” Grant growled.

“It’s true. There’s one every couple of generations. The Steward witches.” Myrna pointed out the window with her towel. “Delia, there, talks to statues.”

“Seriously?” Randi’s fork stopped just shy of her mouth.

“Her grandma used to read minds. That was a real bitch.” Myrna put down her towel and patted her fire-engine-red bouffant. “I used to do her hair before I retired.”

“Delia’s?” Grant flinched at the thought.

“No, her grandmother’s. Don’t mention it to her, though.”

“Her grandmother’s hair?” Randi asked.

“No.” Myrna shook her head. “Don’t talk with Delia about the whole statue business. She’s shy. Thinks no one knows.”

Randi set down her fork. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand how talking to statues makes you a witch.”

But Grant understood. “They talk back.”

“That they do.” Myrna picked up the next glass.

“Grant.” His sister looked at him with something like pity. “I’ve seen her. She’s nothing like Mom. Nothing at all.”

“She’s nuts, Randi.”

“Eccentric, maybe. But she’s no addict. She’s not hurting anyone, and you have no evidence she ever has, do you?”

“No.” He shook his head. “She checks out squeaky-clean.”

“Well, that’s it, then. If you and Lars can’t find any dirt, there’s no dirt to find. I liked her.”