Superstition (33 page)

He tugged her shell out of the waistband of her pants. His hand slipped beneath it. She felt the hard heat of that hand sliding up the cool skin covering her rib cage and moaned into his mouth.

In answer, he pulled her closer yet, and his thigh pushed between her legs.

Wait. Hang on. Get a grip. Slow down.

Even while that niggly little voice in her mind tried to tell her that this was a mistake, that she was going way too fast, that if she didn’t call a halt soon, this was going to turn into one of those you’re-going-to-hate-yourself-in-the-morning kind of situations, she ignored it in favor of abandoning herself to sensation. It had been so long since she’d felt anything like this. Had she
ever
felt anything like this? She tried to remember. . . .

Then her instant mental replay of past boyfriends crashed and burned as her thrice-damned phone began to ring.

The sound came out of nowhere, shocking her with its incongruity. It took her passion-fogged brain a moment to figure out what it was. Then she realized, and stiffened.

He lifted his mouth from hers, met her gaze with eyes that were narrow and gleaming with desire.

“Let it ring,” he said.

She wanted to. Oh, she wanted to. But as much as she would have liked to ignore the strident summons, she couldn’t. It was her mother, she knew it was her mother, and the idea that it was her mother was like having a bucket of cold water dumped on her head. It was stupid, it was maddening, it was probably childish as all get out, but there it was: She couldn’t fool around with a man knowing that her mother was at the other end of her phone.

“I can’t.”

By the time she started wriggling to get free, it was on its fourth peal.

His eyes blazed, his jaw clenched, his body went taut and still—but he let her go.

“Sorry,” she said distractedly as a glance at the caller’s number confirmed her suspicion. Joe’s fists were on his hips, he was breathing hard enough so that she could hear it, and he was looking tall and dark and dangerous in the moonlight. She discovered that she especially liked the dangerous part.

I’m going to kill you, Mother
.

She sent the thought winging its way toward Twybee Cottage, and tried not to sound as ticked off as she felt as she answered the damned phone.

“Are you on your way home yet?” Leonora demanded.

“Yes, I am, Mother.” Okay, she probably sounded just a little annoyed. Anyway, Joe, who was now about three feet away, lighting a cigarette, smiled a little as he listened.

“Did I interrupt something?” Her mother wanted to know. Clearly the edge in Nicky’s voice had told her more than her daughter would have voluntarily imparted.

“Not at all.”

“Oh,” Leonora said. “Well, you’re an adult, but I would have thought you might want to wait just a little bit longer. . . . But that’s your decision to make, of course.”

“I’m hanging up now.”

“Wait. The reason I called is Marisa’s here at the house. She brought the tape from Sunday night. There are voices on it. Tara and Lauren and Becky, I’m almost sure. You can hear them whispering things like ‘He’s here’ in the background. They mean the man who murdered them, of course, and I thought Joe ought to come and have a listen.”

Nicky glanced at Joe. He was watching her, the smile gone now, his expression impossible to read as he puffed away at his cigarette. At the thought of conveying this news to him, Nicky’s stomach tightened.

And not in a good way.

It was hard to discuss ghosts in a reasonable manner with a man who patently didn’t believe in them.

Her mother was still talking. “I
knew
they were there that night. I just couldn’t see them. All I could do was pick up Tara’s imprint. Nicky, what on earth am I going to do if I don’t get over this?”

“You’ll get over it,” Nicky said, added a quick “We’re on our way,” and then disconnected.

“I think that took ‘saved by the bell’ to a whole new level,” Joe said as she dropped the phone back into her pocket. His tone was light; his eyes were anything but. They still gleamed hotly at her in the moonlight. He had, she saw, finished his cigarette. At least, it was nowhere in evidence.

“Joe,” she said, and stopped. Her legs were rubbery, she still felt flushed and way too warm, her breasts tingled, and there was an ache deep inside her that had not yet had the decency to even begin to subside.

“Yeah.” He moved toward her then and picked up her hand and carried it to his mouth. While she watched, faintly mesmerized, he pressed his lips to her palm. The heat of them made her fingers curl so that her fingertips just brushed his cheek. His skin was hot, and the faint stubble there was prickly to the touch. The tiny contact sent heat shooting through her body. Her heart started beating faster again. The steady blaze in his eyes told her that he, too, was still feeling the glow.

“So-o,” he said, drawing the word out, “how do you feel about sex on the beach?”

Okay, knock off some points in the romantic department
.

Nicky narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re taking a lot for granted, aren’t you?”

To her surprise, he lowered her hand and grinned a little at her.

“That’s what I thought. In that case, maybe you better tell me what your mother wanted.”

Nicky sighed. The night was bright with stars, waves were crashing toward the shore, and the beach was bathed in moonlight. He was looking like the embodiment of every erotic fantasy that she had ever had, she was feeling sexy as hell, and the thought of simply taking up where they had left off was extremely appealing.

On the other hand, it was a
public
beach—with sand, which, if she followed through on her imaginings, was probably going to end up in some very uncomfortable places. And, besides, she really didn’t know him all that well.

Wrong time, wrong place. Maybe not the wrong man, but jumping in the sack on a first date was never a good idea.
She could almost hear her mother saying it:
Be careful, or he’ll think you’re easy.

She practically ground her teeth. Being back on the island was causing her to regress. It had been years since she’d heard her mother’s voice in her head like that.

Forget sex on the beach. For her, it was clearly destined to forever remain just a drink.

“Marisa—my mother’s assistant—made an audio recording of the program Sunday night,” Nicky said, knowing as she did so that she was probably doing the verbal equivalent of shooting the remainder of the evening in the foot. “There are voices on it. They say ‘He’s back’ a couple of times, and my mother says that by ‘he’ they mean the man who murdered Tara Mitchell. And the other girls, too. Which means that their killer is probably Karen’s killer, because whoever he is was at the Old Taylor Place Sunday night.” From the corner of her eye, she saw a couple—elderly, from the shape of them—silhouetted by moonlight as they walked toward the hotel. They were still a little distance away, down near the edge of the surf. But if she could see them, they almost certainly could see her and Joe. It was a good thing she had decided against sex on the beach.

Joe frowned. “Wait a minute. Whoa. Back up.
Whose
voices are on the tape?”

Nicky sighed again. “Tara and Lauren and Becky’s.”

A beat passed.

“
Ghost
voices?” There was so much incredulity in his tone that Nicky stiffened and glared at him.

“Yep.”

Pulling her hand from his, she turned and started marching away down the beach, toward home, passing the elderly couple on the way.
Chalk the last little interlude up to the triumph of sexual chemistry over innate incompatibility,
she thought angrily.
Okay, make that
sizzling
sexual chemistry.

Not that it made any difference.

“Wait. Hold on. Okay.” Joe caught up with her. A sideways glance told her that he was smiling. Her visceral reaction was,
not
a good idea. “Let me get this straight: Your mother’s assistant has ghost voices on tape.”

“Are you
laughing
?” She shot him an outraged glance.

The smile vanished. His face was immediately as solemn as a judge’s.

“No, I am not laughing. See me not laughing?” He pointed at his own face. Nicky caught the teasing gesture from the corner of her eye.

“It’s good you’re not laughing,” she said in a dangerous tone. “Because if you were, I might just have to deck you.”

At that he did laugh, unmistakably, and she made a furious sound under her breath and stalked on.

“I was joking, all right? Don’t tell me you’re one of those girls—women, whatever—who can’t take a joke? Damn it, Nicky, quit walking away from me. You have to admit that ghost voices on a tape sounds pretty far-fetched.”

“Go screw yourself,” she said pleasantly. A playful little wave shot spray at her as if in reprimand, and she dashed the droplets from her face with an impatient hand, even as she kept on trucking—and at a pretty brisk pace, too.

“Nicky. Honey.” He caught up with her again. He was looking at her; she was looking straight ahead—though she was monitoring his expressions out of the corner of her eye. Lucky for the length of his life span, he looked—sort of—contrite. “If you say there are ghost voices on tape, then I am absolutely willing to believe there are ghost voices on tape.” There was the briefest of pauses. One corner of his mouth quirked up. “What, you can hear them but not see them?”

For a man who was not laughing, there was a hell of a lot of amusement in the question.

“Sometimes,” Nicky said, shooting him a killer glance.

“I’ve got to admit, that’s a new one on me.”

“But then, you don’t know much, do you?”

“So ghosts aren’t my area of expertise. Sue me.” He grinned at her. “Are we quarreling again?”

“Yeah, I think we might be.”

He was keeping pace with her without any visible effort at all, despite the fact that she was now striding along like a power-walker on a mission, which was annoying. There were two other couples in view now, youthful silhouettes splashing through the surf in a close, laughing quartet as they headed in the direction of the hotel, and Nicky skirted closer to the undulating rows of sea oats that lined the dunes in an effort to stay well out of their way. She had always loved walking along the beach at night. Despite everything, it was still a joy to feel the ocean spray on her face again, to taste the salt in the air, to watch the waves surge toward shore. Without Joe’s solid presence, she would have been afraid tonight, she knew—certainly too afraid to venture out onto the beach. Generally speaking, though, she couldn’t ask for a more reassuring bodyguard than a cop with a gun. Specifically speaking, Joe with a gun was even better. The fact that he was tall and dark and handsome was not the point. The fact that with him beside her, she felt safe was. Even if, at the moment, she kind of wanted to throttle him.

“And by the way,” she added, “while we’re quarreling, did I mention that I’m getting plenty tired of the way you practically roll your eyes anytime anybody says anything to you about ghosts or spirits or psychic phenomena?”

“I do not roll my eyes.”

“You do. Practically. Anyway, you know what I mean.”

“You mean I exhibit healthy skepticism when somebody tells me they’ve seen a ghost?”

“Not somebody.” Nicky narrowed her eyes at him. “See, that’s the thing. We’re talking about my mother here. And me. Take, for instance, earlier. When I told you I saw Tara Mitchell in her bedroom window, you quite clearly didn’t believe me. What, do you think I made it up?”

“No.” He shook his head. “I do not think you made it up. But . . .”

“But what?” Her tone dared him.

He grimaced. “Okay, you want the truth? I think it’s possible—mind you, I’m only saying ‘possible’—you were mistaken. I mean, how likely is it that dead people are just hanging around out there in the atmosphere somewhere, popping up to show themselves to the living whenever they feel like it?” “I don’t think that’s
quite
how it works.”

“So how
does
it work?” He sounded genuinely curious. “Explain it to me. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that there are such things as ghosts. Why would only certain people be able to see them, for instance? You’d think they’d want everybody to know they were there.”

“All I can tell you is that some people are more sensitive to psychic phenomena than others.”

“What about the people who
aren’t
sensitive to psychic phenomena? What does it mean if they see a ghost? Like that kid on your TV show, for example, who was cutting grass at the Old Taylor Place and supposedly saw Tara Mitchell. I talked to him the other day. He
seemed
pretty normal.”

“He
is
normal,” Nicky said, exasperated. “Normal people see ghosts all the time. It could be an accident, a onetime thing, sort of a disturbance in the atmosphere, so to speak. Or it could be the ghost is trying to give that person a message. See, the thing is, a lot of times ghosts—and, just for your information, ‘spirits’ is the term my mother would use—don’t know they’re dead, especially if they passed suddenly, like in an accident—or, like Tara Mitchell, in a murder. Other times, they have unfinished business.”

“Such as?”

Nicky glared at him. “How do I know? It could be anything.”

“So, exactly how sure are you that you saw Tara Mitchell’s ghost in that window?”

“Sure,” Nicky said.

“No possibility of mistake?”

“There’s always the possibility of mistake,” Nicky conceded reluctantly. “But I don’t think I’m mistaken. I think she was there, and I think it’s a bad omen.”
Like I think the howling dog is a bad omen
, she almost added, but she didn’t want to muddy the issue. As far as ghosts and Joe were concerned, the best policy was clearly KISS: Keep it simple, stupid.

“You don’t think you just could have . . . imagined it? Especially considering the fact that your mother is always going around seeing ghosts everywhere, you might be more susceptible than most to things like that.”