Superstition (52 page)

“I figured you’d still be huffy about that. It’s that red hair.” Joe lifted his head and smiled at her. If it hadn’t been for the hot, dark glitter of his eyes and the unmistakable evidence of his desire that she could feel pressing hard and urgent against her, she might have been fooled into thinking he was as unruffled as he sounded. “Anyway, this will be twice.”

Then his head dipped and his mouth found her breast, her nipple. It was wet and scalding hot through the thin cloth as he suckled first one breast, then the other. Nicky caught her breath. Her body surged against that sinewy thigh, sending shock waves of pleasure through her system.

“What if
I
don’t want a relationship?” It was difficult to talk, much less make sense, when her heart was pounding and her blood was racing and her body was quivering with sensation. She slid her hands down over the warm, damp skin of his back, loving the blatant masculinity of it, the feel of strong muscles flexing beneath sleek skin. Her fingertips encountered the waistband of his shorts and slipped inside.

He lifted his head from the exquisite torture he was inflicting on her breasts to look at her. “You’d break my heart.”

She would have been fooled by the almost whimsical tone of that statement if his eyes hadn’t been fierce and black.

“Joe,” she said, which he clearly took to mean
yes
to a relationship because he kissed her, gently at first and then with ferocious need. Nicky kissed him back, wildly, passionately, bursting into flames as his hands slid over her, pulling her slinky nightgown over her head, leaving her naked and vulnerable as he caressed her everywhere, kissing and touching until finally, because patience had never been her strong suit and she was really tired of waiting, she pushed his boxers down his legs and closed her mouth around him and did to him what he had been doing to her.

“Christ,” he said. Then,
“Nicky.”

Then he rolled her over and came into her, just like that, enormous and hot, plunging deep inside her so that she gasped and clung to him, moving with him as he loved her with a torrid eroticism that made her shiver and burn and cry out again and again and again. Finally, he drove inside her with a series of fierce, deep thrusts and she came, just like that, exploding in fiery starbursts of passion, digging her nails into his back and wrapping her legs around his waist and gasping out his name.

“Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe,
Joe
.”

“Nicky,” he groaned in answer, holding himself deep inside her shaking body, shuddering as he found his own release.

Afterward, she lay spent in his arms, warm and relaxed and sleepy, and listened to the deep, steady rhythm of his breathing. He felt hot and faintly sweaty and big and solid and altogether good against her. Her head was on his shoulder, and she tilted her chin so that she could look up at him. What she saw was the lean angle of a stubbled jaw, the sensuous curve of slightly parted lips, the sweep of dark lashes against his cheeks, the hard curve of his cheekbones—and, above, bisecting his temple, the pale, puckered lines of the scars where he’d been shot.

And her gut clenched like a giant hand had reached right inside her body and grabbed it and twisted.

Even as his lashes lifted and his eyes gleamed down at her, she had another one of her patented eureka moments.

I’m in love with you, Joe Franconi,
she thought with a spurt of half-terrified wonder.
And I have absolutely no intention in the world of telling you so.

22

A
T ABOUT FIVE a.m., Nicky was so tired that she actually fell asleep—deeply, dreamlessly asleep, not the little twenty-minute dozes she’d been drifting into between lovemaking sessions all night. By the time she zonked out, Joe’s
twice
had been long since left in the dust. If his standard of measurement was any indication, they now definitely had a relationship going on.

And she still hadn’t told him that she was in love with him. That was a secret she meant to guard until she was sure the words wouldn’t send him racing for the nearest exit. At the moment, she sensed that just committing to an ambiguously defined “relationship” was as far as he was prepared to go.

Not that she was particularly unhappy about it. She recognized that he saw an enormous risk when he thought about letting someone into his heart. She was willing to give him some time—and anyway, she needed time herself to make sure that this wasn’t just some stress- and lust-induced aberration.

But she didn’t think it was. It felt like—
gulp—
the real thing.

Which was a scary thought all by itself. Making things worse was the fact that the last
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
broadcast would be over soon, which meant that soon—not immediately, because she wanted to stay around until Livvy was out of the hospital at least, but soon—she would be leaving Pawleys Island. Whatever happened with the show, or with
Live in the Morning
or any other gig she might be offered, her work was elsewhere. She simply couldn’t stay.

She could visit, though, and she would, frequently, because she meant to keep looking for the bastard who had attacked Livvy until he was caught or she died, plain and simple. And also—she would visit for Joe.

She wondered how he felt about commuter relationships. One thing she could be sure of was that as soon as it occurred to him that she would be leaving soon, she was going to find out.

By the time she woke up, it was nine a.m. and she was alone. She glanced around the bedroom, a little warily because she was just then remembering Brian, but there was no ghost in sight. No Joe, either. That being the case, and since the day in front of her was jam-packed with things she absolutely had to do, she rolled out of bed.

In the bathroom, she took one look in the mirror and nearly shrieked. Forget about love’s rosy glow. She had bags under her eyes from lack of sleep, and there was whisker burn—yes, definitely whisker burn—on her cheeks. And was that a hickey at the base of her throat?
Ohmigod,
it was. And she had to be on live TV
tonight.

Mario and Cassandra and Tina would have their work cut out for them, Nicky thought, patting the puffiness under her eyes with her pinkies with horror. Maybe things would improve during the day, but right now she was looking like the poster girl for the morning after the night before.

A cold shower helped with the bags, if nothing else. She put a little lotion on the whisker burn, and added a peach-colored T-shirt that fit close around her throat in hopes that it would cast a flattering glow over her face and hide the hickey at the same time, and she realized that she had done the best she could without professional help.

She would grab a cup of coffee and head out. Next stop, the hospital and Livvy. Then she had to do a little more digging into Tara Mitchell’s father. . . .

The funny thing was, she reflected as she crossed the living room and glanced out through the big front window to see that Joe’s cruiser was no longer parked in front of the house, she’d known that Joe wasn’t in the house almost from the time she’d woken up. The place had felt empty in a curious kind of way, as if its energy had gone. If she was that attuned to him, she had it bad, Nicky thought, as she walked into the kitchen to find Dave sitting at the table, holding a pencil and checking off data on a computer printout that lay on top of a stack of papers scattered across an open folder. A cup of coffee was sitting beside him. A glance told her that Cleo was, as expected, looking in through the back door. A further glance told her that the day was cloudy and overcast—not a ray of sunshine in sight.

Great.

“Hey,” Dave greeted her when she said a cheery good-morning and started pouring coffee into a cup. “Joe had to leave. He said to tell you he’d call you later.”

If Nicky had thought she looked bad, it was nothing compared to how awful Dave looked. His eyes were bloodshot, his normally ruddy cheeks were pale, and every muscle in his face drooped.

Nicky felt a little thrill of alarm.

“Is anything wrong?” she asked, her coffee cup suspended halfway to her mouth. Her first thought was that something had happened with the Lazarus Killer.

Dave grimaced. “Amy moved out last night. She took the kids and went back to her ex-husband.”

“Oh,” Nicky said softly, having heard all about Dave’s girlfriend during the long hours he’d spent babysitting her. She sat down at the table and looked at him sympathetically. “I’m sorry. Are you all right?”

“Yeah, sure. Like Joe said, it just wasn’t meant to be.”

“Joe said that?”

Dave nodded. “He had her pegged right from the start, I guess. Cleo, too. Neither one of them ever liked Amy. I guess I should have listened.”

Nicky reached across the table and put her hand over his.

“There’s somebody out there who
is
right for you, Dave. You’ll find her. You’ll see.”

“I guess.” He made a face and took a sip of coffee. “At least I get to take Cleo home again. I know Joe’s ready to see her go. I’ll pick her up later today, I guess.” He finished his coffee and started putting the papers he’d been working on back into the folder. “You ready to go?”

Nicky nodded, finished her coffee, and stood up.

“THIS PLACE HAS TURNED into a damned freak show,” Vince growled, glaring out the window of the squad room at the dozen or so men in Civil War-era uniforms marching across the courthouse square. A TV camera crew rode alongside them on a mobile camera unit, taping the whole thing. The white tents and blue beach umbrellas of the press occupation had been joined by a full contingent of vendors hawking everything from lemonade to “I survived the Lazarus Killer” T-shirts. “What the hell do you suppose they’re doing now?”

“At a guess, I’d say something about the history of the island.” Joe glanced out the window without much interest and then turned back to the dry-erase board where pictures of Karen Wise, Marsha Browning, and Livvy Hollis—who was considered a victim although she had survived—were taped to the top right, while pictures of the three earlier victims were taped to the top left. Everything the most recent set of victims had in common was listed beneath their pictures, while everything those three women had in common with Tara Mitchell, Lauren Schultz, and Becky Iverson was listed beneath the girls’ pictures. Acquaintances, places they had frequented, hobbies they had enjoyed, things like that. There was a surprising amount of overlap between all of them except Karen Wise, Joe thought, going over the list. But then, the other five had all been residents of Pawleys Island, which was small, and which meant, necessarily, that their lives would overlap. Even fifteen years apart. So far, Karen Wise’s link was that she had spent approximately two hours on the island before being killed.

Not a lot of time to meet a murderer.

“Are you ever going to solve this?” Vince turned to glare at him. “I’m guessing no, right? You know what? From start to finish, this is all the fault of your girlfriend’s damned TV show.”

His girlfriend.
Joe instantly pictured Nicky and felt something that was ridiculously akin to a warm-and-fuzzy glow right in the region of his heart. Vince had called her that before, and it had annoyed the hell out of him at the time. Now the description felt right.

He hadn’t meant for it to happen, but somehow or another, Nicky managed to get through the flak vest he’d zipped around his heart. The thing about this case was that the killer seemed to be focused on her. That not only scared the hell out of him, it also made him want to catch this guy in the worst way and stomp his ass into the ground before he could come after Nicky again—which Joe had a real bad feeling that before this was all over, he was going to do.

“Working on it,” Joe said mildly to Vince, and went back to studying his chart.

BEN HOLLIS WAS with Livvy in her hospital room when Nicky walked in. Leonora had just arrived, too, and Uncle Ham, who had spent the night, was just leaving. Uncle John, who had come to fetch Uncle Ham, was standing right inside the door, arms crossed over his chest, glaring at Ben. And Hayley was there, too, bawling her head off in the arms of a uniformed nurse who was carrying her from the room.

The tension in the air was so thick that Nicky, who was carrying a vase of Livvy’s favorite daisies, nearly turned around on the threshold.

Then she sighed, cooed at Hayley in passing, and kept going to plunk her daisies down on the table by Livvy’s bed.
Look at it this way,
she told herself:
The good news is that Livvy is well enough for the family to have sunk into chaos as usual.

Back to his usual
GQ
self, Ben greeted Nicky with a curt nod, which she returned with disinterest. If this was war, and it seemed it was, she was squarely on Livvy’s side.

“You think about it,” Ben said to Livvy, and to Nicky’s surprise—and in the teeth of the concentrated glares of everyone else in the room—he bent down to brush his mouth against her cheek.