Whispers at Midnight (6 page)

“Matt Converse, what do you think you’re doing?” she demanded furiously.

He froze. His eyes met hers, and his brows snapped together.

“Carly?” He sounded doubtful.

“Yes, Carly.” There was bite to her voice. Even as she sucked in a much-needed breath, memories of the last time she’d lain beneath him like this rushed back at her, about as welcome as a rubber check.

“Jesus, you’ve got boobs.”

His hand, with hers flattened beneath it, rested partly on top of her right one. She could feel his fingers flexing, gauging the curve of her breast. She yanked her hand free—and he copped a feel. Last time his hand had been wrapped around her breast she’d barely filled
an A cup. Now she was a lush and lovely C, thanks to years of exercises and creams and good living and—all right, about five thousand dollars’ worth of implants. Not that she meant to tell him
that.

“Yeah, well, boobs happen.” She glowered at him. Lucky for him his hand had slid on out from between them or she would have slapped him into next week. She
owed
him a slap. Had owed him for twelve years. She was practically itching to pay up.

“And you’re blond.” He was sounding mildly stupefied. His gaze was on her shoulder-length, stick-straight, stylishly choppy platinum blond hair. Its natural state was a wildly curly mouse brown, as he well knew.

“Blond happens too. Want to get off me now? At least, I’m assuming the rape’s off, since it turns out we know each other.”

“Rape?” He snorted. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Is that what you thought?”

“You know, I don’t know why, but when some guy tackles me in the dark and starts feeling me up, rape tends to be one of the possibilities that enters my mind.”

Her words dripped sarcasm. His mouth quirked into the slightest of smiles.

“Curls, is that really you?” Seemingly in no hurry to move, he propped himself up on his elbows as the nickname he’d bestowed on her years before took her back to places she didn’t want to go. With his dead weight still pinning her to the ground, he did a quick visual inventory of each feature. It galled her to realize that any claim to beauty she might under better circumstances have possessed had been done in by an unfortunate combination of the weather, the lateness of the hour, the marathon drive she’d just endured, and her lingering depression over the implosion of her entire, carefully constructed life. Since she’d been driving, she’d washed her face with plain old liquid rest-room soap and water at the last pit stop in an effort to keep awake, which meant she had no defenses left. What he was seeing was her face just as he no doubt remembered it: the same unadorned blue eyes, the same freckled and sure-to-be-shiny snub nose, the same too-wide, bare-except-for-Chapstick mouth. Her face, without blush to shape it, was still more round than oval, her
neglected eyebrows were once again well on their way to reverting to unibrow mode, and, in a complete antithesis of the woman she’d become over the last dozen years, not a trace of tinted moisturizer remained on her face to stand between him and the unvarnished truth. This circumstance did not make her feel any more kindly toward him; in fact, it increased the vitriol factor about a hundredfold. As their eyes met again, she scowled. In response, his smile widened into a full-fledged grin.

“Baby, you’ve changed. And not just with the boobs and the hair. Way back when, you used to be sweet.”

The teasing infuriated her all over again. If he had forgotten the most recent chapter in the history of their acquaintance, she had not.

“Way back when, I used to be a lot of things—like stupid. Very, very stupid. Now get off—”

She never finished. A copper-bottomed saucepan interrupted her as it came swooping out of the darkness like a navigation-impaired bat to crash with a sickening
thunk
into the back of his head.

5

“D
AMN IT
!” Matt yelled, grabbing his head and rolling.

“Run, Carly!” Brandishing the saucepan, Sandra was dancing around in the darkness as if someone had poured hot coals into her shoes. “Don’t you move. I’ll hit you again,” she said threateningly to Matt as he started to sit up. “See if I don’t. I’ll hit you again.”

“Sandra, no!” Carly shrieked as Matt, cursing, arms wrapped around his head, sat up beside her anyway and the saucepan swooped down again. Matt ducked just in time. The pan’s copper bottom flashed harmlessly past his cowering shoulder. “He’s a friend.”

Although
friend
wasn’t quite the right word to describe the role Matt had played in her life. And it certainly didn’t cover her feelings for him now. The lonely little girl who had hero-worshiped the three-years-older boy was long gone. She had grown up, and in the process had painfully discovered that the swaggering black-haired youth she’d thought hung the moon was just one more in a long line of untrustworthy male rats.

“What?” Sandra looked at her, hesitating, the saucepan poised for another swing.

Matt dared an upward glance and grabbed it, yanking it away from Sandra with a disgusted sound.

“Whoops,” Sandra said, backing away.

“It’s okay.” Carly scrambled to her feet. She felt a little shaky from the aborted battle, and her entire back side from her shoulders to her knees was damp, but as she looked down at Matt sitting on the ground with the saucepan beside him and his long fingers gingerly exploring the back of his head, a smile began to tug at the corners of her mouth. “He’s stupid but harmless. Sandra, meet Matt Converse. Matt, this is Sandra Kaminski.”

“Uh, pleased to meet you,” Sandra said, nervously eyeing Matt.

Still feeling the back of his head, where presumably a good-sized bump was beginning to make itself felt, Matt glanced up. Carly’s smile widened at the look on his face. She discovered that she really, truly liked the idea of that bump.

“Wish I could say the same.” Matt’s tone was sour; his hand dropped away from his head. He got to his feet, hanging on to the saucepan and grimacing. “You shouldn’t go around hitting people like that. You can get yourself in a lot of trouble that way.”

“Sorry,” Sandra offered weakly, keeping a safe distance between them.

Carly intervened with unconcealed enjoyment. “Hey, she thought she was saving me from a rapist or murderer or something. It was really brave of her to hit you over the head. Thank you, Sandra.”

“You’re welcome,” Sandra said, sounding happier.

Matt’s gaze swung to Carly, who deliberately widened her Cheshire cat grin for his benefit.

“Think it’s funny, do you?”

“Well-deserved, was more what I had in mind.”

“Oh, yeah?” He considered Carly for a moment without speaking. It was too dark for her to read his eyes, but it wasn’t hard to guess what was on his mind: the same thing that was on hers. The air between them all but crackled with their mutual memory of the last time they’d been together. She’d been a shy and socially backward eighteen, it had been the night of her senior prom, and he, the handsome twenty-one-year-old hell-raiser that all the other, more popular girls drooled over, had been her date. That night of glory had ended with her losing her virginity to him. She hadn’t had to lose her heart,
he’d owned it for years. She hadn’t seen him to speak to since. The son of a bitch.

“Am I wrong, or do I detect some hostility here?”

“Ya think?” Hostility wasn’t the word. She could feel her skin prickling with burgeoning antagonism. That whole, agonizing summer after she had given him her all, he had avoided her as if she had a communicable disease. The glimpses she’d caught of him had been rare and at a distance, like Bigfoot sightings. For years before then he’d come around almost daily, teasing her and advising her and in general treating her like a favorite little sister as he’d worked around her grandmother’s house, and then, after her not-so-secret crush had found its ultimate expression in the backseat of his beat-up Chevy Impala, he’d dropped her like a wormy apple. He’d broken her heart, shattered her self-esteem, and given her her first taste of the true nature of the male beast: slimeballs, the lot of them.

“Jesus, Curls, it’s been twelve years. You ever hear of forgive and forget?”

The nickname was too much. Carly gave him a huge, blatantly false smile.

“Hey, Matt?” She flipped him the bird. “Go to hell.”

Matt blinked, then shook his head at her. “Ah-ah. Your grandmother’s probably spinning in her grave right now. How many times did I hear her say,
I don’t care what the other girls are doing, I’m raising you to be a lady?
Too many to count. And there you go again, letting her down.”

Both Carly’s hands clenched into impotent fists. “Like I said, go to hell.”

“I thought you said he was a friend,” Sandra said uneasily, looking from one to the other.

Carly glanced at her. “I lied.”

Matt gave a grunt that could have meant anything. Carly’s gaze swung back to him. For a moment the two of them exchanged blistering looks. Then Matt shrugged.

“Fine. Have it your own way. You want to hold on to a twelve-year-old grudge, it’s all right by me. What are you doing here, anyway?”

“I own this place now. Why shouldn’t I be here? The real question is, what are
you
doing here? Don’t tell me you’re sleeping under porches now.”

That last, uttered in the nastiest tone she could muster, was a low blow, and she knew it. It referred to his hand-to-mouth existence as a child, when he and his mother and three younger sisters had moved from trailer park to rented room to apartment to rented house with numbing frequency, depending on whether they had managed to scrape together the money to pay that month’s rent. Once Matt had gotten old enough to get a job—at eleven, he’d been mowing grass and pulling weeds for her grandmother the summer she’d first met him—things had been better, and eventually the family had managed to spend a couple of years in the same small house, where, for all she knew, they lived still. Matt had always been prickly on the subject of his family’s poverty, and she had always gone out of her way not to offend his sensitive male pride. He, on the other hand, had ultimately shown no such consideration for her sensitive female heart. Such one-way relationships were the story of her life, and she was sick and tired of it. The days of Carly the doormat were gone for good. A new chapter in her life had just dawned.

Call it Carly Linton: No more Mr. Nice Guy. Or girl. Or whatever. The key point was, she was sick and tired of being nice. If she had learned just one thing in her life, it was this: Nice girls get the shaft.

Matt’s eyes narrowed at her. He recognized her verbal thrust for what it was, of course. He’d always been good at divining what she was thinking.

“I got a call about a possible prowler around your grandmother’s house. I was checking it out.” There was the briefest of pauses. “I’m the sheriff now.”

For a moment Carly simply stared at him, wondering if she’d heard him aright. The Matt Converse she’d known had been a hard-partying, motorcycle-riding hellion who’d been right at the top of the town’s list of native sons most likely to end up on death row. The product of the union of a tiny spitfire of a Mexican mother and a tall, blond, eye-catchingly handsome but shiftless itinerant worker who
had ambled in and out of her life as the seasons and his whims dictated, Matt had been earmarked by the town as a potential troublemaker almost from the moment of his birth. His appearance, which combined his mother’s Hispanic coloring with his father’s height and good looks to devastating effect, had attracted attention early on. His awareness of local opinion and his defiant determination to live up to it as a boy and his increasingly bad-ass behavior as a teen and young adult had meant that too much attention flowing his way wasn’t a good thing. The fact that he’d been a reliable employee, a good son and brother, and a dependable friend to Carly and a few others was known to only a limited group. The rest of the town had taken his wrong-side-of-the-tracks toughness at face value, and treated him with the kind of wary watchfulness generally reserved for a rumbling volcano.

“You’re joking, right?”

“Nope.”

Her eyes swept him. It was dark, but not so dark that she couldn’t tell that besides the jeans, his attire consisted of a plain old white tee shirt and sneakers. She also couldn’t help noting that he hadn’t changed a bit in appearance. Oh, maybe his black hair was shorter and he was a little taller, certainly a whole lot broader about the shoulders and chest, but he was basically still the same old too-handsome-for-his-own-good Matt. Not that she cared. In the aftermath of that long-ago night in the steamy closeness of his backseat, she’d been inoculated against his looks but good.

“You’re not wearing a uniform.” Not that she actually thought he was lying or anything, but…

His eyes narrowed at her. “It’s after midnight, in case you haven’t noticed. I’m off duty. Mrs. Naylor, who you might recall is the nearest neighbor, called me at home.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, which he flipped open. “Want to see my badge?”

His tone told her that he really had one, but still Carly looked. Sure enough, there it was, all shiny and silver and official. Unbelievable. Her gaze rose to meet his. For a moment their eyes locked and held.