Whispers at Midnight (9 page)

Hoping devoutly that all evil things knew enough to be afraid of the light, Carly edged back inside. With a quick, leery look around she crouched beside Sandra, who was focusing with rapt attention on the ceiling, her hands folded flat across her stomach so that she looked unnervingly like a laid-out corpse. The pan, abandoned now, lay upside down beside her, its copper bottom unmarred and softly gleaming in the oh-so-welcome light.

“Sandra …” Alarmed most of all by that fixed stare, Carly experimentally poked her in the shoulder.

Sandra’s eyes rolled to meet hers.

“I just remembered why I don’t like cats. Sneaky things, always getting under people’s feet. You sure you wouldn’t consider letting John-boy have custody?”

Carly’s brows snapped together. “No.”

Sandra sighed. “You’re going to be hard to live with, aren’t you? I was afraid of that.”

Matt appeared at the top of the hall just then, expression grim, gun in one hand and flashlight in the other. He glanced their way and his eyes widened.

“What now?” Sounding thoroughly put out, he came toward them. His upper body was soaked: His black hair was plastered to his skull, his face was shiny wet and his tee shirt clung to his torso in a way that made it impossible for Carly not to be aware of just how broad-shouldered and muscular his formerly wiry six-one frame had become.

He had changed in other ways as well. His lean, bronzed face had always been the stuff heartthrobs were made of, and it still was, but it was subtly different, too. His eyes were the same—slightly heavy-lidded and the color of coffee, set beneath thick, straight black brows—but tiny lines now radiated from their corners. His nose was the same—straight and high-bridged—and his mouth was unchanged too, except somehow he had acquired a scar, white against his tan, that bisected the left side of his upper lip. He was a grown man of thirty-three now, Carly realized with a sense of shock, and he looked it. Since she had recognized him out there in the dark, she had basically been relating to a much younger Matt, her Matt, the Matt she had grown up with: idolized friend and mentor, surrogate older brother, achingly out-of-reach dreamboat, first love and lover—and, ultimately, no good dirty rotten son of a bitch.

That Matt was still there—no doubt about it—but like a pearl he had added layers. This top layer—Matt the grown-up, gun-toting sheriff—was all new.

He was also bleeding. Carly’s eyes zeroed in on a gash in his hairline.
About an inch long, it poured blood, which mixed with the rain on his face to form red rivulets that ran down his temple and into the stubble that darkened his jaw.

“Are you hurt?” he asked Sandra. Reaching the fallen one’s side, he frowned down at her.

“If I’m not, I should be,” Sandra said, grimacing and making no visible effort to rise. “I tripped over Carly’s pain-in-the-patootie cat. Just let me lay here for a minute, would you please?”

“What happened to you?” Carly asked Matt as she rose to her feet.

“Same thing.” His gaze met hers, and his mouth twisted wryly as he thrust the gun into the back waistband of his jeans and lifted a hand to the cut. Drawing back his fingers, he stared at the blood on them in disgust. “At least, that’s what I’m guessing. I tripped over something, but it was too dark to see what it was. A cat sounds about right. A cat belonging to you—I’d be willing to bet on it. You know the corner cabinet in the kitchen? When I tripped my shoulder rammed into that, and the damned flowerpot on top fell off and hit me on the head.”

“Oh.” Feeling slightly deflated, Carly blinked at him, having expected an explanation for all that blood to involve a death-defying battle with the intruder at the very least. Then the sheer ridiculousness of what had happened to him occurred to her, and she batted her eyelashes at him and gave him a huge, razzing smile. “My hero.”

“As always.”

His eyes mocked her. Carly frowned.

“What are you doing here, anyway? I thought you were leaving.”

“Did you really think I’d let you two come up here all by yourselves? I was walking up the porch steps when I heard you scream.” He set the flashlight down on the cabinet that concealed the radiator by the door. “Good thing I didn’t leave.”

With that he picked up the hem of his tee shirt and swiped the wet fabric over the bloody left side of his face. Carly was rendered speechless by a surprise glimpse of six-pack abs and a buff, wide, hair-covered chest. Clamping down hard on her purely instinctive female response, she realized to her dismay that some things never change.
As cynically wise to the ways of men as she had become, she was still a sucker for a hunk.

Good thing she knew this particular hunk for the skunk he was.

She wrenched her gaze away to the open dining-room doors.

“So I take it that whoever was in the dining room got away?” Glancing around, Carly shivered. The sheer horror of being grabbed in the dark was still sickeningly fresh; but the light and, as much as she hated to admit it, Matt the grown-up sheriff’s reassuring presence were going a long way toward helping her to get a grip.

“He ran out the kitchen door just about the time I tripped over the cat,” Matt said. The cut was still bleeding copiously, Carly saw as she looked back at him. With less moisture to dilute it, the blood was bright scarlet now, and starting to drip from his jaw. “I wasn’t but a couple of yards behind him, either. That flowerpot knocked me for a loop. When I could see straight again I chased him across the backyard, but he had too much of a start. He jumped the fence into the cornfield, and I lost him.” His attention shifted back to Sandra, who was slowly, cautiously, sitting up. “Anything broken?”

“Nothing but my shoe,” she said, staring dismally at the leather strap of her left sandal, which stuck straight out across her instep. “Third pair that got ruined so far this summer. Do you know how hard it is to find wide shoes?” She made a disgusted sound, and cast Carly a dark look. “See there, I told you: We should’ve waited ’til August. My horoscope
said
that any new venture I undertook early in the summer would turn out to be more expensive than I thought.”

“Sandra’s a Pisces,” Carly offered with a faint rekindling of her earlier enjoyment. Matt’s expression as he absorbed Sandra’s gloomy acceptance of her astrological fate was priceless. He’d never had any patience with what he had called all that psycho stuff, probably because his mother, who believed in it so avidly that she kept a tarot deck beside her bed and checked her horoscope each morning, was always seeing brighter days ahead for her family that, so far as Carly knew, had never materialized. Now, as Matt extended a hand down to Sandra, he cast a derisive look Carly’s way.

Carly grinned.

“The stars know what they’re talking about,” Sandra said, taking a good grip on the handle of her pan again before she grasped Matt’s hand and let him haul her upright, which he did with impressive ease. Once on her feet, she dropped his hand, looked at him and frowned. “You know, you’re bleeding.”

“I think you might need stitches,” Carly added, looking at Matt’s cut. It was simple human decency that prompted the stab of concern she felt for him, she assured herself, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the man bleeding all over her front hall was
Matt.

“That bad, huh?” Turning to look in the gold-framed mirror above the radiator cabinet, he grimaced at what he saw, then pulled his soaked tee shirt over his head, wadded it up, and pressed it to the cut. “Nah. Head wounds always bleed a lot. It’ll stop in a few minutes.”

Without any more warning than that, Carly found herself staring at a broad, muscular back. Wide and strong-looking across the shoulders, it tapered down in classic vee fashion to a lean waist and the previously noted ogle-worthy butt. The elastic of his underwear—he apparently still favored briefs over boxers—formed a narrow white band just above his hipbones. His gun, all sinister black metal, nestled in the small of his back, only partly visible above the waistband of his faded, damp, bun-loving jeans.

Yum,
Carly thought, impressed by the available eye candy. Then, backtracking with alarm:
No, wait, not yum. Definitely not. No way. Nohow. Uh-uh.

She’d gotten a bellyache’s worth of that candy once already.

“You got a…”

As he turned from the mirror, Carly couldn’t help it; she instinctively scoped out his chest. His shoulders were heavy with muscle and his pectorals were sharply defined. He was hairier than when he was younger, sporting a thicker wedge of the same fine black hair that had once felt crisp and cool beneath her exploring hands. His nipples were brown and flat; they’d puckered into hard little nubs when her fingers had brushed them. His arms had trembled as he’d wrapped them around her. They’d been hard to the touch then. She reckoned
they were harder now. He’d always been strong; now his upper arms bulged, and his chest was wider even than she remembered. As she had already noted, his abs were mouthwatering. And as for—

No. Wait. Stop.
She was not, not,
not
going to check out his package.

“… Band-Aid?” he finished. Her averted gaze encountered his, and she discovered that he was regarding her with raised brows.

Thank God she hadn’t looked where her baser instincts had been leading her.

“Uh, sure,” she said, flustered. “I think.” Realizing that she was this-close to stammering like the schoolgirl with a crush she had once been, she took a deep mental breath and got a grip and an edge. “How should I know? I haven’t lived in this house for twelve years, remember?”

“I remember.” His voice was dry. He started walking, holding the shirt pressed to his head, and moved past her while her gaze followed him. “I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m guessing they’d still be kept in the bathroom. Miss Virgie wasn’t much for change.”

Without answering, she watched him until he stepped inside the bathroom and out of sight. Spell broken, she glanced away only to have her gaze collide with Sandra’s. Their eyes held, and an unspoken message of purely feminine appreciation for a drool-worthy male was exchanged between them.

A moment later Matt reappeared with an extra-large Band-Aid plastered to his forehead. Stopping in the doorway with one arm propped against the frame, he looked at her.

“Okay, Curls, you want to walk through the house with me and see if you can tell if anything’s missing?”

He still lacked a shirt, and looking at him without it was still enough to make her hot. Not that there was anything wrong with that, Carly assured herself. After all, no good dirty rotten son of a bitch or not, he was the hunkiest man she had seen in a long time, and what with the divorce and everything she hadn’t had sex in—God, had it been almost two years?

She was practically re-virginized.

“Quit calling me Curls,” she said through her teeth as the horror of the realization sank in. “It’s a stupid nickname, I don’t like it, and it no longer applies.”

“Oh, yeah?” His lips twisted into a maddening smirk. Without saying anything more, he caught her by the arm and pulled her into the bathroom with him. With his hands on her shoulders, he positioned her in front of the sink. His chest was almost touching her back; although she couldn’t actually feel the heat of it—her imagination was doing all the work here—just knowing that all those muscles were that close made her tingle.

The mirror was right in front of her. She had no choice but to look into it, which was probably a good thing if she wanted to get her mind off how close he was. For a moment, though, the reflection of his broad, bronzed shoulders looming above her own drew her gaze to the exclusion of everything else. Then she registered how much shorter his crow-black hair was than it had been at twenty-one; the degree of five o’clock shadow darkening his lean jaw; and how tall he was. He towered above her, just as he always had. In her flat-soled sneakers, she saw, she was still quite a few inches short of having the top of her head hit his chin.

Then something off about her own reflection caught her attention, and she refocused with a snap.

Her carefully straightened hair had given up the ghost. Instead of the stylish do she’d left Chicago with, her head was now a mass of springy blond ringlets.

Her eyes met his through the mirror.

“The more things change …” he said softly. And smiled one of those wickedly taunting smiles which, long ago, had been enough to infuriate her without him needing to do anything else.

Even now, at the ripe old age of thirty, it was all Carly could do to restrain her instant, childish urge to punch him in the gut as she jerked free of his grip and stomped back out into the hall.

7

“W
HOA
,” S
ANDRA SAID
, staring at her. “I didn’t know your hair could do that.”

Carly shot her a look so poisonous that it could have been used to tip blow-darts.

“So, you coming with me or not?” Matt asked, cool as lemonade as he walked past her.

For a moment Carly simply glared after him. Then, shoulders slumping in defeat, she followed, hideously aware of her Orphan Annie corkscrews bobbing with every step.