Groaning, he turned his face into his raised arm and rubbed his forehead against his biceps, cursing himself for being every kind of fool. He should have heeded his impulse to call Headly and tell him to screw this trial, screw Jeremy Wesson and whoever his parents had been, he was coming home.
But he’d taken one look at Amelia, and his ennui had turned into razor-sharp awareness. His disinterest became avid curiosity. He wanted to know all there was to know about her.
No, scratch that. Not
all
. He could do without knowing about her personal relationship with her ex. Because every time he thought about her in bed with Jeremy Wesson, about Wesson or any man moving on top of her, inside her, he wanted to hit something.
The hell of it was, Headly expected him to turn Wesson’s life inside out. Pivotal years of his life had been spent with Amelia. If he did this thing for Headly, and did it right, there was no way he could omit the active role she had played.
He gave her house one last careful study, then walked to the bed and lay down, stretching out on his back. The pills he’d taken earlier were kicking in. He’d caught a pleasant buzz from the combo of them and Kentucky’s elixir, and he was feeling drowsy. Maybe tonight would be the first night that he would sleep through without having the nightmare.
Please, God.
Closing his eyes, he forced back the ghastly images that continually lurked on the borders of his mind. To replace them, he conjured up Amelia’s face. Having finally gotten to see her eyes up close, he knew they were a deep, deep blue. Hooking her hair behind her ear was an absent-minded habit, as he’d suspected when he saw her do it in the courtroom. She also had a tendency to bite her plush lower lip.
Thinking of that caused a physical response of unequaled lust.
For weeks, he’d been sleepless during the nights, wound up tight during the days, his nerves flayed by recurring memories and nightmares of war. So, probably, this intense physical reaction was based on nothing more than a critical need for solace. Like any straight guy, one of the first places he would seek it was a woman’s body. It couldn’t cure the malady, but it could provide temporary relief from the symptoms.
But if it was only comfort he needed, wouldn’t any breasts feel as soft? Couldn’t forgetfulness be found between any pair of thighs? Wasn’t one woman’s hand as effective a magic wand as another’s, one woman’s mouth as mind-numbing as the next?
He had thought so. He’d lived his adult life believing so. Whether a sexual relationship lasted for a few months or a few hours, he’d got from it what he’d wanted and no more than he’d invested.
His customary nonchalance didn’t apply here. Not to Amelia Nolan. No, this was something else. This wasn’t a crotch throb that would be easily pacified. This was different. A first and only. This was hell.
He hoped Jeremy Wesson was frying in one of his own.
M
om!”
“Mom! You gotta come see!”
Amelia was in her office composing an e-mail to George Metcalf when the boys rushed in, tracking in sand and practically stumbling over each other in their haste. Their faces were sweaty and flushed.
“What in the world?” It had been less than ten minutes since she’d heard them leaving the house on their way to the beach. “Did a spaceship land on the shore?”
“No, it’s better. You gotta come see.” Hunter took her hand and tried to pull her from the desk chair.
“Hold on. Where’s Stef?”
“She’s down there. Come on.”
“Okay, I’ll come down, I promise. Just let me finish this—”
“No! You gotta come
now
.” Grant was bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Come see.”
“If it’s that stupendous, I guess my e-mail can wait.”
Laughing, she let each one take a hand and drag her from the room, down the stairs, and out through the front door. Her laughter subsided when she looked beyond the dunes. Stef, looking sleek and bronze and young, was chatting with “hot, hot, hot” Dawson Scott. He had on swim trunks. A ball cap worn backward was keeping his hair out of his face. Something he said caused Stef to tip her head back and laugh.
“Hurry, Mom!”
Hunter tugged harder on her hand and together the three of them went down the steps. When they reached the boardwalk, the two boys left her and bolted ahead. She was too miffed to remember to warn them against splinters.
As she crested the dunes, she saw what all the excitement was about. A dragon had been sculpted into the sand. It had fangs and scales and claws, and a body that arched in and out of the sand for twelve feet. She didn’t need to guess who the sculptor had been. Her sons were dancing around him like aboriginals worshiping a totem pole.
He’d placed her in an untenable situation. She couldn’t spoil the boys’ excitement, and, damn him, he knew it. Pasting on a smile, she approached the dragon. “My goodness!” She pressed her hands together and placed them under her chin, as though completely captivated. It worked to fool the boys.
Both were grinning up at her, their rapture apparent. “Isn’t it awesome, Mom?”
“It certainly is! I hardly know what to say.” This last, she addressed to Dawson, whose eyes were concealed by a pair of aviator sunglasses. She sensed him watching her closely and gauging her reaction from behind the dark lenses.
“Dawson made it!” Grant said.
“Did he?”
“Yeah, and he said he could make other stuff, too. We’re gonna build a battleship.”
“And a castle for the dragon,” Grant added.
It was all she could do to keep from grinding her teeth. “Wow.”
Stef, who’d been carefully observing Amelia as the scene unfolded, clapped her hands. “Before all these projects get under way, we’d better put on more sunscreen.”
The boys chorused protests, but she placed a hand on each of their shoulders and turned them toward the house. “March. The sooner we do it, the sooner you can come back.”
Hunter dug in his heels. “Dawson, will you still be here?”
He hesitated and looked at Amelia, but when she remained stonily silent, he smiled at the boys. “I’ll be around.”
“Don’t leave!” Grant shouted over his shoulder as Stef propelled him up the boardwalk.
Neither she nor Dawson spoke until the trio had topped the dunes. Then he said quietly, “I meant only to surprise them. I thought I’d be finished before they came outside. They caught me putting on the final touches.”
“I asked you, more nicely than warranted, to stay away from us.”
“My house shares the beach with yours.”
“But you picked
this spot
for your…your dragon. What made it so ideal? As if I didn’t know.”
“I’m not going to interview your children, Amelia.”
Her tummy fluttered in reaction to his using her first name, and in such a low and infuriatingly reasonable tone. But she didn’t address it, not wanting him to know that she had noticed.
He said, “I don’t see the harm in my spending some time with the two of them.”
She dragged back a strand of hair that had defied her hat and blown across her mouth. “Well, let me tell you what the harm is. Aside from the fact that I don’t know anything about you.”
“That’s not true.”
“Okay, you’ve got credentials. They don’t speak to the kind of person you are.”
“I—”
She held up her hand to stop him. “Secondly, Grant is too young to remember much, but Hunter can recall when his grandfather died. Then—”
“They lost their father.”
“That’s right.”
“So they could use a little man-time, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely. But not with a man I know virtually nothing about. Not with a snake-oil salesman who will be here today and gone tomorrow. Not with a man who’s ingratiating himself with them only in order to get to me so he can write a big, juicy story for his magazine.”
“That’s not why—”
“Save it. I already know you’re a liar.”
Angrily, he whipped off his sunglasses. “A liar? How’s that?”
“Hey, Dawson!” The boys came charging over the dunes, toting pails and shovels. Hunter was the first to reach them. “Can we build the battleship now?”
Grant was bouncing again. “No, I want to build the castle first.”
Dawson, his angry gaze still locked with Amelia’s, arched an eyebrow by way of asking permission.
She said, “What choice do you leave me?”
He told the boys to start filling their buckets with wet sand. As they raced off, he replaced his sunglasses and said to her, “You and I aren’t done with this discussion.”
“You’re damn right we’re not.”
* * *
She returned to her office and finished the e-mail even though there was no urgency to it because George wouldn’t read it until after the holiday. Attached was a proposal for a new exhibit that she’d been thinking about for a while. She expected resistance to the idea. It would require a combination of diplomacy and arm twisting to convince him and the board of directors that it would be a viable and important addition to the museum. She’d wanted to draft the memo while her thoughts were still fresh.
But also she’d come back from the beach shaky and angry and very much in need of putting some distance between herself, Dawson, and his intrusion on her family.
After killing an hour, she determined that she was calm enough to return to the beach and watch him undermine her and dazzle her children. Dressed in a pair of loose white cotton pants and a red tank top, she decided against changing into a swimsuit. She grabbed her hat and joined the party on the beach.
And it was a party. The battleship was splendid. Stef was christening it with a bottle of apple juice. Hunter, the first to notice her, shouted, “Hey, Mom! We named it after you.” Proudly he pointed to the name crookedly etched into the side of the ship.
She bent down to inspect the lettering that read, USS
Amelia
. “Did you print that all by yourself?”
Proudly, he bobbed his head.
She ran her fingers through his unruly mop of hair, now matted with saltwater and sand. “Thank you. I love it. That was very sweet of you.”
“Dawson said to.”
“Oh.” She looked up. He was silhouetted against the bright sunlight, so she couldn’t read his expression. “That was nice of him.”
“Can we go in the ocean now?”
“I’m not dressed for it. Stef?”
“On it.” Telling the boys she’d race them into the water, the three took off.
Grant plunged in, then called back, “Dawson, are you coming?”
“In a minute.”
“If you need to go to the bathroom, it’s okay if you tinkle in the ocean, just not in a swimming pool.”
He chuckled. “Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.”
Amelia retreated to the umbrella and sat down in one of the beach chairs. Dawson rescued his T-shirt from the maw of the dragon, shook sand from it, and pulled it on. It was a faded, threadbare thing with the neck and sleeves cut out, forming large armholes that extended halfway down his torso. As he walked slowly up the beach toward her, the thin cloth molded to his damp chest. So much for his nod toward propriety. His calves and feet were coated with sand.
When he reached the umbrella, he looked at the empty chair beside hers, then at the quilt, but decided against pushing his luck, or so she assumed, and sat down in the sand just outside the circle of shade.
She cut to the chase. “This morning before anyone else was up, I did a Google search on you.”
“Yeah?”
“It took a while for me to read everything. Impressive.”
“Thanks.”
“You didn’t tell me that you’d spent months in Afghanistan.”
“You didn’t ask.”
Up to that point she’d been watching the boys and Stef playing in the ocean with an inflatable dolphin. Now she looked at him. “Right. You’re the one who asks questions.”
He pulled his knees up and looped his arms around his shins. “Ask me anything.”
In spite of her ire, she was curious. “Some of your stories covered particular firefights. Were you actually there, in the thick of the fighting?”
“Not often. A few times. If the fighting was in a real hotbed, the military wouldn’t allow me in. I’d interview the troops when they came back.” He frowned thoughtfully. “The trouble with that war, most often you can’t predict where the fight is going to be. It can be the lobby of a hotel, an open highway, a heavily guarded checkpoint. The enemy isn’t always obvious, either.”
“But when you could, you placed yourself in harm’s way.”
“That’s where the stories were.”
She felt it only fair to acknowledge how good they were. “Your writing is very moving. You made the men and women you wrote about seem real to the reader.”
“I’m glad to hear that. They are real. Their stories deserved to be told.”
She paused to study him. He’d taken off his sunglasses, so his eyes were squinted almost shut to block the glare. But his attention was fixed on her. “Did you meet Jeremy in Afghanistan?”
She could tell the question surprised him. “No. How could I have? I just got back two weeks ago. I’d never heard of him until Willard Strong’s murder trial was brought to my attention.”
“By whom?”
“I can’t reveal a source.”
“How convenient.”
“Ask me something else.”
She picked at the fringe on the beach towel lining her chair. “Why didn’t you approach me through normal channels?”
“Could I have found you?”
“Through the museum. Through Lemuel Jackson. On the Internet, for that matter. Anybody can be found. How about Glenda? She would have found me.”
He cracked a smile, but quickly pulled it back in. “Would you have agreed to an interview?”
“You know the answer to that. I’d like an answer to my question, please.”
“What didn’t I try a straightforward approach? Honestly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to write a story about Jeremy. I was urged to come down here, sit in on the trial, check it out. By the third day, I was basically bored, ready to cash in, go home, and find another topic of more interest to me. But I changed my mind and decided to stay, at least for a while longer. Take it to the next step.” He shrugged. “You know the rest.”
“I caught you at taking it to the next step.”
“It wasn’t my proudest moment when I came out of the bathroom yesterday and realized I’d been caught spying, with my pants down, literally.”
She resisted the appeal of his crooked smile. “You always have an answer ready, don’t you?”
“Not always, no.”
“That hasn’t been my experience. All of your answers are self-deprecating, designed that way to be disarming, I’m sure.”
He turned completely serious again. “I haven’t ‘designed’ my answers, Amelia, and I think you’re anything but disarmed right now. In fact, you seem locked and loaded. Are you that mad at me for playing with Hunter and Grant?”
“Why would a grown man want to waste his time that way?”
“I don’t consider it a waste of time.”
“Even worse. That’s an admission that you have an ulterior motive. I hazard to guess what it is.”
“You think I’m into little boys?”
She didn’t say anything.
“I took just as many pictures of you.”
Recalling one in particular sent a rush of heat through her. “That’s supposed to reassure me?”
“It should reassure you that I’m not a deviant.”
“Perhaps. But it doesn’t rule out that you’re a slick opportunist.”
He tipped his chin down and stared at his sandy bare feet. Or maybe he was staring at hers, their bare toes being only inches apart. In any case, it was several moments before he raised his head.
“You don’t know me, so I don’t blame you in the slightest for being suspicious. In fact, I admire you for being ultraprotective and careful of who you let near your children. But I would never harm those boys, or you. Please trust me on that.”
His words were stirring and persuasive, and she resented her strong inclination to believe them. “Why should I trust you when you so blatantly lied to me?”
“About what?”
“The photos. What kind of game are you playing?”
“Game?”
“I’d call it that. All those creepy things you did to work on me, play on my mind. Returning my lost watch, the porch light, the beach ball.”
“Beach ball?”
“And then there’s the photographs. Why come on so sincerely apologetic about them and tell me you’d returned them, when clearly you didn’t?”
“I don’t understand.”
Thoroughly exasperated, she said, “There was nothing under the doormat when I got home last night. As you well know.”
He became very still and stared at her for a count of ten. Then quietly he said, “I swear to you, I clipped all the photographs together and put them under your doormat.”