“Ladies,” Matt intervened, his voice still dangerously soft as he eased the truck off the gravel verge and onto the road. “I worked fourteen hours today. I got the call reporting the prowler just about the time I got home and fell into bed. In the last half hour, I’ve been
hit over the head with a pan, tripped by a cat, coldcocked by a flowerpot, and screamed into next week. I’ve got a bump on the back of my head and a cut on the front of it. And after I get you two stowed away where you can’t get into any more trouble, I have a crime scene investigation to run. I’m tired, I’m overworked, and I have the mother of all headaches. Keeping all that in mind, do you think you could, please, hold off on the bickering?”
Carly looked at him. Once again that soft voice was not lost on her. Neither was the glint in his eyes, or the grim set to his jaw. And to all those warning signs she mentally said,
Too bad.
“Obviously you can’t tell the difference between talking and bickering,” she said with a sniff. “Just because we’re women doesn’t mean we bicker.”
“You know,” Sandra added in a thoughtful tone, “my horoscope said that I’d be meeting up with a handsome, dark-haired man with a bad attitude.”
The glance he sent the pair of them would have silenced Oprah.
“The bottom line is, I’d appreciate it a whole heck of a lot if the two of you would just sit there and
shut up.
”
For the space of a couple of heartbeats the atmosphere in the cab seemed to sizzle.
“Fine,” Carly said, folding her arms over her chest and glaring out the windshield.
“Yeah, fine,” Sandra echoed, crossing her arms and glaring too.
Uneasy silence reigned while the truck bounced through a cumbersome U-turn. Wedged between Matt and Sandra, Carly was forced to learn more about the physical characteristics of her seatmates than she really cared to know. Both were far bigger than she. Both generated a considerable amount of heat. Sandra was soft and cushiony and smelled of some sort of floral perfume. Matt was firm and slick and smelled of sweat. Sandra’s shirt was at least reasonably dry. Matt’s bare skin was disturbingly warm and damp. Her shoulder butted into his arm. Her thigh lay alongside his. Worse, every bump and bounce—and the road suddenly seemed to be as pitted as the surface of the moon—threw her against him. She grew ever more aware that he was shirtless. Her senses were inundated with unavoidable
glimpses of broad, bronzed shoulders, deep hairy chest, washboard stomach; the faintly musky scent of him; the soft sound of his breathing. She was reminded at every turn of the sleek resilience of his rib cage, the crisp texture of his chest hair, the hard strength of his arms which, incidentally, flexed as he drove.
Eventually Carly realized that she was overdosing on
Matt.
It wasn’t but a few minutes later that it occurred to her with the suddenness of a thunderclap that what she really, truly, positively wanted to do was jump his bones. Do the nasty. Right there on his lap in the cab of the truck with her butt wedged against the steering wheel. The sudden vivid fantasy made her tingle in places that had no business tingling and appalled her at the same time.
Not
happening, she told her baser self fiercely. Not again. Not in this life. Forget about it.
But still the searing image continued to flicker in taunting Technicolor around the edges of her mind. Telling herself that the man beside her was Matt, no good dirty rotten son of a bitch, was no help. No good dirty rotten son of a bitch or not, he was hot. Worse, he was making her hot, and whether she liked it or not—and she didn’t!—there didn’t seem to be a whole heck of a lot she could do to stop it from happening.
“Could you roll down the windows, please?” she requested faintly a few feverish minutes later. If she got any hotter, she was going to melt into a little puddle right there on the black vinyl seat.
Matt had pulled out his phone and was punching numbers into it as he drove through the center of the dark and silent town; clearly her proximity was not turning his bones to butter.
“They are down,” he said absently. Sandra nodded confirmation.
Looking past them both in disbelief, Carly saw that he was telling the truth: the windows were down. Her view of the improvements proudly touted in the brochure put out by Benton’s chamber of commerce—which included newly picturesque storefronts, sidewalks enhanced by strategically spaced planters overflowing with flowers and ornate iron street signs added to every corner—was largely unimpeded by bug-smeared glass. But stuck in the middle as she was, she wasn’t getting so much as a whiff of fresh air.
Matt looked comfortable. The wind was ruffling his black hair and drying the sweat on his face and body. Sandra looked comfortable. Her black hair was cut too close to her head to blow in the breeze, but her dangling butterfly earrings were dancing. Carly, on the other hand, was the opposite of comfortable. Besides being tortured by graphic images of getting it on with Matt in ways she hadn’t even known she knew about, she was being asphyxiated and roasted and bounced around like a baby on a clueless uncle’s knee all at the same time. She was starting to feel light-headed. Her stomach was doing flip-flops. She was emotionally wrung out. She was over being scared now, but she was still shaken up by what had happened. She was depressed about her life in general. She was having grave second thoughts about the wisdom of returning to Benton at all, much less living in, and trying to make a living from, her grandmother’s old and broken into house. Her friend and business partner was threatening to back out of their deal. The no good dirty rotten son of a bitch she’d been mentally hurling bricks at for years had somehow managed to once again turn up front and center in her life. After years of good behavior, her hair had reverted to its childhood anarchy in little more than an hour. And to top things off, she was worried sick about her cat.
Talk about not having a good day. She’d gone way past that by now: plain and simple, she was not having a good life.
“Yo, I need somebody to come pick me up at my house,” Matt said into the phone, interrupting the dark flow of her thoughts. “And I want you guys to keep an eye out for a missing cat.” Pause. “What do you mean, what does it look like? It’s got four paws and a tail and weighs about a hundred fifty pounds. Think grizzly.” Pause. “Jesus, it’s a cat. White and fluffy. Says meow. What do you want, a composite?” Another pause. “No, they’re with me. I’m taking them to my house for the night.” He laughed suddenly. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be fine. Yeah, I’m sure. Okay. Fifteen minutes.”
He disconnected and slid the phone back into his pocket. “Antonio’s afraid that if I let you ladies sleep over at my house you might murder me during the night.” A smile tugged at the corners of Matt’s mouth.
“Gee, he must know you pretty well,” Carly replied with a pointed faux smile of her own. She didn’t know whether to be relieved that Matt had actually told someone to look for Hugo, or affronted at his description of him.
Matt didn’t reply. Instead, he slowed down, then turned left into a well-established neighborhood with a mixed bag of homes. A couple of turns later, the U-Haul slowed, then swung wide, lurching up an asphalt driveway. The headlights swept the front of an older story-and-a-half bungalow with a shingle-covered facade and a pair of square masonry pillars supporting a low-hanging porch. Matt’s home, obviously. There was a car in the driveway, a small yellow Civic, parked in front of a detached garage. Impossible to imagine Matt at the wheel of such a vehicle.
It occurred to Carly as Matt parked behind the feminine-looking thing that she was still thinking of him as the younger Matt, the girl magnet Matt, the Matt she had known. As she had already discovered, that kind of mistake was fraught with pitfalls.
“I’d hate to wake your wife.” Her tone was carefully neutral, absolutely noncommittal—and a total lie. She was horrified to discover that the thought of Matt’s wife—of Matt having a wife—bothered her.
“I’m not married.”
If she didn’t quite sigh with relief, she came close. As she watched Matt get out of the truck, Carly realized with chagrin that somewhere deep inside her still lurked the teenager with the crush.
She was going to have to keep an eye on that girl.
Sliding out after Matt, who was patiently holding the door open for her, she stood looking up at the house for a moment as she waited for her wobbly legs to reaccustom themselves to solid ground. Upstairs and down, the windows were uniformly dark. The house was still. She would have thought it empty if not for that car.
“Do you mind?” Matt asked, indicating the door. Carly obligingly stepped aside, and he closed it. As she walked toward the front of the truck, her eyes once again found the Civic. If he wasn’t married, then who did the car belong to?
“Does your mother live with you?” she asked as he fell into step
beside her, trying her level best not to sound hopeful. The idea pleased her. Matt at thirty-three still making his home with his mother—there was a whole lifetime’s worth of retaliatory needling in that.
“My mother’s dead.”
“Oh.” Her mood went flat. He’d loved his mother. The loss would have hurt. Instinctively Carly put a sympathetic hand on his arm. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
She hadn’t known because after she’d left Benton for college she had deliberately never asked her grandmother anything about him, and her grandmother, knowing that Matt was a sensitive topic even if she hadn’t known exactly why, had not so much as once mentioned his name. At first, during Carly’s infrequent, flying visits home there’d been so much to talk about that avoiding the subject of Matt had been easy. Later, as her grandmother had begun to fail, the focus had turned to the older woman’s health.
“No reason you should have.”
“What—when …” Her voice trailed off, leaving the request for details vague, so that he could tell her or not as he chose.
“A few years back. A heart attack. She was waiting tables at The Corner Café when she just collapsed.” He paused and glanced down at her as her hand tightened in silent sympathy on his arm. “I was just finishing up a stint in the Marines. I came home.”
Carly’s throat threatened to close up. Idiot, she told herself fiercely, to be so moved by his matter-of-fact tone. But she knew him so well—too well to be deceived. That tone hid a wealth of pain. And her heart ached for him.
“What—the heck—did you pack—in this suitcase?” Panting, listing slightly to one side, Sandra rounded the front of the truck to join them. She was lugging her own small satchel in one hand and Carly’s slightly larger (and obviously much heavier) gym bag in the other. Carly had thought it advisable for them each to pack an overnight bag to get them through at least their first night and day in Benton, by which time, presumably, they would have managed to get the truck unloaded. Self-conscious suddenly under Sandra’s sharp-eyed gaze, Carly let her hand fall from Matt’s arm.
“Oh, thanks, I forgot all about that.” Without really answering she reached for her bag. The truth was that her hair dryer and brushes and shampoo and straightening gel, to say nothing of her makeup kit and clothes and various necessities for Hugo, combined for quite a lot of weight, none of which she cared to account for in front of Matt.
“Give it here.” Matt beat her to it, and took Sandra’s as well. If the weight of hers bothered him, he gave no sign of it, carrying both bags easily. She and Sandra followed him inside, waiting somewhat uneasily in the dark hush of the house as he put the bags down to fumble for the light switch. Seconds later he found it, and was rewarded by a burst of dazzlingly bright light followed almost immediately by a gasp and a loud thump.
“Ohmigod, Matt, you scared the life out of me! I thought you were gone for the night.”
The speaker was a pretty teenage girl with thick-lashed dark eyes, a to-die-for tan, black hair that waved down to her waist, and long legs bared by a pair of tiny khaki shorts. She was sitting bolt upright on a yellow floral couch on which she’d obviously been stretched full length, clutching the edges of her unbuttoned white blouse together with both hands. Having equally obviously just fallen off the couch, a long-haired blond kid of about the same age was on the floor beside it, caught in the twin acts of trying to pull up his jeans and scramble to his feet, an almost comical deer-in-the-headlights look on his face.
It was clear to Carly, who stood just inside the door peering around Matt, that they had surprised a couple heavily engrossed in making out. It was equally clear, from the sudden tension in Matt’s body as he stood regarding the pair with his hand still on the light switch, that Matt didn’t like what he saw one bit.
The girl was the likely owner of the car, Carly surmised. Was she his girlfriend, caught in the act of messing around on him in his own house? Carly’s mind boggled at the thought. But she looked way young for Matt—and the vibe Carly was picking up from him was off.
“You thought wrong then, didn’t you?” Matt’s hand dropped at last. The front door opened directly into the living room, Carly realized, which accounted for the degree to which the teenagers had been
taken by surprise. The room was nicely furnished, complete with a TV and a pair of striped wing chairs and the customary lamps and tables and knickknacks. The curtains, drawn now, matched the couch. The carpet underfoot was moss green, the walls a delicate celadon. The only jarring note in the whole well-coordinated assemblage was an oversized and obviously ancient black vinyl recliner, repaired in more than one place with duct tape, which was positioned at a comfortable distance from the TV. Complete with its own floor lamp and side table, flanked by an untidy stack of newspapers and magazines, it formed an incongruously ugly island in an otherwise charmingly decorated sea.
“Time to go home, Andy.” Matt moved to the center of the room to fix the kid with a disagreeable stare.
“Y–yes, sir,” Andy stuttered, trying to hang on to his unfastened jeans without being obvious about it as he edged around Matt. The novelty of hearing Matt addressed as sir made Carly blink.