Whispers at Midnight (34 page)

“Just for the record,” he said, still fixing her with that dark, level gaze. “I think your ex-husband is a fucking idiot.”

“Well,” she said, smiling at him a little because this, too, was familiar. He’d always stood up for her whenever anyone had tried to bully her at school or elsewhere until all her less-than-pleasant schoolmates and acquaintances had been made forcefully aware that
bothering Carly meant taking on Matt and had consequently left her alone. It felt strange and a little wonderful to have him taking up for her again, and she realized that she’d gotten used, maybe too used, to fighting all her battles alone. “I think so too.”

He looked at her for a long moment without speaking, then said, “To hell with it” in a voice grown suddenly husky and reached for her. She met him halfway, twining her arms around his neck and meeting his gaze with what she was sure could be nothing short of bedazzlement in her eyes as he cupped her face with his hands and sought her mouth with his. Then she shut her eyes as his lips closed over hers, hard and sure. As his tongue staked its claim to her mouth, she kissed him back with hungry abandon and felt fire shoot clear down to her toes.

Two quick blasts from a horn broke them apart. Breathing hard, still dazed and tingly and not even sure exactly what it was she’d heard, Carly glanced around in time to spot another sheriff’s department cruiser speeding past. Just before it disappeared around the nearest bend, she saw the driver waving jauntily at them.

“Shit,” Matt said, looking after the car.

He was breathing hard, too. His hands still cupped her face and her arms were still looped around his neck. His eyes looked almost black in the golden light, she saw, and his skin looked very bronze. The light revealed every tiny line around his eyes and emphasized the small scar on his lip. Carly caught her breath as she remembered that the Matt who was kissing her now was all grown up. The boy she had known so well was still there, but he had added layers upon layers of experiences that she knew nothing about. The thought with all its various implications was so erotic that her mouth went dry and her loins clutched and her breasts tightened and swelled against the satiny confines of her bra. She must have made some slight sound, because his gaze came back to her, and then he kissed her again, hard and hot and so thoroughly that she was lost. She responded with fiery hunger, uncaring that anyone who just might happen to drive by could, and would, certainly see, that they would be the subject of town gossip for months if not years, that if they didn’t stop, soon,
being charged with public indecency became a real possibility, or at least it would have been if he hadn’t been the sheriff, which in itself would add a whole other dimension to the explosion of gossip.

“Okay, enough,” he said in a low, thick voice, as without warning he freed his mouth from hers and pulled her arms from around his neck and put her firmly back in her seat.

“Matt …” Impossible to disguise that her voice was unsteady.

“We’re not teenagers and it’s not dark. And we’re sure as hell not doing it beside the road in a damned marked car.” He took a deep breath, settled back into his seat and gripped the steering wheel with both hands as he rested his forehead against it. “We might as well sell tickets.”

He was right and she knew he was right, but still that didn’t stop her from wanting him so much that she was dizzy with it.

“Put your seat belt on,” he said after a moment, lifting his head to look at her. His eyes were still hot and dark, but she could tell from the set of his mouth and jaw that he once again had himself well under control.

Conscious of a little pang of disappointment—she liked the idea that she could make Matt lose control—Carly complied as he started the car and pulled out onto the road, then executed a quick, neat and wildly illegal U-turn before heading back toward town. Dry-mouthed, she felt her heart start to pump faster from just thinking about what
doing it
with Matt would be like. The last time she’d gone all the way with him she’d been a clueless virgin and he’d been all of twenty-one. And the earth had still rocked and the sky had still exploded and her heart had been stolen away and her body had been branded as his forevermore.

Because he was Matt, and because she’d loved him then every bit as fiercely as she loved him now.

Not that she meant to tell him that. Not now, and maybe not ever.

“You hungry?” He shot her a narrow-eyed look. Knowing that he meant hungry for food, she shook her head. His eyes still had that hot, dark gleam that made her quake, but she managed to preserve the outward appearance of cool, or at least she hoped she did. Not that Matt was likely to be fooled. He knew how much she wanted him.

“Just sex, no strings,” he said, looking at her hard.

“Absolutely,” she said, while her fingers mentally crossed again and her heart threatened to pound through her chest.

Looking almost grim, he gave a curt nod.

“Where are we going?” she asked after a couple of minutes, when he turned down a road that did not lead back to town. She was pleased at how steady her voice sounded, particularly considering the fact that her senses were going haywire at the imminent prospect of sleeping with Matt. Now that she thought about it, though, where
could
they go? Her house was Grand Central Station. His was no better. The sheriff’s office was definitely out, and he had just nixed the car.

A hotel? There wasn’t one in Benton. Even if there had been, she could just see herself and Matt, the well-known and clearly popular county sheriff, checking in. The whole town would probably be standing outside with binoculars before they’d even gotten the door to their room closed.

She had never really realized it before, but she now saw it for the self-evident truth it was: little towns were hell on a person’s sex life.

Matt glanced at her. “I happen to own a boat. I also happen to rent a garage to keep it in. The garage happens to have a small apartment above it that’s included in the rent.”

The cautious way he phrased this coupled with her memory of Lissa saying that Matt never brought girls home provided Carly with a burst of enlightenment: Matt had already figured out that a decent sex life for a single small-town sheriff saddled with live-in sisters could be problematic, and had taken steps to deal with the problem. The garage apartment was that step.

She didn’t begrudge him the sex life, she discovered, thinking the matter over. As long as from now on, it included her.

“How convenient,” she said, just to let him know that he was not the only person who could read minds.

He glanced at her and grinned.

The garage was located in an area of apartments and storage buildings and mini-warehouses scattered across barren acres punctuated by Dumpsters and rusty chain-link fences. As Matt pointed it
out and then turned up the short gravel driveway that culminated in a small, story-and-a-half building sheathed in gray aluminum siding, Carly saw that their destination was just that, a garage, looking as if it might have been constructed as a detached appurtenance to a house that was no longer there. Whatever had happened to the house, the garage, still set in a weedy little lot, remained. Apparently not having had the foresight to provide himself with the remote control that generally operated the type of overhead garage door that confronted them when they stopped, Matt got out and rolled open the door by hand. As she waited, a quick glance around showed Carly that, while there was a pickup truck parked in front of a cluster of mini-warehouses farther down the street, no one was in sight. If they were lucky, the town would never know that Matt had driven her to a remote garage for purposes that the gossip mill would have a field day speculating about.

Then Matt got back inside the car and drove into the garage. As he parked and got out, walking back to pull the door down behind them, Carly got out too, and discovered, to her own surprise, that she was suddenly, absurdly nervous about what they were about to do.

At least, if they’d gotten it on in the car while they were both so hot, she wouldn’t have to keep hearing Sandra’s warning about getting her heart stomped repeating itself over and over in her brain.

Despite all kinds of expert advice to the contrary, giving oneself lots of time to think important decisions through was not, she was discovering, always the best thing.

The door rattled as Matt closed it. He had flipped the light on, so that even when the door was closed Carly was able to see that what she was standing in was crude even by garage standards. It was hot in the stifling way of little-used buildings in the summertime, and it smelled faintly of gasoline. The cement floor was cracked and uneven in places. The walls were unpainted boards. The ceiling was supported by exposed beams that ran the width of it, and electrical lines and white PVC pipes ran alongside the beams. A single overhead bulb provided illumination. Unpainted wooden steps mounted one wall, disappearing into an opening in the ceiling. These, Carly assumed, led to Matt’s apartment.

She hoped it was in somewhat better shape than the garage itself. Not that it really mattered, of course. They were only going to be using it for a little while, just long enough to…

At the thought of what they were going to be using it to do, Carly felt butterflies do loop-de-loops in her stomach.

“How do you like my boat?”

Matt had come up behind her, and at the sound of his voice she jumped. Turning around, glancing at the fifteen-foot runabout he was eyeing with such pride, she hardly saw it.

“It’s lovely,” she said, having noticed almost nothing about it except that it was a boat and painted white.

He looked at her closely, and she was reminded again that he knew her well enough to be able to guess a lot of what passed through her head.

“Okay, Curls, spit it out.” His voice was dry.

He was not, Carly noticed, touching her. Instead he hooked his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels a little as he studied her face. He was standing close enough to her so that she was once again aware that the top of her head didn’t quite reach his chin and his shoulders were twice the breadth of hers and he could probably tuck her under one arm and run off with her if he felt so inclined.

“What?” If her tone was defensive, it was because she couldn’t help it. Her mouth was dry and her heart was pounding and the butterflies in her stomach could have put the Blue Angels to shame with all the aerial acrobatics they were doing.

“If you want to chicken out, feel free. This is one hundred percent your call.”

“Of course I don’t want to chicken out.”

When she’d worked so hard to get him here? Not a chance. It was just that she was, most unexpectedly, a little nervous, that’s all.

“Then quit looking at me like I’m a serial killer and you’re a Cheerio.”

That was such a bad joke that Carly groaned. He grinned and picked up her hand and kissed it, and looked at her over it in that sexy way that she had already discovered made her knees go weak,
and suddenly she wasn’t nervous anymore. At least, she was, but now it was in a good way. A delicious, anticipatory way.

Just in time, too, because he was heading for the stairs, holding her hand, pulling her up after him. Trying to ignore her shaky knees and pounding heart, she followed him up to a tiny, rickety landing where a railing of roughly nailed together two-by-fours was all that kept unwary souls from taking a step sideways and plunging back down to the concrete garage floor. It was dark and dusty and hotter than blazes up there and she couldn’t help it, she was nervous. Still, scared he might be going to have second thoughts if he guessed how really utterly discomposed she felt, she managed a smile for him as he let go of her hand to feel above the door.

Whatever came of it, she wanted to do this, she told herself stoutly. She was going to do this. She was going to have great sex with Matt.

The no-strings part they could work on later.

Retrieving the key, he opened the door and stood back to allow her to step inside.

Taking a deep breath, Carly did.

25

T
HE APARTMENT WAS SMALL,
consisting of one large rectangular room, a bathroom and a tiny galley kitchen. All this Carly saw as soon as she stepped over the threshold and Matt closed the door behind her. He didn’t turn on the light, although the switch was right there beside him. This omission was deliberate, Carly had no doubt, and at the implications her knees threatened to give out. Still, she managed to hold it together, pretending not to notice that they were standing there in the hushed twilight with only the light filtering in between closed curtains for illumination. The air was pleasantly cool, courtesy of a hotel type heating/air-conditioning unit installed directly in the back wall. A nondescript beige carpet covered the floor. The furnishings were of the functional variety, with a recliner that looked like the ugly stepsister of the two at Matt’s house and a worn brown tweed couch plus a table, lamp and TV grouped in the half of the room nearest the door. The other half of the room was given over to a queen-sized bed. Spotting it, Carly was almost afraid to look any closer. Would it have a fur spread? Rubber sheets? Handcuffs attached to the dark wood headboard?