Playing with Fire (20 page)

“We don’t need one anymore,” she protested.

He paused and looked hard into her eyes, his face serious. “If we made a baby that tine, Cassie, it was meant to be. But if we didn’t, let’s get this mess straightened out before we try again. Okay?”

She sighed. “O-okay. But hurry.”

His fingers opened her as if he was peeling back the petals of a flower, and he entered her with one hard, swift thrust. She was so damp with her own moisture he slid in with ease, seating himself to the hilt.

“Like that better, sugar?” His words were thick with desire. “Like my cock inside you? Oh, Cassie, you don’t know how good you feel. Or what heaven it is being inside you.”

Her tender flesh surrounded him like a velvet glove, the little spasms still gripping her walls like so many tiny flames against his cock. The hard points of her nipples stabbed into his chest, the curly mat of hair abrading her skin with an erotic caress.

As aroused as they both were, it took him only a few strokes before they both exploded in a fierce orgasm. Bodies slick with sweat crashed against each other. He held her tight against him as he emptied into her before collapsing on top of her. Their lungs begging for air, little pulsations still gripping their bodies.

When they could both breathe again, he rolled onto his back, taking her with him, holding her against his body. “Jesus, Cassie. I think we might kill ourselves.”

“I…do things with you I never thought I’d do with anyone.” Suddenly shy, she turned her face away from him.

“Good, sugar.” He kissed her shoulder. “Because I’d hate to have to go out and
really
kill someone.” He bit her shoulder, a tiny love nip. “I love you, Cassie. There should be no boundaries between us.”

“Will you keep teaching me?” She was surprised she could get any words out. Every muscle, every nerve in her body was wrung dry.

“You bet. We’ve just begun, darlin’.”

“Griff?”

“What, honey?”

“I think you made today all better.”

He chuckled, rolled onto his side, and molded her against him. The outside world might conspire against them, but what they had no one could destroy.

Griff left the house before sunup, planning to go by his house to check it out and pack before he started his first job of the day. Cassie rose with him, anxious to get started on her own project.

“I have mixed feelings about taking this trip with you, Dewdrop,” he told her. “But I’m not about to let you do it alone.”

“I can handle it if you need to be here,” she reminded him.

“That’s not the point. I’d never have a peaceful moment with you driving back from Tampa by yourself, being on the highway for two days.”

When she opened the front door for him she saw a car cruising slowly down the street.

“Fuck,” he growled. “They’re out before dawn now.”

“We’ve sure had our share of traffic in this neighborhood alright.”

They were both aware of the chattering tongues in town and the parade of cars past her house, hoping for a titillating glimpse of the two of them together. Cassie would have thrown up the window shades and told them to take a look. Griff, however, insisted on protecting her from prying eyes as much as possible, the hot and heavy scene in the backyard the other night notwithstanding. He promised them both that would never happen again.

While Griff was off trimming shrubs and shoveling mulch, Cassie again worked her way through the house room by room. She decided to start with one more look in Diane’s room, in case they had missed anything. All of her sister’s clothes were stacked in a corner, ready for packing in cartons when Cassie got back from Tampa. There were plenty of places to donate them. However, they hadn’t yielded anything.

She stripped the sheets from the bed, tossing them in the washer and folding away the blanket, leaving the mattress to air out for the time being. Then she scoured every inch of the room, even checking to see if the carpet had been pulled up anywhere, but found nothing. If Diane had hidden something in the house, she had hidden it well enough that Cassie was having a difficult time finding it.

Going through her mother’s room, where her parents had slept together until her father’s fall from reality was equally as difficult. The stale air of sickness hung in the air, along with something more. Neglect? Failure? Retreat? Cassie found it very depressing.

She followed the same process with the clothes and the bedding. Then she dumped everything from the nightstand drawer into a sack and put it in her room along with her mother’s jewelry box.

By the time she’d finished with the upstairs, she was hot and dusty and still had no answers. She drank almost a whole pitcher of iced tea with her lunch then began with the downstairs.

By four o’clock, she’d accumulated a lot of trash to haul to the curb, another sack of papers to go through, and every inch of the house had been dusted and vacuumed. She was still, however, empty-handed as well as discouraged. She felt in her bones that Diane’s secret was hiding somewhere close at hand, but no clue jumped out at her.

She decided to use some of the food she’d bought to make spaghetti sauce for dinner. A salad, French bread, and the bottle of red wine she’d picked up rounded out the menu. Not quite the gourmet meal she had in mind, but, for once, they wouldn’t be eating takeout.

Griff ate everything she put before him with obvious gusto, complimenting her with each bite. After dinner they sat out on the patio again, in the fading light, discussing their options. Cassie reported on the fruitlessness of her search.

“We just need to drop everything until we get back,” he told her. “Whatever our unwelcome visitor is looking for, if you couldn’t find it today, as much as you tore the house apart, he or she won’t either.”

“I thought for sure I’d have better luck.” She rubbed her forehead. “But I’m trying not to get discouraged.”

“You shouldn’t leave that jewelry and all those papers lying around, though,” Griff told her. “I wouldn’t put it past dear sweet Carol Markham to do a little snooping while we’re gone, either.”

Cassie chuckled. “We do have nasty suspicious minds, don’t we? You’ll be happy to know tomorrow morning I’m going to run by the bank and rent a big enough safety deposit box to dump everything into.”

“I asked Phil to check on things every once in a while till we get back.” Griff saw her open her mouth to object. “I know, I know, Phil’s just Phil. But maybe he’ll see something that will help us.”

Phil was not the person she would have picked to keep an eye on the house. She wouldn’t put it past him to do a little light burglary himself if given the chance, but she decided if Griff trusted him, she should, too.

After they finished their wine, they made one more sweep of the house and discovered some old cartons stacked any old way in one corner of the garage.

Cassie dumped all the clothes into them for the time being. “I’ll make things neater when we get back. I just wanted the closets and dressers emptied in case Carol troops people through here this weekend. She’s putting the For Sale sign up tomorrow, and I’m sure it will attract plenty of snoops.”

“Don’t you have to be a serious buyer to have someone show you a house?” Griffin wrinkled his forehead with curiosity.

“Sure.” She mimed dialing the phone. “Hello, Markham Realty? I’m a serious buyer. You have a house listed I want to see.”

He shook his head. “Maybe there’s a lot to be said for being out of the mainstream. People sound less appealing to me all the time.”

She laughed. “Try being a reporter. You get to see a side of people you wish they’d shipped on the Titanic.”

When they dropped Griffin’s truck at his house the next day, Cassie waited while he double-checked the locks on the doors.

“You surprise me every day,” she told him, watching him reset his alarm system. “I’d never have thought you were the kind for such fancy gadgetry.”

He grinned, but with a touch of bitterness. “When you’re as popular in town as I am, you need to cover all your bases.”

“You mean people might try to break in and damage your things?” She was aghast.

He shrugged. “They make me uneasy enough I wouldn’t put anything past them. Especially with Diane’s murder still unsolved.”

“My God, Griff, what a way to live. With these people treating you the way they do, why didn’t you leave here long ago?”

He slid into the driver’s seat of her rental car, leaned over, and kissed her. “Maybe I was waiting for you to come back, sugar.”

Warmth spread through her that always came with his touch.
Heaven help me,
I’m becoming a sex maniac.
She giggled.

“My kisses are funny now?” he asked.

“No. Just a little private joke. I’ll tell you tonight if you’re real, real nice to me.”

The flight was on time, smooth and easy. In Tampa, they retrieved their luggage and went outside to the cabstand.

“You didn’t leave your car here?” Griffin asked.

“No.” Cassie shook her head. “It’s at my place. My friend Claire chauffeured me. She thinks all airport parking lots are treasure chests for thieves.”

“My guess is she’s right.”

They snagged a cab, and, in less than thirty minutes, Cassie was unlocking the door to her apartment. Griffin carried their bags inside then stopped in the living room, looking around.

“Something wrong?” She opened drapes, letting in the light.

“No, just interested in how you live. How come the place looks so temporary? It’s almost like a hotel room.”

Cassie glanced about, trying to see things through his eyes. She was struck by the fact he saw what she hadn’t—everything appeared as if she’d bought it from a discount showroom and plunked it down without thought or scheme. Which was pretty much what she’d done. She’d always promised herself to fix it up the way she wanted, but, somehow, the urge had never quite stirred within her.

Is that how Griff sees it?
She nibbled her lip as he took in every inch.

At last, he came up behind her and hugged her. “You weren’t planning on staying here forever, were you, sugar.” It was a statement more than a question.

She shook her head. “I guess not. Claire always told me I should make more of a home out of this place, and I see now what she meant.” She turned in his arms. “Maybe you were right. Maybe I was just waiting to get back to you, to have you in my life again.”

They stood, just holding each other for a moment, until she broke the contact.

“Okay. We’ll open the suitcases on the floor in the bedroom and take out what we need. Shower, fresh clothes, food and drink. In that order.”

She didn’t want to go to any of her usual places to eat. They’d be bound to run into people she knew, and she wasn’t yet ready to share Griff with anyone. Besides, Claire would kill her if she didn’t get the first look. They went, instead, to a little pub in a strip center near her apartment where they had thick steaks and aged bourbon.

“So, this is Tampa,” he said, polishing off the last of his dinner. “This is where you’ve been hiding from me?”

“Maybe hiding from myself.”

“You came here that summer after….”

“Yes. After. I called Claire and told her I needed emotional first aid. She never blinked, just told me to pack my bags and come on down. I’d spent vacations with her before, so it wasn’t like I was a stranger. Her folks were very welcoming and gave me the space I needed.”

“Just out of curiosity, what did you do all that summer? You had a long time before classes started again.”

“I got a job as a summer intern at the newspaper. They had just fired the one they had. I walked in, looking to find anything at all, and they hired me on the spot. That’s how I met Mike Rivard, my editor at the sports publication.”

“So, you worked there the next summer, too?”

She nodded, sipping at her drink. “Semester breaks and vacations I just hung out with Claire and her family.”

“Didn’t your folks ever want you to come home?” He raised an eyebrow. “I can’t believe they were happy to let you just opt out of seeing them at all.”

Cassie stirred her drink with the tip of her finger, weighing her words.
How to explain this to someone and not have it come out wrong?
“When Diane was killed, I always had the feeling my folks would have been happier if it had been me. It didn’t make me anxious to hurry back to the bosom of my family.”

“Shit, Cassie. That’s an awful way to live.”

“You get used to it. They never stinted on money. Until my dad began drinking after Diane’s death and just sort of faded away, finances weren’t a problem. They paid all my college expenses and sent me a check every month.”

He reached across the table and took both of her hands in his, rubbing his fingers over the knuckles, caressing the skin. “Life hasn’t been much better for you than it has for me, has it, sugar?”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” she told him. “I didn’t spend my time wallowing in self-pity. I went to work full-time at the paper here right after graduation, then went with Mike to this new publication. I’d saved a lot of the money my folks sent me, so I was able to get my own apartment, buy a car, things like that.”

“What do you say we get out of here? We’ll be a long time making up for what we lost, and I don’t want to waste a minute.”

As soon as they were up in the morning, Cassie took care of her apartment situation. Next, she called Claire and arranged for them to meet her for lunch.

“I want to stop and get some moving cartons.” She stood in front of her open closet. “Tonight, we’re going to pack my clothes and the few things I want shipped to Texas. I’ll hire a mover and ask Claire to be here for the pickup.”

“What about the rest of your stuff? You don’t plan to just walk out on it, do you?”

“Nope. I’ll talk to Claire about that, too. She’ll have some ideas.”

And she did, but not before the woman had given Griff a thorough once over. Cassie knew he had dressed with care, wanting to make a good impression for her. The blue polo shirt was almost the exact color of his eyes, and his black slacks fit his body as if he’d had them custom made. His deep tan set off his sun-bleached hair that just brushed the collar of his shirt.