“If you’re determined to stay here, you could at least come into the shower with me,” he called from the other side of the smoky glass.
“Maybe next week,” she said.
“What? What’s next week?”
“The point is that you’re not getting any tonight, so just get your mind off it.” She left the door ajar, and went into his bedroom. The master suite wasn’t particularly huge, but the balcony was a pool of moonlight, the room colors a rich blend of silvers and pale grays and charcoals. She plumped his pillows, turned back the sheets.
She debated what to do with the clothes he’d peeled off-her first choice was to trash them, but really, she hardly had that right. The fire stench was too noxious for them to stay inside, so they got a temporary home in his garage.
Griff emerged from the shower still protesting-but his voice was starting to slur, his eyes bloodshot from all the smoke. She pointed with a royal finger-her teacher royal finger-toward his room. “I’m not tired,” he said. “And besides that…”
She didn’t need to tune him out. He was out for the count from the instant his head hit the pillow. Actually, he crashed so deeply that she was a little fearful he’d gone straight into a coma-but his chest was rising and falling, so there was no excuse to keep hovering over him.
Because she couldn’t find any herbal tea, she poured herself a thimbleful of that Talisker stuff, found a blanket from his linen closet, and curled up in an oversized chair in his living room. With that location, she was within springing distance of his landline, just in case anyone dared try to call and interrupt his sleep again.
She expected to nap, but couldn’t. She was too troubled-by the fire, by why arson fires had suddenly started when she came back. By why anyone would target Griff. By that long-ago fire and the memory of her dad’s face in the window, backlit by flames…
Unsettled by the old nightmares, she scrounged in her purse for her cell, thinking that maybe it was past time to consult with the big guns. She used to either call or email her sisters several times a week-but that was before they’d both fallen in love last year. Their guys were great, but her sisters had been so insufferably, relentlessly happy that they couldn’t talk about anything but her finding someone. Tonight, though, she just plain needed sis time.
Because it was the middle of the night in D.C., she couldn’t call her youngest sister, Sophie. But Cate was honeymooning in Alaska, and the time there was relatively early evening.
“You are in such trouble.” Cate not only immediately answered the phone, but started right in with the bossy business. “You haven’t answered your email in days. Sophie said she hadn’t heard from you either. What’s going on?”
“Guilt,” Lily admitted. “I knew you’d yell at me if I told you what I was up to.”
“Of course I’m going to yell at you.” Cate adjusted the phone, said something to Harm-her good-looking groom-informing him that a girl had priorities. Sex was an important second. But sisters came first. “Now-where are you? And I don’t want to hear that you’re spending your whole teacher summer doing stupid stuff like jewelry parties and gardening and volunteering endless hours for some godforsaken cause. I want to hear that you’re up to no good. With a man. Preferably a bad boy kind of man. Preferably-”
“Yup,” Lily said peaceably. “I’m doing exactly that.”
The silence between Alaska and Georgia was abruptly deafening.
“What?”
“For years now, you two have been urging me to strip off the teacher clothes, quit being nice, quit dating safe guys. So I took your advice-”
Cate, in a crisis, didn’t fool around. She cut through the drivel. “Where are you? I can get the next plane out.”
Lily smiled into the receiver, but then got serious. “I’m in Pecan Valley, Cate. I’m looking into our fire. Or trying to. I know we’ve talked about this a zillion times, that we need to put the fire behind us, take charge of our lives. Only you and Sophie have done that. And somehow I haven’t been able to.”
“Wait. Honey. Wait. If we knew you wanted to do this-or needed to do this-the three of us could have found some time to come together, go there together-”
“No. You’d both have tried to talk me out of it.” Lily snuggled up tighter in the blanket, leaned her head back. “I never thought Dad started that fire. We all repeated the things we were told. That he loved us, but he was desperate, not in his right mind-all that. But I never believed it, Cate. Every time I’m with a guy…I’m thinking of dad. How much I loved him. How perfect we all thought he was. How good. And that if he set that fire, maybe I can’t judge anyone’s character. Maybe I’d just love blindly. Trust blindly. I’m probably not explaining this well, but-”
“You are, Lily. But I hate the idea of you doing this alone. And what about this man you mentioned?”
Lily heard her brother-in-law’s voice in the background, and figured she’d interrupted enough. “Cate, I’ll talk to you in another couple days, promise. Don’t worry. Everything’s fine. Give Harm a big hug from me. Love you.”
She switched off her cell, thinking she’d prowl around Griff’s place one last time, make sure all the doors were locked, make sure he was sleeping, make one more run to the bathroom.
That was the plan. But the last thing she remembered was snuggling just a moment longer in the blanket. It wasn’t as good as Griff’s arms around her, but thinking about Griff set off a chain reaction of dreams.
Chapter 5
Griff awoke with his heart pounding, the threatening smell and heat of fire invading nightmare after nightmare. Immediately, of course, he was fine. His bedroom was familiar, dark and cool and safe. And his bed damned lonely.
He vaguely remembered Lily bossing him around, bullying him into the shower, absconding with his clothes, ordering him into bed. He couldn’t recall ever being so offended…male-ego offended. The bossiness had charmed him. But then, she didn’t even seem to notice when he was naked in the shower, and later tucked the covers around his neck as if he were a boy instead of the sexiest man she'd ever seen in her life.
It was enough-almost-to destroy a guy’s confidence.
The bedside digital claimed it was 3:00 a.m. He’d only slept two hours, was still groggy with exhaustion. Still, he pushed off the covers, swung his feet to the floor. First thing in the morning, he needed to devote 100% effort to the fire and all the fire’s complications. But right now there wasn’t a prayer he could get any further rest without knowing where Lily was.
She could have gone home of course, just taken his car. That would have been a no-sweat. And when he checked the spare bedroom, the couches, and didn’t find her, he thought she’d had the brains to do that-but no. The bunched-up blanket in his favorite recliner had a body swallowed in it. He had no idea how she’d managed to curl herself into that small a ball-much less how she’d escaped being smothered.
When he peeled back the edge of the blanket, he found the gleam of her dark hair in the moonlight. But she didn’t awaken. He scooped her up, blanket and all. That didn’t awaken her either. Her cheek nuzzled against his shoulder, as if she’d been sleeping against him her whole life.
Halfway through the hall, he almost tripped because part of the blanket slipped, tangled with his bare foot. But he managed to compensate, pushed against a wall-none of that commotion woke her either-and finally made it to the bed.
He dropped her on his side, his pillow, and when the last of the blanket slipped away, realized she was still wearing clothes. He hesitated. This wasn’t about seduction, it was about…something else. Showing her that he didn’t need taking care of. Showing her that he could take care of her. Or something like that. Still, sleeping in clothes seemed bulky and uncomfortable. So he pulled off her knee-length shorts-or pants-or whatever they were. Then he re-covered her, and finally sank onto the other side of the bed, and discovered the strangest thing.