She felt one of Rafe’s hands slide beneath her sweater. The clasp of her bra dissolved at his touch. When his thumb lightly touched her nipple she almost screamed. It was as though every inch of her had been sensitized. She was in some never-never land where the line between acute pleasure and pain was murky.
“I’ve been thinking all day that it would be like this,” Rafe muttered into the curve of her shoulder. “I was going crazy waiting to find out.”
His hand moved over the curve of her hip. She felt his fingers on the zipper of her slacks. Things were moving swiftly. Much too swiftly. But she could not seem to summon up a lot of good reasons for calling a halt.
She heard Winston on the stairs again. For some reason the knowledge that her dog had returned to the scene cleared some of the fog from her brain.
“I think this is far enough,” she managed to get out.
“Not nearly.” Rafe peeled up the edge of her sweater and kissed one of her breasts. “I’ve been wanting you since you got here.”
“That’s nice.”
He went very still. Then he raised his head and looked down at her with gleaming eyes. “Nice?”
“I’m flattered. Honest.”
“Flattered,” he repeated carefully. “Great. Flattered. Shit.”
She swallowed. “I don’t want you to think I’m a prude, or anything, but—”
“But you’re still Miss Goody Two-Shoes, is that it?”
“Not exactly.” She was starting to grow annoyed. “It’s just that in a lot of ways you and I are strangers.”
“You’re a Harte. I’m a Madison. The way I look at it, we’ve known each other most of our lives.”
She blinked. “That’s certainly an interesting viewpoint. Maybe it’s even true in certain ways. But something of an oversimplification, don’t you think?”
“Do you always talk like this on a date?”
“That wasn’t a date we had tonight. I did you a favor.”
His smile was infinitely slow, infinitely seductive. “Well, in that case, allow me to repay it.” He started to lower his mouth to hers once more.
She braced her hands on his shoulders to stop him. “My point—”
He gave her a look of polite surprise. “You mean you’ve actually got one?”
“My point,” she continued grimly, “is that, although we’ve known of each other’s existence most of our lives, it’s stretching things to imply that we’ve been anything more than distant acquaintances. I still say we’re strangers as far as this kind of thing is concerned.”
“Shush.” He covered her mouth with the palm of his hand.
“Mmmph?” Outraged, she grabbed his wrist and tried to yank his hand away from her lips.
She was so intent on telling him in no uncertain terms that she did not find this kind of stuff a turn-on that it took her a few seconds to realize he was not paying any attention to her. She finally noticed that he was lying much too still, his head turned toward the front door.
She heard a very soft whine. Winston was standing at the door again, just as he had done last night. His alert, watchful tension radiated clear across the room.
“He hears something.” Rafe took his hand away from Hannah’s mouth. He kept his eyes on the dog as he sat up on the edge of the sofa.
“Probably an animal prowling for garbage.” Hannah hastily pulled her clothing back into place. “A skunk, maybe. Or cats.”
“Probably.” Rafe watched Winston intently.
Hannah sat up slowly. “He did this last night, too.”
Rafe got to his feet and crossed the room to where Winston vibrated at the door. He halted at the window and pulled aside the curtain. “Fog’s so thick now you can’t see past the edge of the porch.”
Winston whined softly. He glanced at Rafe and then at the door and then back at Rafe. The message was clear. He wanted to go outside to investigate.
A cold chill went through Hannah. It was the same disturbing sensation she’d experienced last night.
“Whatever it is, it’s not coming too close to the house,” she said quickly. “Winston would be barking like crazy if there was a critter in the bushes at the edge of the porch.”
“Sure.” Rafe reached for the doorknob. Winston strained forward, preparing to streak through the crack in the door as soon as it appeared.
Real fear galvanized Hannah. Everything in her was suddenly focused on the danger of opening the front door.
“What, are you crazy?” She leaped to her feet and rushed across the room. She bent down to seize Winston’s collar. “You can’t send him outside. He was raised in a high-rise apartment in the middle of a city, for heaven’s sake. He knows nothing about wild animals. Whatever’s out there might be a lot bigger and meaner than he is.”
Winston tried to pull free of her grasp. He was trembling with eagerness. His nose did not waver from the crack between the door and the frame.
Rafe glanced down at him. “Okay, city dog. Stay inside and be a sissy. I’ll handle this on my own.”
“Oh, no, you don’t.” Exasperated, Hannah released Winston and threw herself in front of the door, arms spread wide. “You’re not going out there, either.”
Rafe looked amused. “Doubt if whatever is out there is bigger or meaner than me. This is Eclipse Bay, remember? Crime rate around here is almost nonexistent.”
Winston whined again and bobbed restlessly at Rafe’s heels.
Hannah glared at both of them. She did not budge from her position in front of the door. Frantically she searched for a rational, sensible reason for refusing to allow either male outside.
“Cut the raging testosterone, you two. Let’s have a little common sense here, shall we? It is entirely possible that there’s a skunk outside. Does either of you have any idea of just how long it would take to get rid of the smell if you got sprayed? You’d both have to sleep on the beach for a week.”
“Don’t think it’s a skunk.” Rafe looked thoughtful. “A skunk would head straight for the garbage cans. We’d have heard the clatter by now.”
“If it’s not a skunk, it might be something worse,” she said through her teeth. “Maybe somebody’s pit bull or Rottweiler got loose. For all you know, there’s a whole pack of vicious dogs out there.”
“Speaking of common sense,” Rafe said mildly, “I think that theory is a bit weak.”
“I don’t care. It’s my theory and I’m sticking to it. Neither of you is going out there and that’s final. Besides, you just got through saying that the fog was so thick you couldn’t see beyond the edge of the porch. It makes no sense to go floundering around in the stuff.”
Rafe looked at her. She realized that he was laughing silently.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing.” He pulled the curtain aside again and peered thoughtfully out into the darkness. “Just occurred to me that if you don’t let me outside, I won’t be able to get home tonight, that’s all.”
She hesitated. “You can leave after Winston relaxes.”
“Can’t see a damn thing in that muck.”
“You can leave your car here and walk home.”
He dropped the curtain. His eyes gleamed.
“Now what?” she snapped.
“What if someone drives past your house early tomorrow morning and sees my car parked in front?”
She sighed. “Half the town already thinks the worst, anyway.”
“Okay, then what about the pack of maddened Rottweilers and pit bulls I’ll have to confront if I walk home?”
She moved just far enough from the position in front of the door to lift the curtain. A single glance outside showed that the fog was an impenetrable barrier. The light from the yellow lamp over the door was reflected back from what looked like a solid gray wall.
She looked at Winston. He was now pacing restlessly in front of the door. Whatever it was that he sensed was still out there. She made an executive decision.
“We’ll drink the tea I made,” she
said. “If nothing has changed by the time we finish, you can sleep on the sofa tonight.”
“Okay,” Rafe said much too easily.
Winston lost interest in whatever lay out in the fog about the same time they finished the tea. But when Rafe checked the view from the window he was pleased to see that the mist had not dissipated. If anything, it was thicker than ever.
Luck was with him tonight.
Hannah came to stand behind him. She peered over his shoulder. “How does it look?”
“Like a great night for mad dogs and skunks.”
“Not funny.” She hugged herself and rubbed her arms briskly, as though warding off a chill. “I guess you’ll have to stay here.”
“Don’t go overboard with the gracious hospitality routine. I don’t mind walking back to Dreamscape. It’s not that far.”
“No.” She turned away abruptly. “You can have the downstairs guest room. I’ll get some blankets and a pillow.”
He watched her climb the stairs. She had been a little too quick to suggest that he stay here, he decided. The expression in her eyes was wrong, too. He wondered how much of this new, brittle tension derived from the scene on the sofa earlier and how much came from Winston’s prowling at the door.
Logic told him that a few kisses wouldn’t have rattled her this much. She wasn’t a teenager, after all. She was a confident woman who had built a thriving business. It would take more than a sexy tussle on the sofa to throw her. In any event, he was pretty sure that if she really had been upset by the small skirmish, she would have been more than delighted to let him walk home in the fog.
Instead, she had insisted that he stay here.
He glanced at Winston. The dog was stretched out on his belly on the rug, nose on his paws, dozing. Hannah had said that it was the second night in a row that he had gone on alert.
Hannah and Winston were both accustomed to life in the city, Rafe reminded himself. They had merely overreacted to whatever small creature had wandered too close to the house. But if Hannah wanted him to stay here tonight, who was he to argue?
An hour later he was still awake. Arms folded behind his head, he stared up at the deep shadows on the ceiling. He was intensely aware of the fact that Hannah was just out of sight upstairs. He pictured her in a nightgown. Maybe a frilly little see-through number that showed a lot of skin. Fat chance. More likely a sober, long-sleeved flannel thing that fell to her ankles.
Either one sounded interesting, now that he considered the matter. Very interesting, in fact. He was hard as a rock.
Logic told him that a few kisses shouldn’t have rattled him this much. He wasn’t a teenager, after all. It took more than a sexy tussle on the sofa to throw him.
Right.
chapter 8
He awoke at dawn when a cold nose was thrust against the bottom of his bare foot. The shock brought him to a sitting position in a hurry.
“Sonofa—” He broke off when he saw Winston. “No point in calling you that particular name, is there? You are a son of a bitch. And don’t think it hasn’t occurred to me that the big dramatic act last night at the door might have been just your deliberate attempt to disrupt the mood of the evening.”
Winston gave him a meaningful look.
“Things were going pretty damn good until you showed up and made like Mr. Macho Watchdog.”
Winston turned and trotted to the door. There he sat down and stared intently at Rafe.
“Okay, okay. I get the point.”
Rafe shoved aside the blankets and got to his feet. He found his trousers and reached for his shirt. After a short search he discovered his low-cut boots fooling around with some dust bunnies under the bed.
“All right, let’s go.”
He opened the door to a damp, fog-bound morning. Winston stepped smartly outside and headed for the bushes at the edge of the porch. Rafe went down the steps and followed the little path that led to the storage locker used to house the garbage cans. There were no signs of animal tracks in the vicinity and no claw marks on the wooden lid.
Having concluded his personal business, Winston hurried over to see what was going on at the garbage can locker. Rafe watched him closely.
Winston sniffed a bit, but his interest in the locker appeared casual at best. After only a couple of minutes he headed on down the long drive toward the trees that veiled the house and gardens from the narrow road.
Rafe followed, watching to see if the dog paid any unusual attention to any particular point along the way. Winston’s progress was slowed by numerous pauses, but none appeared to be any more intriguing to him than another. When he got close to the edge of the property, Rafe decided it was time to call him back.
“Hannah will chew me out but good if she finds out I let you play in traffic.” Not that there was much on this quiet road, especially at this hour of the morning.
Winston ignored him, displaying a breathtaking disdain for a clear and reasonable command. Rafe concluded that the attitude was either the result of generations of fine breeding or something that had rubbed off from Hannah. He was inclined to credit the latter.
“Come back here.” Rafe walked more quickly toward Winston, intending to grab him before he reached the road.
But Winston stopped of his own accord before he got as far as the pavement. He veered left toward a stand of dripping trees and began to sniff the ground with great authority.
“Just like you knew what you were doing,” Rafe said quietly.
Winston flitted briskly from one tree trunk to another, pausing to sniff intently in several places. Eventually he lifted his leg. When he was finished he turned to Rafe as if to say that he was satisfied.
Rafe walked into the stand and took a close look at the tree Winston had marked. He knew that his human senses were abysmally inadequate for the task at hand.
He crouched to get a closer look at the ground at the base of the tree. Unfortunately the pebbles that covered the earth made it impossible to detect any footprints. Always assuming that there were any there to detect, Rafe thought.
He looked at Winston, who was watching him with an inquiring expression. “You know, if one of us had gotten both your nose and my brain, we’d be in great shape.”
Winston gave the equivalent of a canine shrug, then turned and went quickly along the drive toward the house.
Rafe straightened. He was about to set off after the dog when he caught a glint of silver foil out of the corner of his eye. A closer look revealed a tightly wadded candy wrapper lying on the ground near the point Winston had marked.
Not exactly a major discovery. A stray breeze could have blown it into the stand of trees. It might have been tossed from a passing car or fallen off the garbage truck.
Or it might have been dropped by someone standing in this very spot about midnight last night.
He picked up the discarded wrapper and went back down the drive to where he had parked the Porsche. He unlocked the door, opened the glove compartment, and rummaged briefly inside. No luck. He looked at Winston, who was waiting, head cocked, on the porch.
“Used to be a time when I carried a spare razor and a few other basic necessities with me for just this sort of occasion,” he explained. He shut the door and pocketed the keys. “But I got out of the habit.”
His social life had never really picked up again after his divorce, he reflected. Probably because he had not worked very hard to get it up and running. He’d had other interests to occupy him.
He stopped once before he went up the steps and plucked a few sprigs of the mint that were growing beneath the garden’s water faucet.
Back inside the house he spent a few minutes in the downstairs bathroom, where he discovered that none of the Harte males had left a razor behind.
“Thoughtless,” he told Winston. “But, then, what do you expect from a Harte?”
He listened to the silence upstairs for a moment before he wandered into the kitchen and started opening cupboard doors. He found the usual ass
ortment of aging condiments and spices that tended to get left behind in a vacation cottage. Salt, pepper, sugar, a half-empty bottle of vanilla extract, and an unopened jar of maple syrup. The last item was the real thing, not caramel-colored sugar water, he noted.
He took the vanilla extract and the syrup out of the cupboard and went to check the contents of the refrigerator. The eggs and milk were fresh. The loaf of dense, rustic-style bread baked by the New Age crowd who had taken over the old bakery near the pier was a day old.
Perfect.
The bride’s gown was three sizes too big. She tried desperately to pin it into place, but it was hopeless. She knew that no matter what she did the dress would never look right. The client was in tears. The groom kept looking at his watch.
She glanced at the clock and saw that the reception was supposed to start in a few minutes. But the caterers had not yet arrived. None of the tables had been set up. The flowers were limp. She opened a case of the premium-quality champagne that she had ordered and discovered bottles of mouthwash inside. She looked around and realized that the musicians had not yet appeared
On top of everything else, there was something dreadfully wrong with the room. The reception was supposed to be in an elegant hillside mansion overlooking the city. Instead, she was standing in an empty, windowless warehouse.
The tantalizing smell of something delicious being cooked nearby distracted her from the chaos. She realized that she was very hungry, but she could not abandon the client to go get something to eat. She was a professional, after all . . .
Hannah came awake with a start and found herself gazing into the depths of the impenetrable fogbank that hovered outside the window. For a few disorienting seconds she thought she was still in Portland trying to hold together the unraveling threads of a disastrous wedding reception.
Then she smelled the exquisite aromas from downstairs. Reality returned, jolting her out of bed.
Rafe. He had not vanished discreetly at dawn as she had expected. He was down there making himself at home in her kitchen. She had been so sure that he would be gone by the time she awoke.