Beach House No. 9 Part 22

"Where are you going?"

Her gesture was vague, verging on wild. "Out...away. Be back soon." She scrambled from the room and headed for fresh air. It was only when she was standing in the sand that she realized the entire day had pa.s.sed. The sun was heading for the horizon, and she couldn't remember accomplis.h.i.+ng anything beyond not nipping Griffin's bottom lip.

That wasn't good.

"Jane!" She looked toward the sound of her name and saw Tess and Skye sitting on the front porch of No. 8. Griffin's sister waved. "Come talk to us."

It was as good an excuse as any to avoid returning to the office. She refused the offer of a cold drink and took the empty chair. A little fresh air, a little girl talk, could clear the dangerous images from her mind. She'd cut herself off from friends for much too long, she realized, relaxing into her seat.

Skye, in boyish chinos and a short-sleeved sweats.h.i.+rt with a kangaroo pouch pocket, sent her a smile. "I haven't seen you around much."

"Sorry. Doing work."

"Me too," the other woman said. She drew out some mail from the oversize pocket. "Want to save me a delivery?"

A postcard. Jane reached for it. "For Griffin?" The back was covered in a slapdash of dark-inked handwriting.

Skye nodded. "From Gage. Everybody got mail from him today."

"Including you?" Tess asked the younger woman, looking up from a sheet of paper in her lap, covered in the same distinctive lettering.

Her face turned pink. "That's right. You know we correspond." She worried the ribbing on the hem of her sweats.h.i.+rt, then turned to Jane. "It's really nice of him to answer my letters."

Tess snorted. "Nice? Skye, Gage is not a nice man."

"Of course he is!" Skye protested. "I mean, well, he's nice to me."

"He's a reckless daredevil who cares about his next adventure more than any woman in his life."

"I'm not just any woman in his life," Skye said, then her face went redder. "What I'm trying to say is that I'm not a woman in his eyes. I'm a friend from home, that's all."

"You keep reminding yourself of that, okay? The Lowell boys are not good romantic bets." Tess's gaze touched Jane. "Isn't that right?"

Especially the Lowell boy who was in love with a dead woman. Jane lowered her eyes. "You know Griffin better than I do."

"And I know my romantic bets gone wrong too," Tess muttered. "It's men that I don't understand at all. Do you know my sons have been practicing eating Cheetos with their toes? Why would they want to do that?"

"Maybe for some reason we don't understand." Jane's gaze moved to the cliff at the end of the cove. Jumping from it had seemed inexplicable to her until she'd been told that the resulting adrenaline shot had an anesthetic effect. It made some sense now. "Though Griffin tells me that the best part of an Oreo is the white stuff in the middle, which does not compute and never will."

It gratified her that the other two women concurred. The female companions.h.i.+p calmed her, and she was able to relax a little and think about something other than dark hair and broad shoulders. She sighed.

Tess glanced over. "Uh-oh. From the sound of that, do I take it that my bro is still evading the task at hand?"

Jane wished she hadn't used that word. It made her think of Griffin's hands. All day, she'd been watching them move on the laptop, the long, nimble fingers working the keyboard like a piano. It reminded her of his fingers playing along her skin, stroking her hips and opening her thighs. She swallowed a little whimper and remembered the question hanging in the air. "He's actually knuckling-"

Grr. She stopped herself, plagued by more images. She remembered him running the back of his hand along her cheek. One of his curled fingers stroking the slope of her nose.

"He would never talk about it with me, you know," Tess said. "That year in Afghanistan."

Jane looked over. "Somehow I'm not surprised."

"Since he came back he's avoided his entire family, which I don't like at all. David and I tried to get him over a dozen times when he first returned, but he's given excuse after excuse. Mom and Dad are living in Hawaii, yet he's resisted even a short tropical visit." She glanced down at the letter in her lap. "I've been thinking of sending an SOS to Gage. Getting him to the cove for some kind of intervention."

"Don't," Skye said quickly. Then she jumped to her feet, clearly fl.u.s.tered. "Sorry. It's none of my business. I have to go."

Tess frowned. "Skye?"

"He can't see me," she said, lifting a hand. Then, distress in every tense line of her slender body, she rushed away.

They stared after her, the too-loose clothes flapping around her as she ran up the beach. "What was that about?" asked Jane.

Tess looked grim. "I hate to think it's another woman who's fallen for the wrong man." She slumped in her chair, her hands draped over its arms, her long legs splayed. "What a summer. Disaster abounds."

Considering she was still living at the cove with her kids and without her husband, Jane a.s.sumed the other woman included her marriage in that gloomy statement. "It's not all bad," she said. "Your daughter's more consumed with her history project than pregnancy these days. Duncan and Oliver may have discovered a marketable skill."

"How so? You think there's money in monkey imitation?"

Smiling, Jane shrugged. "In ten years' time, who knows?"

"I'm developing a dislike of annoying gla.s.s-half-full types."

Jane cast a look at her. "Something tells me that's your usual type."

Tess sighed. "Give me more to put in my gla.s.s, then."

"It's summer. We're sitting beachside. We have a pretty view of the sun setting on the Pacific." Jane crossed her feet at the ankles. "Now you go."

The other woman groaned. "The mosquitoes aren't out. Yet."

"You're not even trying."

"Fine. Russ is too little for Cheetos."

"You are in bad shape."

"Don't fall in love, Jane. That's all I can tell you."

The warning only brought to mind a white grin, a big hand tousling her hair, a pair of reporter's eyes that looked at her and seemed to see something beyond four plain letters. We're both aware there's more to you than that.

"That's a suspicious silence." Tess groaned again. "Don't say it. Don't tell me you and Griffin-"

"I didn't say it," Jane said, breaking in. There was no "she and Griffin." "I mean, before, I meant to tell you that he's actually working on the memoir."

Tess straightened. "Truth?"

"Truth. He's over there right now, productive as you please."

"Well, that's good news."

"Very good," Jane agreed. The only bad had been her silly self, which allowed her brain to head off on useless tangents. It had been a night out of time! "And it was good I came over here too, because now I can go back, refreshed. Thanks for the conversation."

As she headed for No. 9, dusk was falling. Tess's voice came to her from the now-shadowy porch, a quiet warning. "Jane, just remember. That you... That Griffin-"

"It's all good," Jane said firmly, repeating the word. "Everything's under control."

She let herself into the house and set the postcard from Gage on the coffee table. No lamps were lit in the living room or the kitchen, so she turned them on as she went by, then trod down the hall to the office. Nearing the doorway, she noted there wasn't any sign of life in there either-and she had to shake off the sinister feel of it.

Then she heard Private whine, and she knew man and dog were inside the room. Still, her hand trembled as she reached for the light switch.

"Don't," a voice said. It was gritty and dark and almost unrecognizable as Griffin's.

It took a moment to make him out. He was stretched on the floor like a corpse-except in a mirror of the first time they'd met, he balanced a bottle of beer on his midriff. Three empties lay beside him, knocked over like bowling pins. Private was nearby, attentive to his master's needs.

Whatever they might be. Jane didn't have a clue.

"What happened?" she asked, in her library voice.

He was silent so long she worried he might have pa.s.sed out on her. Just when she thought she should check, he lifted his head to take another draw from his beer. It was so quiet she heard him swallow. Then his skull clunked against the wood floor, and Jane winced. Griffin didn't seem to notice.

"Nothing. I've been working, just like I'm supposed to, honey-pie. I was going through the notes."

Something else had been in that big envelope: several small notebooks Griffin had used during his embedded year. They were dog-eared and dirty, but each was labeled with their dates of use and bound with a rubber band. She'd a.s.sumed that at some point he'd sent back a batch of them for safekeeping.

Private whined again. Exactly, Jane thought.

"Maybe we should get you something to eat," she suggested. "Or drink. Coffee. A soda."

"Beer's fine," Griffin said. "Beer's making me drunk."

He didn't sound drunk.

"Beer's helping me mine my emotions, honey-pie."

Now he sounded angry, and just a little bit mean.

Her stomach clenched, and her first instinct was to run back to Tess's. But there he was on the floor, her dark pirate, looking just as alone as he'd been that first afternoon with the raucous Party Central all around him. His sister had said he'd declined invitations to be with family and refused to talk about his experience. Had he reached a place and time where he could finally tell someone about it?

"What about the notes?" she asked, her voice soft. "Why did they bother you?"

"You don't want to know."

That's when she saw it. A slip of paper crumpled on the floor beside him, a tiny ball that she guessed had packed enough punch to knock over those beer bottles-and knock Griffin off his feet. Without thinking, she bent to pick it up, then flattened it out with her fingers.

It was impossible to read in the dim room.

"Always signed her name the same, G.o.dd.a.m.n it." His voice was harsh. "Like a f.u.c.king fourth-grader. An E surrounded by a heart."

Jane's heart gave a little lurch at the image. "This is from Erica?"

Once again he lifted his head to swig his beer. "She would write messages on sc.r.a.ps of paper when we were embedded. Leave them on my bunk."

Jane could guess what kind of notes they were. An E surrounded by a heart.

When he didn't say any more, she found herself filling the silence. "I know it's hard." If only she could get him started, maybe he could express his grief and find a way past it. Find a way to...to someone else.

She bit her lip, guilty at the thought, and forced herself to go on. "I can't fathom how hard. Loving someone and losing them like that..."

Now his silence seemed to grow, expanding until it pressed against the walls, a black blob that made the room more murky, the atmosphere almost threatening. Private whined again, and his furry head dipped to his front paws.

Jane's throat went dry. Light, she decided. They needed some light. A little warmth, a little glow, would take the menace out of the place. Maybe out of the man.

Griffin lay between her and the lamp on the desk. Urged by an odd panic, she darted for it. Halfway there, his hand snaked out and grabbed her ankle.

She yelped.

"Is that where your sappy, overactive oven-mitt imagination has led you, Jane? You think I'm in a mood because I loved her?"

His fingers were hot, and they bit into her skin, staying just on the not-quite side of pain. Despite that and the billowing tension in the room, Jane felt herself reacting to his touch. Hot chills arrowed up the inside of her leg, a straight shot that pierced her belly and then her heart.

A feeling that was very bad indeed.

GRIFFIN TIGHTENED his hold on Jane's leg. His fingertips met his thumb, she was so delicate, but that didn't encourage him to be gentle. She'd brought him to this emotional place, d.a.m.n it, and she was going to pay.

"Sit down," he said, releasing her ankle. "Sit down right here."

His eyes were used to the dark, and he could see the wary expression on her face as she obeyed. She was wearing another of her maddening little dresses. Fussy and demure, its full skirt swirled around her thighs as she sank to the floor. In full Lady Jane mode, she sat with her legs folded to one side. A prim-and-proper woman waiting to be served a picnic.

What a meal he had ready to dish out.

He shoved himself up, his fourth beer still half-full. Tipping his hand, he drained the bottle, then let it drop with a clunk.

Jane jumped.

"Nervous now? Thinking about all those eels that are lurking in the corners of my soul?"

Her head moved from side to side, though her eyes didn't leave his. "I'm not nervous. I'm not scared of you."

Those f.u.c.king eels, he thought, swiping a hand over his face. He couldn't get them out of his head. The memory was there, Jane in his arms, the way she'd clung to him as he'd almost tossed her to her greatest fear.

Her pretty wavy hair, tickling his chin as they sat together on the beach. He didn't think she'd realized that a little tremor had run down her spine when she'd confessed her phobia. He'd been holding her that close to his heart. It had made him want to be a better brother to her than her own. It had made him want to be her hero.

Her brother. Her hero. What a crock.

He could never be anyone's hero, and he didn't feel brotherly toward her in the least. He'd been dying to f.u.c.k her again since that night in L.A. By G.o.d, she was going to understand that by the time he was through. Then she'd stop looking at him with those beautiful eyes filled with compa.s.sion.

"I didn't love Erica," he said. "I didn't love her, and the fact of that drove her to her death."