When she stepped to the phone, he took her hand, turned her, nudging her in until she stood between his legs. “I’d like to discuss that break from kissing you talked about. And I think since you’re the one who apologized, you should be the one to kiss me.”
“I’m thinking about it.” She picked up the phone first, kept her eyes on his as she called, spoke briefly to Zack, then replaced the receiver. “Okay, here’s the deal. Hands on the bed. And you keep them there. No touching, no grabbing.”
“That’s very strict, but okay.” He placed his palms down on the edge of the bed.
It was time, she decided, to show him he wasn’t the only one with moves. She leaned over, slowly, letting her hands run through his hair before they rested on his shoulders. Her mouth paused an inch from his, curved.
“No hands,” she said again.
A brush of lips, a slight scrape of teeth, a hint of tongue. She nibbled one corner of his mouth, then the other, let her breath come out on a long sigh.
She eased back, a breath away—held the moment suspended. Then her fingers dived into his hair, fisted, and she plunged.
Instant heat, enough to burn a man alive from the inside out. His hands tightened like vises on the edge of the bed, and his heart spiked straight into his throat.
&nb
sp; It was like being devoured, with merciless greed.
She took him over, pumped into his system like a fast-acting drug, one that scraped nerve endings raw rather than numbing them. He could feel . . . too much, and waited for his system to simply implode.
She nearly shoved him back, nearly gave in to the need plunging inside her and pushed him back on the bed. Something happened to her, every time she was with him, that jangled her brain, shocked her body, squeezed her heart. Even now, when she’d demanded and taken control, she was losing.
She felt him tremble, and her own shiver of response.
It took every ounce of will for her to end the kiss, to draw back.
He let out a ragged breath. She could see the pulse beating in his throat like a jackhammer. Yet he hadn’t touched her. That kind of control was something to respect, she thought. To admire, and to challenge.
She dabbed a fingertip at the corner of her mouth. “Let’s eat,” she said and strolled out of the room.
Point for point, she decided as she scooped up her coat, they were dead even.
Nine
Jonathan Q. Hardingknew how to get people to talk. It was a matter, first of all, of knowing that under the veil of dignity and discretion or reluctance, peoplewanted to talk. The seamier or more bizarre the subject, the more they wanted to gab about it.
It was a matter of persistence, patience, and occasionally palming over a folded twenty.
The story had its teeth in him every bit as much as he had his teeth in it. He started back at the cliff on Highway 1, where a desperate woman had faked her own death. It was a picturesque spot—sea, sky, rock. He imagined stark black-and-white photographs, the drama of them.
He was no longer thinking just a feature in a magazine. Harding had upped the bar to a big, juicy, best-selling book.
The seeds of that ambition had been planted during his first visit with Remington. It was odd, he thought, that it hadn’t occurred to him before. That he hadn’t realized how, well,hungry he was for the fame, for the fortune.
Others had done it, turned their expertise or their hobby into a book with a glossy cover and fast sales. Why couldn’t he?
Why was he wasting his time and his considerable skill on magazine bylines? Instead of him pursuing Larry King for an interview, this time around Larry King would come to him.
A voice he hadn’t known was inside him had awakened, and it continually whispered,Cash in.
That’s just what he intended to do.
Gathering tidbits of information, morsels of speculation and hard bites of fact from police records, he began to follow Helen Remington’s, now Nell Channing Todd’s, trail.
He had an interesting conversation with a man who claimed to have sold her the secondhand bike she’d used as her initial transportation, and after various questions asked at the bus station in Carmel confirmed the bike’s description.
Helen Remington had started her long journey pedaling a blue six-speed.
He imagined her riding up and down the hills. She’d been wearing a wig—some reports said red, some brown. He was going with the brunette. She wouldn’t have wanted to be flashy.
He spent more than two weeks tracking, backtracking, rapping into the wall of false leads until he hit his first jackpot in Dallas, where Nell Channing had rented a cheap motel room with kitchenette and taken a job as a short-order cook in a greasy spoon.
Her name was Lidamae—it said so on the name plate pinned to the candy-pink bodice of her uniform. She’d been waiting tables for thirty years and figured she’d poured enough cups of coffee to fill the whole of the damn Gulf of Mexico. She’d been married twice and had kicked both sons of bitches out on their lazy asses.
She had a cat named Snowball, a tenth-grade education, and a Texas twang so sharp you could’ve cut diamonds with it.
She didn’t mind getting off her dogs for a few minutes to talk to a reporter. And didn’t scruple to refuse the offer of a twenty for her time and trouble. Lidamae tucked the bill just where you’d suppose she would. Into the generous cup of her bra.
The sheer perfection of her, the overbleached hair teased into an enormous cascade, the blowzy body, the staggering blue of the eyeshadow that covered her lids almost to her eyebrows, had Harding wondering who might play her in the film based on his book.
“I told Tidas—Tidas, he runs the kitchen back there—I told Tidas there was something odd about that girl. Something spooky.”
“What do you mean by ‘spooky’?”
“A look in the eye. A rabbit look. Scared of her own shadow. Always watching the door, too. ’Course, I knew right off she was on the run.” With a satisfied nod, Lidamae took a pack of Camels out of her apron pocket. “Women, we sense these things about our own kind. My second husband tried to kick me around a time or two.” She dragged in smoke like breath. “Hah. It was his ass got kicked. A man raises his hand to me, he’d better have a good health policy, ’cause he’s gonna spend some quality time in a medical-type facility.”
“Did you ever ask her about it?”
“Wouldn’t say boo to a goose, that one.” Lidamae snorted, sending a dragon-stream of smoke out of her nostrils. “Kept to herself. Did her work, you can’t say different, and never was anything but polite. A lady, I said to Tidas, that Nell’s a lady. Got quality written all over her. Thin as a rail, her hair all whacked off any which way and dyed mongrel brown. Didn’t matter, quality shows.”
She took another drag, then wagged the cigarette. “I wasn’t the least bit surprised when I saw the news report. Recognized her right off, too, even though she was all polished up and blond in the picture they showed. I said to Suzanne—Suzanne and me were working the lunch shift—I said, ‘Suzanne, look at that on the TV set.’ That one there, over the counter,” she added for Harding’s benefit. “I said, ‘That’s little Nell who worked here a few weeks last year.’ Coulda knocked Suzanne over with a feather, but me, I wasn’t surprised.”