Beachcomber (23 page)

Without waiting for an answer, Luke opened the door, and a black streak shot through, tearing across Luke’s bare foot, flying past Gary, who fell back against the wall open-mouthed, and exploding into the living room.

“Ow! Shit! I forgot about the damned cat!”

Grabbing his injured foot, Luke hopped around in a tight little circle, foot stinging, swearing a blue streak, watching blood leak from a set of scratches that were an almost perfect match for the ones on his chest.

“Yowzers!” Gary was wide-eyed. “That’s no cat, that’s a frickin’ wild animal!”

Having suffered no physical injury, Gary was much quicker to recover and get with the program. Shooting Luke an accusing look, he ran after the cat. In the living room, the animal was bouncing off the walls. Luke could hear it tearing around to the accompaniment of
assorted crashing sounds, but he couldn’t see it. Didn’t want to see it. Still, a glimpse of Gary leaping through the kitchen wielding a dish towel in obvious pursuit of the cat made him smile despite his pain.

Yowl!

Scramble. Crash.

“Drop that steak, you—!”

The sounds of a raging battle made Luke’s smile widen. Still, he was a professional. Far be it from him not to provide backup to a partner in distress.

He limped into the living room, took a good look at the crazed cat leaping over the breakfast bar with a trout-sized steak firmly clutched between its jaws, shifted his gaze to Gary snapping the dish towel into the empty space where the cat had been, pulled back the patio door, and jumped out of the way.

He’d done what he could. Now it was up to fate.

“Shoo! Shoo!” Gary yelled, wielding the dish towel so that it made another mean-sounding pop.

The cat, no fool, tore out the door and vanished into the night, steak and all.

A better man would undoubtedly feel guilty about having allowed a poor defenseless animal to be driven out into the pouring rain.

Luke slammed the patio door shut, and gave Gary a low five.

“So what was up with the cat?” Gary demanded, still panting, fists on hips, dish towel hanging forgotten from one hand. A glance around the room revealed the cat’s path: crooked pictures, knocked over lamps, a broken glass.

“Long story,” Luke said, already heading back to his bedroom to doctor his foot and lose the soggy jeans before he froze to death. “Don’t ask.”

“I am asking,” Gary yelled. “It stole the steak I was marinating for breakfast tomorrow!”

That was the most passionate he’d ever heard Gary get. Luke glanced around at him with raised brows.

“Jesus, Gary,” he said with a dawning grin. “Chill, man. I’ll buy you another steak.”

“I don’t want another steak,” Gary said, clearly seething as he stormed after Luke. “I want to know about the freaking cat!”

“Check the monitor, why don’t you?” Luke recommended as he shut his bedroom door in Gary’s face. He was still grinning as he padded toward the bathroom. It had just occurred to him that he was smelling something a little off, something that had nothing to do with wet jeans and hair and musty rental cottages, when he happened to glance at his bed.

What he saw froze him in his tracks.

“That damned cat took a dump on my bed!”

“Luke, Luke!” Gary pounded on the bedroom door. “Luke, get out here
now!”

“What?” Contemplating the mess, Luke got sick to his stomach. He yanked open the door, glaring at Gary, in no mood to deal with hysterical rantings about a steak or a cat.

“I checked the monitor. She’s leaving. She’s packing up and leaving! Christy!” Gary said.

16

I
F THEY DIDN’T HAVE ROOM
at the Inn, then she was spending the night in the lobby. That was what Christy told herself as she rushed through the kitchen into the garage, flipped on the light, pressed the button on her key chain that popped the trunk, threw her small suitcase inside, slammed the lid and practically leaped behind the wheel. Locking the car doors, she turned on the motor before activating the garage door opener and to hell with the risks of being overcome by carbon monoxide, a danger that her mother was always preaching about in connection with starting cars in closed garages. She’d take her chances with carbon monoxide any day rather than leave herself vulnerable to attack by opening the garage door to the dangers that lurked in the night before she was ready to run over them.

She had to leave. She couldn’t stand it. There’d been no delivery today, so she didn’t have to hang around waiting for a one
A.M.
phone call, no matter what the guy on the phone had said. She didn’t have to stay awake all night jumping at the slightest sound, cringing at every shifting shadow. She didn’t have to deal
with the pounding of her heart, the racing of her pulse, the fear-induced knot in the pit of her stomach that just kept getting bigger and bigger with every minute that passed. Not tonight. She could spend tonight elsewhere, and come back in the morning. Nothing—not even the cottage, not even the situation she was in—seemed quite as terrifying in the bright light of day.

As late as an hour ago, when she’d been eating dinner with Luke and Gary, she’d thought she was going to be able to tough this thing out. But as Luke had walked her home and the night had started closing in around her, as the wind had risen and the waves had crashed and the prospect of being all alone in the dark had loomed ever closer, she’d realized that she couldn’t do it after all. Fear was a powerful motivator, as she had already learned. Fear was what had forced her to come down to Ocracoke in the first place. But the fear of what would happen if she didn’t do precisely as she was told had turned out not to be quite as acute as the fear of being dead before morning.

What it had boiled down to as she had turned her choices over in her mind was basically a case of
possibly die now
versus
possibly die later.
Later had won out.

Even the cottage itself was starting to creep her out. Christy couldn’t get over the weird feeling that someone was watching her even while she knew—hoped? prayed?—that she was alone inside.

It had occurred to her that maybe her attacker was hiding somewhere, in a closet, under a bed—Luke had not looked under the beds, she had realized after he had gone—behind the water heater, in a secret room that would open after she was asleep.

Not that she was planning to sleep. Nohow. No way. As she saw it, her best line of defense was the gun, and that only held true for as long as she was awake.

Even with the gun she couldn’t help but imagine various bad things that
could
happen, which had left her feeling scared to death. So scared that it had taken her all of about fifteen minutes after Luke had left to decide to head for the Silver Lake Inn, and never mind the fact that they’d said earlier that they’d be full up for the rest of the week. Cancellations happened, and, if not, there was always the bar until its two
A.M.
closing, and then the lobby. She might not sleep, but at least she would be safe. She’d thought about calling just to see if they did have an unexpected vacancy, but she figured she was harder to turn away in person than over the phone. Besides, whether they did or not didn’t really matter. No way was she spending the rest of the night alone. Lights and people were what she needed.

So she’d grabbed the bare essentials for the night and bolted.

Now rain pelted her car as she backed down the driveway, drumming on the roof with a brisk urgency that did not seem to have slacked off any from when the downpour had begun almost an hour before. Then she’d been soaked in a matter of seconds, and so had Luke. But thinking about just what they’d been doing when they’d gotten so completely wet brought humiliation with it, and so she did her best to push it out of her mind. Driving past Luke’s cottage, though, she couldn’t help but notice that the lights were still on. Under other circumstances, she would have pulled in there and
shamelessly begged a bed for the night. But after what had happened between them, she would rather, by far, opt for a chair in the lobby of the Silver Lake Inn.

Had she really said
I don’t want to be alone tonight
and kissed him like she was dying to take him to bed?

The short answer was, yes, she had. And she’d done it in cold blood, too, because she hadn’t wanted to spend the night in that cottage alone.

Had he really turned into a virtual sex machine, pushing her up against the fence and kissing her like a man who had kissed far more than his fair share of women and caressing her breast and pressing his leg up between her thighs until he had actually managed to turn her on?

Yep, that too.

And then, when, to her complete and utter astonishment, he had finally gotten her as hot as he seemed to be himself, gotten her to the state where she was wanting his hand in her pants and his mouth on her breasts and a bed somewhere close by in the worst way, had he said,
I’ve got to go,
and, unbelievably, walked out on her because, he’d claimed, he had an early morning fishing trip scheduled with his pal Gary?

Oh yeah. There was no getting around that.

Christy didn’t know precisely what had happened to change his mind between those first blistering minutes on the patio and that last freezing brush-off, but the end result she clearly recognized: she’d propositioned the guy, and he had said no.

Remembering, the discomfort factor was intense.

Luckily—or not—she had more important things to
focus on at the moment than the recent apparent breakdown in her sex appeal.

Like staying alive.

There was a car behind her as she pulled out onto Silver Lake Road. She caught a glimpse of its headlights in the rearview mirror, and frowned. Not that there was any reason why there shouldn’t be another car on the road, of course. It was getting on toward midnight, which was late for the local crowd, and it was pouring down rain, which should tend to discourage most of the tourists from getting out and about, but it was Monday and there were a few things open still, certainly at least one convenience store that she knew of, the bar at the Silver Lake Inn, the medical clinic, the marina …

She glanced in the rearview mirror again. All she could see of the car were its headlights, but that was enough to tell her that it was a good distance behind her, not close at all. There was absolutely no reason why it should make her nervous—but it did.

The impression she had that it was following her was probably nothing more than her usual rampant paranoia raising its nervous head one more time.

She hoped. No, she prayed.

A quick glance reassured her that she had easy access to her two-pronged self-defense system: the gun and her cell phone. Both were in her purse, along with a new can of Mace and, just for backup, an air horn with enough decibels to send any assailant running with his hands clapped over his ears at the touch of a button. Her purse was in the passenger seat. All she
had to do was grab it, unzip the top, plunge her hand in, and she was basically a one-woman SWAT team.

Of course, the last time she had tried 911, the results had not been so good. She had since learned that there was an excellent reason for that: Ocracoke didn’t have 911 service. The next time she needed help, she was calling, not stocky-bodied Sheriff Schultz, but the fire department. A self-defense instructor in a class she’d taken once had told his students always to yell
fire
instead of help if they were being attacked; people pay attention to that because a fire might affect them. The technique had worked well once, and she was counting on it to work again. So much so that she now had the fire department’s number on speed dial.

So, see, she had no need to worry about the headlights that she could still see in her rearview mirror. Whatever happened, she was covered. Not that she expected anything would. She was in her car, driving straight to the hotel, where she was planning to park beneath the porte cochere in front of the entrance and run right in to the well-lit, well-manned lobby.

As she drove past the harbor with its semicircle of glowing halogen lights, it occurred to her that she might be able to see the other vehicle as it passed through the illuminated area.

She almost hit a telephone pole trying, and struck out to boot. It was too dark, and it was raining too hard, for her to see anything besides the headlights.

From Silver Lake Road she turned onto Cemetery Road, named for the British Cemetery that lay at its western tip and contained the remains of seamen from
HMS
Bedfordshire,
which was sunk by a German torpedo off the coast of Hatteras during World War II. During the day, this was one of the island’s premier tourist attractions. So late on a rainy Monday, it was closed and the road was deserted. The Inn was located almost directly across from the cemetery, so she didn’t have much farther to go, Christy comforted herself as she passed an RV park on the left and a condo development on the right and then plunged into the utter darkness of the piney woods that ran along either side of this stretch of road. Except for the sound of the rain and the swish of the windshield wipers, it was utterly quiet in the car. She had not realized how little developed this part of the road was, but then, she’d never driven along it in the dead of night before. There was nothing: no storefronts, no service stations, no houses …