Dead By Dusk (11 page)

“Yeah, like you're a gopher!” Suzette said.

“Hey, I learned that early. In any form of live theater, you do whatever it takes. Steph, if you're heading to the cottage, I'll walk you over,” he said.

Suzette flashed Stephanie a glance with a sly, secret smile, convinced that whatever had been going on between them still was.

“Hey, you guys, stick close with our little Franco-American hottie, huh?” Stephanie teased the others.

“We won't leave her for a second,” Drew assured her, a little too solemnly.

“What if I find the love of my life?” Suzette demanded.

“Too bad. He'll have to wait,” Doug said.

“What if you two find the loves of your lives?” Suzette asked.

“Wow. Hmm. We'll have to think about that one,” Drew said, laughing. “Oh, not to worry. The chances of us both getting lucky in a small town like this are so far out of the spectrum! And Clay will be around, right?”

“I'll be around,” Clay said. “Speaking of which, one of us should have walked Lena to her little place. I think I'll go check on her first.”

“Steph and I will come with you,” Grant said.

“We will?” Stephanie said, irritated just because he had answered for her.

He arched a brow at her, and she was further annoyed to realize that she had sounded sharp.

“Sorry, just thought I might volunteer on my own,” she murmured.

“Maybe we should come, too,” Drew said.

“No, you guys go on out and have a good time,” Clay advised. “I think the three of us will be force enough.”

The others started out the front and Stephanie, Clay, and Grant rose, heading out the back to the beach. The night was another balmy, beautiful sight.

“Full moon in less than a week,” Clay noted.

They could hear the waves rushing in, and it seemed that a very gentle light, with just the touch of a red-gold glow, bathed the area.

“This stretch of Italy is simply gorgeous,” Stephanie murmured. Their conversation seemed absurdly casual.

“That one is Lena's, just there—I think,” Grant said.

“How do you know?” Stephanie asked him.

He arched a brow at her and again pointed. “Because that one is mine, over there. When I checked in, Giovanni showed me the place, and pointed out the cottages where I could find all of you.”

“Ah,” she murmured, feeling a little rebuffed. She hadn't been accusing him of anything. Had she?

Clay walked ahead of them, heading for Lena's door. He knocked on it firmly. They waited, and nothing happened.

“There's a buzzer,” Grant pointed out.

Clay punched the little doorbell.

This time, they heard footsteps on the stairs.

Then, Lena opened the door.

It appeared that she had hastily thrown a terry robe over a far more revealing night garment in some kind of turquoise silk and gauze. Her hair was definitely mussed, and she appeared flushed and nervous.

She stared at the three of them. “Yes?”

“We were just checking to see that you got back okay,” Grant said.

She sighed. “I'm fine. Just fine. As you can see.”

“Right,” Clay murmured. Stephanie noted that he was looking at her little cottage strangely, as if he were trying to
sense
whether everything was really all right or not.

“I'm okay, honest!” Lena said. “I'm tired. I was actually in bed.”

“So, you're not inviting us in, huh?” Clay said lightly.

“No, no, no—you may definitely not come in! I'm going back to bed. I'm sorry—how rude. Thank you all for checking on me. But please, go away. Hey, my director is here. And I intend to do good work for her in the morning, so . . .”

“We're out of here, then,” Grant said. “Good night.”

“Good night. And really. Thank you all for caring,” Lena said.

They turned and started to walk away. Clay Barton paused on the path, looking back.

“What is it? What's wrong?” Grant demanded.

“She swore she was fine,” Clay murmured.

“And it definitely looked as if we dragged her out of bed,” Stephanie commented.

“Right,” Clay said. “Well.” He looked from Grant to Stephanie and offered a wry grimace. “I guess I'm on my way out, then. See you all tomorrow.”

He turned and left them. They watched him until he disappeared back into the resort, then turned toward Stephanie's cottage.

At the door, Stephanie inserted her key, then turned back to Grant. “Well, I'm here. Safe and sound. Thanks.”

He nodded. “Mind if I come in and see it?”

She hesitated. “Look, Grant, we're managing to do fairly well on a professional level. And it's not as if I don't have feelings for you—you know that I do. But—”

“Steph, I didn't ask to sleep with you. I just want to make sure . . . that the place is safe. Oh, come on, Stephanie, really. Tell me that you haven't . . .
felt
strange things here.”

“Wow, that's fanciful,” she murmured. “Not at all like you. Or maybe completely like you, that's just it—I don't really know you at all anymore.”

“You've always known me.”

“Right,” she murmured. “So well that in the middle of a highly intimate and even climactic moment, you called out another woman's name.”

He waved a hand in the air. “Yes, so you said.”

“And you don't believe me?”

“I'm not saying that you're lying. I just don't know why—I have never met anyone named Valeria.”

“I don't think you were even really there,” Stephanie said, searching his eyes.

“If it was such a cataclysmic moment, I had to have been there.”

Physically, yes. Leading her to believe that he was the very air she breathed. In the sense that he could touch and tease and meld, and she could feel as if they were one . . .

Except, in a very strange way, part of him hadn't been with her!

“That's just it. Oh, never mind. There's something strange going on
inside
of you, Grant.”

“There's something strange going on
here
,” he insisted. He took her by the shoulders. “Stephanie, I swear I knew nothing about Reggie having a place here when I signed up as a volunteer on the dig. And you didn't know I was coming here when you accepted Reggie's offer. Don't you think it's strange to begin with?”

Oddly, before she answered, she thought how she would always be in love with his hands. They had such length, his fingers tapered. They were tanned, and his palms and fingertips were slightly rough because he'd dig into construction work on a set just as quickly as he'd step out on stage himself, when need be. They were incredible hands when they moved against flesh; they could caress like a bare breeze, and hold someone with enough power and strength so that it seemed that nothing in the world could interfere . . .

Maybe something not really of this world?

It was just the words he was saying. Creating fantasy in her own heart.

“Grant, there are such things as wild coincidences that do happen,” she said. But his eyes were filled with tension, and she felt it in his fingertips as well. He really wasn't trying to sleep with her, she thought dryly, and wondered if she should feel insulted.

Especially after her dreams . . .

“Come in. Walk around if you want. There's nothing unusual in the cottage, I assure you. It's a pretty place, brand new, delightfully designed.”

She walked in and turned back. “Come in.”

He did so. He wandered around the downstairs, then glanced at her, arching a brow as he looked at the steps up to her bedroom area. “May I?”

“Go ahead.”

She waited on the ground floor. A few minutes later he came back down. “The balcony is glorious, the breeze is great. I locked the windows out to the balcony.”

“I thought that I locked them.”

“Maybe the maid opened them,” Grant said.

“Probably. I mean, normally, a person would love to sleep with the ocean breeze and the stars shining just beyond,” Stephanie said dryly.

“Keep them locked.”

“I told you—I do lock them,” she said. She shook her head. “Grant—”

“Stephanie, believe me, there's something going on.”

She felt a trickling of unease, as if she knew that he was right, but also knew that she was refusing to accept it.

“Grant, maybe that poor girl was kidnapped or killed. But if so . . . surely the police will find the man who did it.”

“Just swear to me that you will keep yourself locked in at night, all right?” he asked her. “I'm going to leave—I'm not doing this to force you into anything. But if you need me . . . well, I showed you where my cottage is, right? And there's a phone, and my cell works here—it's a Chicago number, but it works here.”

“Mine is European, too,” she murmured. “Grant, if I'm afraid in any way, I'll call you, I swear.”

“Right,” he murmured. He didn't sound satisfied.

“Grant, what more can I really say right now?” she asked, a little desperately. It would be so easy to let him stay. To let all her fantastically sexual dreams find release in the real thing. Except that she had been in love with him. She'd wanted a life, forever and ever, children, a house . . .

But there was something seriously, seriously wrong.

Even if she was still in love with him.

And even if she suddenly wanted, more than anything, for him to just grab her, run with her up to the bedroom, and make all the dreams real . . .

No.

“I'm just afraid that . . .”

“That what?” She swallowed hard and forced herself to speak normally.

“I'm afraid you may not have time to be afraid,” he said softly.

“Grant, that's it. Good night. Thank you for the concern, and good night.”

He nodded.

Tall, broad-shouldered, built like steel, he turned and left her, just as she had asked.

And she wondered if she wasn't the biggest fool in the entire world.

“Yes, oh, God, yes!”

Lena was ever so slightly embarrassed, and yet in the flush of such physical excitement that she barely gave her words a passing thought.
So what if they'd been used in every schlocky porn film since the beginning of moviemaking!

“Lord, yes, please!”

Good heavens, the man was an animal!

She'd never been so titillated, and in her life, she'd never been tempted before to fall so quickly into the arms of a near-stranger. And so boldly. No real talk, no pretense of a sudden, dying devotion or affection, just
sex.

A look at one another, a knowing . . . clothing strewn in a matter of seconds. Just an initial kiss as the whole getting-to-know-you-foreplay thing, and then sex—raw, base, first on the table, then on the floor. He was rough, but it didn't matter, because the slide of his teeth and force of his mouth against her were the most erotic things she'd felt in all her life. She'd knelt, she'd stood, she'd parted her legs in a way she'd never even imagined before. He played at her thighs, between them, coerced her into curling her fingers around him, returning every wet intimacy . . .

And then . . .

He was like a jackrabbit. Like the wind.

It might not be the romantic love affair she had thought she wanted, but . . .

“Yes, yes, do it, do it.”

He did.

She thought she was going to die. She was wet as a leaky faucet. Drenched inside and out, shaking, flying, climbing . . . climaxing like a madwoman.

And he just laughed.

“There's more, baby, so much more!” he whispered.

No. There couldn't be. She couldn't take it. She felt drained and exhausted, sucked dry. A weary smile played at her lips.

“Wow.”

He was going to stay with her, she thought. If just for a while.

Yet suddenly, abruptly, he jumped up. As if he had heard something, or someone.

Almost as if . . . someone was coming. Well, they had done so before. But that had just been when she'd been waiting, and, well, of course he'd known—and waited himself. So clever.

Everyone would know that she was fine. For the life of her, she wouldn't open the door now.

“What's the matter?” she whispered. She couldn't really speak.

He didn't reply. She realized vaguely that he wasn't even there anymore, but it didn't matter. She couldn't move. Couldn't have done it again. She closed her eyes, feeling the overpowering desire to sleep, to rest . . .

No, no . . . she couldn't move now.

But all she wanted in the whole wide world was for him to come again.

Her eyes . . .

She couldn't keep them open.