Freefall (19 page)

"Shut up!" Titania's fork paused on the way to her mouth. "You and Zachariah Tremayne spent the night together?"

"Why don't you let me call the
Trumpet
?" Sabrina said dryly. "Then you can issue a press release. Save everyone in this restaurant from having to spread the word one person at a time."

Declaring that eating at Wisteria was too much like work, Titania had insisted they go to the Palmetto Golf and Tennis Club to celebrate their collaboration. The moment the Keira Knightley-look-alike hostess led them to the umbrella-topped table, Sabrina realized exactly how long it had been since she'd had a girl lunch.

And how badly she needed one. Even though the first part of the conversation dwelt on last night's possible break-in, which wasn't exactly a fun topic.

"Besides, we didn't exactly spend the night together." She began searching through her seafood salad for elusive lobster. "I was in my bedroom. And he stayed downstairs."

"Now there's a waste." Titania flashed a flirtatious smile toward the quartet of men at a nearby table who'd been trying to catch her eye since they'd come off the emerald green golf course. Sabrina knew she didn't mean anything by it; her friend had, by her own account, been a flirt in the cradle. "Are you telling me you weren't even the slightest bit tempted to do a little tepee creeping?"

"More than a little."

Sabrina took a sip of the crisp, straw-colored house wine and made a mental note to ask the waiter the label. It would be nice to stock for those who wanted something a little stronger than tea with their finger sandwiches and petits fours.

"Especially after that kiss."

They could also add it to the wine list available for those wedding receptions Lucie had planned.

"Kiss?" The golfers were immediately forgotten. Titania leaned across the table. "What kiss?" she hissed, remembering Sabrina's warning to keep the private conversation exactly that.
Private
.

She grinned. Yes, this lunch had been a perfect idea. She only wished she'd been the one to think of it. "The make-your-knees-weak-and-your-head-spin kiss we shared after he drove me home from dinner at Harlan and Lillian's."

Titania leaned back in the white wicker chair, twirled her own glass of Sauvignon Blanc, and gave Sabrina a long, deep look. "As soon as Nate told me about what happened last night, which is, by the way, really creepy, I wanted to call you but he said to wait until he knew something.

"Then, when he got back to the house, he assured me you were okay and going back to bed. So I decided, since we were having lunch, it could wait. But he didn't mention a single word about Zach staying at the house. Or that you were in danger."

"I honestly don't think I was." Sabrina stabbed a bay shrimp and tried not to think about what Nate had said about the laptop and camera not having been stolen.

"So, I guess finding that your house had been broken into was what derailed the love train?"

"No." Sabrina shifted her gaze to the court, where a hunky tennis pro was hitting balls to an overweight fiftysomething guy who looked on the verge of keeling over as he huffed and puffed after them. "That happened before we went into the house. I was more than willing, but Zach turned me down."

"No way." Titania's doe brown eyes widened.

"Way." Sabrina sighed. "It was probably just as well, since it would just be one more complication I don't want to deal with."

"Like you and the hottie SEAL working together with all that unsatiated lust zapping around the two of you isn't going to be a complication?"

"Good point." And one she'd been thinking about all morning.

"Well, then, there's obviously only one thing to do."

"What's that?"

Titania crossed her long, dark legs, causing one of the men—blindingly decked out in green knickers covered with pink flamingos and a fuchsia surfboard aloha shirt—to choke on his beer.

"You'll have to seduce him."

Before Sabrina could respond to that suggestion, Titania said, "Oh, shit. Don't turn around."

"All right." Feigning casualness, Sabrina plucked a roll from the basket between them. "Who is it?"

"Remember Misty Mannington?"

"Oh, please, not Misty the Man-eater." Sabrina needed an encounter with her childhood nemesis like she needed a yeast infection.

"In the flesh." Titania's carmine-tinted lips widened in a bright, patently false smile. "And so much of it is showing."

"Well, if it isn't Lucie's jet-setting New York granddaughter." The exaggerated Southern drawl ripped at Sabrina's last nerve like razor wire. "Home from the Continent."

Sabrina exchanged a look with Titania. Did anyone call Europe the Continent anymore?

She looked up at the woman wearing a white halter top that barely contained size double-D breasts that had definitely been plumped up from the Cs she'd flashed at all the boys back in high school, a flirty white skirt that strained across her hips, and snowy tennis shoes with those little half socks that have balls on the back.

Revealing that Misty knew how to accessorize with the best of them, the fuzzy little balls were exactly the same bubblegum pink color as the gloss she'd smeared over her collagen-enhanced, bee-stung lips.

"Hello, Misty. How are you?" Sabrina inquired neutrally.

"Oh, as fine as fine can be."

A diamond the size of Alaska glittered like a glacier on her right hand as she pushed her rhinestone-studded Chanel sunglasses onto the top of her artfully tousled and rigidly sprayed blond hair. More diamonds, set off by pink tourmalines, sparkled in a trio of tennis bracelets.

"But the important question, Sabrina, dear, is how are
you
?"

Placing a hand tipped in acrylic nails that echoed her lip gloss on Sabrina's shoulder, she leaned down to air-kiss cheeks, nearly smothering Sabrina in a musky cloud of Obsession.

"I was so shocked to hear about that terrible thing that happened to you. We were all so relieved that you survived, bless your heart."

Sabrina may not have been born and bred in the bosom of the Confederacy, but she
had
spent all those summers on Swann Island, which was more than enough time to understand the underlying meaning of that all-encompassing phrase.

Truth be told, a well-bred Southern belle could say any ugly thing at all, such as "Why, that Sally Mae would spread her legs for the entire front line of the USC Gamecock football team, but given that her family's always been poor white trash, she can't help being a slut." so long as she made sure to tack on "bless her heart." Or, equally as effective, "poor thing."

"Your concern is so sweet, Misty," Titania replied.

"And much appreciated," Sabrina said.

"Well, it's a relief you survived. I swear, if I'd been blown up, then buried alive, I'd still be eating Valium like M&M's. After all you've been through, aren't you nervous about staying out there at that big old empty house by yourself?"

"Not at all." No way was Sabrina going to reveal she hadn't been alone.

"Aren't you the bravest thing? Why, I'd be as nervous as a cat on that hot tin roof. I suppose you'll be going back to work soon?" Her voice went up a bit on the end of the statement, turning it into a question.

"Actually, I'm considering staying on the island."

"Really?" An arch blond brow lifted. Lips pursed. "Well, aren't you just full of surprises?"

Misty stepped back and looked Sabrina over with the sharp, appraising gaze of a female checking out any possible competition.

"You're certainly not looking any the worse for wear," she announced. "Considering. And gracious, it must be lovely to be skinny enough to wear white pants."

She ran her hands over lush hips that used to have boys walking into walls when she'd sashay by in her perky little cheerleader skirt. "Why, with all the weight I put on after having my darling twin baby girls, if I so much as tried to squeeze into an outfit like that, my behind would look like two cats in a gunnysack fighting to get out."

Her blue eyes glinted like steel sabers in the bright noon sun as they took another swift scan. "While you, on the other hand, I swear, are every bit as skinny as you were back in middle school." Her magnolia tone was laced with delicious female malice. "How ever did you manage such a feat, living over there in the land of perpetual pasta?"

"I guess I got lucky and inherited Lucie's metabolism."

"And didn't Lucie Somersett always have energy? I swear, she was always racing here and there, never stopping to take so much as a breath. Which is, I suppose, how she got so overextended."

"I hadn't realized she had," Sabrina said evenly.

"Well, now, I wouldn't want to talk ill of the dead," Misty began in a conspiratorial tone as she sat down at the table without waiting for an invitation that neither Sabrina nor Titania would have ever in this lifetime extended.

"Then don't," Titania suggested.

"Well, I wasn't going to be ugly." Pink Angelina Jolie lips pouted. "It's just that I was surprised when she failed to write up my wedding in her column in the
Trumpet
."

"Perhaps she thought she'd given you enough ink with the first two weddings," Titania suggested sweetly. "And given that number three didn't make it to the first anniversary, I'd say she saved you some embarrassment."

"You needn't be snide, Titania Davis." Misty paused for a lethal moment. "Just because Nate Spencer hasn't seen fit to make an honest woman of you is no reason for you to be jealous of those of us who prefer a more traditional, committed relationship."

She looked up, scanned the terrace. "Oh, there's my party." She waggled bubblegum fingertips at Brad Sumner, who was seated at a table across the terrace. "Well, it was lovely seeing you again, Sabrina, dear."

Her smile was as false as her breasts. "You know, I belong to a book club that meets once a month. We'd absolutely be tickled to have you join us. If you do decide to stay on the island for a while."

"Thanks for the invitation. I'll give it some thought," Sabrina lied. She'd rather go skinny-dipping with sharks than spend an evening with Misty the Man-eater Mannington. "What are you reading?"

"Reading?" Her expression turned as vacuous as Sabrina remembered her mind to be.

"Your book club."

"Oh." She smiled. "That." She tilted her head as if considering the matter. "I'm not sure. Oprah hasn't announced the title yet."

This time she directed her finger waggling to Sabrina, openly ignoring Titania. "Well, toodle-oo. I'm in the phone book; give me a jingle and we'll set something up."

"Will do," Sabrina said. As soon as the devil strapped on a pair of figure skates and began doing triple axels in hell.

Misty had begun weaving her way through the crush of tables, when Titania called out to her, causing her to turn back.

"What?" she asked on an edge of impatience.

"I meant to tell you, I really like what you've done with your hair."

"Really?" She lifted a hand toward the mass of lacquered blond waves.

"Absolutely." Titania's grin could have lit up Swann Island for a month of Sundays. "If I were you, I wouldn't pay any attention to all those mean-spirited gossips who say it makes you look as if you belong leaning against a lamppost and propositioning sailors on the Somersett waterfront."

Color even brighter than her nails flooded into Misty's cheeks. Her mouth moved, but nothing came out.

"If she dies of apoplexy right here on the spot, I sure as hell hope the fact that you're sleeping with the sheriff will keep you out of the slammer," Sabrina murmured.

"It'd be worth going to jail for," Titania returned as Misty spun back around, taking out a tray of mojitos a T-shirted hunk of a waiter was carrying from the bar.

Radiating satisfaction as the horrified young man began madly dabbing at Misty's Playmate breasts with a handful of cocktail napkins, Titania took nearly as big a bite out of her sandwich as she'd taken from Misty's hide.

"Make an honest woman of me, my ass," she muttered around a mouth of crab cake. "As for a committed relationship, any man insane enough to get anywhere near that bitch barracuda belongs in a rubber room at Somersett Sanitarium. And did you see that tan? It's gotta be a spray job."

"If it isn't, she's going to look like a raisin by the time she's forty. But I'm more interested in what she's doing with Brad Sumner."

"I'd say that's more than a little obvious," Titania said. "Given her history of collecting alimony the way my eight-year-old goddaughter collects American Girl dolls, and from that bait of an outfit she's poured herself into, I'd guess she's casting around for husband number four."

"But Brad's married."

"That's never seemed to stop him from playing around. Don't forget, he was screwing wife number two while married to the first one. And, as a matter of fact, Cleo told me he hit on her when she went to his office to sign the papers to buy her house. And again last month, when he brought his wife into the ER after she'd eaten some bad shellfish. Can you believe a man coming on to another woman while his wife is puking her guts out?"

"That is low." Sabrina thought back to the vibes she'd gotten from him. "But I guess I'm not surprised, in his case." Something occurred to her. "I wonder if Nate knows?"

"I told him. Not because I think Sumner is the one who killed Cleo—I mean, let's face it, taking a life has got to require some kind of nerve, which Brad boy doesn't have—but it seemed like evidence. Not that it'd hold up in a court of law, since I believe it'd be hearsay, but still…"