Sex & Sensibility (15 page)

“Right about what?” Jay walked around the desk and took the sweater out of Mandy’s hands. He looked it up and down as if there were a message pinned inside it. “Dammit, you two, give me some answers, here!”

“I picked it up the weekend before I came down here,” Tessa said in a tone of soft amazement. “And the very first time I put it on, I saw Christina tied up on the bed. That was what made me call you guys.”

“So all this time—” Mandy began, and Tessa nodded.

“Yup. All this time I’ve had a connection to her in my suitcase and didn’t even know it. I thought the visions were completely random. But they weren’t. I see her every time I put on the sweater.”

“The point is, what are we going to do with it?” Jay snapped. “If that really is her sweater, I want you in it 24/7, picking up whatever there is to pick up. Meanwhile, Griffin, why are you still here? Why aren’t you warming up the truck so we can go to Santa Rita?”

“Jay, I don’t think you should go.” Mandy laid a restraining hand on her husband’s arm.

“Why the hell not? This is my daughter we’re talking about.”

“If she is there, do you think she’s going to come out and talk to you when you’re like this? I don’t think so.”

Bless Mandy. The thought of a half hour cooped up in a truck with a simmering volcano like Jay Singleton would have been torture.

“Let me go. I’m not exactly as threatening as you are.” Mandy smiled at Jay, and the angry color started to recede from his face.

“Fine. Griffin will go with you.”

“Um, Mandy, with all due respect, I think it should be me,” Tessa said. “If I have the sweater on and circumstances change, chances are better that I might be able to pick up on it. Plus if she sees someone who doesn’t have parental connections in her mind, she might be more inclined to listen to us.”

Jay chewed his lip and glanced from one woman to the other. Two women who, in Griffin’s mind, shared nothing but a similar hair color and an amazing intellect that seemed to click into high gear when they were together. Jay should be damned grateful they were batting for his side. But that didn’t mean he wanted to be cooped up in that truck with Tessa, either. Even Jay by himself would be preferable to that.

Don’t listen to her.
He focused on the middle of Jay’s forehead and sent a silent command.
Mandy should go. Mandy. Mandy.

“All right. Griffin and Tessa,” Jay finally said, and Griffin felt his gut sink. “But I want to be updated the minute you see her.”

“Sure.”

Shit.

“S
O
,
WHERE’S THE BEACH HOUSE
?” Tessa tossed her purse onto the seat and climbed into the truck. She’d barely restrained herself from doing the happy dance in Jay’s office when he’d agreed with her about who was going on this little jaunt. A couple of hours alone with Griffin should turn him around; after all, a guy could only run for so long before he came back to where he started.

“At the beach.” He wheeled the truck out onto the highway with a little more weight on the accelerator than was strictly necessary, given the lack of traffic.

Okay. So he was going to do this the hard way.

“At the low-rent end, where the canneries are, or at the high-rent end, where you can buy a mailbox and maybe a shrub for half a million?”

“What do you think?”

Tessa had always thought sex was supposed to make you happy and relaxed. Maybe someone should tell that to Mr. Grumpy, here. Or maybe he was still feeling embarrassed for having overlooked an obvious love nest while he was chasing around after bouncers, hairdressers and executives’ houses.

“Well, that depends.” She kept her tone light and oblivious. “If the house was in the prenup and Mandy owned it before she married Jay, then I would say it would be in the
middle, maybe with a view of the cannery end but not actually there. If they bought it after the wedding, then of course it would be at the other end. Possibly with a couple of acres and maybe a yacht parked at the bottom of the garden.”

“Yachts are moored. And she owned it before she met him.”

“Aha. Why doesn’t she have it rented? How come it’s standing empty, waiting for teenaged girls to use it for a love nest?”

Griffin slanted a glance at her, then returned his gaze to the highway. “Do the Singletons strike you as the type to need the rental income?”

“They strike me as the type to leave no method of making money unturned.”

He huffed a short breath that Tessa assumed was the hardboiled guy’s way of indicating laughter. Geesh. She’d thought they were
so
past this. She wanted back the guy who fantasized about what her breasts looked like.

Hmm.

She’d changed out of her purple concert T-shirt before they left and, obeying orders, had pulled on Christina’s blue sweater. But, with a shameless ulterior motive, she’d replaced the T-shirt with a bra that was nearly sheer and a sleeveless gauze top that not only turned transparent in the right light, but fastened with three strategically placed bows down the front instead of buttons. It made her look like a bad girl in virgin’s clothing. She’d caught a client once leaning sideways, trying to see skin between the bows. Maybe it would have the same effect on Griffin.

She pulled the sweater off over her head and straightened her spine. A girl had to be aware of good posture at all times. Plus it really made the bows pop.

“We should talk about what we’ll say to Chris—” Griffin glanced at her and stopped, his mouth hanging open on the forgotten word.

“Look out!” Tessa grabbed the wheel. The truck swerved toward the shoulder, Griffin grabbed it back and they sailed the other way, into the fast lane. He swore and corrected, settling into the middle of the right lane once more.

The corners of Tessa’s lips twitched.
Tessa one. Griffin zero
. “You were saying?” she asked sweetly.

His struggle to get the defensive shields back up was practically visible. “I was saying that we need to figure out how we’re going to convince Christina to come home.”

“I don’t think we should.”

He stared at her, then jerked his gaze back to the road as if it wasn’t safe to look at her. Which, at the moment, it probably wasn’t.

“What are you talking about? That’s what we’re being paid for.”

She turned toward him in the seat, offering him a frontal view of the bows, and bit her lip, trying not to smile when he kept his gaze resolutely on the highway ahead. It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate his desire to avoid a traffic accident. She just hoped his peripheral vision was good.

“She’s eighteen, Griffin. She’s making choices on her own. Maybe not the greatest ones, but she’s in love. Her brain is malfunctioning.”

“Yeah, no kidding.”

She hadn’t meant it seriously, but it seemed he was determined to consider any form of attraction a malfunction. Her task today was clear.

“I think we should just let her know that Jay and Mandy are deeply concerned and would appreciate a phone
call. If she’s in no physical danger, we should leave it at that. Strong-arm tactics are just going to alienate her and dump us in her dad’s camp, if we’re not there already.”

“I disagree. Jay sent me up here to bring her home, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

“Are you going to bind and gag the poor girl?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

“Ooh,” she said, her tone soft and teasing. “How exciting. Do you carry cuffs?”

Another glare flashed across the width of the cab like lightning. “I’m being serious. Stop turning everything into a joke.”

“I don’t consider cuffs a joke. Not at all.”

“Stop it. We agreed. This is inappropriate.”

They turned off the highway and took the avenue to the beach, which was shaded by tall palms that leaned over the road. All very picturesque, but she’d bet the town council worried about their tendency to send heavy fronds crashing down on unwary passersby.

“You might have agreed, but I didn’t. Besides, how could it be inappropriate after last night?” she asked.

“Last night is not going to happen again.”

En garde. Don’t be too sure about that
. “That would be a shame. I haven’t had an orgasm like that in months. Somehow it’s just not the same by myself.”

His eyes widened a little at what she suspected he was seeing in his mind’s eye. She bit her lip so she wouldn’t grin.

“Okay,” he said at last, “I have to admit, I haven’t, either. But that doesn’t make it right.”

The King of Swords was good. Parry and riposte.

“It felt right,” she suggested.

“Fortunately I don’t base my definition of right on how it feels.”

“Why not? When it comes to sex, it’s a pretty good indicator.”

“Not for me.”

“What do you mean?”

But he flipped on his turn signal and turned onto one of the streets fronting the beach. “Here we are.”

It was impossible to spar with someone who put up his sword and refused to play. But that was okay. She had all day for round two.

Mandy’s beach house was not the ramshackle place that Tessa had imagined. A riot of dry-climate plants and shrubs crowded the path that led around to the front, facing the beach, and a couple of bushy dwarf cedars sheltered the door. The house was sided in scented redwood that had aged gracefully to silver by the action of wind and spray, and its trim was painted white. Above her, a dozen windows precisely shaped to form a huge trapezoid of light faced the ocean and made the view part of the living space.

Tessa couldn’t even imagine the kind of rent a place like this would bring. Five grand a month?

The door was painted white, too. Griffin lifted a brass knocker shaped like an arched fish tail and let it fall a couple of times.

“No one’s there,” Tessa said. The place was empty, with none of the usual waves and currents of life that she could sense when there were people about.

“We’ll wait a second. The bedrooms are in the back.”

“There’s no point. No one is here. Did you bring a key?”

But of course he had to go into cop mode and wait for the evidence of continuing silence to tell him there was no one home. She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. He pulled
a key out of his pocket and let them both in, then tapped a number into the pad set on the wall inside the door to disable the alarm.

And there they were in the living room of her vision, complete with rubber plant and striped cushions on the couch in front of the window. A frieze of Greek keys had been painted on the walls just below the ceiling. She’d missed that in her vision, she supposed. She wandered into the kitchen, expecting to find coffee grounds in the coffeemaker, spoons in the sink, maybe a wadded-up paper napkin or two, but there was nothing.

She wasn’t much of a cook, but even she could tell that Mandy had poured a whole bunch of money into this custom kitchen. The sinks were color-coordinated with the granite counters, and a huge copper oven hood covered the cooktop. Implements and a string of what Tessa hoped was fake garlic hung from a rack suspended from the ceiling. The place was so clean it practically squeaked.

Either the runaways were excellent housekeepers or her vision of them in the room behind her had been of a time other than last night.

She hoped she was wrong.

She followed Griffin down the hallway with its cool floors—maple, not washed pine—to the bedrooms. Man, what she wouldn’t give to live in a place like this. Mandy had fabulous taste. The bedrooms were like something out of a Greek idyll, all blue and white with warm touches of peach and yellow in pillows and chairs. Two smaller bedrooms contained queen-size beds and pine dressers, and the friezes painted on the walls were of shells and seaweed. Then Griffin stopped in the doorway of the master bedroom.

A mermaid flipped her tail at them from a huge mural
painted on the wall behind the bed. Fish and kelp surrounded her in a joyous circle, and shells and starfish formed a garland at the bottom.

“Wow,” Tessa said. “Who did that?”

“Mandy. There’s one similar in her and Jay’s bedroom. Some Greek goddess whose name I forget.”

“Aphrodite?” Tessa guessed aloud. “Think Jay gets the hint?”

“He won’t let her paint anywhere else, but I think she’s getting ready to do something in the kitchen. He never goes in there, and she’s been staring at the walls a lot lately.”

Tessa had a feeling that Mandy would find a lot in common with Gaia Tillman, her footloose artist mother. And Jay was obviously pulling his control tactics again, the big philistine. Mandy should be able to paint wherever she pleased.

Of course, the mural over the bed brought one’s attention to the bed, with its vast expanse of warm yellow coverlet on which squares of sunlight fell through the mosaic of shaped windows.

Griffin’s attention fell on it at the same time.

Round two, she thought gleefully. Let the games begin.

Pretending to be searching for clues or whatever detectives did, she moved into the bedroom and made a show of looking into the empty walk-in closet.

“It doesn’t look as if anyone has been here in a while,” she said helpfully.

“I’m going to check around downstairs,” Griffin said, and took a step back, away from the door.

“Oh, wait, what’s this?” Deliberately, she moved into the path of the sunlight in front of the windows and gave him her body’s profile under the pretext of checking the empty wastebasket.

He stepped back into the bedroom, looking mesmerized.

“Nope, nothing in the trash.” She extended her arms over her head and stretched luxuriously. “Ooh, that sun feels so good.” The bow that held her blouse together at nipple level popped erect as she put tension on the fabric.

Tessa let her arms fall. A huge pine table stood under the windows, piled with books, pillows, and a vase of sea grasses. She turned her back to him, both hands flat on the table, and lifted her face to the sun. She could feel an answering heat in the gaze that tracked down her body. When it reached her backside in its short denim skirt, she heard him suck in a breath.

Tessa two, Griffin zero.

S
HE WAS DOING THIS
on purpose—standing in the sun like some fertility goddess, wearing transparent clothes, looking so touchable and sexy it was guaranteed to drive any man totally insane. Her body was like a magnet, calling out to his and making promises he knew she would take pleasure in keeping. He’d managed to fight her for half a day, but there was only so much provocation a man could take.

He didn’t care that they were in someone else’s private home. He didn’t care that Christina wasn’t here. All his brain had room for was the way Tessa leaned on that table with her face raised to the sun, her back arched and her derriere tilted up, her whole body an invitation.

He moved up behind her and bracketed her waist with his hands. His steps had been quiet on the patterned throw rug, but she didn’t even jump. She’d been waiting for him to make a move. This should have annoyed the hell out of him, and if he weren’t in such a state of sexual deprivation
and sensual disarray, he might have been. But right now all he heard was that irresistible question posed by her body.

The one he needed to answer as soon as possible.

“What are you doing to me?” The words seemed to come from somewhere deep inside him, not from his brain.

“What you want me to do,” she murmured. “Touch me. I want your hands on me.”

The fragile fabric under his hands was warm from her skin. He moved his feet a little and snugged her bottom against him so that he could look over her shoulder and drop a kiss just below her ear. Hot blood spilled into his erection as he pressed it against the back of her little skirt, and his jeans tightened as the bulge behind them grew.

“Where do you want my hands?” he whispered. He knew where he wanted them. Right on the twin shadows he could see through the gauzy material. The neckline plunged to a bow that tied between her breasts. He’d wanted to undo it ever since she’d taken off her sweater in the truck.

“Here.” She took both his hands in hers and cupped them over her breasts so that her nipples poked at his palms through two layers of fabric. He bit back a groan that was half gratitude and half delirium. “I know what you like.”

White Indian gauze crumpled under his fingers as he lifted and fondled her flesh, brushing his thumbs over her nipples just so he could feel how hard they had become. As he did so, his hips seemed to move of their own volition, grinding his hardness against her soft, peachy bottom.

“I have to do this.” With infinite slowness, he pulled one of the ties that held her top together, and the bow released. The other two followed more quickly, and he palmed her breasts again. “This isn’t much of a bra,” he noted. It was
about as sheer as a garment could get. “Your nipples show through your top.”