Storm Surge (9 page)

Paige Waters, you always charge in before thinking.

I know, Mom. I know.

“Do you have someone in your life, Liam?”

As she spoke, her nipples hardened within her thin bra. All he needed to do was look and he would see. But he held his gaze steady on hers.

“I don’t. Not anymore.”

Paige marched across the walkway and onto the white boulder glistening in the dying day. This is how she would reach his mouth. Just like this.

Liam opened in shocked but eager willingness to the heat and hunger of her questing tongue. She had unexpected strength in her arms, pulling him solidly against her body. He lost his breath and clear thought as blood plunged into his groin. Inside his boxers, his penis sprang up hard against the rough denim of his jeans.

He slid his hands beneath her blouse, wanting skin, naked and warm and responsive, against his palms. Yanking down a soft bra cup, he grasped her stiffened nipple between his fingers. She moaned. He maneuvered his other hand past her waistband, cupping her buttocks, pressing her against his straining cock. A shock ran though him, like a static charge. He wanted in. Now. He shoved her pants down farther, the waistband expanding to accommodate his search, and slid his hand into her underwear, fingering the soft, slick places, feeling her shudder.

Conscience and self-preservation took his libido in a strangle hold. He released her, backing away. “Paige, I’m sorry.”

“I—what?” Paige stepped down from the stone, shoving her hair off her face. Her ponytail had come loose in a mass of tangled curls. He reached for her hand.

“Oh, God,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t—I need to go.”

He grabbed her fingers before she got away. “No, Paige, you don’t need to go anywhere. I don’t want you to go anywhere.” Recognizing the truth in his last statement nearly floored him. A couple of deep breaths were in order. “Come inside and sit for a minute. We’ll go get a few things from your place that you might want for the night. You can have the couch. Or we can finish what we’ve started.”

She shook her head. “Not tonight.”

“That’s fine. It’s up to you. But you’re not staying at the cottage. There’s no guarantee of safety there.”

“And you’re sure there’s no one—that I haven’t just—that—”

He smiled. “I’ve never seen you at such a loss for speech. Not since the night I met you, anyway. And I’m positive. There’s no one.” His heart contracted with a hollow, remembered pain when he spoke those words.

Leaving Paige on the sofa, looking like an animal ready to chew her paw off to escape a trap, Liam climbed the stairs to the upper hallway to shut down his computer. He hesitated at the attic door. Twice last night, while he’d been working, he thought he’d heard a weighted step on the timbers. He hadn’t gone up, as he’d gotten used to these occurrences. Now, in light of what had happened to Paige, he figured the attic warranted an examination.

Liam yelled down the stairs for Paige to help herself to whatever she might like from the fridge. He received a mumbled reply that at least assured him she hadn’t left. Reaching for the attic doorknob, he paused to eye the heavy doorstop in his office, gauging its use as a weapon. After a moment’s debate, he picked it up.

Hefting the weight in his hand, he understood his fists, his strength, might not be enough because sometimes people had other plans, ways and means of doing bodily harm that had nothing to do with the limits of human endurance. And he feared that the man who had been in Paige’s cottage, who had followed her north and likely back again, was such a person.

* * * *

Paige returned to the couch with water in a tumbler. She sat, gazing at the lowering night through the bow window. Suddenly the lamp on the end table clicked on. She jumped, splashing liquid on her knee. Spotting a timer hooked up to the cord, she relaxed and sat back, taking a sip from the glass. Her actions, the room around her, were reflected in the curved expanse of the window. She turned the lamp off. Anyone could be out there, able to see in. She’d rather sit in the dark.

Liam was taking a lot longer upstairs than she’d expected. Recalling those few heated minutes outside, the abandon with which she threw herself at him, her underwear’s condition right now, Paige vacillated between longing and a niggling anxiety. But she wouldn’t go back and undo it. Despite her babbling behavior immediately following, what had occurred was exactly what she’d needed. She only hoped Liam’s long absence wasn’t due to regret.

Five minutes later, she heard him coming down the stairs with a quiet, hesitant tread. She bit her lip. In spite of his ability to hold himself utterly still, she’d noted his energetic locomotion from place to place. He liked to pound up the steps two at a time. Perhaps he’d noted the darkened living room and hoped she’d gone. Well, no reason to keep him in suspense now that he was nearing the bottom. She turned the light back on.

The stairs were empty. Paige shot up from the couch.

“Liam? Liam! Where are you?”

He gave a shout from somewhere up above. A scant minute later, his footsteps sounded across the ceiling and down the stairs to the first landing. “Sorry,” he said, “I was having a quick look in the attic.” He came down and crossed the floor to pull the drapes.

“I thought I heard you on the stairs. When I looked, no one was there.”

Liam paused a moment in his adjustment of the curtains and then continued, his back to her. “You really never noticed anything like that when you lived here?”

“Hearing footsteps and finding no one? Not that I remember. Are you going to try to tell me this house, the house I grew up in, is haunted?” She moved to stand between him and the curtained window. Even now, his nearness caused her blood to heat.

“Yes, that’s what I’m telling you,” he said.

“I don’t believe in ghosts, Liam. But tell me, why wouldn’t it have been haunted when I was a kid?”

Liam twitched a shoulder. “Recent catalyst?”

“Like what?” She considered a moment, eyes widening at the implication. “Not my father dying?”

No matter what her father had done, who he’d hurt and who he’d abandoned, Paige had no wish to see his spirit, his soul, whatever energy survived after the body had failed, trapped in some kind of limbo. Because that’s what people said, didn’t they? Ghosts had unfinished business, couldn’t move on, whatever claptrap believers touted.

“I didn’t say it was your father,” Liam murmured. “This house is nearly a hundred and twenty years old. It was built around the turn of the last century, but you knew that, I suppose.”

Paige barely heard him. Her thoughts had returned to the morning, when she’d looked up at the window and witnessed a shadow converge with and pass over Liam’s, moving faster than he had been. “Liam, don’t misunderstand me when I ask this. It’s not the same question I asked earlier. Was there someone with you when the sun was coming up?”

“No.” Quickly. Maybe too quickly.

Paige narrowed her eyes at him. His expression remained bland as he faced her with the curtain still in his fist, giving the material one final tug. His blue eyes looked black in the lamplight.

“I need to know,” Paige said. “Please tell me.”

Dropping the curtain, he came to her and took her hand, pulling her down beside him on the cushions. He shook his head. “No. No one was with me. Why?”

Turning her fingers in his warm grasp, she realized how cold her own had grown. “I was outside and I looked up. I saw you in the window. I saw someone, or something, with you. I saw what I thought was their shadow moving past.”

He remained silent for a small time, finally rubbing his free hand across his eyes. Releasing her, he stood. “Thank you for telling me. Are you hungry? I know it’s late, but I’ll make us something to eat.”

Paige rose beside him. “That’s all you have to say?”

“That’s it.”

“You’re not surprised.”

“Surprised? No. But confirmation troubles me in ways I can’t even begin to explain.”

She frowned. “I haven’t confirmed anything.”

He turned a condescending expression on her. Unreasoning anger shot through her veins like boiling water. She opened her mouth to speak, but closed it before a word escaped. Loosening her curled fingers, she flattened her palm against her thigh. She knew this scenario. She’d played it out many times before. Sex, pick a fight, move on. Most men were happy to have it that way. But she and Liam hadn’t had sex yet. And she held a deep suspicion Liam Gray wasn’t most men. “Can I help with dinner?” she asked. Reasonably, she hoped. “What are you planning on making?”

Scratching his head, he gazed at the ceiling in thought. “I have leftover beets. Three or four eggs. Enough ham and bread for a single sandwich. Think we can make something out of that?”

Paige snorted. “If we skip the beets? Definitely.”

* * * *

Though attentive and shockingly kind, Liam kept himself at a distance. She couldn’t blame him. He’d invited her into his house for her protection. If he slept with her, the night and however many days that followed could get complicated pretty quickly. She wasn’t even sure he wanted to. Not emotionally, anyway. The erection he’d pressed against her was pretty solid evidence his body had a different idea.

Liam went alone to collect her things from the cottage and returned with a puzzled expression on his face. “What was the point of placing the bed over the trapdoor?”

“I don’t like mice,” she said, and left it at that. It didn’t matter he’d found nothing beneath the floorboards. Blocking off the dark province under the cottage had eased her mind, however foolish. Microscopic, icy feet tiptoed up the ridges of her spine in memory. Suppressing a shiver, Paige grabbed her toothbrush and comb from her suitcase, along with something suitable to wear while sleeping, and put a foot to the bottom stair tread.

“Bathroom’s upstairs, first door on the—”

“I know,” she said.

“Forgot.” He smiled apologetically. The scar almost disappeared in the deep creases created by his grin. One day, if she didn’t blow it, they might reach a point—as friends, if nothing else—when he would feel comfortable telling her about the injury. Of course, that one day would have to come soon, or she’d be gone. She’d given herself until the Saturday prior to Labor Day before heading back home. The way the last two days had panned out, she might not make it that long. If somebody didn’t find the creep who’d broken into the cottage, her departure could be much sooner.

Upstairs, Paige made her way slowly toward the home’s only bathroom. On her way, she glanced toward the room that had been her parents’ and, finding the door open, paused in the hallway to look in. She experienced no guilt over her study since it had nothing to do with curiosity about Liam and his lifestyle, whatever that might be. Nope. For the briefest of moments, she thought she might be able to feel her parents there, perhaps recall tenderness, a display of affection, some small proof of the love they must, at one time, have shared.

She’d sensed nothing downstairs while sitting on Liam’s sofa. She felt nothing of them here, either, gaze lingering on Liam’s large and tumbled bed, his dark, masculine furniture, a handsome, brightly-colored area rug upon which a book lay open to a page marked by what appeared to be discarded junk mail. She backed away and crossed the hall.

She paused in the middle of the cracked tile floor of the bathroom. Liam had only made a rudimentary attempt at renovations in this room. It looked almost exactly as she remembered. Paige sank down onto the closed toilet, shutting her eyes to block out the burden of recollection prompted by wallpaper bits still stuck to the plaster walls, the fixtures with their yellow light beside the outdated mirror, the familiar curve of the sink. Images circled in her mind like flotsam in a whirlpool.

Mom, what happened to your face?

Don’t ask questions, Paige.

In time, the influx passed enough for Paige to perform her nightly routine, washing up, brushing her teeth, combing her always hopelessly tangled hair. Changing her clothes, she tucked everything under her arm and exited the bathroom, breathing a sigh of relief in the hallway. Here, the walls were freshly painted, and a runner on the floor covered the age scars on the wooden floor. She found herself wondering again about the footsteps on the stairway, the shadow dancing past Liam’s. Pressing her personal items close to her breast, she held her breath and listened.

Nothing. Why would there be? Nonsense, all of it. Utter nonsense.

An abrupt creak of the joists in the attic caused her to jump and then chuckle at her foolishness. The door at the base of the narrow steps leading up beneath the roof stood slightly ajar. Paige walked toward it. “Liam?”

“Paige, what are you doing?”

Paige whipped around toward Liam’s voice. He stood with a foot on the uppermost stair, his dark brows raised.

“I thought you had gone back to the attic. I heard—”

“No ghost,” he said with a laugh. “The wind’s picking up. I probably left a window cracked up there.”

She made a face at him. “So you’re going to pooh-pooh me now, after all your talk.”

“This time, yeah, I am. Come on downstairs.”

Paige trailed him back to the lower floor and found he’d been in the process of making up the couch with sheets and a thin blanket. He tossed a pillowcase and pillow at her, nearly causing her to drop everything else on the floor. Tucking the pillow beneath her chin and tugging the case over it, she eyed Liam’s body with unrelenting avarice as he worked. Disgusted with herself, she tossed the pillow back in his direction before turning away to her open suitcase to slip her toothbrush and comb into the small cosmetic bag.

“Paige.”

“Hmm?”

“Don’t allow me to give you the impression you’re easy to resist, because you’re not.”

She straightened, faced him, folding her hands before her abdomen like a schoolgirl awaiting punishment from a nun for impure thoughts. Her stomach furled into a molten knot. She cleared her throat. “Really.”

“Really.” Spine like a rod, he clutched the pillow in his fist. She wondered if he had the same urge to fly in her direction as she did in his. Fortunately he possessed restraint, and she possessed shame to keep her rooted where she stood. “There are multiple reasons why, not the least of which is what happened outside.”