it was their first time. Um, touching, she meant. Arms and shoulders, she meant. Fully clothed, she meant. But the way her heart was racing when the two of them separated, and the way the blood was zipping through her veins, and the way her breathing had gone hot and ragged, they might as well have just engaged in a whole ’nother kind of first time.
She mumbled an apology, but he didn’t acknowledge it. Instead, he gripped his armrest as if his life depended on it. After another few hundred jostling, friction-inducing feet of what may or may not have once been a road, the SUV finally broke through the trees and into a clearing.
A clearing populated by a motel that was clearly a remnant of mid-twentieth-century, pre-interstate travel culture—single story, brick and shaped like a giant L. There was a parking space in front of each room, but there wasn’t a single car present. In fact, the place looked as if it had been out of business since the mid-twentieth-century, pre-interstate travel culture. The paint on the doors was peeling, the brick was stained with mold and a rusty, mottled sign in front read The Big Cheese Motor-Inn. In a small clearing nearby were a half-dozen stucco cottages shaped like wedges of cheese. It was toward one of those that Inspector Grady steered the SUV.
“Seriously?” Renny said when he stopped the vehicle and threw it into Park. “You’re going to hide us in a cottage cheese?”
“We’ve used this place as a safe house since nineteen sixty-eight,” Grady said. “That’s when we confiscated it from the Wisconsin mob. These days, no one even remembers it exists.”
“There’s a Wisconsin mob?” Renny asked. “Like who? Silo Sal Schlitz and Vinnie the Udder?”
“There was a Wisconsin mob,” Grady corrected her. “The Peragine family. Shipping and pizzerias.”
Of course.
The marshal snapped off his seat belt, opened his door and exited, so Renny and Tate did, too. The moment she was out of the vehicle, she was swamped by heat even worse than in Chicago. Impulsively, she stripped off her jacket and rolled her shirt sleeves to her elbows. Her hair, so tidy earlier, had become a tattered mess, so she plucked out the pins, tucked them into her skirt pocket and let the mass of dark hair fall to the center of her back. Then she hastily twisted it into a pin-free topknot with the deftness of someone who had been doing it for years, drove her arms above her head and pushed herself up on tiptoe, closing her eyes to enjoy the stretch.
By the time she opened her eyes, Tate had rounded the back of the SUV and was gazing at her in a way that made her glance down to be sure she hadn’t stripped off more than just her jacket. Nope. Everything was still in place. Though maybe she shouldn’t have fiddled so much with her shirt buttons earlier, since there was a little bit of lace and silk camisole peeking out.
But come on. It was a camisole. Who thought camisoles were sexy these days?
She looked at Tate, who was eyeing her as if she were clad in feathery wings, mile-high heels and a two-sizes-too-small cubic-zirconia-encrusted bra. Oh. Okay. Evidently, there was still at least one guy in the world who found camisoles sexy. Too bad he also hated her guts.
As unobtrusively as she could, she rebuttoned the third and second buttons. Then she followed Grady to the giant cheese wedge, telling herself she only imagined the way she could feel Tate’s gaze on her ass the whole time.
“Oh, look,” she said in an effort to dispel some of the tension that had become thick enough to hack with a meat cleaver. “Isn’t that clever, how they made some of the Swiss-cheese holes into windows? That’s what I call functional design.”
Unfortunately, neither man seemed to share her interest in architectural aesthetics, because they just kept walking. Grady pulled a set of keys from his pocket as he scanned the tree line for signs of God knew what, and Tate moved past her to follow the marshal to the front door, not sparing her a glance.
Renny deliberately lagged behind, scanning the tree line herself. Though for different reasons than Grady, she was sure. In spite of the weirdness of the situation, and even with the suffocating heat and teeming sky, she couldn’t help appreciating the beauty surrounding her. The trees were huge, looking almost black against the still-darkening clouds, and there was a burring noise unlike anything she’d ever heard. She recognized the sound as cicadas—she’d heard them on occasion growing up in Connecticut—but here it was as if there were thousands of them, all singing at once.
The wind whispered past her ears, tossing tendrils of hair she hadn’t quite contained, and she closed her eyes to inhale deeply, filling her nose with the scent of evergreen and something else, something that reminded her of summers at the shore. That vague fishy smell that indicated the presence of water nearby. If they really had traveled due north, it was probably Lake Michigan. She wondered if they were close enough to go fishing. She’d loved fishing when she was a little girl. And she’d always outfished her father and brothers whenever they went.
She listened to the cicadas, reveled in the warm breeze and inhaled another big gulp of pine forest, releasing it slowly. Then she drew in another and let it go, too. Then another. And another. Bit by bit, the tension left her body, and something else took its place. Not quite serenity, but something that at least kept her panic at bay. She loved being outdoors. The farther from civilization, the better.
She felt a raindrop on her forehead, followed by a few more; then the sky opened up and the rain fell in earnest. Renny didn’t mind. Rain was hydrotherapy. The warm droplets cooled her heated skin and tap-tap-tapped on the leaves of the trees and the hood of the SUV, their gentle percussion calming her even more.
With one final breath, she opened her eyes. Tate stood inside the door of the cottage looking out at her, his expression inscrutable. He was probably wondering what kind of madwoman he was going to be stuck with for the rest of the day—maybe longer. Renny supposed that was only fair, since she was wondering a lot of things about him at the moment, too.
Like, for instance, if he enjoyed fishing.
* * *
As Tate gazed at Renata, so much of what had happened today became clear. The woman didn’t even have enough sense to come in out of the rain.
He must have been nuts to have thought her professional, capable and no-nonsense. Then again, he’d also been thinking she didn’t seem to want to be any of those things. Now he had his proof. Even when the rain soaked her clothing, she still didn’t seem inclined to come inside.
On the other hand, her saturated state wasn’t entirely off-putting. Her white shirt clung to her like a second skin, delineating every hill and valley on her torso. Just because those hills weren’t exactly the Rockies—or even the Grassy Knoll—didn’t make her any less undesirable. No, it was the fact that she’d disrupted his life and gotten him into a mess—then made a literal federal case out of it—that did that.
Actually, that wasn’t quite true. She was still desirable. He just didn’t like her very much.
He heard Grady in the cabin behind him opening and closing drawers, cabinets and closets, and muttering to himself. But the activity still couldn’t pull his gaze from Renata in the rain.
Renata in the rain. It sounded like something by a French watercolorist hanging in the Musée d’Orsay. But there she was, a study in pale shades, and if he were an artist, he would be setting up his easel right now.
She really was very pretty. Not in the flashy, showy, don’t-you-wish-you-were-hot-like-me way that the women he dated were. Her beauty was the kind that crept up on a man, then crawled under his skin and into his brain, until he could think of little else. A quiet, singular, unrelenting kind of beauty. When he first saw her standing at his front door that morning, he’d thought she was cute. Once they started talking, and he’d heard her breathless, whiskey-rough voice, he’d even thought she was kind of hot—in a sexy-librarian way. But now she seemed remarkably pretty. In a quiet, unrelenting, French-watercolorist kind of way.
“Mr. Hawthorne?” he heard Grady call out from behind him, raising his voice to be heard over the rain pelting the roof.
Yet