Christie Ridgway - Beach House No. 9

Or to their demons.

With a sharp shake of his head, he dislodged the thought and then jostled Ted again. “Kid.” The surfer was in the same age range as the nineteen-to-twenty-seven-year-olds with whom Griffin had spent his embedded year. Those young men had grown up fast. Griffin, at thirty-one, sometimes felt as if he was twice that after those three-hundred-sixty-five days.

“Kid,” he said again. “Get up. Stretch out on the couch. Better yet, take a bed in one of the guest rooms.”

Ted blinked and slowly rolled to a sitting position. He looked down at his naked chest, the beach towel and then the half a bathing suit tangled around his fingers. “Did I get lucky last night?”

“Don’t know.”

The other man lifted the fabric he held and stretched it between both hands. “I was dreaming about that librarian.”

That librarian? Griffin tried not to scowl. Ted could only mean the small stubborn woman who’d arrived uninvited to the party. She was the only bookish female around last night. He’d done his best to ignore her, but she wasn’t easy to avoid, damn her pretty eyes. Jesus, now she had Griffin’s surf buddy thinking about her in his sleep!

“You called her ‘Mom,’” he told Ted.

“Nah. That was my second dream. In my first, you take her with you off the cliff, and her clothes sorta melt to nothing on the way down.”

“Huh.” Griffin tried imagining it, but all he could picture was her mouth flapping at him. The mouth was pretty too, soft-looking. Tender. But it flapped all the same. You signed a contract. You’ve got to get to work.

Ted looked from the bikini to Griffin. “Which reminds me. I took some good shots of your jump. And also of you pulling Sammy to shore. I think he drank as much seawater as beer last night.”

“He puked up both.” Griffin felt guilty about it. He shouldn’t have let the guy take that leap. He’d tried reasoning with him, but he’d recognized the mulish light in his eyes. Griffin had never managed to talk his twin, Gage, out of anything when he looked like that. And Erica had worn that same intractable expression the last time they’d spoken.

A warm furry body bumped against his knee, and he reached down to pet his dog, Private. “You need to go out?” he asked the black Lab. “Okay, I’ll let you take a turn in the garden before breakfast. But for God’s sake, stay off Old Man Monroe’s property. The last time you did your business there he threatened me with citizen’s arrest.”

Private didn’t seem worried about their cantankerous neighbor or his owner’s fate, but just ambled through the back door, his craggy teeth in an anticipatory smile. As Griffin swung the paneled wood shut, a small blue espadrille placed itself in harm’s way.

The canvas, embroidered with multicolored flowers, was attached to the librarian.

Governess.

Jane.

He’d been so sure he’d gotten rid of her yesterday. After all, she’d been gone when he got back from his jump. “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked, using his body to block the opening.

Her answer was to slip a venti-sized cup through the narrow gap, from a coffee place that was a twenty-minute car ride away. Crescent Cove’s isolated location meant you had to commute for your four-buck fix of fancy Seattle caffeine.

“I thought you might like this.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. Her jeans were rolled at the ankle, and she wore a pale blue oxford shirt that seemed to leach the gray from her big eyes. They were as silvery as the morning overcast and looked a little spooky with her dark lashes surrounding them. Her mouth wasn’t scary, though. A rose-petal pink, it had the puffy, swollen look of one that had been kissed all night long.

That was what was so arresting about her, he decided. It had caught his attention the day before too. Though she walked around all buttoned up, there was that contradiction of the making-out kind of mouth.

It gave him this insane urge to check her for hickeys.

Jane sent him a bright smile. “You look like a caramel macchiato kind of man to me,” she said. Then added, “With extra whip.”

“Goodbye.” He didn’t give a damn about her toes.

“Wait, wait, wait,” she cried, but her words turned muffled as he closed the door firmly between them.

“I would have taken that caramel macchiato,” Ted complained, drifting into the kitchen.

Griffin ignored the insistent knocking on the back door. “You don’t know this sort of woman like I do, Ted.” His instincts were on red alert, had been since he’d slipped off his eye patches to find her in his place. That silvery gaze had seemed to look right through him. He didn’t appreciate being that open. “You take her coffee, she takes your soul.”

“I don’t know. She looks harmless to me.”

“Her looks…” Griffin let the thought die off. He wasn’t going to get into Jane’s looks with Ted, who’d been dreaming of her naked. Griffin couldn’t really imagine there was anything interesting under those clothes she wore. He wouldn’t imagine there was anything interesting under there. She had the mouth, and the demands that came from it were all the reason he needed to pretend she didn’t exist.

She’d stopped knocking.

The relief he felt at that had him almost smiling at Ted. He clapped his hands together. “What are we going to do today?” The other man was a part-time county lifeguard. His leftover hours seemed to revolve around surfing and partying, both of which made him the perfect companion in Griffin’s eyes.

Ted’s expression turned troubled. “I don’t know, Griff. Maybe I should take off.”

“What? Why?”

“You’d probably like some privacy.”

It wasn’t exactly panic that shot through him at that last word, but it was close enough to make Griffin’s voice tight. “I would hate some privacy. What’s going on?”

Ted shifted one shoulder. “The librarian. You’re supposed to be writing, she said.”

“The librarian doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” Glancing over his shoulder, he checked the view out the window. She wasn’t there. The tightness around his throat eased. “I don’t owe anyone anything,” he lied.

Ted’s hands were worrying the scarlet bikini top. “Yeah? But still…there’s something about what she said….”

“There’s something about her!” Griffin interrupted, glancing over his shoulder again. “You’re dreaming she’s naked, her mouth is annoying the hell out of me, and—” He broke off as the woman in question came into sight through his window.

“—she’s stealing my dog.”

He stalked closer to the glass. Sure enough, she had threaded what looked like a belt through Private’s kerchief-collar. Though he couldn’t hear her words, it was clear she was coaxing the dog to follow her. He rapped on the glass with his knuckles.

“Hey!” he yelled, cranking open the window. “Leave my pet alone. Besides being a party crasher, are you a dognapper too?”

She froze, those lips of hers turning down in a frown. She looked from Griffin to the animal, then back to Griffin again. Her eyes narrowed.

“Hell,” he muttered, knowing what was coming next. He’d just given her the damn idea himself.

Jane put her free hand on her hip. “Come out and get him.”

“You don’t want me to do that.” He assumed his fiercest expression, the one that had caused a gunman to hesitate a crucial second at a Taliban-manned checkpoint, thus saving Griffin’s life.

Jane, however, merely tapped a toe. “Is that supposed to be a threat? Are you going to come out here and just do-nothing me to death? You can’t meet a deadline, let alone mete out some kind of punishment.”

Rage burned in Griffin’s belly. “Ted,” he said, with a jerk of his head. “Go out there and get Private.”