Cindy Dees - Killer Affair

“It’s just a scratch,” he bit out, his gaze skimming down her body and back up again. A flash of something hot and forbidden glinted in his gaze. “Damn, you’re beautiful,” he murmured. “As much as I’d like to tear off the rest of your clothes and make love to you right here, we’ve got to get off this beach.”

She glanced down at the remnants of her clothes and gasped. Scraps of sodden cloth clung to her chest enough to provide a minimum of modesty, but not much more than that. Her silk Chanel blouse, no less. It had cost her a week’s pay and the neckline draped exactly perfectly. Drat. She’d loved that blouse.

The man in front of her shifted impatiently, peering suspiciously over her shoulder as if he expected the attacker to come back any second. Abruptly, the pieces fell together in her head. They’d been lying on a beach…it was nighttime… and he said that out of nowhere a stranger had tried to attack them…

She exclaimed, “I bet that was the Sex on the Beach Killer!”

“The who?” Tom responded blankly.

This guy hadn’t heard about the psychopath roaming the South Pacific killing pairs of lovers on beaches? He’d have to be a complete hermit to have missed that news flash. The killer had last struck on Fiji’s big island a couple of weeks back. He was due to strike again, according to Agent Griffin Malone, the FBI profiler who’d saved Alicia’s life.

“The Sex on the Beach Killer,” Maddie repeated. Cold chills that had nothing to do with being wet and nearly naked snaked down her spine. A psychopath had tried to kill them? A fine trembling erupted throughout her entire body.

“How—” Her voice broke. She tried again. “How did you scare him off?”

He shrugged.

“Did you get a good look at him? Police have been chasing him all over the place. No one knows what he looks like. Well, besides the fact that he’s Caucasian and around six feet tall. I know that because my friend found a pair of his victims, and she got involved in the investigation and met the FBI profiler and she told me a little about the case, you know, what to look out for and…” And she was babbling. She did that when she got really nervous.

He stared down at her as if she was jabbering a foreign language at him.

She huffed, “You have heard of him, right? The guy who’s been running around the South Pacific stabbing lovers on beaches while they…do the deed.”

His eyebrows lifted at that, but he made no comment. Not real talkative, her handsome pilot. But, hey, the guy kissed like a god. She swayed toward him once more.

“C’mon,” Tom growled. He took off striding down the beach, his long legs outdistancing her quickly.

“Wait up!” she called after him. She ran through the heavy sand, feeling as clumsy as a drunken chicken. Ugh. Style note to self: never run on beaches .

He stalked onward without slowing down to wait for her. Not exactly the most social guy on the planet when he didn’t have his arms around her and his mouth on hers. Exasperated, she tagged along, wishing he’d slow down, but too unaccountably annoyed at her uncontrollable attraction to him to ask it of him.

Eventually, they came to a stretch of beach bordered by tall, rocky cliffs. Before long, he veered away from the water and headed for a pale shape zigzagging up the face of the black, wet rocks. Her gaze followed the jagged line upward. She spied a dark, rectangular hulk at the top of it, perched not far from the edge of the cliff.

They drew a little closer and she saw that the pale line was a set of stairs. It led to a bure , a traditional Fijian dwelling made of stucco, logs and thatch. The house nestled within a grove of banyans and palm trees.

“Who lives there?” she asked cautiously. The last thing they need to do was walk into the Sex on the Beach Killer’s hideout.

Tom tossed over his shoulder, “The weather’s about to get nasty. We need to seek shelter now.”

“But—”

“Ladies first,” he interrupted gently.

With a sigh, she set her feet to the long staircase. Something inside her was disappointed that they’d found civilization. For a minute there, she could’ve really enjoyed being stranded in a deserted paradise with a hunky pilot who made her knees weak when he kissed her.

Not that the fantasy ought to do a blessed thing for her, of course. Madeline C. didn’t go for sand, drinking out of coconuts and building palm-frond shelters. She was a city girl all the way. She liked her plug-in creature comforts and was never caught without a makeup kit or the perfect shoes. Of course, she had neither at the moment. Her hair was a sodden mess, and her clothes were destroyed. She’d have to extract a promise out of the pilot never to reveal to anyone that he’d seen Madeline C. without her chic armor polished and firmly in place. And no cameras! If he took a picture of her looking like this, the Sex on the Beach Killer wouldn’t be the worst of his worries!

The Plan. She had to stick with the Plan. Build a new life for herself firmly anchored in the bright lights and big city. Find herself the richest—and nicest, of course—guy she could find and marry him with all due haste. No way was she spending the rest of her life working her fingers to the bone through drought and freezing cold and searing heat to scrape a living out of the ground. She was absolutely not repeating her mother’s mistake. No, sir. She was Madeline C.

She took a deep breath and peered upward, trying to catch a glimpse of the dwelling above her. Even if Tom did kiss better than ought to be legal, there was no room in her life for heavy panting with some beach bum bush pilot. Focus. It was all about focus. It was how she’d dragged herself out of the ocean, and it was how she would drag herself off the farm and into a new life.

She tromped up the stairs, her already exhausted legs burning fiercely. Her personal trainer back at the gym would be appalled that a simple set of stairs was doing her in like this. But hey! She’d spent a couple hours fighting the Pacific Ocean in all its fury. That had to count for something.

Man. What a day. This trip had been jinxed from the moment she and her fellow Secret Traveler reviewers left Chicago. She just wanted to get home, go to her favorite spa, get a mani-pedi, a full body wrap and a facial and forget she’d ever been to this miserable corner of the world with its cyclones and serial killers and tempting strangers.

She glanced at the ocean pounding behind her. The waves were getting bigger by the minute, swallowing a few more inches of the beach with every crash of surf upon the shore. She didn’t know a whole lot about the South Seas, but common sense told her that spending the night down on the beach might not be the smartest thing in the world to try with a storm rolling in. Reluctantly, she continued up the long line of steps.

Finally, several stories above the ocean, she set foot on level ground once more. Tom took her elbow and escorted her firmly to the house’s front door. He fiddled with the doorknob for a few seconds, and then the door opened under his hand. Good grief, the guy’d just broken into the place! She stared, appalled.

“Are you coming or not?” he tossed at her.

“I don’t think we should just walk in there like this.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Well, the owner might be scared if we barge in. What if he’s got a gun?”

Tom snorted. “The owner has several guns.”

Her eyebrows shot up in alarm. “How do you know that?”

He bit out, “I’m the owner.”

She stared. “What?”

He glanced over at her and didn’t bother to repeat himself. A girl could get tired of listening to herself talk, trying to have a conversation with this taciturn guy. She followed him inside. If she thought it was dark outside, it was inky black in here. She banged into something about knee-high and yelped.