front door. Ted. He pointed to the bluff at the south end of the cove. Even from here, Jane could see a handful of men scrambling along a path up its side. “Sammy says he’s taking off from a spot five feet above your last leap.”
Griffin glanced over his shoulder. “Sammy’s drunk.”
Beach Boy’s curls bounced when he nodded. “It’s why he’s talking trash. But I think he means it. I think he’s going to outdo you this time.”
“Outdo me? Like hell he will.” Griffin was already standing. Then he gripped the railing of the deck and swung himself over and onto the sand below. “Get your camera ready,” he advised the other man as he stripped off his shirt and ran toward the outcropping.
Jane realized she’d spent too much time with English majors and MFAs. They preferred Frisbee golf and strolls through farmers’ markets. They didn’t splash through surf that rose to their knees and then ascend a steep hillside, the muscles in their backs shifting and their strong arms flexing as they reached for each handhold.
They didn’t shout something indistinct and then hurl themselves off a jutting boulder into the roiling ocean.
Several of Griffin’s party guests did just that, from various heights. Jane found herself holding her breath as each man launched himself into space. Her initial reaction could mostly be summed up by “Why?” but after the first couple of men made it back to shore, she could admit there was a certain…exuberance in the activity.
Ultimately there were only two men left on the bluff. One, she guessed, was the drunken Sammy. The other was Griffin. They stood beside each other, the wind tugging at the legs of their shorts.
“Griff should talk him out of it,” one of the partygoers lining the deck railing said. They all wore dark glasses or had their hands up to shade their eyes from the lowering sun. “He’ll have the record if he takes off from there, but Sammy’s just pickled enough not to realize that height means he has to jump farther outward into deeper water.”
But if Griffin tried to talk sense into the other man, it apparently didn’t work. Those on the deck gasped in unison as Sammy bounded from the rock. The others followed his descent, but Jane kept her gaze on their host, who instantly scrambled even higher.
“Is Griffin trying to get a better look at his friend?” she asked Beach Boy, who was still beside her.
“No,” the dude said on a sigh, as Griffin stopped at a sharp nose of stone. “He’s upping the ante. Nobody’s ever attempted a jump from that height. It could be…” He didn’t finish, but the expression on his face did it for him.
It could be dangerous.
Appalled, Jane closed her eyes, squeezing them tight. Though she’d been concerned about her latest author’s uncooperative attitude and then his penchant for crowded beer bashes, she’d remained confident in her ability to help him mold his memoir. She’d been taught long ago that failure was not an option, after all. But clearly the task of aiding Griffin Lowell was going to be more complicated than mentioning deadlines and being available with red pen in hand.
This man was more than a stalled writer. Clearly he was also an impulsive risk taker with an overblown competitive streak.
Or a full-fledged death wish.
CHAPTER TWO
THE TV WAS DRONING at a dull level when Griffin woke up, just as it did every morning. Without opening his eyes, he fumbled for the remote and edged the volume higher. It didn’t register whether the broadcast was news or cartoons or something in between, because it didn’t matter—the noise was only necessary to block out the voices in his head. He wasn’t schizophrenic, he was just hyper-memoried. They had the tendency to play in the background of his brain unless he supplanted them with the sound of twenty-four-hour news or hard-driving music or an alcohol-infused social gathering.
Being Party Central had its benefits.
And another man besides himself was reaping them, he realized as he made his way toward the kitchen a few minutes later. One of his surfing buddies, Ted, was sacked out on the living room floor, a beach towel thrown over him. In his hand, he clutched a bikini top.
Griffin didn’t see a sign of the bottoms or the female body that the D-cups belonged to. He shrugged and prodded the guy’s shoulder with his flip-flop. “Hey.”
Ted batted at the annoyance, thwapping the bikini strings against Griffin’s ankle. “It’s not a school day, Mom,” he murmured.
Though Griffin could hear the television from here, Ted’s mutter sucked him straight to a sandbag-and-timber hooch in a remote northern valley of Afghanistan. Soldiers slept within inches of each other, and someone was always talking in their sleep. To their mom.
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
