She flinched at his snort of laughter. “What’s so funny?” she snapped. “Are you done groping me yet, you disgusting pig?”
“Not yet,” he said mildly. He grabbed the towel and started briskly drying her body.
She tried to twist away, sputtering. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” he replied. He flung the towel away, ran his eyes over her. She was mostly dry and her lips had more color. Down to business.
“Let’s talk, Becca Cattrell,” he said. “Tell me all about Marla.”
“I-I-I work with her. At the club.” She got points for consistency.
“OK,” he said. “The club. That’s a good place to start. Tell me all about this club, beautiful. Who runs it?”
“Ah, well, the CEO, I guess. James Blaystock the Fourth. It’s the Cardinal Creek Country Club in Bothell. I’m the events coordinator. I arrange meetings, banquets, parties. Weddings.”
Nick’s mental processes flash-froze. He just stared at her. Country club? What in the flying fuck…?
“Marla is my boss,” she babbled. “Marla Matlock. She was the one who gave me the keys to Jerome Sloane’s—he’s her boyfriend—vacation home. It’s the big A-frame on the hill. She told me she’d been coming here to swim for years. She said the owner was a harmless sort of guy—” She faltered. “I take it he’s…not you, right?”
Nick cleared his throat as the possible scenarios morphed into new, even less welcome shapes. “No. He’s definitely not me. This house changed owners recently. A few weeks ago.”
She nodded. “I see. P-p-please,” she whispered. “Let me go.”
Nick crossed his arms over his chest. She could still be lying but Sloane was the name of the guy who owned the nearest house. Nick had a file on him. Jerome Sloane was a rich art dealer in his fifties, who divided his time between Seattle and San Francisco. He had files for the owners of all the other properties on the small island as well. Sloane had left Frakes Island the second week of August and he hadn’t been back.
Plausible cover story, the voice in his head whispered. Anyone else could have done the same research that he had done.
“OK,” he said. “Let’s assume, for a second, that this is true—”
“It is true! I swear, I never meant to—”
“Shut up.” He gave her a thin smile. “Assuming that it’s true, explain to me what you’re doing here in April. And more specifically, explain what the fuck you were doing trespassing stark naked, waking me out of a sound sleep and scaring the living shit out of me at—” He checked his watch. “12:40 A.M.”
Her eyelashes fluttered. “I?” she asked delicately. “Scared you?”
“Explain,” he growled. “And you’d better make it convincing.”
She let out a shuddering breath. “I, um, had some p-p-personal problems lately. I wanted to, you know, to get away from it all. Marla persuaded Jerome to give me the keys to his island house. She told me about your beautiful pool. I just didn’t think. She said nobody would mind. I guess she was, um, wrong.”
He processed that. In point of fact, he had not yet had time to rig up the security system for the poolhouse, just the video. His beeper had gone off when she tripped the infrared set up at the perimeter.
This sucked. His chances of living through Zhoglo’s impending visit were slim enough without involving clueless innocent bimbos who organized weddings and banquets. “Do you trespass naked often?” he asked, genuinely curious.
Dark, curling lashes swept down over enormous leaf-green eyes. She had a dusting of freckles on her nose. Concentrate, damn it.
“No,” she whispered. “I’ve never done anything like this in my life. It was, um, an exercise. I’m trying to be—I want to be more, ah, adventurous.”
Adventurous? He stared at her. His lips twitched. His cock lengthened. Hell, he’d show her adventure. A hot, sweaty adventure that she’d never forget. Left, right, sideways, upside down, inside out.
No, he wouldn’t. “Adventurous?” he repeated.
She shrugged as best she could. “I know it sounds stupid. But I’ve always been a good girl.” The rest of her explanation came faster. “I brushed my teeth, I did my homework, I took my vitamins, I worked hard, I put myself last…I guess that’s why my fiancé thought I’d make such a good politician’s wife—”
“Fiancé?” He came down on the word, like shark jaws chomping.
“Ex-fiancé.” She added the prefix with vicious emphasis. “I’ve never had the nerve to misbehave, so the bastard figured there would be no dirt for the gossipmongers to dig up. He might as well marry a department-store mannequin, that condescending, manipulative son of a bitch—”
“Can we stick to the subject, please?”
Too late. The chick was on a roll. A detail came back to him—the nearly empty wine bottle he’d glimpsed by the pool. She must have carried it in. Finished most of it off.
“The snake cheated on me!” she said heatedly. “With Kaia! She’s the adventurous type. Her nose is pierced. She’s trekked in Nepal. She’s gone on safari. Whoop de doo for her. Bitch.”
Her fury made his mouth twitch. He hadn’t smiled in so long, he almost didn’t recognize the sensation. Sort of like a tic.
She didn’t appreciate it. Her eyes narrowed. “What’s so funny? Do I amuse you?”
“Sorry.” He looked her slowly up and down. “I don’t think you’re a mannequin. You look real to me.”
“Um, thank you, I think,” she said stiffly. “I don’t suppose that means you would consider taking off these handcuffs? They hurt.”
He stared at her. If what she said was true, he’d endangered them both by making her curious about him. If what she said was a lie, then there was an evil plot afoot, which meant that the chances of him going on up to the Great Stake-Out in the Sky tonight were very good.
He took a deep breath, let it out. The more he looked at that gift-of-God gorgeous body, the less inclined he was to worry about it.
It occurred to him that if she really was just a naked events coordinator, she wasn’t likely to drug, stab, or poison him while they did the deed.
He stopped that thought dead in its tracks. The chick was scared out of her wits. Restrained with his cuffs. No matter how stunning she was, he had never forced the issue with a woman in his life, and he damn well wasn’t going to start now. No matter who was watching.
He couldn’t think of any safe way to deal with her, though. If only there was a way to scare her off the island until Zhoglo and his crew had come and gone. But keeping her quiet might be impossible if he was deliberately terrifying. She could go to the local cops, file a complaint, and screw up everything. Perhaps fatally.
So.
