The P.I. Who Loved Her

Ruth sighed. “Nice girl, that Mel. And pretty, too. Who’d have thought Marc would hook someone like her?”

Sharon angled her way back behind the counter to pick up an order. Mitch watched her absently. “Yeah, who’d have thought.”

“Enjoying the view?” Ruth asked as she dragged a rag across the counter in front of him.

Mitch grinned at her. “Yeah.”

Sharon shot him a coy little smile as she squeezed out from behind the counter to take Ezra his breakfast pizza. Ruth put her rag away and leaned closer to him.

He told himself he didn’t care what she was about to say. He lifted the cup to his lips. Nothing was going to stop him from enjoying his first cup of coffee.

Ruth said, “You’ll probably enjoy the view a whole lot more tomorrow morning when Liz comes back to work.”

Mitch spewed the coffee out all over the counter. What precious little peace he’d managed to find scattered to the four winds, and his frustration level surged past the danger point.

Ruth smiled, tossed him the rag to clean up the mess, then walked pleased as could be toward the kitchen.

ADMIT IT, McCoy, you’re thinking with the wrong body part.

Mitch pulled his pickup over a low rise and slowed to a stop on the weed-choked gravel road. He stared at the hulking Victorian some fifty yards away. Not just any hulking Victorian, but Liz’s hulking Victorian. Just knowing she was in it—alone—did interesting things to his body.

He dragged in a deep breath and let loose a line of unmatched curses. Who in the hell had decided to boot him out of his familiar life and into a twisted version of Oz?

Mitch scrubbed his hand over his face. In this particular instance, he could count the bricks that led to the unfamiliar territory in which he now wandered around stupidly. First, Liz had slunk back into town in that shiny new car. Next, Pops had rambled in, looking like he’d come fresh from licking some woman’s neck, his off-tune whistling chasing Mitch straight from the house, bursting with the urge to do some of his own neck-licking. Then Ruth had spilled the beans about Liz’s returning to work at the diner. Soon thereafter he found out word was already all around about her impulsive return. Everyone at the diner was abuzz with the news. Even Josiah—who did little more than rock in his chair on the general store porch—had said something about her still being the tallest drink of water this side of the Appalachians. This when the old guy had barely said anything to anyone for years.

That had been the last straw. Who else but Liz could invade every corner of his life in less than twelve hours without even trying? So he’d abandoned his plans to have breakfast then return to the house to start laying pipe from the house to the new barn, and headed out to the old Braden place.

Mitch took his foot off the brake and steered his truck over the remainder of the potholed, deeply rutted drive. Goliath barked beside him. He looked at the little traitor. How, after living in D.C. with him for several years, could the damn dog remember this ramshackle house and the fact that Liz lived here?

Correction. Had occasionally lived here. She might be visiting, but Mitch had no illusions that Liz was staying, despite her having taken on her old job. She was merely a visitor in a place she, herself, had once described as never really having been home.

He ground the truck to a halt next to a weeping willow and shut off the engine. While Old Man Peabody had managed to keep time from touching the house itself much, the surrounding greenery had been left to run wild. Trees that had been little more than saplings now towered over the truck. The lilac bush was so overgrown, it would take a chainsaw to cut it back. The grass was nearly up to the middle of his shins….

The sight of the grass sent him reeling back to a time when he was seventeen and had decided to make a good impression on Liz’s grandmother by offering to mow the yard. A grand gesture that had turned into a disaster when he found out exactly how much grass he would have to mow. Using Minerva Braden’s old push mower, it had taken him all afternoon.

Ah, but it had been worth it. He smiled. The sun had been setting, the lights inside the house just switching on, and he’d caught a glimpse of Liz—who would have been all of a tender fourteen then and well on her way to being built like Marilyn Monroe—through her bedroom window, exploring her blossoming curves in a full-length mirror. He’d watched her skim her hands lightly over her breasts, pinching her pink nipples. Then she slid her fingers down over her still-boyish hips, then back up over her inner thighs, pausing where her soft curls sprang against the white cotton of her panties….

Sweat caused by a whole different source had soaked him, his own shallow breathing sounded foreign to his ears…much as it sounded now.

Mitch closed his eyes to banish the vivid image and to ease his acute physical reaction to it. It was only natural that being near Liz again would open a door to the past. He only wished that door would reveal as much of the bad as the good.

He couldn’t help wondering if he’d be in the sorry state he was if he and Liz had ever…well, if they had ever had sex. If they hadn’t waited for the wedding night that had never come, and if he had had what he’d been only dreaming about.

He reached for the ignition, then dropped his hand again. For the fifth time that morning, he told himself he’d be better off to lie low and wait for her inevitable departure to happen. But he couldn’t. Not when he knew the only reason she’d have returned to Manchester would be because she had to be in some sort of trouble.

And not when his testosterone level had reached an all-time high, leaving him little more than a quivering sack of lust.

He climbed out of the truck and waited for the aging Goliath to leap down. His stout body appeared to shudder as his paws met the hard earth, then he lumbered in the direction of a stand of trees on the north side of the property. Shaking his head, Mitch shut the door and stepped around the side of the house, noting the weeds pushing through the thin gravel of the drive. Near the one-car garage some twenty feet behind the house, he spotted the Lexus. A large green tarp he suspected was a tent was draped over the roof and hood. Little was visible except for half the Massachusetts license plate.

Interesting….

He might have believed she’d covered the vehicle to protect it from the elements, if it weren’t for the bloodstained wedding dress she’d been wearing when she drove the car into town. And her elusive answers to his questions.

“Hello?” he called through the screen door. He made out the tinny sound of a radio and stared through the screen at wet wading boots in the mudroom…right next to the pair of strappy red shoes she’d been wearing last night.

He called out again—no response. He grasped the tarnished handle and tugged the door open, cringing at the bone-chilling screech of the rusty hinges.

“I’m in the kitchen!”

Mitch stepped ever the boots, knowing it had to be Liz who invited him in. Who else would welcome Lord only knew who into the house? He froze in the open doorway to the roomy, sun-filled kitchen.

“Oh, it’s you. Tell me why I’m not surprised,” she said casually. She stood in front of the sink, yards of white fabric pooled around her feet. She yanked on the material, stuffing a good portion of it under running water.

Mitch tried to come up with a finely honed comeback, but doubted the words would make it past his closed throat anyway. His gaze moved of its own leisurely accord. Up from her slender bare feet and purple-painted toe nails, over the shapely length of her long, tanned legs to where a pair of cutoff jeans barely covered her firmly rounded bottom. He shifted until his gaze rested on the jaggedly cut edge of the Georgetown University T-shirt, an indecent scrap of cotton that came dangerously close to hiking up over her breasts. Breasts he guessed were bare given the way they swayed as she shoved the white material into the sink.

Seven years ago the outfit had been tomboyish on her almost too-slender body. Now it was downright sinful given her fuller, lusher curves.

He pushed a swallow past his dry throat and stared at her golden hair.

“You’re blond,” he said, staring at the way the sunlight made the shoulder-length straight tresses glow. The impact of her looking so much like she had before was like a blow to the stomach.

“Life as a brunette wasn’t as lucky as I thought it would be,” she said, motioning toward an empty box of hair coloring on the cluttered counter. He caught her gaze. There must have been something on his face that gave him away because she bit her bottom lip and touched a hand to her head. “What’s the matter? Did I miss a spot or something?” When she plopped her hand back in the sink, water splashed onto the threadbare front of the T-shirt. Mitch caught sight of the tightening of her nipples beneath the soft cotton, then forcibly wrenched his gaze away.

“No, it’s fine. It’s great. Couldn’t you find anything else to wear?” He plucked a travel brochure from the table and held it strategically in front of himself where his jeans had grown snug. He hadn’t gotten a hard-on so easily since… He cursed. Since he’d last seen Liz in the same outfit.

He stared at the other items on the table. More brochures, maps and travel guides littered the top, some dog-eared, others apparently untouched. He frowned and slid a map of Dallas aside, finding another pamphlet on Miami underneath.

“I don’t know if you noticed, but I didn’t exactly have a suitcase with me when I rolled into town.” Liz drew his attention back to her. She turned off the water and rubbed the shining wet material together.

Oh, no you don’t, he warned himself, as his gaze yearned to watch how her breasts responded to the vigorous movement of her arms.

“It was the only thing in the house I could find that still fit,” she said between determined attacks on the dress.

Fit. She was certainly stretching the definition of that word. Then again, his own jeans had fit just fine until he came into the house.

Agitated, he rustled the brochure he held and focused his gaze on her slender hands. It suddenly struck him what she was doing.

She’s washing the bloodstain from the wedding dress.

Or at least she was trying to. Judging from the puddles of water on the countertop and around her bare feet—were her toenails really painted fluorescent purple?—she had been trying for some time with little luck.

If anything could have cooled him down, her intentions did. He put the brochure back onto the table. “What are you doing, Liz?”

She shrugged off his question as she wiped her damp forehead on her shirtsleeve. “Thought I’d do a little laundry this morning.”

He was frustrated, not only by her evasion of his question, but by the way his libido was so acutely focused on her tight little behind and the delectable curves of her flesh. He stuffed his hands into his jeans pockets, wincing as the coarse denim pulled tighter across certain strategic areas.

“Uh-huh.”