Irresistible Stranger (3 page)

“Yup. That's how I heard it. Thankfully, you invented and patented your own ice cream. Maybe moved here because the cost of living was extra-reasonable. You can sit around all day and just make a little ice cream, hire kids to help you, and spend the rest of your time
romancing all the pretty Southern Belles. Why should everyone need to be ambitious? Why should you do hard work if you don't have to? Only…none of the girls have caught you. In bed, maybe. In affairs, maybe. But nobody's caught you anywhere near the altar, or that's the story I heard.”

“Anything else?”

“Anything you want to deny so far?”

“Oh, no,” he assured her. “Gossips have the story absolutely straight.”

“They usually do,” she said without missing a beat, and finally turned her head to face him. “So I might ask you what your real story is. Sometime. If it's something you're interested in sharing.”

“I was going to make the same offer. To listen if you needed an ear.”

She turned quiet, the devilment in her eyes fading. A moment ticked by, then another. The bustling noises inside the house had faded into the single noise from a television. Lamplights had turned on throughout the neighborhood.

The sun had taken its lazy Southern time going down, but it finally ebbed out of sight, nothing left but a deep violet haze beyond the trees and rooftops.

He didn't realize how much time had passed, how late it had become…but it seemed as if she suddenly did. “You know what?” she said.

“What?”

“I'm glad you stopped. You didn't need to. It was beyond kind—particularly for a man who seems to have a mighty reputation in this town for not caring much about
others. You keep that kind streak really well hidden, I gather.”

“I'm not kind.” Sheesh. It was like being accused of larceny or something. No guy liked to think of himself as
kind.

“It's okay,” she said. “I won't tell. I just brought it up because I didn't want you to think I needed looking after. I knew coming back here would be tough. I'm all right.” Rather than leave it on a heavy note, she came through with a grin and added, “Except, of course, for dying of the heat.”

She uncurled her legs and started to clean up the spoons and ice-cream container. Griff didn't need a bat over the head. It was time for him to go.

Heaven knew what sparked the impulse to visit to begin with. The buzz of gossip coming from Jason had just nagged on him. The sound of the fire truck siren had annoyed him further. He just kept getting some stupid, uneasy feeling that Lily was alone in town and in trouble.

So—fine. He'd come and brought her ice cream and they'd made each other laugh. Everything was great. Time to pack it up. Hell, he'd lost a couple hours of the real work he did at night as it was.

Yet they both stood up at the same time. He reached for the container at the same time she extended a hand to offer it. She was still smiling at him, friendly fashion. She'd absolved him of any responsibility. She was tough, she'd implied. Prepared for trouble, she'd implied. No one needed to worry about her, she'd implied.

This close, for that millisecond, he saw a pearl of
perspiration on her neck. Saw the tilt of her head, proud, stubborn. Saw the sunset in her hair.

He had to bend down almost a foot to kiss her. Didn't know he was going to do it. He didn't plan it, and didn't intend to. He was holding the sticky spoons and container, so it was a no-hands kind of kiss, couldn't be any more, couldn't turn into more.

Yet her face tilted to accommodate the landing of his mouth, not as if she was inviting him, but as if she just instinctively moved to make a meeting of lips more natural, more easy. He tasted ice cream. He tasted the vulnerable satin of her lips.

He lifted his head almost immediately, saw the startled flush on her cheeks, thought…oh yeah, she's tough, all right.

Tough as a rose petal.

“I'll give you a discount on ice cream if you show up regular while you're here.”

“As if that was an offer I could refuse.” But her eyes shied from his now. The sass was still there, the ready teasing…but she didn't know what to make of that kiss.

As he ambled down the walk, headed home, he thought, hell times ten, neither did he.

L
ily had serious things to think about—why fires had started up in Pecan Valley since she'd shown up, the facts surrounding that long-ago fire, whether there was a chance of finding more information that might clear her dad's name…and, oh yeah, that extraordinary kiss from Griff the night before.

The man had been humming in her dreams all last night. But this morning she couldn't concentrate on anything because of her landlady.

Louella Bertram was eighty if she was a day, never met a cat she didn't like, made coffee so weak it looked like dirty water, and treated every guest as if they were skinny runts that she took in just to feed.

“Now, sugar.” When Lily tried to rise from the breakfast table, Louella was already trying to block the doorway. “You can't go a whole day on a sip of coffee
and a half a bite of toast. You'll waste away in the heat. Now you just take a little bag along with you. It's just a couple of my cinnamon muffins, something to tide you over. You end up here at lunch, you just come on back to the kitchen, and I'm sure I can whip up something for you.”

She'd been here less than a week, yet Lily already knew better than to argue. She took the bag, then, when Louella lifted her wrinkled cheek, bent down to give her a smooch and a hug. Louella wouldn't let her out the door without those, too.

“Now,” the older woman walked her to the door, “I know you think you want answers to the past. Everybody wants answers. The whole South, we understand about how the past and our history is part of who we are. But sugar, the things that matter in life, you never find those kinds of answers in facts. It's all in the heart. So I'm not saying you shouldn't look, honey. But I just want you to enjoy being back in your home town, instead of dwelling on that one bad moment. Your momma and daddy had a good life here once. You try and think about that, child.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“And another thing…”

Lily escaped inside of ten minutes, the best she'd managed to do so far. Carrying her purse and a satchel—and the muffins—she headed straight for the street. She didn't have a thermometer, but outside, this early, it couldn't be more than one hundred and ten. In the house, it was hot enough to fry eggs.

She'd given up jeans in the first two days, then gave
up skirts, and that was the end of her traditional teacher clothes. Her shorts were barely decent, her tee tissue thin, and if this relentless heat didn't let up, she planned to walk around naked with no apology. She'd neglected to get her long hair lopped off, but that was only because she'd been too busy to check out the local salons.

Two blocks later, she paused at Griff's place. Naturally, this early in the morning it was still locked up. She didn't expect to see him. It just seemed to be a knee-jerk reaction—walk by the ice cream place, remember that kiss. Remember his sitting on the veranda, feeding her Griff's Secret, making her think about other seductive secrets he might offer.

To the right woman.

Under the right circumstances.

He was a player, she reminded herself. A womanizer. An uncommitted, lazy, adorable scoundrel. There wasn't a soul in the town who'd suggested anything else.

Truthfully, it was his lazy scoundrel persona that rang her bells. It had been so long since a man rang her bells that she couldn't believe it. Somehow, though, she couldn't manage to believe his reputation. Something was…off. He kissed like trouble. He looked at a woman like trouble. She didn't doubt that he
was
trouble.

But a sixth sense still warned her that he was not what he seemed.

Like everything else in this town.

Another block later, she opened the door to the police station, which had become as familiar as Louella's. The same Martinet Martha guarded the front counter, gave her the same two-second acknowledgment, then barked,
“Chief, someone to see you!” at the top of her impressive vocal range, same as before.

And Herman Conner, after a few moments, clomped out of his office, hitching up his trousers, with the same refrain. “How many times do I havta tell you—” And then he spotted her. Sighed.

“You gonna visit me every day this week?”

“Not every day. But I just—”

“Come on in, come on in.”

“You're busy.” Phones were ringing. Printers clacking.

“Not too busy for you, sweet thing. We need to get your mind satisfied so you could finally put all this to rest.” He motioned to the same scarred-up wood chair he had before. “I'm having coffee. You gonna be here long enough to have a mug?”

“I could kill for a cup.”

He sighed again. “Not a thing to tell the sheriff, honey.”

She propped a peace offering on his desk. “Cinnamon muffins. Fresh.”

He opened it, smelled. “All right. I admit it. There is good in you.” She got the coffee. He got the muffins. She opened up the satchel and pulled out her faded copy of the police report.

“Not this again,” he said.

“I just have a few more questions.” She leaned over the desk with her copy of the investigation report. It was only three pages, and that included signatures and dates and times and addresses. The actual information related to the investigation was sparse—which was why she'd
read and reread it until her eyes crossed. “At the very end of the report, you wrote, ‘no reason to connect this to the other arson fires'. That kept jumping out at me.
What
other arson fires?”

“You've been on the computer again, haven't you? That, or watching
Law and Order
reruns. Everybody's an expert on the law these days.”

“I'm sorry to be such a pain,” she said, real apology in her voice, but not moving until she'd heard an answer. He sighed and eventually got around to responding.

“You know, it's been twenty years, but if I recall correctly, there'd been a rash of vandalism fires, stretching maybe a year or so, before the one at your place. But there was no relationship, like I wrote. There was no one killed in the other fires, no property damage that remotely compared.”

“Still, was there
any
similarity with my family's fire? Like…was the same accelerant used? Or were those fires set in the same time of day? Any connection at all?”

“The similarity you need to know, sunshine, is that the arsons stopped after your daddy died. For a whole three years, there was no other fire except for old Samuel Wilson's trying to cook after his wife died. So this is probably not an avenue you want to pursue. It only points to your daddy all over again.”

That hurt. She admitted it. Still, she said softly, “So you're sure…there was no similarity in the other fires?”

“To be honest with you, sweetheart, I don't remember now. I just remember studying the thing at the time, concluding there was nothing in common with the other
prank-type fires. If you're doubting I know how to do my job—”

“No, no.” She hurried to look penitent…and to push the other cinnamon muffin his way. Being a teacher, she had a half-dozen ways of locally researching the past fire, all of which she still intended to pursue—but there'd be no real way to get closure without Sheriff Conner on her side. If she had to grovel, she was more than willing to grovel. “I'm just trying to understand, sheriff. It was so devastating to my family—”

“And to everyone in this town. Now—you got any more questions?”

“Just one teensy one.” She motioned to the partial sentence on the second page. “The report says the fire started outside our back door. Actually, it says, west of the back door.”

“Okay. And you think that means
what?
” the sheriff asked with a look of fatherly patience.

“Well, I'm not sure. But I
remember
our house. We shared a garage wall with the house next to us. And that my dad had a shop on that side of the garage. He liked working with wood, so he had stuff out there, like lacquer and varnish and mineral spirits and all that.”

“I'm still listening.”

“Well…I had no concept when I was a little kid, but now, it seems pretty obvious why the whole downstairs exploded. Why the fire was so fast and awful. Because of the chemicals my dad had in the garage.”

Herman Conner took the last bite of muffin. “Okay.”

“But my dad would never have deliberately started a
fire near those products, would he? That wouldn't have made any sense at all. The belief was that he wanted the insurance money. But he loved us. I can't imagine in a million years why he would have started a fire where all those accelerants were around. It would have been asking for an explosion. And he'd never have done anything to deliberately harm my sisters or my mom—”

“Lily. Honey. We've been over this. He was despondent. He'd lost his job. He wasn't thinking rationally.”

“But isn't it possible…that the fire might have started in the house next to ours? But that ours went up so fast because of the stuff my dad had in the garage? I mean, do you know who lived next door? What happened to them? I don't remember at all—if that house burned down, too, or if anyone was hurt there, or anything else. If there could have been a connection…” Lily could have sworn she caught a flash of alarm in the sheriff's eyes, yet his voice was as calm and patient as before.

“Aw, sweetheart. You got eyes full of hope. But there was no one in that house. It'd been for sale for several months. There was fire damage there, too, a course, but nothing like what happened to your place, where the downstairs fire took off like hell in a fury. Pardon my French. You were all trapped on the second floor. There was no one on the other side of the garage wall to be hurt.”

“So. You think that's a dead end,” she said carefully.

Something had changed in his expression. His posture was a little stiffer, his eyes more guarded. Or maybe it was her imagination, because his tone of voice never changed.
“I think, if you want to come back here every single day you're here, ask more questions, pursue anything on your mind, honey, then that's what you should do. Let's get this off your mind so it'll never come up again. I admit, if I were your daddy, I'd be advising you to let it go, that it's not good for you to dwell on something you can never make right. A tragedy is a tragedy, honey. You already went through it. No point that I can see in reliving it yet again. But you do whatever you need to do. I won't get mad. That's a promise.” He added, “Particularly if you keep bringing me Louella's cinnamon muffins.”

When Lily left the station, the temperature had risen to one hundred and thirty—at
least
. Virginia had hot summers, but nothing like this. She battled the humidity straight to the ice-cream store—which, she told herself, had nothing to do with seeing Griff. It was about saving her life.

The place was wallpapered with kids, some slurping ice cream, but not all. Lily recognized the phenomenon. With school out for the summer, the kids too young for a job needed a hang-out place. Griff's was clearly it.

Two boys were manning the counter, with a third visible in the back, doing washup. Griff seemed to choose employees who looked as if they'd recently been let out of juvenile detention—lots of tattoos, lots of metal on their faces, lots of attitude. The one Lily had come to know—Jason—seemed to half-live there.

“You looking for Griff?” he asked when she made it up to the counter.

“Well. It doesn't look as if he's here—”

“He's here. He's just locked up.”

“Locked up?”

Jason nodded his head toward a far steel door. “He's in the vault. It's where he makes the ice cream. Nobody's ever allowed in the vault, but I can let him know you're here—”

Before Jason finished the comment, Griff appeared from beyond the locked steel door. As if expecting her, he turned and located her in two seconds flat. That slick, wild kiss on the dark veranda was suddenly between them as if it just happened.

Possibly, she'd have had the good sense to run out the door, if he hadn't crossed the room too quickly for her to take that option.

“I don't want to interrupt you,” she said immediately.

“You won't if you come back with me. I'm right in the middle of something.”

“Jason just said no one's allowed back there?”

“No one is,” he agreed, and motioned for her to follow him.

All right, all right, so she had more curiosity than could kill any cat. After a word with his kids, Griff led her into the so-called vault. “You can test one of the new flavors I'm experimenting with,” he said.

She tasted. Then tasted again. The flavor had some peach, some pecan, some vanilla bean, some unique and tantalizing other flavor. She took another spoonful, thinking that when she left this darned town, she was going to be fatter than a pig.

Which didn't stop her from more taste testing, even as she turned in a slow circle, examining his “vault.”
The room was long, clean as a new penny, all stainless steel and bright light. A one-way window supervised the shop—so that was how Griff knew exactly what was going on with the customers and kids—and inside were counters and a bunch of futuristic appliances she couldn't identify. Ice-cream making equipment, obviously. She would have asked a dozen questions, except that Griff clearly
was
in the middle of something, had put on gloves, had some kind of quietly vibrating blender that he was supervising—so he got in his grilling first. “How'd your visit with the sheriff go?”

“Pretty much the same as the other times. I raised questions. He called me a fool. I thanked him.” She gave him more rave reviews for the new flavor, but he still had questions.

“Where are you going after this?”

“I figured either the newspaper office or the library. Wherever I can dig into old copies of newspapers the easiest. I assume old editions will be available online—”