The Kissing Game (7 page)

“What if he's not as great as you remember him to be?”

“What if he's better?”

Simon was still watching her intently, and Frankie forced herself to stare back at him. He didn't quite believe her, and rightfully so. But what was she supposed to tell him? That she couldn't risk acting on this sexual attraction that had suddenly ignited between them? That she couldn't risk giving in to the temptations that her body desired because it wouldn't take much for her heart to become involved?

Shoot, her heart already
was
involved. When she daydreamed about Simon, she wasn't dreaming about a sexy bed partner. She was dreaming about a
lover.
And that was where fantasy and reality became hopelessly entangled. She dreamed about someone who did more than fulfill her passionate physical fantasies, someone who satisfied her emotional needs as well. Someone who used sexual intimacy as a means to express his
deepest feelings of love rather than someone—like Simon—who played at love to achieve sexual gratification.

Frankie could pretend to be a willing participant in the kind of casual, no-strings relationship that Simon was so good at having. She knew she would enjoy the physical intimacies she saw promised in the heat of his eyes. In fact, a good part of her was tempted ….

Jazz, she reminded herself. It was only a matter of time before she found Jazz Chester again. Compared to Jazz's deep sensitivity, Simon would seem frivolous and shallow.

“Alice liked Jazz too,” she told Simon. “She was so certain that we were going to end up together, you know, get married. When Jazz didn't come back to Sunrise Key, Alice was almost as upset as I was. She told me that she wished she could wave a magic wand and make him appear. She said she'd do
any
thing to get the two of us back together. She didn't manage to do it while she was alive, but she just might be able to pull it off now that she's gone.” Simon finally looked away, and Frankie knew that she had won—this round at least.

And she herself was starting to believe her own words. Finding Jazz was going to be good.

Simon glanced up at Frankie again as she moved toward the bookcase and slipped the photo album onto the shelf. Damn Jazz Chester. He'd disliked what little he'd known about the boy, and those feelings held true for the man.

Simon had seldom had rivals when it came to a woman's affections. This jealousy he was trying hard to curb was an uncomfortable sensation. He didn't like knowing that he couldn't even compete with a man that Frankie hadn't seen for twelve years.

But that didn't mean Simon was going to give up.

“I think you're holding out for a dream,” he told her. Even if Jazz
weren't
married, he couldn't possibly be as perfect as Frankie remembered. No way. The flowers and poetry had to be part of some cheeseball act designed to make it easier to worm his way onto a young girl's beach blanket.

She glanced at him, her dark eyes unreadable and finally dry. Man, when he'd come back into the parlor to find her crying, his insides had twisted, and all thoughts about the incredible antique
treasures he'd found throughout the entire house had fled.

“So what if I am?”

So what, indeed? Jazz
was
going to be a disappointment, and Simon was going to be there to pick up the pieces.

Frankie finished her perusal of the bookcase and headed out of the room toward the stairs leading to the second floor of the house. Simon trailed after her.

Clay Quinn was still on the telephone, his voice muffled behind the closed kitchen door.

“What's the furniture like in the dining room?” Frankie asked, climbing the stairs, pointedly changing the subject.

“Perfect. It's all red-seal Stickley oak too. In fact, I've been searching for a dining room set just like it. I have a client who has an end-of-the-month deadline, and if I don't come up with something, he's going to go with inferior pieces from another broker.”

She glanced at him over her shoulder. “Isn't the end of the month—”

“Next Monday. We need to find this John guy
before next Monday, or you don't get your bonus and I don't make this deal.”

Simon followed Frankie into a room that must have been Alice Winfield's bedroom. The heavy curtains were drawn and the room was only dimly lit by the light from the hall.

“I don't think we should count on my friend at Boston University coming through with a current address for Jazz,” Simon continued. “I think we need to go through those rental records we copied and try to find John's last name that way.”

Frankie turned to face him, her delicate features mysterious in the gloom. “We?”

“Let me help you find this guy,” he said.

She didn't say anything. She just looked at him.

“All private eyes have sidekicks,” Simon continued. “Sherlock Holmes has Watson. Spenser has Hawk. Rockford has his dad. Inspector Clouseau has Kato …. “

She finally spoke. “You don't think I can find John on my own.”

“No! That's not true! That's not what this is about at all,” Simon hastily assured her.

“What
is
it about?”

“It's the old two-heads-are-better-than-one
thing. My schedule is light for the next few days, and”—she was still watching him, her face damn near expressionless—”and I have to confess, Francine, I'm still holding out hope that I'll be able to get you into bed with me.”

She looked surprised for the briefest fraction of a second, and then she laughed. “Finally, something that rings with truth.”

Simon lowered his voice, suddenly aware of the quiet dimness of the room, of the big antique bed in the corner, covered by a protective sheet. “Just think how incredible it could be.”

Something shifted in her eyes, something that told Simon that she, too, had imagined the nuclear heat the two of them could generate. “You're probably right.” She turned away from him and crossed to the windows, pushing aside the curtains. “But I can tell you right now, Si, it's not going to happen. So if that's your motivation for helping—”

Simon squinted slightly in the sudden brightness. “I'm having fun, Francine. That—and the thought of making a very important client happy—is my motivation.”

“I was serious about what I said before, about you and me being a bad mistake.”

“I know. And you're probably right.”

“I'm definitely right. No means no. And if you repeatedly overstep those bounds—”

“I won't. I promise.”

“I'm really sorry,” Clay Quinn said from the doorway, and Simon nearly jumped with surprise. “But the manure has hit the fan back at my office and I've got to go. I've called the airport, and my charter flight is ready to leave as soon as I can get there. You're welcome to stay here in the house as long as you like. I'll leave you the keys—they're still down in the door.”

Frankie nodded.

“Oh, and I'll give you my brother's phone number, in case I can't be reached.” From his pocket Clay took a little notepad with the Seaholm Resort logo on the front. He scribbled a name and phone number on a sheet of the linen-blend paper, then tore it out and handed it to Frankie.

She glanced at it, folded it, and pocketed it. “If you don't mind, I'll let Simon—my assistant— drive you to the airport.”

Her assistant. She was going to let him help.

Simon knew he was grinning like an idiot, but he couldn't seem to stop. Frankie met his eyes only briefly, but it was long enough to send him a silent message: If he came on too strong, he'd be outta there.

Okay. He could play by those rules.

“Have a good flight,” Frankie said to Clay.

“Thanks. I'll be in touch.”

“I'll be back,” Simon told Frankie, following Quinn out the door.

HERE'S ANOTHER TWO-WEEK
rental for John Marshall.” Simon reached for his notebook computer and deftly typed the information into the file they'd started. “April 1974.”

“Great.” Frankie looked over his shoulder. “How many names do we have now?”

“Fifteen Johns,” Simon said. “Five of them have now rented on Pelican Street two years in a row.”

The photocopies of rental records that they'd made were spread out across Frankie's kitchen table.

“Why couldn't his first name have been Percival?” Frankie mused.

“Or Fenton.”

She snickered. “Or Beauregard.”

“Dudley.”

“Or Oscar?” Frankie shook her head, her laugh ter turning to frustration. “Anything but
John.
This is taking forever.”

It better not take forever. Simon was running out of time.

It had nothing to do with his client's end-of-the-month deadline, and everything to do with his willpower. He'd been sitting at this table with Frankie for nearly six hours, and his strength was being severely tested. He'd memorized every single freckle on her nose and cheeks, he'd studied the way she caught her lower lip between her teeth when she was concentrating, and he'd stopped himself from reaching out for her more times than he could count.

He needed to find this man John, so he could find John's stepson, Jazz, so Frankie could see for herself that the guy was not worth her time.

Whereas Simon was?

No.
But the time Frankie spent with Simon— preferably in Simon's bed—was going to be so incredible, it wasn't going to matter. It was going to be worth it.

At least it would be to Simon. Somehow—he didn't know how or why it had happened— Frankie held the key that would unlock him from this damned self-imposed state of monkhood he'd recently found himself in. Somehow, out of all of the women in the world, Frankie was the one woman that he wanted, the one woman who could set him free.

It
was
going to happen. He had to believe that.

“I wish there were a way to narrow down the dates,” Simon said. “Lots of people take vacations the same two or three weeks each year. Are you sure Jazz and his family didn't—”

“I'm positive,” Frankie interrupted. “Some times he was here in April, and sometimes he came down in February or March. The last year he came down it was early May. I know because—” She broke off. “Oh, my God.”

“What?”

She shuffled through the papers on the table, searching for the date. “It was May, and it was a
month before I turned eighteen. I know because I reread what I wrote in my diary just last night.”

Simon stared across the table at her. “Your diary?”

Frankie kept a
diary?
She hardly seemed the type. “Since when did you keep a diary?”

“Since forever,” Frankie said, not even looking up. “I still do—sometimes.” She found the page she was looking for and quickly skimmed the contents. “Shoot.”

“What?”

She pushed the paper in front of him. “No first names.”

Simon glanced down the list. “Here's Marshall again.” He frowned. “But it's a different address than the two previous records.”

Frankie snatched the page back from him and skewered it to the corkboard on the wall with a green pushpin. Then she bolted out of the kitchen. The swinging door rocked on its hinges as he heard her rapid footsteps up the stairs.

Curious, Simon followed, standing and stretching for the first time in what seemed like hours. He took the stairs to the second floor of the little house at a more leisurely pace.

The sun was starting to set, and Frankie had turned the light on in her room. Simon stopped in the doorway, watching as she moved from bookcase to bookcase, pulling spiral notebooks of all shapes and sizes from her shelves and tossing them onto the bed.

There were about thirty-five notebooks already there, and she showed no sign of stopping.

“Diaries,” she said in response to his unspoken question. “I've always kept diaries. All we need to do is search through these for any mention of Jazz, and we'll have the dates that he was here on the key. We can cross-reference those dates with the rental records and hopefully come up with his stepdad's last name.”

She dumped another armload on top of the pile, then sat down, cross-legged, her back against the headboard.

“I know it looks like a lot,” she said, “but in the front of each book I always wrote the year. We can ignore the ones that I wrote before I turned ten, before Jazz first came to the key, and after I turned eighteen.”

Frankie flipped open a notebook, quickly checked
the date, tossed it onto the floor, then did the same with the next one.

Simon couldn't believe it. Was Frankie actually going to let him read her diaries?

She wasn't kidding when she said she'd been writing them forever. The bed was covered with pages and pages of her deepest thoughts. And passions. And desires ….

Simon sat down on the edge of her bed and picked up one of the slim, spiral-bound books. He opened to a page in the middle.

December 20th,
he read silently. Frankie's hand writing was bold and messy, but not un readable.

College. Frankie had written this when she'd gone away to college, Simon realized. It had taken her nearly three years after high school to save enough for her college tuition, even with the scholarship she'd won. But she'd never finished, never gotten her degree. He vaguely remembered her grandmother having a stroke or something that required Frankie's full-time care. He flipped ahead several pages, knowing that there was no reason for him to continue looking in this notebook, but unable to stop himself.

Charlie? Who was Charlie?