Off Limits(17)

But with Dane, we'd done things I'd only dreamed of. He tasted my body and ran his tongue along every erogenous spot I had. I knew from the first touch of his tongue between my legs that I wanted more, and that I’d never be the same again.

Still, even a long-repressed body eventually tires out, and it was time to wash up and go. Soon enough, the water finished sluicing the dried sweat and sticky residues of our repeated lovemaking from my body, and I felt as refreshed as I was going to get. I'd picked up my panties and bra from the floor of the bed area of the loft, tossing them in the washer on a gentle cycle. Now, after no heat tumble drying, they were probably the freshest thing I had to put on.

"This one goes out to all you girls having breakfast . . . in last night's dress," Katy Perry had said, and I smiled to myself thinking about it. Damn right. Fixing my left shoulder strap, I looked at myself in the mirror, thinking I wasn't looking all that bad. I looked more like a girl who'd overdressed for breakfast than a girl who was still dressed from the night before.

I finished teasing my hair with my fingers, wishing that Dane had an actual hair brush, or at least some sort of band I could use to pull my hair back into a ponytail.

I made my way out to the kitchen, and I could still hear Dane snoring softly. I looked around, knowing he must have coffee. I’d gotten into a habit of having a nice steaming mug every morning, and I simply could not function without it. I saw the coffee maker, and next to it a clear glass jar that obviously had ground coffee inside. I remembered Shawnie's admonition to me that coffee should be stored in a cool, dark, airtight place to preserve the most flavor, especially if it'd been already ground. "Shawnie would smack you upside the head for that."

Still, the aroma that came from the canister when I opened the seal was heavenly, and I quickly got a pot going. I preferred my coffee with milk or cream, so I turned to the fridge, reaching for the handle. I had the door halfway open when the photo held to the other side by a magnet caught my eye, and my hand froze. With trembling fingers, I took the magnet off the face in the photo it had been covering, my mouth going dry.

I hadn't seen or heard from Chris Lake in years—not since he had what he described as an "incident" in Iraq. I'd been in high school at the time, so proud to be dating a handsome guy like him. I was even more proud of the fact that he was a soldier, and at the time, I thought he was out there defending our country. His final letter to me was long, and I remembered it was somewhat rambling. He'd lost a friend, he said, and another went to jail for the killing. As I looked at the three faces in the photo—one was clearly Chris, the other clearly Dane, but there was another that I didn’t know. Right then, fear stabbed icily into my heart.

Marching to the bed, I stood at the foot, not sure what to do or say. Fear kept grabbing at me as I saw the things that I dismissed earlier. The amateur nature of some of Dane's tattoos . . . they could have just been ones done hastily in the service, or could they have been prison ink? When he talked about his time in the military, he hadn't really said where he'd been or even why and how he'd gotten out. Had he been the man Chris had told me about? Had I spent the night making love to a murderer? It couldn’t be. Dane seemed nothing like a killer . . .

Before I could say anything to wake him up, he stretched his arms to the sides and opened his eyes. He blinked a few times when he saw me, obviously confused by what I was doing standing there. "How do you know Chris? Who the hell are you?"

Dane's eyes flickered between the photograph and my face as anger and shame built within me. "Abby, I . . .” he said, his voice trailing off into silence. For the first time, I saw secrecy in his eyes, and shame of who he was and what he'd done. "This isn't my apartment."

"Well, that explains a few things,” I said, trying not to sound snippy and vindictive. I've got a temper, and a very sharp tongue to go with it if I let it loose. "Anything else around here not yours?"

He sat up, pulling his knees to his chest and scooting back. It enraged me, seeing him trying to take a cute defensive body position when he was obviously more than he'd led me to believe. Or perhaps less, depending on how you looked at it. "Almost all of it," he sighed, looking around. "I'm house sitting for Chris while he took a couple of months in Europe. He wanted to catch a festival in Switzerland and the last of the spring skiing or something, he said. I didn’t have anywhere to stay, so he was basically doing me a favor. I've been trying to find a job the whole time."

"Not too many people want to hire a murderer," I spat, my anger boiling over. Dane recoiled as if I'd slapped him across the face. Still, he didn't deny it, which for some reason made me even angrier. I guess I still had a semblance of hope that I was wrong. “So what were you doing last night, huh? Deciding to hang out with the other *s and felons in the park? You all have some sort of convention or something?"

"Abs, I never hurt you," Dane said, trying to defend himself. "I would never hurt you. I'm not like that."

"No? Then what about the other guy in this photo? What's his name and where is he now?” I nearly screamed, almost throwing the picture in his face.

Dane hung his head, guilty. "Lloyd. Lloyd James, from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania."

The name clicked, and now I could place Dane's as well. "Yes . . . Lloyd James. You know, Dane, you're kind of famous in some circles. Killers and those who betray their comrades aren't too popular in places like Atlanta. Why the hell did you come here instead of someplace a little less military-friendly? You have a death wish or something?"