Thick as Thieves(74)
“Guess not.”
“What was Brian Foster like?”
“He was a nerd. Timid. The anti-Rusty. Which I’m sure is why Rusty picked on him.” He soothed his conscience by asserting that none of what he’d told her was an outright lie. She was thinking it over. He hoped her frown was one of concentration, not doubt.
He continued. “I don’t how, or to what extent, Rusty was instrumental in Foster’s death. I can’t prove anything. But on the night Foster died a grisly death, Rusty, the walking wounded, showed up at Crystal’s house in more urgent need of an alibi than emergency medical treatment.”
“It’s broadly circumstantial, Ledge.”
“So is everything they had on your dad.”
“All right, but circling back to motive, I understand Rusty being a bully who picked on a nerd for fun. But what would have provoked Rusty to kill him?”
Damn it. She’d given him another perfect opening to tell her why. But if she had knowledge of the burglary, and Rusty’s motive to get rid of Foster, she would pose a real threat to Rusty. Bad things happened to people whom Rusty perceived as a threat. “Maybe Foster got sick of his bullying and fought back. Or, knowing Rusty as I do, he wouldn’t have needed a motive. He would kill somebody just to see if he could get away with it.”
“Based on the way he struck me today, I can almost believe that. Almost.” As she looked out across the watery landscape, she blindly reached for Ledge’s flashlight, and he relinquished it. She moved the beam across the panorama of the wetland. “The monotony of it has always frightened me. It all looks the same. How does one find his way? But Dad was never lost on the lake. He always knew exactly where he was.”
Ledge didn’t say anything.
“He had a boat. He also had a motive. Half a million of them, in fact.”
Her extended arm dropped to her side as though the flashlight had become weighted. Slowly, Ledge took it from her listless hand. She turned and started walking quickly back toward the truck, stumbling over natural obstacles.
“Arden.” He followed and reached for her, but she shook off his hand and kept walking.
He outdistanced her and arrived at the pickup first. He opened the passenger door. She reached for the handhold above the door, but he splayed his hand over her bottom and boosted her up. He went around, and, as soon as he slid into the driver’s seat and cranked the engine, she said, “Please take me back to my car.”
He turned the truck around and headed back toward the highway. “Don’t jump to a wrong conclusion, Arden.”
“Then why did you bring me out here? To see for myself how logical it is that my father killed that man? I would rather you have continued to delude, evade, and invent.”
“Invent?”
“That crap about the district attorney.”
“It’s not crap. You saw the medical chart.”
“All that means is that as a hotheaded young man, Rusty Dyle got into a fight.”
“With Foster.”
“You want it to be Rusty because of your silly feud.”
“What would my silly feud have to do with Rusty’s interest in you? Explain that.”
“Explain yours.”
“My what?”
“Your interest in that night. Your obsession with Rusty, Foster, my dad, the whole thing. If anyone has unexplained motives for his actions, it’s you.”
The truck bumped off the dirt road and lurched onto the highway. When it hit the blacktop, Ledge floorboarded the accelerator. He sped back to town without a word passing between them. Main thoroughfares, such as they were in Penton, were more heavily patrolled, so he stayed off them and took a backstreet route to Crystal’s house.
With a short distance still to go, he pulled over to a curb that bordered a vacant lot, cut the engine, and turned off the headlights.
“Why are you stopping?” she said. “Where are we?”
“A couple of blocks from Crystal’s house.”
“Take me to my car, Ledge. Now.”
“We can’t do this in front of Crystal’s house.”
“Do what?”
“Either fight or fuck. Which?”
Chapter 30
Then we fight,” she said.
“Okay. You go first.”
She blinked. She took a swift little breath. She waited too long.
He leaned across the console and captured her mouth with his.
She remained stiff and unresponsive for a couple of heartbeats, then her lips became pliant, and her tongue engaged with his, and her hot, sweet body seemed to melt into the car seat.
He curved his right arm around her shoulders, and his left around her waist, and pulled her as close as the console between them would allow. She tunneled all ten fingers through his hair, angled her head, and held his fast as they continued a kiss erotic and evocative, a kiss that was a mind-blowing preview of what sex with this woman would be like.
She didn’t kiss with the timidity of inexperience. But she also didn’t kiss with the near boredom of a woman who had frequent lovers. She wasn’t just going through the motions before moving on to the next step. She was into it, with an unabashed combination of pleasure in the kiss alone and a yearning for more.
He raised his head, looked into her face, pulled his arm from around her shoulders, and swept his thumb across her full, wet lower lip. “You want to know about my interest in you? It has a lot to do with this.”