Proposal (The Mediator, #6.5)(9)

Now I was the one who felt indignant. I nearly dropped one of my boots.

“Afraid? I wasn’t afraid of that little brat. I just didn’t enjoy being pelted by funerary floral arrangements, that’s all.”

“Susannah.” Now he was looming over me, seventy--three inches or so of tasty man--meat. “What happened in the cemetery?”

Susannah.

I felt another chill down my spine, but unlike the one I’d felt when I’d seen the name Paul Slater on the envelope Lauren had handed me, this one was pleasant.

As hard as it is to date someone with nineteenth--century manners—-seriously, it’s getting to a point where I spend so much time swimming laps in the campus pool to work off my sexual frustration, my highlights are becoming brassy—-I still feel a thrill every time Jesse calls me Susannah. He thinks the name everyone else calls me—-Suze—-is too short and ugly for someone of my strength and beauty.

Yeah. He gets me. Well, except for the part where I’m totally fine with premarital sex and am also convinced that God, if he or she exists, is, too.

“Well,” I said, since he was still looming over me, looking more like a dominating he--male than a nerdy doctor--to--be. I had no choice but to tell him, even though I knew it was going to make him mad. “Okay, so there’s this NCDP who’s been stealing flowers off his dead girlfriend’s grave, and the girl’s family got it on video—-well, static is what they mostly got, but it’s been freaking everybody out—-I’m surprised you haven’t seen it, it’s been all over the news. But I guess you’ve been busy with your studying and interviews and stuff. So, anyway, I decided to go check it out tonight.” I wiggled out of my jeans. “And long story short, this guy, Mark, says—-”

“Susannah.” My name came out in a frustrated hiss. When I glanced in his direction, I saw that Jesse had turned to face my window, the curtains of which he’d closed, so no one could see that a resident of the Virgin Vault was entertaining a contraband man in her room.

He had his arms folded across his chest and his dark head bent, his gaze fastened to the floor. I felt a surge of shame for my bad behavior—-but not for my black hipster briefs, which even I have to admit I look pretty hot in.

“Sorry,” I said, pulling open a drawer and grabbing a dry pair of jeans. “But you’re the one who told me to change out of my wet things.”

“Not in front of me,” he ground out. “I’m not a eunuch.”

“Oh, believe me, I know. But you’re the one who says we have to wait until we get married to have sex, and that we can’t get married until you can financially support us both, which is just about the most ridiculously chauvinistic thing I ever—-”

“Can we not have this conversation again right now?” he questioned over his shoulder. “I’ve told you, I respect you and your family both too much to be a financial burden—-”

“I thought you said you didn’t want to have this conversation again right now.”

“Are you finished dressing?”

I zipped up my fly. “Yes.”

He turned around. His angular jaws—-beneath a dusting of five o’clock shadow—-had a slight flush to them, and his dark eyes were brighter than ever. “What happened in the cemetery? Did he hurt you?”

“Geez, of course not.” I thought it better not to mention the vases, or that Mark seemed to have been the one who’d whipped up the super cell. That was probably only a coincidence, anyway.

Except that in my business, there are no coincidences. Had it been a coincidence that of all the houses in all the world, I’d just happened to move into the one Jesse had been murdered in?

I think not.

But if there is some higher power in charge of all this stuff, he or she has some explaining to do. Because why would they put someone like me in charge of mediating a case like Mark’s? I was already doing a supremely crappy job of it, if the expression on Jesse’s face as I described to him what had happened in the cemetery—-well, an abridged version, anyway—-was any indication. How I’d gone there to convince Mark to move on, and how he’d revealed to me that he couldn’t, because he hadn’t actually killed Jasmin (like everyone thought), and how he was now convinced he had to go get revenge on the person who (allegedly) had.

“But technically it isn’t my fault,” I said in my own defense. “How was I supposed to know there’d been a second vehicle involved in the accident? Nothing in any of the news reports mentioned that. You would think there’d have been skid marks or broken glass or paint from the other car or something—-”

He had me in his arms so fast, I hardly knew what was happening. One second he’d been over by the window, and the next, he was crushing me in his embrace. He may not have been a ghost anymore, but he could certainly move as rapidly as one when he felt like it.

“Thank God you weren’t hurt,” he said, burying his face in my rain--dampened hair. “Susannah, how could you have been so foolish as to have gone there alone?”

“Well,” I said. The hug was surprising, but not unwelcome, especially since I enjoyed the feel of his rock--hard chest against me, and in particular the familiar tingle from the general vicinity of my pubic bone I always experienced whenever it came into contact with any part of his anatomy. “I didn’t have a choice. Father Dominic is away at some ministry conference. And I didn’t know you were coming. If you’d called sooner, I’d have waited for—-”