Chapter Four
H e wanted her.
Badly.
In his office on Tuesday, writing an argument that, depending on the judge’s ruling, could make or break his case, Scott caught himself staring at the computer screen. Hands still on the keyboard.
Thinking about Iris’s comments about the case when he’d shared it with her the night before. She’d been fully engaged. Hearing not only the facts, but the nuances, too.
Her motive was clearly murder for hire. Those are the only charges you have to prove.
Polly Ernst’s emotional distress had already been litigated. She’d lost. Scott typed. If she’d won the previous case, perhaps the evidence brought by her psychiatric team could be admitted for the current case, but trying to prove that a suspect was not guilty due to a mental state that had not been deemed duress in civil court was egregious. The accused was clearly distressed. Upset. Lividly angry. That didn’t give her a free pass to take another life.
That fact was a basis of the entire justice system.
You aren’t God, Scott… You have to trust the system to make the final choice .
Right, but the system relied on his ability to do his job.
No matter how strongly Scott felt the sting of prosecuting a woman whose husband had committed the same moral crime as Scott, he had to stick with the prosecutable facts.
He’d married a woman, promised to be her partner and then deserted her, chaining her to an empty, lonely life. And she’d left him. No matter how angry she’d been, how hurt, how much she’d probably hated him, she hadn’t tried to murder him.
And he couldn’t let a personal issue interfere with his duty to provide justice.
He was staring at his screen again. Knew his argument was strong. Solid.
And the rest…
His brief was done.
Iris was still there. Taking up mental space in his office.
His way forward, to be accountable for the distress he’d caused, was to avoid future failure.
A process he’d set in motion the night before.
“So, now that we’ve established that there’s no risk of us suddenly falling madly in love, are we okay?” she’d asked.
They were.
He’d smiled.
So had she. His mind conjured up the image of her grin the night before.
Which led his inner gaze to her lips.
And his body jumped on board.
Big-time.
There were women who could help with that. He had no shortage of date prospects.
The idea didn’t appeal at the moment.
Felt sleazy.
His body concurred.
And all was well.
Driving across the bridge from San Diego to Coronado Island on Wednesday, Iris couldn’t help but smile. Blue skies and sunshine above, waves beneath her for the two-mile-long stretch and memory of time on the beach with Scott the night before.
Scott as he’d always been.
Charming. Caring. Engaged. There.
And not at all weird.
He’d finished his brief. The judge had ruled in his favor. Iris had shown him the photos she’d taken that day—a series of dogs up for adoption—and he’d been so moved by the portrayal, he’d emailed one to a woman he knew in his office who’d already put in for adoption.
He’d said that she’d caught the sweet boy at just the right moment, somehow depicting his longing to be loved.
Probably because her heart lived behind her lens, not that she told him so. It wasn’t them conversation and there was no way she was going to risk a relapse.
She’d fought too long and hard to find an acceptable level of happiness without her other half in the world.
She was still smiling as she walked out onto the beach, cameras and lighting in cases on her back, and set up for the day-long shoot of Navy SEALs in training. Photos that had been commissioned for a brochure.
Some would be staged. And she’d be doing live shots of actual training, too.
She’d done her research. Knew what to expect. Was completely professional as she homed in on taut muscle in action, on bodies in superb shape, seemingly indefatigable as they ran on the beach carrying heavy rubber boats above their heads, did sit-ups, rowing, surfing boats onto rocks, underwater training and grinned at her when they were posing for hunk shots.
But that night, as Angel bounded ahead of her out the door and down the beach toward the water, as she caught her first sight of Scott jogging up the beach toward them, all she could think about were his muscles.
The perfectly toned, tall, lithe body coming toward her.
The swelling she’d noticed in his dress pants when he’d first stood up off the bench on a different beach four nights before.
She’d looked away.
He’d covered it, quickly, buttoning the jacket of his tux.
And there the image was, in her mind’s eye.
She blinked it away.
It came back.
She blinked again. And found herself in a loop where she couldn’t stop thinking about it because she was thinking about not thinking about it.
While she was busy trying to escape, her body lived in the moment. Reacting to a previous hard-on from the man running toward her.
Her nipples were hard and she was wet by the time he reached her. Crossing her arms, she nodded at Scott, and then almost immediately dropped to the ground to greet Morgan. The corgi’s enthusiastic greeting knocked her to her butt and Iris stayed there, loving on both dogs, letting them pounce on her, laughing.
Grateful for the distraction, she was still smiling when Scott offered a hand down to her to help her up. She took it automatically, swung up and stood there, inches from his face. Staring at him eye to eye.
For too long.
Neither of them could pretend it hadn’t happened.
But they tried. He dropped her hand as though he’d been burnt. She turned down the beach. Toward his place. Which took them to Sage’s old cottage next door to Iris. And she latched on. Asked if there’d been any more showings since Monday. If there’d been any offers.
He answered in a kind tone. But succinctly. As though his thoughts were elsewhere.
The dogs had raced down to see Dale’s Juice.
“It’s really strange, not having Sage here,” Iris blurted. Needing desperately to make whatever was happening to her where Scott was concerned just go away. “And Leigh.”
That was it. Most days when she and Scott were together, Leigh spent time with them, too. Not the entire time. They always had the chance for their adult conversation. But they never knew when they’d be interrupted.
And with Sage… Scott’s sister had been the supreme chaperone. At least where Iris was concerned. No way she wanted her friend to think she was developing feelings for her twin brother. Because when Sage discovered that those feelings only went skin-deep, Iris could lose one of the most important females in her life.
Or both of them, if she lost Leigh, too.
“I had no idea how much seeing Leigh lightened my days,” Scott said as they walked at their normal pace. With maybe a few more inches than usual between them. “The beach is too quiet without her.”
The elephant was there. On the sand in between them. In front of them. Beside them. Behind them. “That’s all this is,” she blurted. “Our daily routines have been disrupted. It’s kind of like being alone together on a desert island out here…”
No. Wrong words. The image they created had to be crushed. Quickly. Islands. Coronado. A day behind her lens filled with testosterone overload.
“I like that.” Scott’s words ricocheted through her. Sharply. Leaving vibrations in all her womanly places. And then he added, “There’s nothing different about the two of us. It’s the lack of the rest of our immediate gang that’s plaguing us. Take away the sister, the best friend, the kid…and you’ve got…”
He stopped.
Neither of them needed to hear what was left. They both knew.
She kicked up sand with her tennis shoe. Watching the dogs. Looking for Dale, but not finding him, she did what she’d learned to do to save her life. Faced the challenge head-on. “You’re still feeling it, too, huh?”
Harper, Scott’s next-door neighbor, was out with Cassie, the pediatrician who’d just gotten married to a professor from the university. They’d been jogging together lately and were a good half mile away from their places.
Most of the other cottages were still closed up, their owners not yet home from work.
There was no one to save them.
Except themselves…
Scott hadn’t answered.
“It’s not going to do any good to bury it,” she said, irked that he wouldn’t admit that he had the hots for her.
Unless…was it just her, still feeling that way?
“It’s better than talking about it,” he said, his tone unusually somber. Hard to hear above the sound of the waves. Better that way. To be on the edge of the words, rather than drowning in them.
Maybe he was right. Would any attraction between them suffocate if they didn’t give it air to breathe?
Or would their friendship just slowly wither and die from the awkwardness?
She watched as Morgan and Juice raced Angel up to Dale’s back porch in the distance. The writer must have come outside.
The hope that possibility gave her, as though rescue was just ahead, lightened her spirits some. Until she realized just how critically in trouble she and Scott were if they needed someone else around to save them.
“We’re both attractive people,” she said then, as though reason could provide a ladder out of the hole into which they’d fallen. “It’s possible that the feelings were always available, simmering beneath the surface, but with all the distraction, just never had a chance to present themselves.”
Until they’d been at the most romantic wedding of all time, maid of honor and best man, without dates.
Which didn’t explain the nearly debilitating surge of emotion that had hit her right as Sage had been finishing her vows.
Could it be that something was happening within her? Her defenses weakening as she aged? Could she be having a relapse?
She’d been her normal self all day.
Other than the wedding—and the dream following it—she’d been fine for years. No point in making the issue bigger than it was.
She had the hots for her friend.
An ordinary physical irritation.
Period.
* * *
She wanted to talk about it. Fine.
“I’ve never been turned on by you before.” There. In three years’ time she hadn’t done it for him once.
Then she had.
What more was there to say?
Except, “Have you…been attracted to me in the past?”
His body jumped to full alert as he waited for her reply.
“No.”
Oh. Deflation had never been a pleasant experience.
But, good.
“So it’s got to be just a reaction to the wedding finery,” he said, his analytical mind coming up with motive for the recalcitrant, unwelcome reactions that seemed to suddenly be intent on plaguing them.
Were they really doing this? Walking on their beach, talking about his hard-on for her?
And the nipples he’d noticed tightened against her dress the other night.
She could have been cold.
He didn’t think so.
Her response to his kiss certainly had not been.
It seemed as though he felt her nod as a physical brush against his chest as she said, “We were in completely different roles, with Sage and Gray pretty much nonexistent, as consumed as they’d been by the marriage, the rituals, all their guests…”
“And Leigh going upstairs with her babysitter…” Like a drowning man, he grabbed hold.
“And the three of them gone for so long… It’s just residual. We know it’s there. Acknowledge it. Have made the very mutual decision that it’s not a right move for us—”
Feeling his body leap to attention with that, he jumped in, cutting her off. “As long as we do nothing, time, and Sage and Gray’s return, will take care of the rest. You watch, a year from now, we’ll be laughing over the whole thing.”
He’d give his fortune to be able to laugh about it right then.
Instead, his only hope, at the moment, was an ice-cold shower. An hour-long one, minimum.
“Okay, good, we have a plan.” Iris’s words gave him a start. It was as though she’d just read his mind. Was agreeing to the cold shower.
Which had him immediately, mentally under the spray together.
“I’m sure I can keep my hands off you,” she said, a slightly teasing note in her tone. One that was almost swallowed up by the near choking sound that came with it. “Can you keep yours off me?”
She’d issued a challenge.
Something she’d done many times over their years of hashing out life together. Challenging him to succeed at whatever goal he’d set out for himself in the moment.
From getting his deck stained to handling his first full weekend alone with his niece the time Sage and Iris had gone to Palm Springs for a girls’ weekend of shopping and no responsibility.
She’d issued a challenge that left no room for failure.
Issued to a man who viewed failure as the kiss of death.
Which meant…she’d left him only one option.
Absolutely no kissing at all for him.
And he was good with that.
Mostly.
“I can if you can,” he replied.
Because if she came on to him, all bets were off. He couldn’t guarantee his ability to reject her.
Which told him he wouldn’t.
And then they’d lose everything.