One Stormy Night. Marilyn Pappano

He offered me a raise if I keep an eye on her.”

      “She’s worth getting shot for, and he’s not sticking close enough to keep track of her himself?”

      “They’re separated. Remember? She went missing in the hurricane, he thought she was dead. She’s not and she’s back, and he wants to know everything she does.”

      “Why doesn’t he hire a private investigator who specializes in divorce cases?”

      “When he can let the city pay me to watch her?” Mitch scowled as a car sped past on the way into town. The city manager’s teenage son was behind the wheel and he was at least twenty miles over the limit. Lucky for the brat that his father was on Taylor’s good side.

      “Funny thing,” he went on. “Taylor’s not worried about a divorce.”

      Rick was silent for a moment, considering that. Mitch thought about it, too. Taylor didn’t have a prenup—he’d mentioned that before. He had a lot of assets, most of which couldn’t have been funded by his salary. It was hard to imagine that he could possibly have anything on Jennifer that would make her walk away from the marriage with nothing. Taylor, guilty of something worthy of blackmail? Sure. No doubt. Jennifer? No way.

      “Maybe he plans to win her back,” Rick suggested.

      “Maybe.” Or maybe he had other plans for her. But this was neither the time nor the place to discuss that in depth. Anywhere else in the country, phone calls, especially from pay phones, were relatively safe as far as privacy. But Belmar wasn’t anywhere else.

      “Well, there are worse people that could be watching her.”

      “And worse people to have to watch.” But damned if he could think of a single one. If there was a woman in town with the ability to screw with his concentration the way Jennifer had, he hadn’t met her yet.

      “When you get that raise, why don’t you come up here and take us out for a weekend on the town?”

      “Isn’t that a night on the town?” Mitch asked drily.

      Rick snorted. “A night’s not even enough to get started. Mom said to tell you she misses your ugly mug and she wants to know when you’re coming to visit.”

      “I’ll call her when I get a chance.”

      “Yeah, just be careful what you say.”

      Mitch rolled his eyes. What was it with people stating the obvious to him? Did he look that dumb? “Jeez, thanks for the advice. I probably would have blurted out everything, going all the way back to that pretty blonde who lived across the street from you guys and taught me everything a fifteen-year-old boy could bear to know when I spent the summer there.”

      Rick gave a low whistle. “Kayla Conrad. Son, she taught all of us all we could bear to know. Man, I haven’t thought of her in years. Tell you what—you stay there in Mississippi and I’ll go home for a visit. I’ll give Mom—and Kayla—your best.”

      “You do that.” Though if anyone could take his mind off the crappy state of his life at the moment, it might be Kayla.

      Jennifer could make him forget. For a while. Then they would put their clothes back on and come back to their senses, and life would be even crappier because he would have broken one of the few rules he lived by. Taylor would find out and Mitch would suffer the consequences—and with people like Jimmy Ray on Taylor’s payroll, suffer was definitely the right word.

      Scowling, he said goodbye to his brother, then returned to the car and switched on the radar unit. He was frustrated and annoyed, a prime combination for writing traffic tickets.

      Taylor might be paying him illegally from the city’s coffers. But at least Mitch would know he’d done his best to increase those coffers first.

      Chapter 3

      A minute shy of six o’clock, Jessica ran out of steam.

      She’d taken every CD and DVD out of its case, checking for original labels, and flipped through the pages of every book. She’d looked behind every picture and painting and underneath every shelf and drawer. She’d unzipped the sofa and chair cushions and tipped the furniture upside down, searched for loose tiles in the kitchen and bathroom and crawled the perimeter of the apartment checking for places where the carpet might have been pulled up. She’d heaved the mattress and the springs off the bed, dragged the frame from the wall so she could see behind it and taken every single item from every drawer, cabinet and the closet.

      In the process, she’d discovered that Jen had been an amazing housekeeper, gotten hot and dirty and found nothing. Now, after a shower, she was calling it quits for the evening and heading out to dinner. Snacks could only take a woman so far.

      “Going somewhere?”

      She started as she locked the door but thought she did a decent job of hiding it. Letting her key ring dangle from one finger, she turned to find Mitch kicked back in a folding lounge chair underneath the scrawny oak. He wore denim shorts, faded and soft, and a Belmar High School basketball jersey that looked about twenty years out of date.

      He looked incredibly hot—and she didn’t mean his temperature.

      “To dinner.” She moved to the edge of the grass, wishing she were barefoot like him and could curl her toes into the cool green growth. There she could see a beer can on the ground next to the chair and a book open in his lap. She recognized it as the one she’d read on her last flight from Hong Kong—a thriller about a vulnerable woman taking on police corruption.

      She chose to ignore the book. “Drinking on duty. Why am I not surprised?”

      “Not much surprises you, does it?”

      She shrugged.

      He picked up the can, drained the beer, then crumpled the aluminum. “I’m not on duty.”

      “Uh-huh. After following me around town this morning, you just happen to be sitting outside my door now by coincidence?”

      “No coincidence. I sit out here most nights. I’ve been doing it since I moved in here—which, by the way, was before you moved in. Look.” He rolled to his feet with more grace than any man should show and lifted the chair easily in one hand. “There are places worn in the grass from the legs.”

      The three faint lines showing where the chair had spent many hours were impossible to deny. So was the foolish feeling that curled through her. You could have told me that, Jen.

      Of course, there was no response from her sister.

      “I’m going to that little barbecue place out on the east side of town,” she said. “In case you lose sight of my car on the way.”

      Tilting his head, he studied her a moment before saying, “I told you, I’m not working. But if you want my company for dinner, all you have to do is say so.”

      She blinked at the remark, thoroughly unexpected. She wanted his company like she wanted a hole in her head. He was Taylor’s buddy. The enemy. Not to be trusted.

      But someone was going to be watching her. Better him than the creepy kid who’d hung around part of the morning and all afternoon. Even with the drapes drawn, she’d known the kid was there, had felt his presence.

      “I assume this restaurant requires shoes and a real shirt.”

      “This is a real shirt,” he protested.

      She looked at the jersey. Truthfully, it was perfectly adequate, particularly in a beach town. But it showed a lot of smooth brown skin and muscle and sinew and all that other sexy physical stuff. She would be lucky to taste her dinner, and the same could probably be said for any other female diners in the restaurant. Since she was a firm believer that barbecue, especially Southern barbecue, required all of a diner’s attention, she repeated, “Shoes and a real shirt.”