Deadline

“This encounter with Stef slipped your mind? Even though we talked at length about the unlikelihood of her returning soon, you forgot to tell me that you’d just seen her?” He was about to reply, when she stopped him. “Don’t bother inventing an explanation. I know why you didn’t tell me. You didn’t want me to know that you and Stef were…friendly.”

“‘Friendly,’ spoken in that tone, sounds like a euphemism.”

“Bernie saw the two of you together.”

Bloody hell. He co

uld kick himself for not telling her before. The omission made him look as guilty as her glare indicated he was. “It was innocent.”

His disclaimer made it sound anything but innocent and did nothing to assuage her suspicion.

He drew in a long breath. “Thursday, the day after my arrival, I had gone for a run and was on my way back to the house. Stef was on her bicycle, returning from the store. We crossed paths, exchanged names. She asked where I was staying, and when I told her, she remarked that we were neighbors and told me not to be a stranger. She said, ‘Maybe we’ll catch each other on the beach tomorrow.’ We parted.”

“You helped her with her bicycle basket.”

“That’s right. The clamp was loose. She was afraid the basket was going to shake free of the mounting and dump her purchases. So, yeah, I tightened the clamp for her. It took thirty seconds, max. That was it.”

“If that was ‘it,’ why did the two of you pretend that you hadn’t met? When I caught you spying Friday afternoon, you asked me who she was, when you already knew. Friday night at Mickey’s, when she brought you over from the bar to our table, she didn’t say, ‘This is our neighbor, who was kind enough to help me with my bicycle basket yesterday.’”

“I asked you who she was because when we met, she hadn’t specifically explained her position in your household. I didn’t know that she wasn’t a relative. At Mickey’s, I suppose she was sensitive to the tidal waves of hostility you were radiating. I can only guess, but I guess she didn’t want to rile you.”

“You took your cue from her and went along with the pretense of never having met.”

“Something like that.” She continued to look at him, making him wonder if she also knew about that other time. Whether or not she did, it would be better to come clean about it now. “I was alone with her one other time.”

“When?”

“Also on Thursday.”

“The same day you met?”

“Late that night. I went over to leave your wristwatch on the porch railing. As I was skirting around the back of your house, Stef drove up in your car and caught me in the headlights. I had no choice except to brazen it out. I told her that I’d heard something and had come to check for an intruder. Which wasn’t such a stretch of the truth. I’d been keeping an eye on your house, particularly late at night, for reasons you know.”

“You were sneaking around my house in the middle of the night, and she didn’t think that was the least bit suspicious? She didn’t raise a hue and cry and ask what the hell you were doing?”

“She was in no condition to do anything. She’d been drinking. Quite a lot. I had to help her from the car to the back door. She begged me not to tell you. Since I didn’t want you to know that I was staying in the house next door—”

“Spying.”

“—I promised that you would never hear it from me, in exchange for her promise never to drive again in that condition.”

“You two formed a pact.”

He wished he could deny it, but that was more or less the truth of it. “It was a nonissue.”

“Was it? The authorities might disagree. Do they know about these secret meetings between you two?”

“Yes. I told them.”

That calmed her a little, but she was still looking at him with anger and suspicion. “Did you see her as an excellent source of insider information on me? Or as something else entirely?”

“No to the first question. I don’t dare guess what ‘something else entirely’ implies.”

“Come on, Dawson, don’t play dumb. She was a friendly, flirty girl, who also happened to be a head turner, especially in a bikini.”

“She was. All that. She was also half my age. Near enough, at least.”

“That didn’t matter to her. She said the guy she was seeing was older.”