Still Lake - Anne Stuart [95]
He saw her looking at it, and a faintly ironic smile lit his face. He held it out to her. “Would it make you feel safer if you held on to this?”
“I don’t think it would be much of a defense against you if you decided to hurt me. You’re a lot bigger than I am, and faster.”
“Yes,” he agreed, not terribly reassuring. “But you’d cause some damage, and when they investigated your murder I’d be a prime suspect. It would be difficult to explain away the physical evidence. That’s what got me the first time.”
His calm words made the situation even more macabre. She couldn’t be sitting here in the moonlight, conversing with a killer. Could she? He seemed perfectly ready to convince her that she was.
“Did you?” she asked suddenly.
“Did I what?”
“Did you kill those women? Any of them?”
He hesitated. “And you actually think I’ll tell you the truth? That all you have to do is ask me?”
She thought about it for a moment. He was threatening her, with body language if not with the knife, trapping her against the picnic table. There were no witnesses, no one to know where she was. If he was a crazed killer, then the only way she’d survive was to be very, very careful. Asking him leading questions wasn’t the smartest thing in the world.
She looked up at him. The moon was behind his head, casting his face into a canvas of light and shadows. His brooding eyes were hidden in the dark, but she already knew the expression that would be in them. His mouth was twisted in a cool smile, but she knew that mouth. Knew the taste of it. Wanted to taste it again.
And then she knew, with an absolute certainty she seldom possessed. The man looming over her, trapping her, might very well be Thomas Griffin, convicted murderer. But he’d never killed anyone, even in a drug-dazed rage. She could feel it in her bones.
“Yes,” she said.
“Yes what?”
“Yes, I think all I have to do is ask you,” she said patiently.
His mocking grin faltered for a moment. And then he nodded. “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you. I don’t know for sure. I was drunk, stoned in a haze I can’t even begin to penetrate. I found her body in the toolshed. But I don’t have any proof.”
His voice was flat, unemotional, and the words should have chilled her. But they didn’t.
She was suddenly in a perfect oasis of calm and quiet. The soft breeze from the lake had stilled, the moon hung bright overhead, and the only sound was their breathing.
Back at the inn her mother had slipped over the edge into a completely delusional state. Her younger sister was off somewhere, probably corrupting the morals of the only decent teenage boy left in Colby, and she was alone with a convicted murderer who just happened to be the first and only man she’d ever made love with.
And was about to make love with again. She knew it, in her heart, her stomach, between her legs. And she wasn’t going to do anything to stop it. She was going to start it, because it was inevitable, because she wanted it, because she was out of her mind. The reasons didn’t matter.
“I don’t believe you killed anyone,” she said.
He was singularly unimpressed by her declaration. “Prove it.”
How could she feel so calm and so nervous at the same time? So certain and so afraid of what she was about to do? “I can’t prove you didn’t do it,” she said. “I can only prove that I don’t believe it.” And she put her hands on his shoulders, drawing him down to her mouth.
He didn’t resist, he simply braced his hands on the picnic table and let her brush her lips across his. She’d been expecting a more enthusiastic response, and she pulled back, quizzical.
“Honey,” he drawled, “that ain’t trust and it ain’t true love. That’s about sex, pure and simple.”
It took her only a moment to rally. “And do I strike you as the kind of woman who has sex with a man who murders women? I haven’t been known for my high-risk behavior.”
“Being around me is high-risk enough,” he muttered.
She looked at him,