Voyeur - Lacey Alexander [77]
Whew. She was still trying to wrap her mind around his suggestion and the fact that she’d almost actually agreed to it. Images still floated in her head. The two men taking off her clothes, touching her at the same time. Her body, between theirs, being buffeted by masculinity from both sides. And then, of course, the specific thing Braden had mentioned—two men equaled two cocks. At once. Her whole body tingled at trying to imagine what that would feel like, or if she could even handle it physically.
She still didn’t know if she could do it. And she had no idea what would help make up her mind. Part of her knew she simply couldn’t do anything so risqué. Yet another part of her knew she couldn’t let Braden down, and that she couldn’t pass up an invitation to what sounded like such overwhelming pleasure.
But it was early in the day, hours before anything would happen. And God knew she couldn’t afford to waste half a day of writing on worries about what might or might not happen tonight. And if nothing else, work would provide a good distraction. Thinking about Riley’s fictional affair with Sloane Bennett was considerably easier than dealing with her real affair with Braden. And possibly—gulp!—Tommy.
Which was when she realized that something big needed to happen in Riley’s world—and she knew exactly what it was! Pulling her gaze back from the window, she focused on the screen and began to type.
As Riley and Sloane rounded the last bend before reaching the garden, he hefted the old quilts higher in his arm and took her hand. But as they reached the entrance—a white latticed arbor draped with hummingbird vines and bracketed by the tall, well-groomed walls of green shrubbery on both sides—Sloane pulled to a rough halt, jerking Riley back a step.
“What?” she asked, dumbfounded.
Sloane didn’t look at her, but she could sense the darkening of his demeanor. “Wait here,” he said and started inside.
“Why?” she asked, following.
He turned on her, his gaze serious and menacing. “Wait here, Riley—I mean it.”
Riley drew in her breath, incensed. How dare he? She watched as he strode through the arbor into the garden, wondering what on earth was going on. Which was when she saw it: a foot! She gasped, covering her mouth with one hand. A man’s lone foot stretched into her line of vision through the hummingbird vines—she spied the hem of simple dark blue pants, a black laced work boot sticking out from the bottom.
Just then, Sloane reappeared, scowling when he saw that she’d been peeking. “Who is it?” she asked, stunned. “And is he . . . ?”
“Hawthorne is dead,” Sloane told her plainly.
“Oh my God!”
“You can say that again.”
Riley had never cared much for the Dorchesters’ gardener—in fact, he was generally quite surly. But that didn’t mean she wanted to see him dead.
“Tell me it looks like a heart attack or something natural,” she demanded. Because discovering stolen items in the garden was one thing—but a dead body was entirely another. She didn’t want to find out they had a murderer on their hands.
“Well,” Sloane said, “I’d love to. But given that the guy has a big knife in his chest, I don’t think it’s likely.”
Riley gasped again. “A knife?” She found herself leaning closer to the arbor, trying to peer around it. The move revealed more of Hawthorne’s leg, and the other, bent at an odd angle.
Sloane pulled her back. “Multiple stab wounds, Riley, and a lot of blood. Not something you need to see, honey—okay?”
She drew in her breath and knew she must have looked panicked as Sloane took her into his arms. She couldn’t believe this! In all the cases she’d worked on, no one had ever been murdered!
“He was kind of mean,” she whispered into Sloane’s shoulder, echoing her thought from a moment earlier, “but I never would have wished him dead.”
Sloane drew back slightly.“Mean how?”
Oh, she’d forgotten—Sloane wasn’t here often, so he hadn’t known Hawthorne well.
“He was just the grumbly sort. Just recently, in fact,