He gave her a sarcastic look. “That’s just my face. I’m a cop. I have to be ever vigilant for would-be miscreants.”
“No.” She shook her head, still studying him critically. “It’s not your face. It’s your body language. You need to loosen up in here.” She stepped forward, her gaze on his face, but her hands in the air. “May I?”
“Um . . . sure.” What was she going to do with her hands?
He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised when she placed them on his hips. This was a dance lesson, after all.
“You need to loosen up here,” she said, pressing firmly on his hips, and then swaying her own in front of him to illustrate what she meant—while not releasing her hold. “Do you see what I mean? You’ve got to feel the music. If they were playing Beyoncé, I mean, and not this—”
What they were actually playing was jazz. Coltrane, to be exact. John liked Coltrane and listened to him quite a lot in his car on the streaming channel that Katie had set up for him. The combination of the Coltrane and Molly Montgomery’s hands on his hips, plus her own hips swaying so suggestively in such close proximity to his own, plus the sweet scent of her hair and coconutty smell of her clothes in this darkened room, with the ocean breeze blowing in from the beach, was doing something to him. Something he hadn’t felt in a long time.
Something he liked a lot.
Still, he wasn’t sure what he should do about it. He hadn’t dated in so long. And this was the librarian. Up until this very moment, he’d been fairly sure she hated him.
But would a woman who hated a man be holding him by the hips and encouraging him to loosen up while also smiling up at him with such enticingly red lips?
He didn’t think so.
Still, his heart pounding as nervously as it had the time he’d asked his first-ever girlfriend—Lori MacNamara, seventh grade—to couples skate at the long-since-demolished Little Bridge Skateland, he lowered both hands to her hips.
“Molly,” he said, in a voice that had gone suddenly hoarse.
Her body instantly stilled, and she brought her questioning gaze up to his. Those red lips were still smiling, invitingly to his mind. “Yes?”
Should he ask first or just kiss her? What did people do these days? He knew what they’d said in the sexual harassment seminar, but that had been about work, and this wasn’t work . . . or was it? Why did everything have to be so confusing? Why couldn’t—
To his utter shock, Molly pulled him toward her, raising up on tiptoe in her bare feet to bring her mouth toward his. He wasn’t even aware of what was going on at first, it all happened so fast. One minute they weren’t kissing, and the next, they were, her arms slipping around his neck so that her soft, round breasts pressed up against his chest, her scent enveloping him in a heady cloud.
He might have considered himself the luckiest man alive if his cell phone hadn’t chosen that moment to let out a shrill blare from the pocket of his dress uniform.
She pulled away immediately, startled. For him, the sudden break in contact was as if he were an astronaut traversing a bleak and airless planet and she was his only connection to home and oxygen.
“Goddammit,” he swore, and clawed at his uniform trousers in an attempt to find the phone, which was continuing to ring loudly.
Fortunately Molly seemed to find the situation funny. She stood a few feet away, her arms folded across her chest, laughing at him. “Does this happen to you often?” she asked.
“Too damn much.” He managed to extract the phone and glared down at the screen. For a second or two he’d been worried it was Tabitha’s parents—he’d left them his personal number. How was he going to explain to the librarian that he’d violated what he’d expected were the personal wishes of Baby Aphrodite’s mother by contacting the family from whom she’d run away?
But it was only Marguerite, who’d volunteered to skip the party and work late, since so many of his deputies were still out looking for Beckwith and John had wanted someone competent at the office (and Marguerite professed to hate parties, anyway).
“What is it?” he barked into the phone. He couldn’t help it. He’d been kissing Molly Montgomery. What were the chances of that ever happening again?
“Well, and good evening to you, too, Chief,” Marguerite said with cheerful sarcasm. “Sorry to bother you, but I just thought you might want to know that while you and everyone else was over there on Jasmine Key, partying it up, the High School Thief has been busy.”
John threw a glance at Molly. She’d turned away from him because Mrs. Tifton and a number of her friends had come into the bar, all chattering at once. Mrs. Tifton was waving her cell phone and looking alarmed.
“Oh, yeah? Busy doing what?” But John was pretty sure he already knew the answer.
“Robbing Dorothy Tifton’s house,” Marguerite said, confirming his suspicion, “while she was there with you.”
Chapter Thirteen
Molly
Molly had never been to a crime scene before. Well, aside from the one at the library the other day.
She’d had no intention of ending up at another one, except that Mrs. Tifton insisted that if all of her friends didn’t come along with her on the boat back to Little Bridge Island in order to help her inspect whatever damage had been done to her home by the High School Thief, she wasn’t certain how she was going to make it through the night emotionally.
The sheriff didn’t look too happy about that, given how firmly he kept his lips pressed together throughout the ride . . . those lips that mere minutes before had been so tantalizingly pressed to hers.
But Molly refused to think about that. This was a serious situation, and she intended to keep her mind focused on the matter at hand, and not at all on the fact that a little while earlier, the sheriff had been holding her so tightly in his strong arms, she could hardly breathe, and kissing her as if his life depended on it.
John had decided that Mrs. Tifton could have one friend with her inside the house during “this difficult time.” The rest had to wait for her outside, so as “not to disrupt the crime scene.”
“And I,” he’d added, “will be the one picking which friend gets to come inside.”
That’s how Molly found herself sitting on one of the pure-white couches in Mrs. Tifton’s living room, taking in the scene around her and trying very hard not to think about the sheriff’s lips.
“I just don’t see how he did it.” Mrs. Tifton was crying, and not for the first time. She’d been wailing this same statement, or something along similar lines, since they’d left Jasmine Key. “I always keep all my doors locked. And I have an alarm!”
It was true. Mrs. Tifton, unlike the thief’s previous victims, had kept all the French doors leading from her beautiful, high-ceilinged living room to her backyard pool locked.
But neither this nor the security alarm appeared to have troubled the thief, who’d merely broken the pane of glass closest to the gilt door handle, reached inside to unlock it, then snatched up whatever he could carry between the time it took for the alarm to begin to blare and the arrival of the first sheriff’s deputies on the scene—which turned out to be seven minutes, John explained.
“Seven minutes?” Molly repeated, throwing an incredulous glance in John’s direction.
But he ignored her. He was busy staring at his deputies—not the crime scene techs, who were busy dusting the door handle for prints, or taking photos of what they believed to be the thief’s footprints in the pile of Mrs. Tifton’s recently vacuumed carpet—a thin young blond woman and an equally thin young man, who’d apparently been first to arrive.
“There were a couple of youths throwing down in the parking lot over at the Coffee Cubano, Chief,” whined the male deputy, whose badge had the name Swanson printed on it. “It took us a little while to get it under control and get over here.”
“Youths throwing down at the Coffee Cubano?” The sheriff raised a single dark eyebrow. “Or was Carmelita giving away free con leches again?”
The young deputies stared down at their shoes, their humiliation so complete that Molly almost felt a little sorry for them.
She also realized why John had allowed none of Mrs. Tifton’s friends but herself into the house. Imagine what Meschelle Davies might do with this piece of information. “Deputies Too Busy Accepting Bribes to Catch High School Thief” was only one of the many headlines Molly could imagine in tomorrow’s Gazette.
“There were no youths throwing down, sir,” the female deputy had the courage to pipe up and say. “But no one was offering free coffee, either. It’s the house alarms, sir. They tend to go off for no reason. Sometimes if the wind blows too strong, they go off. Then we haul ass to get over there, and it’s a false alarm.”
“And was the wind blowing too strong this evening, Deputy Juarez?” John asked in a tone that made Molly thankful she wasn’t Deputy Juarez.
“Well, no, sir,” the deputy responded meekly. “It was a fairly calm evening, weather-wise.”
“Right. Just like I imagine it was fairly calm in the parking lot of the Coffee Cubano. You both wanted to finish your coffees before driving over here to check out what I’m assuming you thought would be another false alarm. But it wasn’t a false alarm, was it?”