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“Shake your head, if you don’t want it.” His voice was raw.
She caressed his face. He made a harsh sound, and let go of his control. Oh, God, she loved it when he went wild, when the tendons on his neck stood out, when he lost himself, ramming into her with deep, hard strokes that satisfied some crazy savage primordial urge.
The explosive rush of life-giving delight fused them together.
When she started noticing things again, she saw him rolling something small between his fingers. It glittered and flashed.
She peered at it. “Your earring,” she said. “Did it fall out?”
He held it out to her. “It’s yours.”
She shrank back. “Oh, no. I’ve never seen you without it.”
He shook his head. “No, it’s always been yours. I bought this stone for you fifteen years ago.”
She gaped, the protest she was about to make evaporating.
“I spent every dime I made that summer to buy it,” he said. “It was the biggest one I could afford. I opted for just the stone. Anything I could have gotten with a setting would have been just a pin-prick of a thing.” His eyes slid away. “I know it’s not a huge rock, but it’s good quality.” He pushed her wet hair back, fastened it into her earlobe.
Desperate questions welled up. She was afraid to let them out. Was it like an engagement ring? Was it just a sweet postcoital impulse?
She opened her mouth to ask, when his cell phone rang.
He grabbed it. “You got something?…Grissom? Yeah, I know it. What’s the address?…I’m on it. Later.”
He closed the call. His eyes had focused, sharp and cool.
“Get dressed, princess,” he said. “Davy’s found our reporter.”
CHAPTER22
The trade of journalism had not been prosperous for Jeremy Ivers. That was Sean’s first impression when they pulled up in front of the chain-link fence that surrounded a shabby single-wide trailer home.
Two ferocious pit bulls were chained to a metal pole in the center of the yard. They snarled and lunged when Sean and Liv got out of the car. A garbage pail had been overturned long ago, and its contents were becoming one with the lawn, which had been dug up and excreted upon until it was just a few diseased patches of brownish yellow stubble.
The length of the chain and the ferocity of the dogs made it impossible to approach the door, but the dogs served as a doorbell, so he just twined his fingers through Liv’s and waited. He lifted up the heavy mass of damp dark hair to admire the diamond winking in her ear. She was so damn pretty. He wanted to drape her with jewels.
It pleased him, to see that rock on her. It was about fucking time.
The screen door of the house squeaked. The man who came out was thin, eyes hollow and reddened. What hair there was on his head was greasy and straggling. His jeans hung on him, his limp T-shirt was stained and grayish. He hacked, spat. “What do you want?”
“Are you Jeremy Ivers?” Sean asked. “The reporter?”
The man’s eyes bulged. “Who wants to know?”
“My name is Sean McCloud. I wanted to ask you about an article you wrote for theWashingtonian, fifteen years ago.”
Jeremy Ivers had begun shaking his head before Sean finished speaking. He shrank in the door like a turtle retracting its head into its shell. “I never wrote any article,” he said. “You got the wrong guy. I’m not a reporter. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Go away.”
The door was closing, the dogs flinging themselves frantically against their chains, barking madly with big, hoarse, hollow voices.
Sean pitched his voice to punch through the noise. “I’m going to kill those murdering sons of bitches,” he said.
The door stopped closing. It opened a crack. Ivers’s eye appeared.
“What murdering sons of bitches?” he called out.
“The ones that did this to you.” Sean gestured at the yard, the dogs, the garbage. The festering despair that permeated the place.
