She humped and moaned and burst into flame with the power of her orgasm.
She kept her eyes closed until she could breathe again and the night air chilled her sweaty skin. When finally she looked, her hands were white-knuckled around the swing’s chains. Pain crimped her fingers. She’d braced her legs in the sand, the toes of her shoes buried in the soft stuff.
“How did you do that?” she whispered.
“You did it.”
“No. You morphed into him.” The morphing thing scared the crap out of her. Cameron had never done that before. It made her realize he’d been keeping a whole helluva lot of ghostly abilities to himself.
“I can be whatever you want me to be. And you wanted me to be him.”
“That’s not true.” She’d wanted Cameron to be alive, but that was beyond anyone’s power.
“You didn’t see me. You didn’t see Nick Drake. You saw Witt. You felt Witt.”
“You’re screwing with my mind.”
“You’re screwing with it when you won’t admit you wanted it to be him making love to you.”
“You called it fucking.”
“But it felt like more than that, didn’t it?” His voice came from a distance now, off to her left.
“I just needed to get off.”
“You imagined it was him getting you off. Not me.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. Cameron had brought Witt into it, but she’d gone along willingly.
“It was just a fantasy.”
Cameron laughed from somewhere outside the little park, and then his laughter stopped altogether. Maybe he’d gone home without her.
Max dragged in a breath, sucking in the scent of her own dampness.
And something else.
The unmistakable aroma of Witt Long’s aftershave. She trembled, remembering the feel of him inside her, the way he filled her to capacity.
God, what was happening to her?
Wendy wanted Nick Drake, a man who very well might have killed her. And God help her, Max wanted the detective who thought her capable of murder.
Chapter Seventeen
Max shoved what happened at the playground out of her mind. It was nothing. Just another of Cameron’s kinky fantasies. A nightmare. No, a morphmare.
Who ever heard of a husband wanting his wife to fantasize about another man? Even if the husband was just a ghost.
Enough. She went back to what they’d been discussing last night, before she’d allowed Cameron and her own body to take control of her.
Oh yeah, they’d been talking about asking Nick where he was the night Lilah died. Max decided to ask everyone except Nicholas Drake. Cameron wanted her to use her so-called psychic abilities. She would, and what she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was that Nick could never have looked Wendy in the eyes as he strangled her.
Max knew what it was like to watch someone die. In those brief moments at the corner 7-Eleven, she’d seen Cameron’s spirit leave his body, seen it in his suddenly lifeless eyes. Heard it as his last breath left his body in a gurgle.
Nick would never have been able to watch Wendy die by his own hand. That took a special kind of person. A monster.
If he couldn’t have murdered Wendy, he’d never have needed to kill Lilah.
Max started her detective work with Remy. She had cause. Overnight, her office had been searched. Cleverly. Almost undetectably. If she’d been a little less tidy, she might never have noticed, but a pile of papers was askew, a binder in the bookcase pulled out a quarter of an inch beyond the others, her file drawer not quite closed, and a couple of the folders were out of order. What had the culprit wanted?
A little after ten, Remy entered, without knocking and without acknowledging that she was on the phone. “I need that—”
Max stifled an oath. “Excuse me, can I call you back?” She hung up with a nod as if the bank clerk could see her.
“Who was that?”
“The bank.”
“Why were you talking to them?”
“I had a question about the statement.”
“What kind of question?”
She bit the inside of her lip, reined in a vicious retort. She almost accused him right then of searching the office, but held back in the nick of time, reminding herself, be subtle. “A returned check. There wasn’t enough information to identify it.”
“I don’t want anyone dealing with the bank except me.”
Why hadn’t someone beaned the man over the head years ago? “Well then, could you please call them back and find out what customer it was so we can rebill?”
“Fine. Write it down.”
She wondered what he had to hide. Could it be that Wendy’s death had nothing to do with jealousy or the affair with Nick? What if she’d uncovered some illegal activity of Remy’s? Then again, it was most likely Remy’s Little Hitler syndrome at work again.
“Remy, when do the janitors clean?”
“Huh?”