“Or who. It’s such a mystery,” I said dryly. “We’ve got evidence and a body, and no place to lock them up tight. A half-hearted kick to the door and someone could be in here in a heartbeat and steal the body.”
“Joe doesn’t seem particularly worried about theft.”
“Joe doesn’t seem particularly worried about anything that’s not contained in the space between Camille’s thighs.”
Jack snorted out a laugh. “We’ll lock the cell just to be safe and take the evidence with us. Once Joe joins the land of the living again we’ll hand everything over. Knowing Carver, we’re going to have a late night ahead of us.”
“Then it’s a good thing we’re having cake and champagne. That’s brain food.”
I got a whiff of myself and grimaced. Standing over a dead body for the last couple of hours without proper ventilation, combined with the fact that I’d run out of sweat from dehydration about an hour ago, and I could barely stand to be in the same room with myself.
I locked the cell door and Jack gathered up the electronics, the bags of evidence, and the statements from witnesses, and put them in a box. I closed the windows and shut off the lights and we locked the door behind us. It was then we both realized we didn’t have a car and would have to walk back to the cabana. Fortunately, the island was only a couple miles in either direction, so we didn’t have far to go.
“There is a silver lining to all this,” Jack said, as we started toward the beach to walk the shoreline.
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”
“I’ve officially had enough time to recuperate and can now have sex again.”
I stopped in my tracks and Jack went a few steps ahead before he realized I was no longer beside him.
“What?” he asked, looking back over his shoulder.
“I’ve spent the last two hours hunched over a body and I smell of things that no living person should smell of. And you want to have sex?”
“You’ll be good as new once you shower. Twice.”
I narrowed my eyes and started walking again, a little faster this time. “If by sex you mean you giving me a full body massage and letting me sleep for a couple of hours, then yes, I’ve recuperated enough to have sex too.”
Jack hefted the box under one arm and then took my hand. “Look at you, already making excuses for why you can’t have sex. And you thought you weren’t going to be any good at marriage.” He squeezed my hand and then nudged me playfully.
“Shut up,” I said. “And maybe ask me again after the cake. Cake fixes a lot of things.”
Chapter Eight
Jack had been right. It had taken two shampooing’s and scrubbings before I was able to stand myself, though the second one might have been more for Jack’s benefit.
He’d brought me a piece of cake and a glass of champagne to eat in the shower. Jack had grown up wealthy—the son of a tobacco farmer—and I’d always imagined that this was how the other half lived—eating chocolate cake in the shower and having a man who looked like my husband pouring cold champagne over my very heated skin.
“The cleaning lady is going to be really confused,” I said a little while later. “It’s probably not often she has to clean crumbs out of the drain.”
“Think of it as we’re bringing a little excitement to an otherwise monotonous job.”
I dried off quickly and ran my fingers through my damp hair, and then I walked naked into the bedroom and fell back on the bed under the ceiling fan.
“This is one of those times that’s really confusing to a man,” Jack said, coming in behind me.
I took a moment to look my fill. I was a lucky, lucky woman. Not only for the fact that he was just about the most perfect example of the male species I’d ever seen, but the fact that underneath the sarcasm and the need to play the occasional practical joke, he had the most giving and loving heart of anyone I’d ever known. I wasn’t sure what I’d done to deserve that kind of loyalty or love, but I was grateful every day.
“What’s confusing?” I asked, much less interested in his thought processes than I was in the towel hanging precariously from his hips.
“It’s one of those times where a normal man would wonder if a woman was laying naked on the bed because she was trying to seduce him, or because she was trying to cool off. Fortunately, I’m not a normal man.”
“Praise Jesus for that. So what conclusion did you come to? Am I trying to seduce you or cool off?”
“First of all, you seduce me with every breath you take.”
I snorted out a laugh and he grinned, dropping the towel.
“Well now, I can see you were telling the truth and you have, in fact, recuperated.”
He grabbed my ankles and pulled me toward the edge of the bed. “Stop trying to distract me, woman. I was in the middle of telling you the conclusion of my hypothesis.”
“I apologize. Carry on.”