Assassin. Her job. By the time Susan had finished her coffee, she’d unearthed a square of plywood from the basement and meticulously printed out fifteen labels, all neatly attached to the board now. The opposite counter was a circus act of jumping margarine tubs. She was feeling distinctly sick to her stomach.
The back door flew open yet again, this time propelled by a much larger hand than Tiger’s. Susan lurched instantly to her feet. “How’s it going?” she asked cheerfully.
Griff watched her busily transferring all the bug containers to the kitchen table. Such busy-busy movements for his normally graceful Susan… His eyes swept over her supple lines in the soft mauve shirtwaist. Those butter-soft eyes were fluttering away from him, hands nervously rearranging her hair and her collar-in between trips back and forth to collect the bug containers.
He cleared his throat, setting yet another one on the table. “A bumblebee. God knows what one was doing in the yard this late in the season.”
“We needed a bee,” she said gravely. “I can’t tell you how worried I was that we weren’t going to have a bee.”
The chuckle came from deep in his throat, just before his hands snatched her up and swung her close to him. She smelled delicious. Susan always smelled delicious. At the moment, a wee bit like coffee and felt-marker ink, but beneath that he could easily detect the faint scent of the perfume she wore, and the undeniable Susan-fragrance of soft skin beneath that. His lips snuggled in at the side of her neck, just for one small bite-
Susan nipped back, wound her arms around his waist and looked up at him. “I want to talk to you.”
“So talk.” Communication was terribly important in a marriage. His hands swept down the supple slope of her back to her waist, communicating terribly important things. Delicate color rose in her cheeks, delighting him. She was getting all the right messages. Tiger could do his own damn bug collecting.
“About hamsters.”
He drew back, eyebrows arched. “Hamsters?”
“Tiger wants one so badly, and Sheila doesn’t want to be bothered.”
“One of the few things in life I agree with my ex-wife on.”
“Hmm.” Her fingers chased up a wandering trail until both her arms were loosely hooked around his neck. He smelled as fresh as the autumn breeze outside, all woodsy and male. “It would be something he could have here. Special for him. That his mother couldn’t possibly resent. And if it’s so important to him…”
“Darling.” He pressed his forehead to hers. “Hamsters smell like the pits, are a great deal of work and mess with little return-and my son, hard though this may be for you to believe, will survive without one. Now a dog-”
“Would be nice. But he wants a hamster.”
“Have you ever had a hamster?”
She shook her head. “Cats and fish.”
“We’ll get a cat, then. You’ve already got the fish.”
He extricated himself from her reluctantly, seeing Tiger approaching from the window over the sink. His son inevitably came through a door as if he lived in constant fear that the knob wouldn’t work. The effort was usually a crash-through, as noisy and clumsy as possible. Tiger’s brilliant smile inevitably made up for that.
“Can you believe it? I’ve got three more. How many we got now, Susan?”
Susan viewed the table impassively. “Thirteen.”
“Well, come on, Dad, we’re nearly done.”
Griff’s sigh reverberated through the kitchen as he turned and followed his son. “Susan?”
She looked up from dolefully regarding the collection. Her smile, by contrast, was remarkably brilliant. “I was just about to start killing them,” she said happily.
“Susan-”
“You just go right ahead.”
“A drop of alcohol. It’s a quick, painless death,” Griff said wryly. “And if it’s really bothering you-”
“Of course it isn’t!” she said indignantly. What did he think she was, some kind of sissy?
“And Susan, no hamsters.”
“Hmm.”
They didn’t seem to have any rubbing alcohol. Vaguely, Susan remembered throwing out half a bottle when she’d packed up the things from her apartment, but no amount of poking through the medicine cabinets revealed one now. Glancing out the window, she saw Griff in the far corner of the yard, laughing at something Tiger said, and guiltily pulled his bottle of Chivas Regal off the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard.
It was alcohol, she defended herself. She sat down at the kitchen table, rearranged her skirt, smiled for her own benefit and, with the first drop of scotch, dosed a simple housefly. Having willingly swatted thousands of them in her lifetime, she decided that the fly would be the easiest to deal with. After a minute, she carefully peeled the lid open just a little, to find the fly still groggily winging around. Her stomach turned over. She dosed the insect with three more drops, and opened a second container.
A dreadful acrid smell assailed her. The stinkbug. She’d thought Tiger was joking. She jammed that lid on again and checked out the grasshopper, who looked distinctly innocent, harmless and deserving of life.
She jammed that lid on, too, and checked the fly again. Murmuring a short eulogy, she gingerly lifted the tiny corpse with tweezers, transferred it to the mounting board, jabbed it with a pin and swallowed hard against her revulsion. This was ridiculous. They were only bugs, dammit. She was no shrinking violet, and had certainly swatted her share of mosquitoes every summer.
All too soon, Tiger would probably be bringing home snakes. This was nothing. So where was her sense of humor?
But Susan knew what was really bothering her, and it wasn’t the bugs. A few painful realities were stabbing at her consciousness. Feelings of inadequacy haunted her. Whatever had made her think she was equipped to deal with a ten-year-old boy who had dropped into her life out of the blue? She knew nothing of his interests, so why had she blithely assumed she could easily occupy a special little niche in his life? Yet that’s what she wanted, not to be a mother to him, but to be someone who was special in another way, someone who really cared, someone he could grow to count on…
She already loved Tiger, but this was their first one-to-one encounter, and she really didn’t understand the monumental importance of red shirts with alligators. Usually so composed, she had quickly lost patience when Tiger was vaulting up and down the escalators in the stores, and as for the squirmy, germ-ridden bugs in her spotless kitchen…
We do tend to overreact on occasion, Susan told herself wryly, and picked up the bottle of Chivas. At least the bugs were going out in style.
Chapter 4
“A little water clears us of this deed,” Susan murmured to herself several hours later as she slid deeper into the warm bath intended to obliterate all trace and memory of her afternoon of bug killing. The blend of water and darkness invoked a lush, lazy sensuality in her. Submerged in clear, scented water to her throat, she leaned her head back against the porcelain tub and regarded the bathroom through half-closed eyes.
A bathroom was a rather eccentric place to put a twenty-gallon aquarium. Weeks ago, when the house was redolent of plaster dust and the pungent scent of fresh paint, it had seemed the safest choice. Now, Susan had discovered that the aches and worries produced by even the most grueling day dissolved after a few minutes of a hot bath in darkness, with only the dim fluorescent light of the aquarium and the soothing sound of the bubbler intruding on her consciousness. The pale blue iridescence illuminated the room with soothing, sensual tranquillity, and the silver fish weaving in and around their watery greenery had a subtle, hypnotic effect.
The bathroom had obviously been a small bedroom once. It had been converted in the way of Victorian houses at the turn of the century, like a lavish afterthought. The room was too big, but the skylight was wonderful; in daylight the sun’s rays streamed lavishly down on the tropical plants in the corner. Now she could see stars through the window to the night. The gleam of brass fixtures, the velvety blue throw rug she and Griff had found, the corner of lush greenery, the blue glow from the aquarium, and the hush of night around her… Half smiling, Susan closed her eyes.