Page 35 of Up In Smoke

“I haven't seen anything I can put my finger on. It’s just a feeling I've been having. And I don't know if it's some stupid paranoia, because my house burned down or if I'm actually sensing something and I just can't articulate it.” She was looking down at the table top, as though ashamed of her own concerns.

Reaching over, he put his finger under her chin, a simple gesture that he hadn't done for simple reasons in a long time. He flirted when he could. He took it further when the offer was on the table, his moves always calculated to make sure that the person he was with wanted to be with him. And if she did, Luke went all in. Then he walked away when it was over.

But nothing here was calculated. He simply reached out and touched her. He'd wanted to see her eyes. Being with Ivy was like nothing he'd experienced. If he'd been choosing who to sleep with, it never would have been the town librarian. Never a woman he'd respected the way he did her. Not someone he admired for the way she had managed to come into a town and find a place at the heart of it. She hadn’t grown up here, but she’d managed to put her finger on the pulse of what made his hometown his home.

She’d even helped solve cases, and he believed she could solve this one, too. Still, beyond all that, he simply wanted to be with her.

Though as she looked at him, he broke eye contact and rolled his eyes, looking up at the ceiling. “Damn it, Ivy.”

He looked back at her in time to see her eyebrows rise, wondering why he was cursing her. “I want you to go out with me because youwantto go out with me.”

Ivy just shrugged and opened her mouth. But Luke waved his hand as if to cut her off, telling her to shut up. “If someone is watching you, you need to have someone with you. You need to have someone who's constantly stopping by. So that whoever is trying to get to you sees that you're not alone, that they could be dropped in on at any moment. Ideally, it's someone who stays overnight and someone with some power, like an FBI agent or a police officer.”

He hated saying that part, but Ivy caught on and grinned at him. “Or a firefighter?”

Half of his mouth pulled up in a smile. “It wouldn't hurt. And I sure as hell don't want you shacking up with someone else.”

“So, wewhat?” she asked. “We go out, get seen together publicly? We become boyfriend and girlfriend?”

“That's the idea.” He said. But it wasn’t all of it. “I don't want you with me just as a cover but also I don't want you unsafe. And I don't want you with anyone else.”

There. He'd said all the words out loud. Let her untangle them. His frustration was that they were all true. Any of them happening would preclude some of the others.

He was looking at the tabletop, studying the grain that had been painted on when her fingers fisted into the front of his t shirt, pulling him upward. He barely managed to look up in time to catch that Ivy was coming toward him.

Her kiss was fierce and strong. He was grateful his cheap table was tiny and she'd easily been able to close the gap. Her lips tasted of sugar from the cereal and her mouth tasted of a heaven he hadn't quite known existed.

“All right,” she said, releasing his shirt. “Let's do this.”

But he was protesting again. He needed Ivy to wanthim,not just safety.

She tipped her head at him as though to chastise him. “Let's be honest, it's the perfect excuse to do what I want to do anyway.”

His heart soared. After all, the woman wore twinsets and hid those sexy tattoos from the world, she made choices based on appearance. But if she wanted to be seen with him, he could live with that.

He slid heavily back down into the seat with a thunk, the jolt almost sloshing the milk out of her cereal bowl.

Then she frowned at him. “I take that back. I don't know if you're going to want to be seen publicly with me after I tell you what I learned.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“Carlos and I were both at my mother's that night.” Luke pointed to one of the papers that was spread out on his table before him.

Some were prints that Ivy had made of police reports and charges and court documents that Orlando Tavares had sent her, others were handwritten notes. The yellow pages held crisp blue pen in neat cursive strokes that spoke of her homeschooled background.

Ivy pulled the page over closer to her and made a mark in the upper corner. She'd made little notes on each, T, M, and C, for each of his brothers. She crossed C off of the report for the fire that had started the night Luke remembered.

He had to wonder if she might have had an L up there, too—if she might have needed to rule him out. Or at some point along the way had she actually done it? It seemed odd to be sleeping with her, to be asking her out, and to not be entirely confident that she knew he wasn't their arsonist.

“Am I off your list?”

“You are now,” she told him with a cute smirk, and he didn't ask when “now” had occurred. “Orlando said that Chloe told him to pull burglaries and it took me a while to figure out how it helped, but, look …”

Ivy pushed one of the reports toward him. Quickly scanning it, Luke read about another arrest for yet another petty theft.

“Jesus, Tiago,” Luke said it out loud, even though he hadn't meant to. All his misery at his oldest brother’s inability to get his life together or even just stop committing crimes seeped into the two words.

He hadn't even known about this most recent arrest—hopefully there weren’t more. He wondered if his mother did but forced his attention back to the table and the way he and Ivy were trying to rule out suspects. “What does this have to do with the arson?”

---