Page 35 of No Offense

Her body instantly stilled, and she brought her questioning gaze up to his. Those red lips were still smiling, invitingly to his mind. “Yes?”

Should he ask first or just kiss her? What did people do these days? He knew what they’d said in the sexual harassment seminar, but that had been about work, and this wasn’t work... or was it? Why did everything have to be so confusing? Why couldn’t—

To his utter shock, Molly pulled him toward her, raising up on tiptoe in her bare feet to bring her mouth toward his. He wasn’t even aware of what was going on at first, it all happened so fast. One minute they weren’t kissing, and the next, they were, her arms slipping around his neck so that her soft, round breasts pressed up against his chest, her scent enveloping him in a heady cloud.

He might have considered himself the luckiest man aliveif his cell phone hadn’t chosen that moment to let out a shrill blare from the pocket of his dress uniform.

She pulled away immediately, startled. For him, the sudden break in contact was as if he were an astronaut traversing a bleak and airless planet and she was his only connection to home and oxygen.

“Goddammit,” he swore, and clawed at his uniform trousers in an attempt to find the phone, which was continuing to ring loudly.

Fortunately Molly seemed to find the situation funny. She stood a few feet away, her arms folded across her chest, laughing at him. “Does this happen to you often?” she asked.

“Too damn much.” He managed to extract the phone and glared down at the screen. For a second or two he’d been worried it was Tabitha’s parents—he’d left them his personal number. How was he going to explain to the librarian that he’d violated what he’d expected were the personal wishes of Baby Aphrodite’s mother by contacting the family from whom she’d run away?

But it was only Marguerite, who’d volunteered to skip the party and work late, since so many of his deputies were still out looking for Beckwith and John had wanted someone competent at the office (and Marguerite professed to hate parties, anyway).

“What is it?” he barked into the phone. He couldn’t help it. He’d been kissing Molly Montgomery. What were the chances of that ever happening again?

“Well, and good evening to you, too, Chief,” Marguerite said with cheerful sarcasm. “Sorry to bother you, but I justthought you might want to know that while you and everyone else was over there on Jasmine Key, partying it up, the High School Thief has been busy.”

John threw a glance at Molly. She’d turned away from him because Mrs. Tifton and a number of her friends had come into the bar, all chattering at once. Mrs. Tifton was waving her cell phone and looking alarmed.

“Oh, yeah? Busy doing what?” But John was pretty sure he already knew the answer.

“Robbing Dorothy Tifton’s house,” Marguerite said, confirming his suspicion, “while she was there with you.”

Chapter Thirteen

Molly

Molly had never been to a crime scene before. Well, aside from the one at the library the other day.

She’d had no intention of ending up at another one, except that Mrs. Tifton insisted that ifallof her friends didn’t come along with her on the boat back to Little Bridge Island in order to help her inspect whatever damage had been done to her home by the High School Thief, she wasn’t certain how she was going to make it through the night emotionally.

The sheriff didn’t look too happy about that, given how firmly he kept his lips pressed together throughout the ride... those lips that mere minutes before had been so tantalizingly pressed to hers.

But Molly refused to think about that. This was a serious situation, and she intended to keep her mind focused on the matter at hand, and not at all on the fact that a littlewhile earlier, the sheriff had been holding her so tightly in his strong arms, she could hardly breathe, and kissing her as if his life depended on it.

John had decided that Mrs. Tifton could haveonefriend with her inside the house during “this difficult time.” The rest had to wait for her outside, so as “not to disrupt the crime scene.”

“And I,” he’d added, “will be the one picking which friend gets to come inside.”

That’s how Molly found herself sitting on one of the pure-white couches in Mrs. Tifton’s living room, taking in the scene around her and trying very hard not to think about the sheriff’s lips.

“I just don’t see how he did it.” Mrs. Tifton was crying, and not for the first time. She’d been wailing this same statement, or something along similar lines, since they’d left Jasmine Key. “I always keep all my doors locked. And I have an alarm!”

It was true. Mrs. Tifton, unlike the thief’s previous victims, had kept all the French doors leading from her beautiful, high-ceilinged living room to her backyard pool locked.

But neither this nor the security alarm appeared to have troubled the thief, who’d merely broken the pane of glass closest to the gilt door handle, reached inside to unlock it, then snatched up whatever he could carry between the time it took for the alarm to begin to blare and the arrival of the first sheriff’s deputies on the scene—which turned out to be seven minutes, John explained.

“Seven minutes?”Molly repeated, throwing an incredulous glance in John’s direction.

But he ignored her. He was busy staring at his deputies—not the crime scene techs, who were busy dusting the door handle for prints, or taking photos of what they believed to be the thief’s footprints in the pile of Mrs. Tifton’s recently vacuumed carpet—a thin young blond woman and an equally thin young man, who’d apparently been first to arrive.

“There were a couple of youths throwing down in the parking lot over at the Coffee Cubano, Chief,” whined the male deputy, whose badge had the name Swanson printed on it. “It took us a little while to get it under control and get over here.”

“Youths throwing down at the Coffee Cubano?” The sheriff raised a single dark eyebrow. “Or was Carmelita giving away free con leches again?”