“Aw, sweetheart. You got eyes full of hope. But there was no one in that house. It’d been for sale for several months. There was fire damage there, too, a course, but nothing like what happened to your place, where the downstairs fire took off like hell in a fury. Pardon my French. You were all trapped on the second floor. There was no one on the other side of the garage wall to be hurt.”

“So. You think that’s a dead end,” she said carefully.

Something had changed in his expression. His posture was a little stiffer, his eyes more guarded. Or maybe it was her imagination, because his tone of voice never changed. “I think, if you want to come back here every single day you’re here, ask more questions, pursue anything on your mind, honey, then that’s what you should do. Let’s get this off your mind so it’ll never come up again. I admit, if I were your daddy, I’d be advising you to let it go, that it’s not good for you to dwell on something you can never make right. A tragedy is a tragedy, honey. You already went through it. No point that I can see in reliving it yet again. But you do whatever you need to do. I won’t get mad. That’s a promise.” He added, “Particularly if you keep bringing me Louella’s cinnamon muffins.”

When Lily left the station, the temperature had risen to one hundred and thirty-at least. Virginia had hot summers, but nothing like this. She battled the humidity straight to the ice-cream store-which, she told herself, had nothing to do with seeing Griff. It was about saving her life.

The place was wallpapered with kids, some slurping ice cream, but not all. Lily recognized the phenomenon. With school out for the summer, the kids too young for a job needed a hang-out place. Griff’s was clearly it.

Two boys were manning the counter, with a third visible in the back, doing washup. Griff seemed to choose employees who looked as if they’d recently been let out of juvenile detention-lots of tattoos, lots of metal on their faces, lots of attitude. The one Lily had come to know-Jason-seemed to half-live there.

“You looking for Griff?” he asked when she made it up to the counter.

“Well. It doesn’t look as if he’s here-”

“He’s here. He’s just locked up.”

“Locked up?”

Jason nodded his head toward a far steel door. “He’s in the vault. It’s where he makes the ice cream. Nobody’s ever allowed in the vault, but I can let him know you’re here-”

Before Jason finished the comment, Griff appeared from beyond the locked steel door. As if expecting her, he turned and located her in two seconds flat. That slick, wild kiss on the dark veranda was suddenly between them as if it just happened.

Possibly, she’d have had the good sense to run out the door, if he hadn’t crossed the room too quickly for her to take that option.

“I don’t want to interrupt you,” she said immediately.

“You won’t if you come back with me. I’m right in the middle of something.”

“Jason just said no one’s allowed back there?”

“No one is,” he agreed, and motioned for her to follow him.

All right, all right, so she had more curiosity than could kill any cat. After a word with his kids, Griff led her into the so-called vault. “You can test one of the new flavors I’m experimenting with,” he said.

She tasted. Then tasted again. The flavor had some peach, some pecan, some vanilla bean, some unique and tantalizing other flavor. She took another spoonful, thinking that when she left this darned town, she was going to be fatter than a pig.

Which didn’t stop her from more taste testing, even as she turned in a slow circle, examining his “vault.” The room was long, clean as a new penny, all stainless steel and bright light. A one-way window supervised the shop-so that was how Griff knew exactly what was going on with the customers and kids-and inside were counters and a bunch of futuristic appliances she couldn’t identify. Ice-cream making equipment, obviously. She would have asked a dozen questions, except that Griff clearly was in the middle of something, had put on gloves, had some kind of quietly vibrating blender that he was supervising-so he got in his grilling first. “How’d your visit with the sheriff go?”

“Pretty much the same as the other times. I raised questions. He called me a fool. I thanked him.” She gave him more rave reviews for the new flavor, but he still had questions.

“Where are you going after this?”

“I figured either the newspaper office or the library. Wherever I can dig into old copies of newspapers the easiest. I assume old editions will be available online-”

“Maybe not online. But likely on microfiche.”

“What’s microfiche?”

He chuckled. “Spoken like a Yankee. We just don’t do technology at the same rate you northerners do, sugar.”

“Hey. Virginia isn’t north.”

“It is, compared to a small town in Georgia.”

“But I was born here. Don’t I get credit for being true Southern?”

“With those legs, in those short shorts, you can get all the credit you want.”

She didn’t think he’d noticed. “Speaking of which…”

“Speaking of your legs, or of credit?”

“Credit. You’ve been giving me a lot of free ice cream. I was thinking I should go the same path as the other women in town and fall at your feet.”

His eyebrows lifted. “I like your thinking.”

“So…I’m asking you to dinner.” Actually, Lily had no intention of walking in here and making that suggestion, but now that it was out, she was going with it.

“Hmm. I’m guessing you’ve been stuck with restaurant food since you got here. So how about dinner at my place?”

“That’d be okay-but it doesn’t solve the problem of my being in debt to you.”

“I don’t need to solve that problem. I love women in debt to me.”

She rolled her eyes. “Your place. But I cook-to erase the ice-cream debt.”

“This is sounding complicated. On the other hand, I like complicated. How about if I pick you up from Louella’s around five. We can grocery and wine shop together. Then go back to my place and sip something tall and lazy while you cook.”

“A reasonably good plan,” she said, “except for not knowing where you live.”

“Close enough for you to walk home if I come on too strong, sugar.”


Several hours later, Lily was just starting to seriously consider that question. It seemed unlikely that Griff would actually come on at all-much less, come on too strong. Yeah, there’d been those kisses on the dark veranda, but maybe she’d built those up in her mind. Unlike her sisters, she’d never attracted a hot kind of guy. Good men, yes. Gentle guys, decent guys with all the important boy scout qualities-but never scoundrels.

At least other women seemed one hundred percent certain that he was.

As they wandered around the local grocery store, she picked out chicken breasts, fresh parmesan, bread crumbs and aimed for fresh potatoes next. Lily wondered if it was possible to make it five feet without yet another woman flashing a smile at Griff. The smiles all had the same brand-the kind of slow, Southern smiles that told a man he was the best thing she’d ever seen in a month of Sundays.

By the time she caught up with him the next time, she’d gotten the potatoes-and everything else she’d sent him after-and found him cornered between the oranges and grapefruit by a redhead in frayed denim. He spotted Lily. His eyes lit up-not necessarily out of exuberant lust-since it looked as if he’d have groveled to anyone who could save him from the buxom redhead’s gregarious chatter.

“Lily! Mary Belle Johnson…this is Lily, Lily Campbell.”

The redhead whirled around, green eyes narrowed-took in Lily in a glance. Instead of spitting fire, the woman’s face immediately calmed. Possibly, it was Lily’s simple blue crocheted top and white capris that conveyed that she was just no competition for Griff’s attention. Not compared to a woman with Mary Belle’s substantial figure and charming ways.

“I swear, Lily, I been hearing about you since you got into town. My daddy told me you’d come back. I was wondering if I’d have a chance to set eyes on you.” The woman lifted a critical hand to her hair. “I could do something with that.”

“You-?”

“Yeah. I run the salon on Main Street. Belle Hair. I do makeovers, too.” Another evaluative look at Lily’s face. “I really know my eye makeup.” Mary Belle glanced down at her hands. “And manicures.”

“Well, thank you so much.” Lily didn’t laugh, but she was inclined to. She hadn’t been insulted so thoroughly-or so kindly-since she could remember.

Griff took off with the grocery cart toward the checkout like a bat out of hell. “That’s the scariest woman in town,” he said sotto voce, when Lily finally escaped and caught up with him.

“Come on. You could handle her with both hands behind your back.”

“Are you kidding? I was about to dive into the grapefruit. See if a commotion might make her go away.” Griff shot her a wry look. “She didn’t seem to upset you. And as far as I could tell, she was trying her best.”

“I desperately need a haircut. And a woman knows never-ever-to offend anyone who could have power over her hair.”

He let out a husky chuckle. “You don’t need a hair cut. It’s great the way it is.”

“Why thank you, sir. But you don’t have to waste flirting on me.”

“Waste? Since when is flirting a waste?” He paid for the groceries, scooped up both bags.

“I saw what you were doing. The blonde. The second blonde. The brunette. Then the redhead.”

“What? What?”

“You were telling the ladies that I was with you. Which’ll be all over town-” she glanced at her watch “-probably within the next ten minutes. Is that why you asked me out to dinner? To make sure people knew I had a friend in town?”