He dumped the blanket onto the couch. “Leave your door open just in case. And if you see or hear anything, don’t hesitate to let loose with one of those screams.”
“Okay, I can do that.” She added a chipper note to her voice to defuse the double entendre. Or was she the only one thinking about a different kind of scream?
Michelle left her door halfway open and crawled into bed, her gaze darting to the makeshift curtain across the window. Had she imagined the hand?
She pulled the pillow to her chest and buried her face into its softness. Whether the hand was real or not, it had brought Colin to her doorstep. And he brought safety and security.
Or maybe he brought more danger than she could handle.
* * *
COLIN WIGGLED HIS toes against the chill seeping into his feet. His nostrils twitched at the smell of rich coffee wafting through the air. Heaven.
He shifted on the uncomfortable couch and peeled open one eye. Michelle buzzed around the kitchen, clinking dishes and dipping in and out of the refrigerator. Pure heaven.
He’d had an uneasy feeling last night ever since he’d left Michelle at her front door after their late lunch. The cops were complacent. That was a bad state of mind—especially for a cop.
He’d noticed the patrol car of one of Coral Cove’s finest cruising down the street once or twice, but Michelle needed more than that. He couldn’t sleep, anyway, and tossing rocks into the inky ocean seemed like a logical alternative. Once outside, his feet beat an automatic path to Michelle’s house.
He’d been on high alert, his ears attuned to the slightest sound. He hadn’t even been sure the noise he’d heard had been a scream or that it had come from Michelle’s house. But it was all the signal he’d needed.
“Did I wake you?”
He blinked and the vision in the kitchen came into focus. “The smell of that coffee woke me up. I know you don’t drink the stuff. You didn’t have to go through any trouble for me.”
“My dad was a coffee drinker, and I still have the coffeemaker—no trouble at all. Besides, it’s the least I can do for a midnight rescue. Black, right?”
She poured a cup of the steaming brew and carried it to him along with a sliced bagel on a plate. She’d already showered and changed from her sexy nightshirt with the sexy slogan into a pair of cargo shorts, a T-shirt and a light sweatshirt to ward off the nip in the morning air.
“Do you want some cream cheese with your bagel?”
“Sure.” He swung his legs over the side of the couch, clutching the blanket in his lap. He’d shed his jeans last night and hadn’t expected breakfast in bed this morning. Not that he minded.
She placed the coffee cup and bagel on the coffee table and retreated to the kitchen for the cream cheese. As she approached him, her gaze dropped to his bare chest. Her cheeks blanched and she averted her eyes.
“Here you go.” She settled the tub of cream cheese with a knife crossed over the top next to the plate.
Before she could draw away, he encircled her wrist with two fingers. “A lovely parting gift from my captors.”
She dropped her lashes. “What’d they do?”
He ran a finger along one of the scars crisscrossing his chest. “You don’t want to know.”
“I’m sorry, even though that’s pretty inadequate.”
“It’s adequate.” He released her and peeled the lid from the cream cheese container. He spread a thick layer on a toasted bagel half. “Are you joining me or did you already eat?”
“I already had something.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “Are we going outside when you finish?”
“Yeah. Have you looked out there yet?”
“I looked out the window and didn’t see a thing. Just sand.”
Several minutes later, Colin finished off his bagel and took a last gulp of coffee. While Michelle carried the dishes back to the kitchen, he let the blanket slip to the floor and snagged his jeans from the back of the couch.
She walked back into the room as he was yanking his pants over his thighs. Pink suffused her cheeks, and he couldn’t help grinning as he zipped his fly. Despite the veneer of sophistication she wore, Michelle wasn’t much different from that bashful high school girl with the endless legs and silver in her mouth.
“Are you coming with me?”
“Of course.”
He shrugged into his sweatshirt and shoved his weapon in the pocket. In response to her raised eyebrows, he said, “In case the hand makes an appearance.”
She led him through a side door in the kitchen and he stepped off the concrete porch behind her. The back of her house abutted the sand dunes, just like his. The houses across the street from theirs, like Columbella House, had the ocean tumbling away from their backyards. They just had mountains of sand.
Her backyard was accessible from the front with not even a fence between them. “Anyone off the street can get into your backyard.”
“Yeah, well, I never had to worry about that before.”
They turned the corner of her small beach cottage where two windows faced the sand dunes. She pointed to first one and then the other. “Those are both bedrooms. The first one is mine.”
Colin eyed the bottoms of the windows, which reached about waist-high. Anyone could climb through those windows. Before he clumped through the sand to the window, he asked, “I suppose you wouldn’t notice any footprints out of the ordinary back here, would you?”
Michelle looked down at the bumps and indentations in the sand and shook her head. “You can’t really make out footprints in dry sand, can you?”
“Not really.” He shuffled through the sand and crouched beside her window. “If you saw a disembodied hand, it’s because the hand’s owner was down here. You couldn’t see the rest of his body or his face because he was hiding below the window and reaching up with his hand.”
“Why would he do that if he were trying to break in or even peer through the window like a Peeping Tom?” She hugged herself and hunched her shoulders.
“Maybe he thought he could cut the glass first before reaching in to unlock the slider.”
She shook her head and her light brown hair slipped over her shoulder. “I’m pretty sure he wasn’t holding a glass-cutting tool. He was scratching or almost clawing at the window.”
Colin mumbled more to himself than Michelle. “Why would you scratch at a window?”
“Huh?”
He ignored her question and brushed his fingers on the front of his sweatshirt, the muscle in his jaw jumping. He smoothed the tips of his fingers across the glass in a grid pattern—up and down and left to right. Then he moved on to the next quarter of the window. He sucked in a breath.
“What is it?”
Lightly, he traced the pads of his fingers over the rough spot on the windowpane. With his nose almost touching the glass, he scraped at the patch with his fingernail.
He held up his finger, dug the residue from beneath his fingernail with his other nail and rubbed the sticky substance between his thumb and forefinger.
“Colin, what did you find? Looks like a grain of sand to me, which wouldn’t be all that unusual.”
She’d crouched down beside him, and he extended his finger beneath her nose. “It’s adhesive.”
“Adhesive?