Dead In The Water (Rebecca Schwartz Mystery #4) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)

got.”
    “Oh, right. She sure does. And she seems to be seeing Lambert every night.”
    “She probably even pays the motel bills.” He was smiling in that way that made me want to look at his mouth until the sun came up. But this was no time for distractions.
    “Wait a minute. She acts so wronged about Don’s leaving her. Was she going out with Lambert first?”
    “You catch on slow, but at least you catch on. To tell you the truth, Marty’s kind of a legend at the aquarium.”
    “You mean—um—” I was trying to think how to put it. “She screws anything in pants.”
    I gasped, remembering how mad she’d gotten when I mentioned Julio’s name.
    “Everything except me and a few others who can outrun her. Poor Ricky got caught, though.”
    “But—this is what she said about Sadie.”
    He raised an eloquent eyebrow. Were you born yesterday? it asked. He said, “Are you hungry, by any chance?”
    “Starved.” But then I remembered what I’d intended to do. “Damn! I was going to go up and see Katy’s maid.”
    “I’ll take you.”
    “You look like you’re going somewhere.”
    “Esperanza and I were going to a movie, but she deserted when Amber called.”
    I wondered if he knew how attractive the vulnerable routine was, or if he just did it naturally. “Let me buy you dinner,” I said. “Something simple—pizza maybe.”
    Julio made a face. “Ewww. Gross.”
    “What’s wrong with pizza?”
    “It’s all ten-year-olds ever eat—especially melancholy ones who’ve just jumped in the bay. I’m going to turn into a pepperoni before Esperanza reaches puberty. Let’s get some tempura—she hates Japanese.”
    There was something kind of wonderful about sneaking around when the kid was gone. Turning tempura into forbidden fruit made it taste twice as good, the way certain things had tasted in childhood. Pizza probably.
    After we’d satisfied our lust for adult fare, we drove out to Carmel, to Katy’s wonderful beachfront house with its little servant’s cottage. I felt a little weird about this—if Yolanda didn’t yet know Katy was dead, I certainly didn’t want to be the one to break the news, but it was a chance I had to take.
    As it happened, I needn’t have worried. The whole place was dark as a cave, and there was no car in the driveway. But Julio was determined our trip shouldn’t be wasted. He suggested a walk on Katy’s lovely beach.
    It was foggy and a little spooky. The moon was waxing, nearly full—a gibbous moon, slightly pregnant and looking her most beautiful in diaphanous veils of fog. The night was too chilly for my thin T-shirt. It was necessary for Julio to put an arm around my waist and draw me close to his body for warmth. Hormones I didn’t know I had flowed into my bloodstream. Waves crashed. Diana the moon goddess was out for a frolic at my expense.
    She let me see light on the water and the passion in Julio’s eyes. But Diana wasn’t the only one with us—some little worry-demon, a messenger from the mundane world we’d left behind, tapped me on the shoulder and started nagging.
    “Rebecca, you don’t know anything about this man.”
    “Rebecca, you’re only a week and a half out of a two-year relationship.”
    “Excuse me, Rebecca, but you always get in trouble with vulnerable men. Do you really want to go back to playing mommy?”
    Julio said, “What are you afraid of?” Words I first heard from fatso Butch Lieberman in the backseat of a Mustang.
    I’d only heard them about a thousand times since—why on earth do men think you’re afraid of them when it ought to be obvious you merely find them repulsive?
    But this time I was afraid. “I don’t know,” I said, answering the question honestly for the first time in my life. We sat on a rock and I told him about Rob, that being the best story I could come up with on short notice. But it wasn’t exactly the whole story.
    “Maybe tomorrow,” said Julio, and I snuggled against him, feeling safe for the moment, delighted to stop the subject. “Lunch tomorrow.”
    “Sure.”
    “And then we’ll buy you a car.”
    Now, that made me really nervous. Talk about rushing into things—I’d been with the Volvo a lot longer than I’d been with Rob.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
     
    As soon as I got back to my lonely motel room, I began to have regrets. Was I crazy to choose a night alone in this overpriced dump over an impulsive cuddle with a man I was starting to like very much?
    Like very much, hell. How