Death's Excellent Vacation - By Charlaine Harris & Toni L. P. Kelner Page 0,98

you’re in Santa Monica?”

Her boldness impressed and entranced him. As he thought about it, he could see this woman being the honest, passionate, carnal lover whose voice he had heard through the wall the night before. Yet Diana had many facets, and he saw one of them now, as a kind of sorrow filled her eyes.

“I don’t mind sad stories. I’ve got a whole catalog of them myself. Go ahead. I’m a big girl. I can take it.”

Something in that last line made him wonder if she had said it to tease him, but he might have imagined it, added a pouty, sexy insouciance to it that was really only an echo of the night before.

“You might think it’s a little strange,” he ventured.

Diana turned her chair slightly, basking in the sun even as she transformed their two balconies into a strangely intimate confessional.

“I like strange.”

Tim thought about Kirk, the idiot who had apparently left this woman after a night like they’d shared last night. What kind of fool must he be?

“All right,” Tim said. He turned down the page in his book and laid it across his chest, staring out at the ocean for a moment before returning his focus to Diana’s curious gaze. “I’m on a kind of tour, I guess. I’ve been to New Orleans and Montreal and to Martha’s Vineyard, off Cape Cod. I even went down to this little village on the Gulf of Mexico. They’re all places that were important to my wife, Jenny, and me during the years we had together.”

The kindness in Diana’s eyes broke his heart all over again. “She’s gone?”

“Just over a year ago. Pancreatic cancer. It was agony for her, so it was probably good that she went quickly, but I didn’t have time, you know? No time to get used to the idea of life without her. It’s taken me this long to accept that I’ve got to live my life. I know she’d have wanted that for me. I’m only thirty-seven. There are a lot of days ahead, if I’m lucky. So I’m on vacation, but it’s also kind of our farewell tour.”

“Wow,” Diana whispered, almost wistful. “That may be the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard. You’re, like, the perfect husband.”

A familiar guilt filled him. It had grown like rust on his heart over the years. After he had betrayed Jenny, he had spent every day trying to make it up to her. He doubted he would ever have been able to, really, no matter how much time they had been given together. But he had wanted more time to try.

“Far from perfect,” Tim said, staring out at the Pacific.

“No, you’re a good guy. I can sense those things,” Diana said. “And you’re lucky, too.”

He frowned. “Lucky?”

The mischief returned to her eyes, and she stood, adjusting the strap of her bikini top.

“You said you were a sound sleeper,” she reminded him. With one hand on the handle of the slider, ready to go inside, she glanced over her shoulder at him in a pose so sexy it was painful to behold. “I always have trouble falling asleep. I need someone to tire me out. The only way I can really sleep well is if I’m so exhausted that I’m a quivering mass of jelly. And with Kirk gone . . .”

Diana glanced away, almost shyly, before looking back at him with renewed boldness. “I don’t know what I’ll do tonight.”

Tim could not speak. He dared not move for fear that she would notice the effect she had had on him, if she hadn’t already.

Obviously pleased by his speechlessness, Diana opened the sliding door into her room. “Enjoy your day, Timothy.”

He managed to croak, “You, too,” before her door slid shut.

Shaking his head in amazement, he went back to his book, the erection Diana had caused—the second in a very short time—slowly subsiding. After a few minutes he realized that his thoughts were straying and he had not understood a word he’d read, and he laughed softly at himself. Had that really been an invitation? Did she mean it?

Not that it mattered. As arousing as it was just being in the presence of this woman, Tim knew that any sexual trysts were still in the future for him. In another life he would have climbed mountains for an opportunity to sleep with a woman like Diana, and he knew that he would remember what he had overheard last night for years, maybe forever. Maybe someday he would