Nantucket Sawbuck by Steven Axelrod Page B

months before that. He knew it for certain; he had started marking the dates on his calendar. He was horny and lonely, but daydreams kept him going. He was in jail and Tanya was the pinup on his jail-cell wall. Nothing wrong with that.
    He parked in the wide circle in front of the house. Tanya’s Ranger was parked at the other side of the driveway. He killed the engine and stepped out into the sharp northeast wind. He looked around. In the spring there would be about eighty thousand dollars worth of new plantings here, saplings and hedges and flowers. Now it looked raw and unfinished. He could smell the ocean. The harbor was a dark iron blue; the exact color of Tanya’s eyes.
    He braced himself and opened the front door.
    She was standing just inside, naked, and after the first shock of seeing her he could feel reality filling the gaps of his ardent but inadequate imagination: This is what she really looked like. Her nipples were darker, her stomach softer than he had guessed. There were no tan lines. She must have sunbathed nude all summer. She was absorbing the force of his undivided attention nervously. She was actually blushing.
    â€œDid I make a mistake?” she asked him.
    â€œNo,” Mike said, “but I’m about to.”
    He stepped up to her, ran his hand across her ribs and up to cup her breast. At the first touch he could feel the combustion inside him, chemical fire, instantly out of control. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt this way. Maybe he never had.
    She took a step toward him and they were kissing.
    His clothes came off and they found their way to a pile of drop cloths. The thought scampered across the dark road of his mind that she had planned this carefully; but he was glad. It was good to lie down with her, on her. Her hands were moving over his stomach and his chest. He knew the concept of skin hunger but he was beyond that. He was ravenous. He was starving.
    So was she. So they devoured each other.
    After the first time, Tanya said “They delivered the beds yesterday. Let’s get comfortable.”
    They slipped upstairs to the king-sized mattress in the master bedroom. There was a drop cloth draped over it, but it slipped out from under them somehow as Mike grabbed the big oak headboard for leverage.
    It would have been perfect, except for a small catastrophic detail: Kevin Sloane, the youngest member of Mike’s paint crew, had left his iPod on the job, and he chose ten-thirty on Sunday morning to retrieve it. He recognized both of their trucks and when he slipped into the house, he heard them going at it upstairs. He found them easily and snapped picture after picture on his smartphone. Finally they noticed him. Mike jerked stiff, paralyzed. Tanya just stared. The moment had outdistanced their ability to react. There was nothing to do anyway.
    They were busted.
    Finally Kevin spoke into the shrieking silence. “Looks like I’m getting a big raise,”
    Then he turned and walked out of the house. It was going to be a really big raise.
    And that was only the beginning.

Chapter Eight
    Fiona Donovan
    I’d been saving Fiona Donovan since the first day I met her.
    Today I was going to have to save her from herself.
    When I pulled into the parking lot of the Faregrounds Restaurant, she had a man’s head caught by the edge of her passenger-side window, the glass up to just under his chin, immobilizing him against the frame. Another eighth of an inch and he’d be strangling. She could probably decapitate him if she closed the window all the way, but I wasn’t going to wait around to find out. I trotted over to her old Jeep Wagoneer.
    I heard her voice first, that lilting Irish accent. “Now do you understand your attentions aren’t welcome?”
    â€œI urgh—” was all he could get out.
    â€œRoll the window down, Fiona,” I said.
    She spoke to her victim. “I need a better answer than that. Try to speak