Beach House No. 9

She narrowed her eyes at him, willing, for the moment, to play along. “And you’ll be right here when I return? I have your word on that?”

His gaze slid off to the side. “Let’s make an appointment for next week.”

As if. After meeting him and seeing the setup he had here, she was only more determined not to allow him another inch of wiggle room. His agent was right. The man was in serious denial. “You’ve got to get to work immediately, Griffin, or you won’t make your deadline. The first half of the book is due at the end of the month.”

He ignored that, his gaze fastened on the label of the bottle in his hand. “Book doctor, huh? You know your way around vocabulary and grammar?”

“Yes, though I do more than—”

“So you really know your stuff?” he asked. “Can you spell humulus lupulus? Do you have a familiarity with Saccharomyces uvarum?”

She held on to her patience. “Unless you’re writing a treatise on beer, specifically lagers, I don’t think either of those terms will come up.”

He paused as if vaguely surprised, then he gave a slight shake of his head. “Fine. Let’s talk serial commas, then. Please state your views on their usage.”

Really, the man could make a woman start to consider serial murder—beginning with him. “The serial comma, also known as the Oxford or Harvard comma, refers to the punctuation mark used before the final item in a list of three or more. It’s the standard in American English—”

“According to who?” He bristled.

“Whom,” she corrected. “And it’s according to The Chicago Manual of Style.”

“But—”

“Though that’s for nonjournalistic writing,” she went on, ignoring his interruption. “I’m aware reporters like yourself follow the AP Stylebook, which recommends leaving out the comma before a coordinating conjunction.”

He was silent at that.

She waited a beat. “Did I pass the test?”

“Look.” He sounded exasperated. “I just want to be left alone.”

She gazed around her, taking in the half-dressed beautiful beach people who were drinking his booze and crowding his deck as the sun slid toward the horizon. “Your need for solitude would be a bit more convincing if you weren’t surrounded by a crowd. If your guests didn’t call your place Party Central.”

Something flashed in his eyes. “That’s none of your business.”

Oops. Though clashes between herself and a stalled client were to be expected, downright hostility was not her friend. Jane scooched her chair closer, twisting it to face him. “Griffin…” she said and, like a good governess with a recalcitrant charge, put out a placating hand to touch his leg.

Weird happened when fingers met shin. An electric spark snapped, a tingle shot up her arm, their gazes collided, veered away, crashed again. As yet another glow of heat radiated across her skin, she was paralyzed, still touching him, still staring at him. Confused, she couldn’t seem to pull away. Members of the opposite sex didn’t produce such strong physical reactions in her. She was above all that, she’d always assumed, her interest more in a man’s mind than in his…manliness.

“Griff!” someone said in the distance, then became more insistent. “Griff!”

“What?” He didn’t move. Their stares didn’t waver.

“Sammy says he’s going to jump,” the voice answered.

“Fine,” Griffin responded without emotion. “Tell him to watch the rocks.”

“He says he’s going for the record. He says he’s going to beat you.”

Griffin jerked. The movement broke Jane’s paralysis, and she snatched her hand from his leg. His head swung around to address the man who was standing right beside them. “What did you say?”

It was Beach Boy from the front door. Ted. He pointed to the bluff at the south end of the cove. Even from here, Jane could see a handful of men scrambling along a path up its side. “Sammy says he’s taking off from a spot five feet above your last leap.”

Griffin glanced over his shoulder. “Sammy’s drunk.”

Beach Boy’s curls bounced when he nodded. “It’s why he’s talking trash. But I think he means it. I think he’s going to outdo you this time.”

“Outdo me? Like hell he will.” Griffin was already standing. Then he gripped the railing of the deck and swung himself over and onto the sand below. “Get your camera ready,” he advised the other man as he stripped off his shirt and ran toward the outcropping.

Jane realized she’d spent too much time with English majors and MFAs. They preferred Frisbee golf and strolls through farmers’ markets. They didn’t splash through surf that rose to their knees and then ascend a steep hillside, the muscles in their backs shifting and their strong arms flexing as they reached for each handhold.

They didn’t shout something indistinct and then hurl themselves off a jutting boulder into the roiling ocean.

Several of Griffin’s party guests did just that, from various heights. Jane found herself holding her breath as each man launched himself into space. Her initial reaction could mostly be summed up by “Why?” but after the first couple of men made it back to shore, she could admit there was a certain…exuberance in the activity.

Ultimately there were only two men left on the bluff. One, she guessed, was the drunken Sammy. The other was Griffin. They stood beside each other, the wind tugging at the legs of their shorts.

“Griff should talk him out of it,” one of the partygoers lining the deck railing said. They all wore dark glasses or had their hands up to shade their eyes from the lowering sun. “He’ll have the record if he takes off from there, but Sammy’s just pickled enough not to realize that height means he has to jump farther outward into deeper water.”

But if Griffin tried to talk sense into the other man, it apparently didn’t work. Those on the deck gasped in unison as Sammy bounded from the rock. The others followed his descent, but Jane kept her gaze on their host, who instantly scrambled even higher.

“Is Griffin trying to get a better look at his friend?” she asked Beach Boy, who was still beside her.

“No,” the dude said on a sigh, as Griffin stopped at a sharp nose of stone. “He’s upping the ante. Nobody’s ever attempted a jump from that height. It could be…” He didn’t finish, but the expression on his face did it for him.

It could be dangerous.

Appalled, Jane closed her eyes, squeezing them tight. Though she’d been concerned about her latest author’s uncooperative attitude and then his penchant for crowded beer bashes, she’d remained confident in her ability to help him mold his memoir. She’d been taught long ago that failure was not an option, after all. But clearly the task of aiding Griffin Lowell was going to be more complicated than mentioning deadlines and being available with red pen in hand.

This man was more than a stalled writer. Clearly he was also an impulsive risk taker with an overblown competitive streak.

Or a full-fledged death wish.

CHAPTER TWO

THE TV WAS DRONING at a dull level when Griffin woke up, just as it did every morning. Without opening his eyes, he fumbled for the remote and edged the volume higher. It didn’t register whether the broadcast was news or cartoons or something in between, because it didn’t matter—the noise was only necessary to block out the voices in his head. He wasn’t schizophrenic, he was just hyper-memoried. They had the tendency to play in the background of his brain unless he supplanted them with the sound of twenty-four-hour news or hard-driving music or an alcohol-infused social gathering.

Being Party Central had its benefits.

And another man besides himself was reaping them, he realized as he made his way toward the kitchen a few minutes later. One of his surfing buddies, Ted, was sacked out on the living room floor, a beach towel thrown over him. In his hand, he clutched a bikini top.

Griffin didn’t see a sign of the bottoms or the female body that the D-cups belonged to. He shrugged and prodded the guy’s shoulder with his flip-flop. “Hey.”

Ted batted at the annoyance, thwapping the bikini strings against Griffin’s ankle. “It’s not a school day, Mom,” he murmured.

Though Griffin could hear the television from here, Ted’s mutter sucked him straight to a sandbag-and-timber hooch in a remote northern valley of Afghanistan. Soldiers slept within inches of each other, and someone was always talking in their sleep. To their mom.

Or to their demons.