Page 181 of The Woman Left Behind

He lapped as I rocked against his tongue while I came down.

Then he pulled me off, set me in bed, kissed my shoulder, and rolled the other way to take his feet and hit the bathroom to clean up.

The dogs followed him.

I settled in by curling up until he got back.

God, that was hot.

I grinned to myself.

One thing I’d learned for certain, Harry did like control.

And I liked how Harry controlled things.

He was very imaginative.

Harry came back with the dogs bustling around him, and I uncurled so we could do what we always did post-nighttime sex.

Turn the lights off and snuggle in under the covers.

It was Sunday night.

Friday afternoon, Leland Dern had been arrested for criminal stalking and harassment. He was still in Fret County jail because our courts deferred bail hearings until weekdays.

With the gate open to Harry sharing more (though, not all) about his work (and I promised I’d never breathe a word to anyone), he’d begun to share more.

This being, Dern flatly refused further comment on the situation surrounding my parents’ murders, denied knowing all Karl Abernathy had gotten up to, and vehemently denied the criminal stalking charges and using his deputies to pursue that behavior.

So that was that.

For now.

He still had to answer for his current charges, and that had MP in an uproar, though, not a bad one. Most folks were in fits of glee to see Dern answering (again) for his shenanigans.

I was one of them.

Harry had elected not to tell Willie’s mom just how hot the water was that Willie was in. I’d heard nothing from him since the first call (then again, I’d blocked him, but in looking at my history, no blocked calls had come in either).

And everything else was in a holding pattern as they searched for Karl Abernathy.

They had an APB on him, but so far, no luck.

As for the rest of it, since Harry couldn’t be intimately involved in that case because of me, Harry took the weekend off.

We had Jawa witches in the yard, and they surrounded a cauldron that produced smoke from a smoke machine situated inside. The porch was strung with orange lights, the bats hung on the outer wall, with more hanging from the ceiling of the porch. And the porch steps were strewn with a variety of shapes, sizes and faces of white jack-o’-lanterns with orange interiors and lights on timers.

It kicked Halloween’s ass.

It was the best decorated house on the block.

So much so, that day, I noticed not only Ronetta, but my neighbors on my other side, Allen and Susan, had been to Kimmy’s, and they’d ramped up the Halloween goodness in their decorations.

I was sure this was Kimmy’s ploy, but you didn’t make a go of a holiday store in a town the size of Misted Pines without deploying some strategy to keep sales going, so more power to her.

We’d spent that day at Jenna and Trey’s, watching football and stuffing ourselves with chips and dips and other football fare.

We’d spent that evening like the one before. With dogs lazing around us (on floor and couch), Harry watching football with his feet on the ottoman and my head in his lap while I played a phone game.

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