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CHAPTER FOUR

THE NIGHT HAS EYES

In 212 of the upscale Castleton Apartments, Amanda Chase stepped from her bubble bath. She was young and petite with intelligent blue-green eyes and a secret she was saving for Gavin at tonight’s New Year’s Eve party. After six years of marriage she was two months pregnant with their first child.

She ran her fingers over the new party dress that lay across the bedspread and smiled at her good fortune. She enjoyed a happy marriage to a husband whose star was rising in architectural circles. They’d put a down payment on an old Spanish house in Topanga Canyon, and were three weeks from signing the closing papers.

After a sprinkling of talcum powder, a touch of makeup, and a whisper of perfume, she slipped into lacy white underthings and shimmery silk stockings. She stood in front of the dressing table mirror, swept her golden-brown hair into a rhinestone clip, then sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on strappy, high-heeled shoes. She glanced at her watch. Gavin should be here by now.

Dack Traynor stood in the windy darkness outside Amanda’s bedroom window, his camera aimed through a crack in the curtains. He wanted to run his hands over every inch of her silky skin, to pull her beneath him on the cool satin bedspread with nothing between them but the slippery sizzle of sex. He smiled. Oh yes, he was a bad, bad boy.

Gavin had once caught him peeping and gone into a testosterone-fueled rage that scared the bejesus out of him. Even a bloodless, stuffed shirt like Gavin could get pretty riled when it came to his beautiful, young wife.

Dacks’s obsession started in high school when he poked a peephole between the boy’s and girl’s bathrooms. Ever since, the fear of getting caught in the act took his level of excitement to a fever pitch.

Amanda looked in the mirror and tucked a stray wisp of hair behind her ear, then touched the back of her neck as if a spider had crawled across her skin. She walked to the window.

Dack stepped away from the glass, pressing his back against the building so he couldn’t be seen. Amanda separated the curtains, allowing a golden slice of light to cut across the second-story walkway. He held his breath until the curtain dropped, then made a dash for 214. By the time Amanda opened the front door he was safely inside.

Dack liked to get his sex on the run, a lusty midnight tumble with a pickup from a bar along the boulevard, a post-coital cigarette, then back home before his wife got too suspicious or the chick started in with her litany of relationship problems.

Dack’s wife Gail looked up from her book. She had sharp eyes and a razor-cut bob like the wealthy women who came to her teller window at the bank.

“What are you doing with the camera?”

“I didn’t want to leave it in the car overnight. Wanna go to The Carnival Room?” he said, setting the camera on top of the bookcase.

“With all the drunks on the road? Are you crazy?”

Just what he wanted to hear.

Dack lit a cigarette. Standing there in his button-fly jeans, a dark curl falling over his forehead, Gail recalled getting drunk and stupid on her seventeenth birthday and ending up with Dack in a roadside motel. He still exuded the same sensory cocktail of smoke, sweat, and overactive hormones, except they were in their thirties now. She’d grown up and he was still a loose cannon.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he said.

”You better not be up to your old tricks, Dack. One more misstep and you’re on your own.”

“I’m going out,” he said. “The quiet around here is deafening.”