Читать книгу A Kiss In The Dark - Jenna Mills, Jenna Mills - Страница 9

Six weeks later

The upper hand felt good.

With insulting detachment, Lance St. Croix studied the sunlight glinting through the cathedral window in a violent wash of light. Shadows stretched languidly across the white carpet of the opulent living room, one threatening, the other nearing the massive fireplace in retreat.

“You’ll never get away with this,” he warned with deliberate dismissal. “Not after what you’ve done.”

The one who’d accused him of having a God complex laughed, not yet sensing the trap. “You can’t just use people and discard them at will. Life doesn’t work that way.”

“Get off your high horse,” he said with a cutting smile. “The shadow of innocence doesn’t touch you any more than it touches me. Have you forgotten I know what you did?”

A glitter moved into blue eyes that invited trust and hid betrayal. “If my secret comes out, so will yours.”

No, it wouldn’t. He’d make damn sure of that, just like he made damn sure of everything else. Every action had an equal and opposite reaction, no matter how innocent, how misguided, the intentions.

“People will be hurt,” he pointed out, changing tactics.

“You should have thought about that before!” the misguided one muttered with all the foolishness of the doomed. “It’s too late now.”

The shadows against the carpet blurred, the sudden absence of the sunlight leaving only an indistinguishable mass of darkness. It was impossible to discern predator from prey.

“Please,” Lance added, playing the emotional card he’d fashioned into an art form during long years of marriage. “Just listen to me. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was careless, I let emotion take over. Trust me, it’ll never happen again.”

“Cut the innocent act!” his betrayer shouted, shattering the illusion of calm. “I’m not falling for it again. You knew exactly what you were doing, and I have the evidence to prove it. Soon, everybody in Portland will know what a gutless coward you are.”

He attacked without thinking, swift, necessarily brutal. There was only a second to react. One second to grab the shiny fire poker before the violent impact of flesh to flesh. The ensuing scream was hideous, the blow shocking, the contrast of red on white horrifying.

The end came obscenely fast.

Dylan St. Croix was nearing the Portland art district when the scratchy report came across the police scanner.

Ten forty-nine at 1467 Lakeview Road confirmed. Requesting backup.

Everything inside him roared violently in protest. Blindly, he changed lanes and whipped his Bronco around, fighting the gnarled rush hour traffic like a living beast. His heart pounded as he slammed his foot down on the gas pedal and tore down crowded streets. Red lights meant nothing. Time seemed to crawl.

1467 Lakeview Road. He knew that address. Knew only one person lived there. One woman.

Ten forty-nine. He knew that code. Fatal Injury.

Something dark and primal tore through him. No! he thought savagely. No. He clenched the steering wheel as tightly as he could, determined not to let his hands shake. But he could do nothing about the adrenaline pooling in his gut like poison.

Never was supposed to last longer than six weeks.

Fatal Injury.

Questions battered him, but the scanner granted few answers. Crime scene technicians had been dispatched. The coroner. Possible homicide.

Dylan swerved off the highway and zipped through a Yield sign. And then he was there, the posh Portland neighborhood greeting him like a sleepy still life. He blinked hard, not sure how half an hour had raced by in the space of a heartbeat. He hardly remembered leaving downtown.

With no regard for the sanctity of the quiet community, he swerved around a slow-moving minivan, turned sharply onto Lakeview, then accelerated toward the house two blocks down. Against a crimson-streaked sky, pines towered high and the sun sank low, working in unison to obscure his view. Squinting, he barely saw the police cars that blocked his progress.

He jerked the Bronco to a stop against the curb and threw open the door. Then, God help him, he ran. Men and women and children blocked the sidewalk, crying and wringing their hands, staring. Dylan pushed past them, until he reached the line of yellow police tape. Then he stopped cold.

The fading light of early evening cast long shadows across the wooded lawn, while a tulip-lined walkway meandered toward the wide porch. Golden light spilled from the cathedral-style front door and arched windows. Bushy baskets of impatiens and petunias swayed in the breeze.

So this was where she lived, he thought morosely.

Perfect, was Dylan’s first thought. Tranquil. Deceptively serene. Just like her. Except for the garishly flashing lights of the four squad cars. The two ambulances blocking the street. The cops swarming the yard like a freshly kicked anthill.

This was where she lived, he thought again. This was where she’d died.

Bethany.

His vision blurred, as an unwanted pain sliced through him. He should feel nothing, he knew. Not anymore. But he’d never learned how. He felt everything. Intensely. Always had. He called it passion. She’d called it out of control.

Shoving aside the memory, he forced his long legs to move up the driveway. Steady. Measured. He was a strong man. He’d seen a lot of ugliness in his life—crime scenes were nothing new to him. He’d visited many. He’d even caused a few.

But the cheerful flowers drove home the reality that this time was different.

This time was personal.

“You don’t want to go in there, son.”

Dylan glanced over his shoulder to see Detective Paul Zito break from a cluster of patrolmen and cut across the lawn. Dylan’s work as a private investigator brought him in contact with the homicide veteran often enough that the two had formed an unlikely friendship.

On the third Tuesday of every month, they met by the river at Shady’s for beer and cards. Nothing rattled Detective Paul Zito. Nothing fazed him. Dylan couldn’t remember a single time when the irreverent cop had looked the least bit uneasy. Certainly not stricken.

Until now.

Dylan’s heart rate accelerated. Dread twisted through him. And for a moment, he wanted to turn and walk away. Walk far. Like she had. He wanted to get back in his car and drive, get on with his life. He wanted to pretend the only woman who’d ever crawled under his skin didn’t lie dead inside.

But that was the coward’s way out, and while Dylan had been called many names in his thirty-two years, coward wasn’t one of them.

“Trust me,” Dylan said when Zito joined him on the tulip-infested walkway. “This has nothing to do with what I want.”

The homicide veteran frowned. “Technically, I can bar your sorry ass from taking another step. This is a crime scene. You have no right to be here.”

“I’m family. That gives me every right.”

“So that’s what you’re calling it these days?”

He ignored Zito, stared at the front door. It hung open, allowing light to spill like blood from a starkly white foyer. A wide staircase swept toward the second level. She was in there. He wondered where. If she’d suffered. If she’d known.

A primal emotion he didn’t understand bled through the indifference he struggled to erect. The last time he’d seen her—Christ, he didn’t want to think about that night. Until the scanner report, he’d done a damn fine job of blotting it from his mind. But now he had to wonder. If he’d known it was to be their last, would he have done things differently?

He didn’t want to think about that, either.

Needing to do something, anything, he stooped and snapped off a bloodred tulip. Indifferent, he reminded himself. Objective.

At the sight of his cousin’s white Ferrari parked in the street, his gut clenched. He could only imagine how Lance must feel, the shock and the grief. Lance and Bethany had long since gone their separate ways, but once, he’d pledged to love her forever.

“Where’s Lance? Is he inside?”

“In the living room.”

Dylan pushed past Zito. “How’s he holding up? Is he okay—”

“Christ, Dylan. I thought you knew.”

The tone, more than the actual words, stopped him cold. He’d heard that tone before, the sunny day eighteen years ago when the police chief had shown up on his grandfather’s doorstep.

“I’m sorry, Sebastian. I don’t want to be standing here any more than you want me to, but I didn’t want you to hear from strangers. There’s been a terrible accident…”

Adrenaline spewed nastily, prompting Dylan to turn toward Zito. The white porch rail and neatly trimmed hedges blurred, but the grim-faced detective looked carved of stone.

“Knew what?” Dylan bit out.

“There was some kind of struggle,” Zito said. “Someone took a fire poker to the side of his head. He probably never even knew what hit him.”

“Never knew what hit him?”

His friend frowned. “Looks like the end came pretty damn fast.”

Horror slammed in, hard. Shock numbed the pain. Lance. His smooth, invincible cousin. The St. Croix prince. Dead. Just like so many St. Croixs before him.

“The ex called 911,” Zito added. “She was pretty incoherent.”

The point-blank statement jolted Dylan back from the whirring vortex like a frayed lifeline. “B-Bethany?”

“The first officers on the scene found her in the living room wearing a torn nightgown.”

“She’s alive?”

“Found the body…or so she says.” Zito glanced at a small notebook in his hands and shook his head. “Story’s got more holes than the ozone layer.”

Dylan swore softly. For the past forty minutes, images of Bethany hurt and bleeding, dead, had tortured him. Now…

Lance.

Jagged emotion cut in from all directions, but Dylan didn’t miss Zito’s insinuation.

“You think she did it?”

“It’s her house, her fire poker, her ex. The blood was on her hands.” Zito shrugged, shook his head. “I count my blessings when Pam was done with me, she was content to sign a few damn papers. Don’t know why people have to complicate a good divorce with murder.”

Blood on her hands.

The image formed before he could block it, turning everything inside him stone cold. Disbelief surged. Too well, he knew how misleading Bethany’s porcelain-figurine exterior could be. Intimately, he knew there was nothing she couldn’t accomplish, if she put her mind to it. Hell, she’d cut him out of her life with the ruthless precision of a heart surgeon. But murder?

“Where is she?” He needed to see her, to—

To nothing.

Zito flipped his notebook shut. “Out back, by the pool.”

“Is she…hurt?”

“A nasty blow on the side of her head, but no concussion.”

Dark spots clouded Dylan’s vision. “Someone hit her?”

“Maybe. Or maybe she hit herself.”

Revulsion knocked up against disbelief. He’d heard worse, a young woman slashing her throat with a steak knife to cover the fact she’d killed her lover, but Bethany…

“I want to talk to her.”

“This is a crime scene. I can’t have you contaminating—”

“Her, damn it! I want her.”

Zito cocked an eyebrow.

“You’ve already taken her statement,” Dylan reminded, fighting a pounding urgency he didn’t understand. “What do you think I’m going to do? Tell her how to change her story?”

Zito’s dry smile said just that. “Stranger things have happened.”

“Ten minutes, Zito. You can listen to every word. Just let me see her.” He had to. God, he had to. He didn’t know why, just knew that he needed to look into those languid blue eyes and see if he saw a murderer looking back at him.

Zito sighed, motioning for Dylan to follow him around the wide porch. “Five minutes.”

The side of the house boasted a wall of windows, giving Dylan a distorted view into Bethany’s world. The thick, beveled glass denied detail, but not impression. Everywhere he looked, shades of white glared back at him—flooring, furniture, art.

Near the back of the house, French doors hung open, revealing another room, where a sheet lay draped over a form near the fireplace. Three uniformed cops stood around talking, while two technicians examined the fire poker. A photographer busily recorded the scene.

“No matter how hard it is, boys, we go on. From now on, I’ll be more like a father, than a grandfather. And you’ll be more like brothers than cousins.”

“But you’re not my father!” eleven-year-old Dylan raged. “And he’s not my brother! We don’t even like each other.”

“Then you’ll just have to pretend, won’t you?”

“It’s the St. Croix way,” thirteen-year-old Lance added, earning his grandfather’s approving smile. “It’s not so bad once you get used to it.”

But there was no pretending now. Lance, the complicated cousin who’d never become a brother despite how hard Dylan tried, really did lie dead on the living room floor. And apparently Bethany had blood on her hands.

Remorse clogged Dylan’s throat, the hopes and dreams of two very different little boys who’d grown up to fall in love with the same woman. Somehow, he kept walking.

“She’s just around the corner,” Zito said.

Dylan stopped before turning, taking in the elaborate cabana and pool area. In the distance, the fading light of early evening cast the Cascades a giant, misshapen shadow against a horizon streaked with shades of crimson.

Even the sky seemed to be bleeding.

And then, for only the second time since that cold night on the mountain, when a snowstorm had shattered the preternatural indifference he’d lived with for six years, he saw her.

“She’s all yours,” Zito indicated with a sweep of his hand.

A hard sound of denial broke from Dylan’s throat. Zito couldn’t be more wrong. Bethany Rae Kincaid had never been all his. Never all anyone’s.

But still, his heart kicked, hard. And the years between them crumbled, just like they had on the mountain.

The ice princess, they’d called her in high school. She held herself apart from the world, refusing to fully give, fully surrender herself to anyone, least of all Dylan. Except when they’d been in bed. Then, she’d literally come apart in his arms. But after, after she’d always sewn herself up a little tighter.

Some things never changed.

The sight of her sitting in a chaise lounge, holding a black-and-white cat and staring toward the mountains, stirred something he’d thought finally dead. Her long chestnut hair was tangled, her creamy skin alarmingly pale. Blood stained her slinky ivory robe. Her feet were bare.

“Pink or red?”

She looked at him, laughing. “What?”

“Your toenails,” he said, running his hand along her high arch. “I want to paint them. Pink or red?”

The memory cut in from somewhere long forgotten, prompting Dylan to swear softly. In the end, she’d chosen red. At her wedding, she’d worn pink.

That damning, defining night in the cabin, there’d been no color at all.

Dylan clenched his hands into tight fists. Damn her. Damn her for turning him into a gnarled mess, while his cousin lay dead inside and she sat there perfectly calm. Untouched.

Untouchable.

He wanted to tear across the patio and take her shoulders in his hands, put his mouth to hers, breathe some life into her. He wanted answers. He wanted to understand. He wanted—

He wanted to stop wanting.

A cool breeze drifted across the flagstone, bringing with it the scent of jasmine that was quintessential Bethany. Or maybe that was only his imagination. Slowly, he stepped into the shadows of twilight and started toward her. Birdseed crunched beneath his loafers, drawing the cat’s attention, but not Bethany’s. Big and scruffy and missing most of one ear, the black-and-white narrowed yellow eyes and watched Dylan approach.

His heart hammered cruelly. Look at me, he raged silently. He wanted her to turn to him, acknowledge him. He wanted to see those startling blue eyes rimmed by the darkest, thickest lashes he’d ever known, see what truths lurked in those deep, deep depths. What lies.

But classic Bethany, she didn’t grant his wish. She just sat there, seemingly oblivious to the world around her, staring beyond the pool that looked more like a lagoon. The evening breeze sent ripples across the turquoise surface, while a stunning waterfall at the far corner babbled peacefully. The wall of rocks seemed to weep. Birds sang.

And deep inside Dylan, something twisted.

It was a damn peaceful scene for a murder.

Beth St. Croix stared blindly across the cabana. Nearly sunset, she knew shadows would be stretching across the pool, but she could bring nothing into focus. The world beyond was hazy, cold. Frozen.

Or maybe that was her.

Till death do us part rang with a finality she’d never expected on that cold day she and Lance had quit pretending theirs was a real marriage. Legal documents couldn’t make up for the distance that had settled between them. She could still see the suitcases sitting against the white marble of the foyer, the empty shelf in the entertainment center where CDs and DVDs had once been stacked. She hadn’t asked him to stay.

Hadn’t wanted him to.

Ma’am, where’s the body?

Horror surged, clogged. Bile backed up in her throat. Once, in a fit of rage, her mother had thrown an iron candlestick at a sliding door. The thick glass had cracked into thousands of misshapen pieces, but by some miracle remained intact. Fascinated by the sun streaming through the prism of color, a six-year-old Beth had put her hand to the surface, only to have the shards crumble, slicing her palm to the bone as they fell to the cold tile floor.

Now, with absolute certainty, Beth knew if she so much as moved, she’d shatter just like that door.

Wake up, she commanded herself fiercely. Wake up! It was time to leave this terrible dream behind, to claw her way out of the frozen cocoon where each breath stabbed like daggers. She had to make her legs work, so she could go back inside and make Lance wake up. Tell the police there’d been a terrible mistake.

Without warning, a low hum broke through the stillness, a sharp wind rushing through a narrow ravine.

“Bethany.”

Her heart staggered, but in some faraway corner of her mind, she wondered what had taken him so long. He always invaded the shadowy realm of her dreams sooner or later, tall and strong, eyes burning, touch searing.

“I came as soon as I heard.”

The hoarse voice settled around her like a steadying hand, a lifeline back from that frozen place she’d slipped into upon finding Lance. She wanted to turn to him, feel his arms close around her like they had one cold, desperate night. Instead, she held herself very still, acutely aware that if she so much as blinked, if she let go of that tight grip she held on herself, she risked losing hold of all those nasty sharp pieces she’d gathered up and shoved deep before the police arrived.

“Bethany,” he said a little stronger, a lot harder. “Look at me.”

No, she thought wildly. No. But slowly, she turned to face him. She’d never been able to deny him anything, at least not in her dreams. In real life the cost had been shattering, but she’d learned the importance of denying him everything. Fire burned. She knew that, couldn’t afford to forget.

He towered over her, his big body blocking out the last fragile rays of the sun. Familiarity faded as well. In her dreams, her memories, he always, always touched her.

Now he just stared, his eyes hot and condemning. And she knew. God help her, she knew. Dylan was here. Here! Which meant she wasn’t dreaming. She was awake. Horribly, vividly awake.

The past two hours came crashing back, breaking through the blanket of shock like a hideous rockslide. “Lance…”

Dylan swore softly. “I thought it was you.”

The strangled words shattered the jagged pieces she’d been trying desperately to hold together. Everything fell away, the haze and the blur and the vertigo, leaving the cold hard truth.

And it destroyed.

For six years this man had stayed away. He hadn’t touched her, spoken to her, even acknowledged her, except that one shattering night on the mountain, when loose ends had played them both like puppets. At a charity auction just two nights later, he’d walked right by her with a gorgeous woman hanging on his arm, looking through Bethany as though she didn’t even exist.

But now, now that he thought she lay dead on the living room floor, he was first in line to view the body.

“Sorry to disappoint you,” she managed through the broken glass in her throat.

The hard planes of his face were expressionless, but a pinprick of light glimmered in his eyes. “Rest assured,” he said softly. “Of the many ways I’ve imagined you over the years, hurt, bleeding, or dead isn’t even close. Not when I watched you marry my cousin, not when I woke up alone.”

The pain was swift and immediate, forcing her to blink rapidly to hide it from him. She looked at him standing close enough to touch, but saw only a man bursting in through a closed door, running across the darkened room, shouting her name.

“What happened, Bethany? What the hell happened?”

The slow burn started deep inside, pushing aside the shock and giving her strength. She released Zorro and stood, welcoming the bite of cool flagstone beneath her bare feet.

Dylan St. Croix was not a man to take sitting down.

He loomed a good six inches over her five-foot-eight, bringing her first in contact with the wrinkled cotton of his gray button-down. He wore it open at the throat, revealing the dark curly hair she’d once loved to twirl on her finger.

Shaken, Beth looked up abruptly, only to have her breath catch all over again. It was bad enough facing him after the night on the mountain, but to do it here, now, like this, seemed crueler than cruel.

Time and maturity had served him well, hardening the lanky, reckless boy into a devastating man. Tall and broad-shouldered, he wore his thick dark hair neatly clipped, obliterating the curls he’d always hated. His green eyes were narrow and deep-set, his cheekbones shockingly high. There was a cleft in his chin. His jaw always needed a razor.

He looked like a million tainted bucks, her friend Janine had once said. The description fit.

“You don’t belong here,” she said, but the words cracked on the remembered smell of sandalwood and clove. “Please. Just go.”

“So you can slip back into your pretend world where roses don’t have thorns, we weren’t lovers, and Lance isn’t dead on the living room floor?” He paused, stepped closer. “Sorry, no can do.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, instinctively stepping back.

His gaze hardened. “Zito says you found him.”

The memory speared in before she could stop it, Lance lying near the fireplace. So still. So cold. She’d lain there for a few minutes before opening her eyes, dizzy, disoriented. The sun cutting through the windows had blinded her at first, but after several moistening blinks, she’d brought him into focus.

Odd place for a nap, she remembered thinking. Odd time.

Then she’d become aware of the stain on the carpet. And the fire poker in her hand.

“What else did the good detective tell you?” Lance had been a prosecutor with the D.A.’s office; she knew how weak her story sounded. Murder was rarely random or anonymous. Spouses almost always topped the list of suspects.

“Did he tell you they don’t believe me when I say I have no idea what happened? That they don’t believe the gash on my head isn’t self-inflicted? Did they tell you that?”

Dylan frowned. “Not in so many words.”

But she didn’t need words. Everything Dylan St. Croix believed, felt, wanted, burned in that dark primeval gaze. He was a man driven by the kind of searing passion that incinerated everything in its path. Her included. Her especially. That he stood there now, so ominously still, so silent and expressionless, chilled in ways she didn’t understand.

“I can see it in their eyes,” she whispered, “just like I see it in yours.”

“It’s a logical assumption.”

In another lifetime, she might have laughed. Logic and Dylan went together as well as fire and ice.

Needing to breathe without drawing in sandalwood, she turned and walked to the edge of the pool, where an empty blue raft floated near the waterfall.

“I came home and walked inside,” she said, looking out over the pool. In the distance, jagged mountain peaks blended into sky, only the faint stars indicating where one world ended and another began.

“Someone grabbed me. I screamed, but…everything went dark.” She lifted a hand to the back of her head, where a nasty knot throbbed. “When I came to, I was in the living room next to Lance. He was…” A sob lodged in her throat. “The blood…There was nothing I could do.”

She stiffened when she felt a warm hand join hers at the base of her scalp. She hadn’t even heard him approach. He circled the injury, making her acutely aware of his fingers in her tangled hair, gently exploring the wound the detectives wondered if she’d given herself.

“Does it hurt?”

“Not anymore.” Liar.

Somewhere along the line, the birds had stopped singing. There was only the sound of cascading water and the hum of activity inside the house. The sound of their breathing. The crazy desire to lean back, to feel the solid strength of a hard male body.

“When did you change into your negligee, before or after?”

Cool evening air swirled around her bare legs, reminding her that beneath her robe, she wore only a white silk chemise. One she hated. One she’d never worn, though Lance had bought it for her over a year before.

“I—I didn’t put it on,” she said, stepping from Dylan and tightening her sash. “I was wearing a suit. It’s hanging in the closet now.”

“What was Lance doing here? I didn’t think you two were even speaking. Had something changed?”

“No.” No way. Their marriage had ended long before he had walked out the door, long before she took a drive one deceptively beautiful afternoon. Long before she learned truths that violated everything she’d ever believed.

“Then why was he here?”

“He called and said he had a few things to pick up, wanted to know when I’d be home. He sounded…strange.”

“Strange how?”

“Just…strange. Upset.” Very unLancelike.

“And?”

“And nothing.”

Dylan swore softly. “Don’t hold back from me,” he said, turning her to face him. Inches separated their bodies, their faces, years their hearts. “I’m a private investigator, for God’s sakes. I make a living finding what people don’t want me to know. And I see secrets in your eyes. What, damn it? What are you hiding? Are you afraid? Is that it?”

Deep inside, she started to shake. He was too close. Much, much too close. The mere sight of him ripped her up in ways she hadn’t known were possible, resurrected feelings and desires and dangers she’d tried to bury.

She didn’t want to see him now.

She didn’t want to see him ever, ever again.

“I came home to find Lance dead and the police think I did it. I had blood on my hands. How do you expect me to feel?”

Dylan frowned. “I learned a long time ago not to have expectations when it comes to your feelings. Still waters run too deep for me. Too cold.”

She angled her chin. “Only because you can’t muddy them.”

“This isn’t about me!” he practically roared. He took her shoulders and pulled her closer, forcing her to tilt her head to see his eyes. “This isn’t about us or what happened on the mountain. It’s about what went down in this house a few hours ago. It’s about you. It’s about a whole hell of a lot of questions, and too few answers.”

A hard, broken sound tore from her throat. “You think I don’t know that?” she tried not to cry. The wind whipped up, sending tangled strands of hair into her face. Agitated, she lifted a hand to push them back, but Dylan did the same. Their fingers met against her cheekbone, hers cold, his thick and hot. She closed her eyes briefly, but the sound of a vicious curse shattered the moment. Heart pounding, she looked up just in time to see hot fury erupt in Dylan’s eyes.

It was the only warning she got.