Wicked Game

by Lisa Jackson

  His mouth touched all those places he’d found years before. Behind her ear, the slope of her neck, the cleft between her breasts. She felt his heat, as white hot as the blood running through her veins.

  She reminded herself that she would feel regrets, that nothing so incredible came without pain, but she didn’t care. Her need was too fierce, and she reveled in the pure, potent passion that streamed from his body to hers. His tongue ran rough against her breasts, circling her areolae, teasing and toying with her nipples, then delving lower while her hands threaded in his hair and the scent of him filled her nostrils.

  Be careful, Becca…you haven’t told him about the baby. His baby…

  Refusing to listen to the voice in her head, she gave in to the pleasure, felt his hot breath against her skin, his hands molding her flesh, his tongue and lips causing quicksilver pulses to run through her blood.

  The back of her throat went dry as sand, but inside she was melting, hotter and hotter, her body beginning to writhe, the throb of desire pounding through her brain. She closed her eyes as the first spasm hit, rocking her, and when the second quake followed, she cried out, her fingers curling in the sheets, her body convulsing.

  He came to her then, body and soul. His lips found hers and she kissed him with the need of all those years of wanting him, hating herself for her desire, dreaming of him. Hudson…it had always been Hudson, even when she’d married another man and now…now…

  She let out a low moan as he entered her, her legs wrapping instinctively over his, his lips and mouth hot and wet. He thrust once, then again, and she cried out as he shifted, lifting her so that she was sitting, facing him, his legs beneath hers as he forced her buttocks tight against him.

  “Oh…Oh…God,” she whispered as he moved, faster and faster, and the heat consumed her, perspiration covering her body, need consuming her. She met his rhythm, faster and faster, the room spinning, her arms wrapped around him, her hands on the fluid muscle of his back. She was gasping for breath, her heart pounding so hard she thought it might explode when he stiffened and cried out. Her own body responded, tightening around him, the world shattering in a billion pieces of light.

  Only when it was over and they’d collapsed together on the wrinkled sheets, still drawing in ragged, sated breaths, did Hudson say, “Was it good for you?” Then they both laughed.

  “Worst sex I’ve ever had in my life. Couldn’t you tell?” she said through shattered breaths.

  “Maybe if you weren’t so damned frigid.” Her mouth curved as her head rested in the hollow of his shoulder and his fingers twined in her hair. “Remind me why we waited so long?”

  She closed her eyes and inhaled his scent. “Too long…” She felt the grin that spread across his lips and asked, “What?”

  “We’re not waiting that long ever again,” he said, sliding his body atop hers, blue eyes slow and sensual.

  “Good,” she breathed, pushing all thoughts aside except for him.

  Chapter Ten

  Renee’s eyes narrowed as she pulled into the small coastal town of Deception Bay the following evening. The night before the drive had been stalled by a phone call from Tim, an excruciatingly nasty fight, then a stop to pick up a few groceries at a twenty-four-hour Safeway store, and finally the slow drive through mixed rain and snow on twisting mountain roads. She’d stayed in the cabin all day today just unwinding.

  The sensation that she was being followed had hung with her all the way through the Coast Range and south along this winding stretch of Highway 101 that cut into the steep hillsides overlooking the Pacific. She’d had to creep to keep the damned car on the road. All the while she’d kept checking her rearview for the glowing headlights that had loomed behind her like the eyes of some great, feral beast.

  “Puh-leeze,” she told herself now as the few streetlights of the small town emerged from the fog. She was still thinking about her fight with Tim. Jesus, he was a piece of work. He somehow thought that he could have an affair with a coworker and expect Renee to (a) understand, and (b) forgive him. Now, he insisted, he didn’t want a divorce, that he’d thought things over and decided it was better for “everyone” if they stayed married.

  Like it was that easy.

  Renee didn’t figure adultery was something she could get over very quickly though she herself had been tempted to step over that invisible marital line a time or two. But she hadn’t. She’d come close but had stopped short. Not that it mattered now. Tim could rant and rave, remind her that she was “his” until kingdom come. It was over. O-V-E-R, and she’d told him so tonight in no uncertain terms.

  He’d been in a rage, and for the first time she’d seen the extent of his temper and had been glad there hadn’t been a gun in the house. Not that she thought he would ever really physically harm her…

  Still, he’d lost it. Really lost it. His face, once boyishly handsome, had turned tomato red, and his big hands had clenched into hammy fists. He’d even gone so far as to punch through the entry hall wall. That’s when she’d left. In a hurry. Only pausing to pick up a few essentials in Hillsboro.

  Had he followed her?

  Decided to have it out again?

  He wouldn’t, would he?

  She returned to the gravel drive of the small cottage she used on her weekend getaways. Three blocks off the beach and within walking distance of town, the cabin was owned by a friend of her father’s, a man who, since his wife had died, rarely spent any time here. His kids were flung to the winds, one son in Miami, another in Denver, his daughter trying to make it as an actress in LA. No one spent any time at the cabin he’d renovated with his own hands sometime in the early eighties.

  Renee nosed her Camry beneath the carport. She hurried through the fog to the porch where the exterior light, always illuminated, had burned out. “Damn it all,” she muttered, fumbling with her keys and the old, rusted lock.

  She heard the sound of footsteps and turned quickly, her heart in her throat, to see someone appear through the mist. She nearly screamed until she spied the large dog ambling beside a man, out for their evening constitutional.

  Get a grip, she told herself just as the lock sprang and she let herself inside. She dropped her things on a futon with a faded print cover that served as a couch, then returned outside for her two bags of groceries.

  She was back in the cabin within seconds. After locking the door behind her, she flipped on the lights, lit the gas fire, and told her heart to stop its ridiculous knocking as she tossed her suitcase into the single bedroom on the main floor, then flipped open her laptop computer and waited for it to boot up.

  She was lucky enough to jump onto a neighboring family’s wireless Internet as this little cottage was barely equipped with electricity, let alone anything as technologically advanced as a router; there wasn’t even a phone line. The owner refused to take any money from Renee and only asked that she “spruce the place up a bit” when she came, so she didn’t argue with him and accepted the tiny abode as her retreat away from Tim and her disintegrating marriage.

  It was also here where she had first decided to do her story on the missing Jezebel Brentwood.

  And Jessie Brentwood was the reason she felt such overwhelming persecution. As if she were being watched and followed. And it was all because she’d taken that first trip to Deception Bay.

  Jessie’s adoptive parents, the Brentwoods, had been reluctant to talk to Renee when she’d first posed the idea to them for a story about their missing daughter. They knew Renee and liked her. She’d been a tenuous link to Jessie, the one friend who’d kept in contact with them off and on over the years, but they’d balked at the idea that Renee would drag it all up again. They still believed Jessie might walk through their door. Stranger things had happened.

  Renee had been quietly persistent and when she asked about Jessie’s birth parents, they both clamped their jaws shut as if afraid of revealing government secrets. Renee had asked them point-blank why they seemed so—scared—to talk ab
out the adoption, but neither would open up to her. The one piece of information she gleaned was that the adoption—a private one—had taken place in the small coastal town of Deception Bay. The Brentwoods had a cabin there, although it appeared they hadn’t returned there in a long time. Renee asked if Jessie knew about the cabin. Had she been there before, on previous occasions? Could that be where she went as a runaway? The Brentwoods assured her that no, Jessie never went to the cabin. It was one of the first places they always looked for her, but she was never there and certainly hadn’t been since the last time she disappeared.

  That information was what had sent Renee initially to the beach and Deception Bay. She’d asked some questions of the town residents about the area, what it had been like, who were some of the notable families, whatever she could think of to get the conversation rolling. Then she would insert that she knew a family who’d adopted a daughter from somewhere around Deception Bay, that daughter being a friend of hers from high school. No one seemed to know anything, but an old salt who spent his time on a lookout bench above the ocean and fed the seagulls, much to the annoyance of the townies who found them scavenging pests, told her she should go see Mad Maddie.

  “Mad Maddie?” Renee asked dubiously.

  “Lives up there…” He waved in the direction of a rocky tor. “Coupla nice motels there once. Run down now. Maddie owns one of ’em, I guess. Leastwise she stays there. Someday some big resort company’ll buy it up and build somethin’ hee-uge. Cost a fortune to stay there, but ain’t happened yet.”

  “You think Mad Maddie could help my friend locate her biological parents?”

  “She’s as fruity as a punchbowl. Lost her marbles. She reads the future.” He snorted out a few chuckles. “She’ll tell ya a whole buncha drivel.”

  “She’s a psychic reader?”

  He snorted. “Call it what you want. Her and her crazy family.”

  Renee had driven up a winding road to the crest of the tor and had to agree with the old salt about the beauty of the area. Someday maybe a resort company would build “somethin’ hee-uge” here and it would have an amazing view of the Pacific. But for now there wasn’t much left of the motel but a gray, weathered, beaten-down, one-story set of buildings with sagging carports and weed-choked gravel parking. There were a couple of equally sad cars parked outside, vacation renters, who could stay by the day, week, or month, according to the handwritten sign propped against the wall.

  Renee guessed the unit at the end was Mad Maddie’s residence, as there were items stacked outside the front door: used furniture, old plastic toys, a propane stove that had seen better days, various and sundry kitchen and bathroom items, and a couple of lawn chairs set out to view the approach of visitors, not the commanding view on the back, western side. A hoarder’s dream.

  She’d knocked on the door that sported a cockeyed sign that read: Office. It took a while, but Mad Maddie opened the door to reveal a woman with iron-gray hair pulled into a severe bun and a stony, oddly blank expression. She appeared to be somewhere in her late sixties, but Renee figured she could be off a decade either way.

  “Are you…Maddie?” Renee asked.

  “You wantin’ a room?”

  “Actually I—was told you do—readings?”

  Something shifted in her gray eyes. “You want to see Madame Madeline.” She stepped aside and Renee hurried across the threshold.

  “Yes.”

  And so Mad Maddie aka Madame Madeline had sat Renee down on a faux-leather couch with springs that felt as if they were going to break through the worn surface at any moment, and then she’d pulled out an equally worn set of Tarot cards. Renee had been fascinated. A frisson had actually crawled up her spine. There was something eerie and authentic about this old woman that the almost antiseptic, staged Tarot reader she’d visited with Tamara couldn’t compete with. Here, the ambience was rich, and instead of the heady scent of incense, she smelled rotting wood and the salt of the sea.

  Premonition had feathered along her arms and Renee automatically rubbed her elbows. Mad Maddie regarded her in a blank way that caused Renee’s heart to beat a little faster. She didn’t look down at the cards. She stared straight at Renee.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  So Renee had rambled on about her friend, searching for her biological parents, her friend from high school, St. Elizabeth’s, who’d been missing for years and who Renee was searching for. She told more than she expected to, a little unnerved by Maddie’s great silences. Only once did Maddie move during the recitation, and that was to look a bit wildly over one shoulder toward the back of the motel. Renee automatically looked as well, but there was nothing there. A gust of wind had rattled the panes and Renee had started.

  “She’s dead,” Maddie told Renee.

  “Jessie? Jezebel?” Renee had been stunned at her bald announcement.

  “Jezebel…” That’s when Maddie threw the fearful look over her shoulder.

  “You see that?”

  But then Maddie had moved on to the cards, making banal predictions that seemed to peter out as if she forgot them before the end of her thought. Renee’s attention had wandered around the room and she thought she saw a shadow creep inside the partially opened door to the back.

  And then Maddie had said she was marked for death. Just like that. She, or one of her friends from that school.

  And that had been the end of the reading.

  Now Renee wasn’t sure what she’d learned. She’d come to believe the “she’s dead” line was just something Maddie threw out to jolt her. A tactic. A pretty damn impressive one, actually, as it had followed Renee ever since. And then when the skeleton was discovered inside the maze, Renee got a total, all-over sense of the heebie-jeebies.

  She’s dead?

  How was that for coincidence?

  Even now another shiver slid down her spine, and Renee shook it off with an effort. She vowed to herself that she would not be so susceptible, and purposely headed toward the galley kitchen. She sliced cheese and apples, placed them on a plate with some crackers, then found the coffee she’d left in the cupboard from her last stay, brewed up a pot of decaf, and sat at the old desk tucked into the corner on which she’d propped her laptop. Sipping the coffee and picking at the fruit and cheese, she began working on her story.

  Instead of going on impressions and feelings, she turned to her usual methods of preparing for a story. She began by deciphering her notes from the meeting at Blue Note, what she thought of the girls who had supposedly been Jessie’s best friends and who had known her intimately, and the boys who had lusted after her and ended up being suspects, at least for Detective Sam McNally, now a homicide cop. When Jessie had gone missing, McNally had been with missing persons, but he’d been particularly rabid about finding the whereabouts of a girl who’d been known for running away. It was almost as if he’d had a thing for her. Renee made a note to herself to check and see if McNally had some other connection to Jessie, especially something romantic or sexual. Now that angle would turn the story on its ear. Though Jessie had been Hudson’s girl, Renee guessed—by virtue of her sexy behavior—that Jessie had been involved with other boys and men. How many or how much, she didn’t know, but maybe she should concentrate on McNally.

  She frowned, her coffee forgotten. The thing of it was, no one really had known Jessie. Not her parents, not the boy who had supposedly loved her, not her friends. She’d been a mystery in life and was even more so now, in death.

  Renee glanced over the names of the guys and her eyes settled thoughtfully on her brother’s: Hudson Walker. He had always been pretty mum on the subject of Jessie. Renee had once thought it was a matter of not kissing and telling, Hudson’s personal code of honor, but maybe Hudson hadn’t really been as involved emotionally as everyone had thought.

  She scribbled a note to herself and wrote down Becca’s name with a question mark. Her brother had sure been hot for her several years after Jessie went missing; and now, it seem
ed that fire was still burning.

  From the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of a shadow in the windowpane at the side of the house.

  Oh, God! She froze as the dark figure shifted and her heart began to race. A face appeared, shadowed as if by a hood or a cowl, and eyes as dead as she’d ever seen seemed to look through the glass.

  Jesus!

  Her heart squeezed.

  She bit back a scream and pushed her chair back so quickly the legs screeched against the floor.

  Searching wildly around the room for a weapon, any kind of weapon, expecting at any second for the glass to shatter, she nearly fell off the chair, then ran, half-stumbled into the hallway and the darkness beyond.

  You’re imagining things, you’re imagining things, you’re goddamned imagining things! She slipped into the darkened kitchen where the palest of light shone through the windows and back door…Oh, hell, was it locked? She crossed the room, tested the dead bolt, then, with every hair standing straight up on her arms, she grabbed a butcher knife from the block on the kitchen counter and fled to the windowless hall again.

  Cold sweat collected over her spine and the sound of the wind whistled through the rafters.

  The cell phone! Use the damned phone!

  “Oh, God,” she whispered, realizing her phone was in her purse, at her desk.

  Moving silently, her heartbeat echoing in her eardrums, she inched down the hall. Her fingers, gripping the handle of the knife, were sweating and she was certain at any second someone or something would leap at her from the back bedroom or broom closet.

  Carefully, heartbeat roaring in her ears, she eased back to the archway to the living area. She barely dared breathe as she poked her head around to view the room and beyond the window.

  No figure.

  No dark shadow.

  Nor was there anything but pure darkness at the other window near the door.

  Had it gone?

  Or had her fertile mind played a horrid trick on her?

  She snapped out the lights, and the interior, aside from a soft glow from the computer screen, was as dark as the night outside. Waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, she eased to the window and peered out.