by Cynthia Eden
“That freaky goat guy on the card is about seduction?”
“The devil is always about seduction. Physical pleasure. The card isn’t necessarily a dark warning. It can just be a message of what’s coming.”
He should get off the motorcycle. “Physical pleasure. Someone wanted us to know that physical pleasure was waiting for us?”
“Don’t you like that meaning better?” Chloe asked as she swung away. “I do. It’s much better than thinking that someone just threatened us with bondage and enslavement.”
He watched her as she headed for the main house. Joel considered the situation. Yeah, if he had to pick, he’d choose physical pleasure over being trapped and locked away any day of the week.
Been there, done that. And he had the scars to prove it.
Chapter Twelve
There was a sharp knock on his door. Joel frowned at his computer screen. He’d been doing research and time had gotten away from him. He realized now that it was nearing midnight. And who the hell would be coming to see him at midnight?
Only one person came to mind.
Chloe.
Joel shot out of his chair and stalked for the door.
More knocking. A little more demanding this time.
“I’m coming. Hold on, just—” Joel yanked open the door.
Not Chloe.
A glaring Marie stood on the threshold. She was holding a big, black, zippered garment bag. “This is for you.” She thrust it toward him.
“Thanks?” Yes, he knew his response sounded like a question.
“Clothes for tomorrow night. Chloe said you needed them. Whatever you’re doing with her, she wants you to dress the part.”
“Uh, yeah, I do have clothes of my own.”
“Not like those.” She crossed her arms over her chest. Glared more.
He lifted his brows. “Is there a reason you seem to dislike me?” Because her disdain was more than apparent. “I can’t remember pissing you off, but if there’s something I’ve done—”
“You’re not tough enough.”
Laughter spilled out. “You have no idea.”
“You killed one person. Big deal. Like that makes you some kind of stud.”
“Excuse me?” He must have misheard. It was late. He was tired.
“Chloe helped me. She pulled me out of the darkest time of my life.”
And she came into my life when I didn’t think anything could get darker. When he’d thought there was nothing else to lose.
Marie surged toward him. “Do you have any idea how many enemies she has?”
He blinked.
“How many people would like to see her vanish? And she gets you for protection? Day one, and all you want to do is get in her pants.”
Yes, dammit, guilty. He did want to get in her pants. But that was his business. His and Chloe’s. “Okay, you need to back off—”
“You need to stay on guard,” she ordered as if he hadn’t spoken. “Everyone you meet has a secret agenda. People who pretend to be nice? They are the worst ones. Look deeper. See the truth. Maybe you’ll last longer than her last wanna-be partner did.” A hard nod.
“What in the hell happened to her last partner?”
But Marie clamped her lips together.
Oh, now she stopped talking.
He lifted the garment bag. “Thanks for this.”
“Whatever.” She spun on her heel.
“Where’s Chloe?”
“Think she’s on a date.” She didn’t glance back. “Don’t expect her back anytime soon.”
A date? “Chloe goes on dates?” Was that jealousy slipping its way through him?
“Sure, she does. You got a problem with that?”
Maybe I do. Only there was no maybe about it.
But Marie wasn’t sticking around to tell him anything else. He stood there, holding the garment bag, and feeling a knot of tension swirling in his gut. Chloe was on a date.
He shut the door. Dropped the garment bag without glancing inside it. Then went back to his seat in front of the laptop. He’d been digging up information on Chloe for most of the night. He’d found references to her in dozens of criminal investigations.
It wasn’t her crime solving that interested him the most, though. Chloe knew his secrets. He figured it was only fair for him to learn hers.
So he had to go back deeper and deeper. He thought that he’d finally hit pay dirt.
Heartbreak in London. The Hastings’ Murders Horrify City.
The headlines had him leaning forward even more.
The picture of Chloe—a young, thirteen-year-old Chloe—made his throat tighten. Her parents had been murdered by a masked intruder at their estate. The intruder had broken in during the middle of the night. He’d killed them, but Chloe had been unharmed.
She’d found their bodies when she woke the next morning.
The reporter said that Chloe had tried to revive them. Their blood had covered her night gown. Soaked her skin.
The mysterious killer had never been found.
Never been brought to justice.
But…just one year after her parents had died, there was another headline…
Hastings’ heir returns. What? He shook his head. Tapped on the keyboard. The reports were from some old paper in England. The website was shit, and half of the articles were cut off because they were so old and—
Another knock at his door.
His shoulders tensed. This time, when he walked to the door, he wasn’t expecting Chloe to be waiting for him. How could she be? Chloe was on her date. He curled his hand around the doorknob and hauled open the door. “Look, Marie, I’m not in the mood for more—”
Reese blinked at him.
“What the hell is this?” Joel demanded. “Unwanted visitor night?”
Reese held up beer. “I know how fond you Americans are of your six packs.” He grinned. “After your first day of working with my sister, I thought you might want to unwind a bit.”
Joel stared at the beer. Then at Reese. “All right. You can stay.” He hurried back to the desk. He needed to shut down his laptop before Reese could see—
“Researching us, are you?” Reese called out cheerfully. He didn’t seem even mildly upset. “Chloe said you’d do that.”
“Chloe likes to think that she knows everything that’s happening. And that she knows everyone.” He snapped shut the laptop. Turned around.
Reese tossed him a beer. “She usually does know everyone. Always been good at figuring out what makes people tick.”
“She doesn’t know me.”
Reese took a beer for himself and put the others on the coffee table. He popped the top and enjoyed a very, very long pull. “You’d be surprised.” He threw himself down on the couch. “But how about you tell me what you’ve discovered so far? I can let you know if you’re going in the right direction or just reading some tabloid bullshit.” Another long pull on the beer and then, “That site you were just on? That would be tabloid bullshit, in case you were wondering.”
What he was wondering…“Did Chloe send you out here? She wanted to see what I was digging up on her or something?”
“Looked to me like you were digging up info on me, not her.” Reese tilted his head. “And I haven’t seen Chloe tonight. I think she’s gone out.”
“On a date,” Joel growled. He popped the top on his beer. Chugged it all down and crushed the can.
“Chloe isn’t dating anyone. Don’t know where you got that idea.”
Joel stared at the smashed can. “Marie.”
Soft laughter.
He looked up.
“She was messing with you. Probably wanted to see your reaction. Marie has this idea that you’re infatuated with my sister.”
“Infatuated? Who uses that word?” He trashed the can. “I need another beer.”
“Have at them. And I use that word. I was trying to be polite but if you’d rather…”
Joel lifted the second beer can toward
his mouth…
“I could just say that Marie is convinced you want to shag my sister.”
“Shag your sister.” He almost choked on the drink. “That’s not much better than infatuated.”
“You’re not denying either charge.”
“I just met your sister.”
“Yet you’re already living here and getting possessive when you find out that she might be with another man.”
“I don’t get possessive.” With the beer can, he pointed toward Reese. “I know what you’re doing.”
Reese pursed his lips. “I completely suspect that you do not.”
Joel had to laugh. “God, you sounded exactly like her for a moment there.”
Reese’s face darkened as he drained his beer.
Joel took the seat near him. Kept a loose grip on his beer. “You’re trying to distract me. But you’re the one who told me that you’d let me know if I was heading in the right direction or not.”
“And I will tell you. But for every question I answer, you have to answer one for me, too.”
“Whatever. Sounds fair.”
Reese put down his beer. “Want to go first?”
“Why weren’t you in the house when Chloe’s parents were killed?”
Reese’s eyes widened. “No beating around with you, eh? Straight to the heart.”
Joel shrugged. “Thought it was better than wasting time.”
“You obviously were reading the tabloid rag about how the heir returned a year after the murders. So you already know I wasn’t in the house when it happened.”
Joel studied him in silence. Then… “Is that a question? Are you asking me if I already know you weren’t there? Fine, let’s say that is a question. And my answer, is…yes. I read enough to tell me that you weren’t there. According to the story I was scanning before you arrived with your beer, Chloe’s brother went missing when he was fourteen years old. She was five. They were walking together along the lake at their country estate. He vanished and was presumed dead.”
Reese glanced at the floor. “That was the story.”
“Only you turned up nine years later. Chloe was fourteen. Her grandfather—who’d been raising her in the year since her parents’ deaths—had just been buried. She had no other family. You swooped in. The long-lost brother…”
“Such an informative rag you were reading. How long did it take you to stumble across this gossip? Have to say, I find myself impressed.”
“It took a while,” Joel allowed. He’d gotten lost at the laptop as he scanned and scanned for information. “But I’m persistent.”
“Good to know.”
“Her grandfather had left everything to Chloe, assuming you were long dead. So, technically, I guess you weren’t the heir, after all. She was the heir to it all.”
“The money was in a trust for Chloe. Her guardian would control it until she turned twenty-one.”
“You became her guardian.”
Reese was still staring at the floor. “Chloe insisted. There was…one of grandfather’s friends was supposed to become her legal guardian. Chloe didn’t want that. She wanted me. I wasn’t going to leave her again.”
“Again?” Joel locked onto that word. “Is that what happened when you were fourteen? You ran away and left Chloe behind? Because when I was reading, there were several theories about what happened to you. Some said you ran away. Spoiled, rich kid just cut out on his family. Other stories said you were kidnapped. Held for a ransom, but your parents didn’t pay.”
“Tabloid rags. Can’t believe everything.” Now he looked up. “A week after my disappearance, I was found wandering in the woods. I was a kid. Lost. No memory of what had happened to me.” His hand lifted and rubbed along the back of his head. “I’d hit my head. Fallen. The people who found me had no idea who I was. You see, I’d wandered very, very far from the lake. Miles and miles. They led a quiet, sheltered life. To them, it seemed as if I’d been hurt. They thought I’d been abused, so they weren’t going to turn me over to the people who’d injured me so badly.”
“You mean…to your parents? To your real parents?”
“I never said my real parents abused me. I said the people who found me—they assumed I’d been abused. My memory didn’t return for years. When it did come back, I went straight to Chloe.”
An interesting story. One filled with so many holes. Too many to be real.
“My turn,” Reese declared. “Though, I have to confess, no, I wasn’t really counting the number of questions you asked me. How about we go with five? It’s a good, sturdy number.”
He’d gotten nothing useful out of Reese. But Joel gave a grim nod.
“Why did you accept this job?”
“Because I didn’t have anything else to do.”
Reese’s gaze sharpened. “You’re a doctor. A surgeon. Why in the world would you turn your back on a career that you worked so very hard to get?”
“A surgeon uses a scalpel to cut into the skin of his patients. I used my hands to slice them open.” He could feel the darkness pushing in his mind. “The SOB who tortured me for hours sliced me open. Every single time I think of picking up a scalpel to use again, I think of him.”
“Chloe would say…” Reese cleared his throat. “She’d say you think you are him.”
“That isn’t a question.”
“No, no, just an observation.” A long exhale. “I think we could use something stronger than beers.”
Damn straight.
“Question three.” Reese scraped his fingers over his jaw. “Why are you in New Orleans? You were living in Dallas. Had family there. Friends. A girlfriend. A—”
“My girlfriend left as soon as she caught a look at all the marks on me. I was in a hospital bed. She couldn’t even meet my eyes. Just said she was sorry and ran away.”
Reese cursed. “Chloe would never do something like that.”
“No, I don’t think she would.” Chloe wouldn’t leave. He had a hard time imaging her running from anything. “As for my friends, they didn’t know what to say to me. Most of them worked in the hospital with me. They thought I blamed them because the bastard tortured me inside the hospital and no one came to help me.”
“Did you blame them?”
“That’s question four. And I don’t know. Maybe.” He only knew he hadn’t been able to talk to them. They hadn’t understood him any longer. No one had. “I was adopted when I was a kid. My biological mother lived here in New Orleans. I lived with her until she passed away.” Then he’d gone into the system. Bounced around in some foster homes and gotten very lucky. The couple who’d adopted him had been willing to open their hearts to a surly, distrustful kid. They’d taken good care of him. But they were dead now, too, and after Joel’s attack… “I had some good memories here. So I thought, since my life in Dallas wasn’t working, I’d try new scenery.”
A moment of silence as Reese seemed to absorb that explanation. He shifted a little against the couch cushions. “And are things working for you here?”
“I met your sister. You tell me. Is that something good? Or something bad?”
Reese opened his mouth, as if he’d answer, then he caught himself. More silence ticked past.
“Sorry about your parents,” Joel murmured.
“And I’m sorry about what happened to you.” Reese eyed the remaining beer. “There’s a whiskey room in the main house. Left by the previous owner. Chloe hates whiskey, so she told me I could do whatever I wanted with it. Want to go and pop open a twenty-year Pappy with me?”
“Hell, yes.”
“Excellent.” Reese gave an abrupt nod and rose to his feet. “I hate drinking alone.”
Joel uncurled much more slowly. “Did you know the previous owner?”
“No, he was some friend of Chloe’s.”
“I heard he was a mobster.”
Reese laughed. “Sounds right.”
That shit is not funny.
Chapter Thirteen
He w
as swimming.
Chloe paused along the pathway that led to the swimming pool. Technically, the pathway branched. If she went to the right, she would head to the main house. It was close to two a.m., and she was exhausted. She could slip inside and crash in the big bed that waited for her.
Or she could go to the left. She could follow the faint sounds of splashing. She could go to Joel.
She found herself turning to the left.
The pool lights glowed a dark, deep turquoise from beneath the surface, and she watched as Joel’s powerful arms circled into the water again and again as he made laps around the pool. He was quite good. Quite fast.
Very focused for a man who’d been drinking whiskey.
She kicked off her high heels. Headed to the side of the pool. She slipped down until she was sitting on the edge, she hiked up her dress, and she let her feet dangle in the water.
Her head cocked as she watched him. Chloe was fairly certain that Joel wasn’t wearing swim trunks. He was moving very quickly, but from what she could see—
“Chloe.” He’d stopped on the opposite end of the pool. His breath sawed in and out as he lifted a hand and shoved wet hair off his forehead. “How long have you been here?”
“Just a few minutes.” Her feet moved lazily in the water. “You’re an extremely good swimmer.”
He pushed away from the wall and swam toward her. She couldn’t help but tense as he approached. There was something about the way he was moving through the water and keeping his focus locked on her. He rather reminded her of a shark.
Is he coming to take a bite?
When he reached her, his hands rose and curled along the pool edge on either side of her body. She knew the water was about five feet deep in that area, so he stood easily.
“You remind me of a shark, swimming after prey.” Chloe wasn’t sure why she’d admitted that. But it was true.
When did I become his prey?
“Did you have fun tonight?” Joel asked her.
Fun? “Not particularly.”
Water trailed down his chest. “Marie said you were on a date.”
“No.”
“Your brother told me you weren’t dating anyone.”
“I’m not.” She couldn’t look away from him. She’d known that Joel was strong. But, seeing him this way…the man was cut. He must exercise like a fiend.