by A. C. Arthur
“You’re welcome, sir. I know Geoff originally said you wouldn’t need it, but the refrigerator and cupboards are packed with supplies. Dorianne’s the head of kitchen staff at the manor; she’ll be sending someone over within the hour to take care of your daily meals. For now, I just brought over some of the scones and muffins from the morning buffet, and the coffee, of course. You have my number should you need anything else, and Geoff plans to check in with you this morning also.” She stood with her shoulders slightly back, her hands folded in front of her starched long black skirt and white blouse.
“Thank you, Lily. You’ve been wonderful since I arrived.” It was a true statement, and he did appreciate the extra help of her finding clothes for Tamika.
“Very well, sir. I’ll be on my way. Ms. Rayder, I’ve given you my card. As soon as I receive your email address—”
“Sent it while you were talking to Mr. Donovan,” Tamika said with a nod. The smile she’d aimed at him was only slightly condescending, but when she looked directly at Lily, Roark noted it was sincere.
“Very well then. I’ll take care of everything.” With a slight nod, Lily left the kitchen.
And then they were alone.
Again.
Roark hadn’t considered how he’d handle being alone with her after dreaming of her last night. He wasn’t really good with morning-afters. “Good morning.” That seemed like the most appropriate thing to say.
“Good morning to you. And thank you for having Lily get me clothes. Designer clothes at that. Do you always treat the women you bring home for the night this generously?” The sexy nightgown had been replaced with a black jogger jacket and he suspected pants to match. But since she was sitting and he was standing at the other end of the counter, he couldn’t tell. There was some sort of animal print design on the shoulder of the jacket that seemed to work with what he suspected was Tamika’s saucier personality.
“No. I’m not in the habit of buying women clothes, if that’s what you’re asking.” Other than his mother, sister and ex-wife, Roark had never bought gifts of any type for any woman. Wining and dining, gift giving and spoiling women, all that was Ridge’s area of expertise. Roark was about his company and his family. When a woman fell within those guidelines, he treated them differently. That had only happened once and it had ended badly.
He took another sip of coffee. “We’re expected at the cottage at eight.”
“Expected? By who? The police?”
Roark shook his head. “Not exactly.”
She wasn’t wearing any makeup this morning; however, her skin sill appeared silky smooth, thick, perfectly arched eyebrows lifted as she continued to stare at him. “What does that mean? I was wondering why no police showed up at the hospital to question me. Do you know something I don’t?”
He suspected they both knew things the other didn’t, and that was the reason for this conversation they were having now.
Roark moved to one of the stools near the end of the island closest to him. He pulled it out and took a seat. The island was at least nine feet long, so it seemed like she was a world away from him as she sat at the other end. “My mother was killed in a fire two weeks ago. We believe it was arson. The police suspect me, my brother, or my sister. Or possibly all three of us together.”
There was a small white plate in front of her with an iced scone on it. He hadn’t noticed that before, but now when she used her fingers to push it away, he did. “My father was killed in a fire thirteen months ago. I know it was arson. I walked the scene, saw the point of origin myself, so I’m positive someone set that fire with the intent to kill him.” She spoke the words adamantly, but Roark caught the hint of emotion lacing each one.
“How do you know that for sure? That the fire was set to kill your father?”
“Because he was drugged. It must’ve been in his coffee, because that’s all he’d had that morning after leaving home. His coffee that he brewed fresh in that awful little pot on the credenza in his office. Somebody put the drug in that, he drank and then—”
“He was paralyzed.” Roark finished the sentence for her, not totally sure he was right, but going with the feeling of dread he’d felt yesterday when he’d looked at his phone and seen the report of the fire at the cottage.
“Yes.” She spoke the word on a whisper and nodded. “Succinylcholine.”
Roark nodded this time, and they both sat staring at each other, letting the words they’d just spoken sink in. “Did you show your mother that letter?”
She laced her fingers, then let them slip apart. “No.”
“Because you did think they were having an affair.” During their first meeting she’d been sure to state there was no affair, but he suspected that’s just what she’d wanted to believe. His mother had been a widower for twenty-three years. If she’d found someone to make her happy, Roark wasn’t going to begrudge her that. But Tamika’s father had been a married man.
She looked away from him, staring out the window across the room. The sun hadn’t shown its face yet this morning, so the sky was still a muted gray hue. This part of the house faced the tennis courts and walkways leading to the manor’s main building. “I never wanted to think of my father as a cheater.” She turned back to him, her gaze pinning him with just a hint of sadness. “And that letter didn’t really prove that he was. I couldn’t ask him, and I didn’t find anything else to support an affair. That was the first time I’d ever seen your mother’s name or anything like that in my father’s belongings.”
“But you still didn’t take it to your mother and ask her. She knew your father better than anyone. If you really didn’t think it was an affair, why not ask her?”
Tamika pushed back from the island, the legs of the stool making a loud sound as they were dragged across the floor. She stepped down and grabbed her plate, walking it to the counter where she set it beside the sink. “After the funeral, my mother wasn’t herself. She was quiet and withdrawn, and I didn’t want to do anything to make that worse. I didn’t want to make her have to think about losing him anymore.”
She’d brushed her hair back from her face today so that it hung straight down her back, the dark color blending with the hue of her jacket. Yesterday she’d worn high heels with her outfit; today she had on black platform tennis shoes with the CKDavis emblem in gold on the back heel.
He remained silent while he waited for her to continue. She turned around slowly, planting her hands behind her on the counter as she leaned against it.
“My mother wasn’t handling his death well. One weekend, two weeks after the funeral, she just packed up everything and came here to stay. She didn’t even tell me before she left. I found out when I went to her house and saw the for-sale sign. When I called her, she said she wanted to be closer to him, and the cottage was the only place she could do that. I didn’t fuss—I just went along with it.”
“Because it was easier.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Because it was her life. I couldn’t imagine how it felt to lose a husband.”
“You lost a father.”
“And I dealt with that. I’ve been investigating that fire since the day it happened, and I keep coming up with nothing. Except that letter.”
“That letter could be nothing.” Or it could mean everything. Roark was still trying to decide.
“You don’t believe that,” she said. “Because if you did, you wouldn’t have run to the hospital last night. You wouldn’t have stayed there with me to see what the outcome was, and you definitely wouldn’t have brought me here. So why don’t you tell me who we’re meeting who aren’t exactly police? And then tell me why you thought it made sense to call them.”
There was a lot he could tell her, more pieces to the gigantic puzzle they’d both stumbled upon, but he wasn’t sure the time was right. He glanced down at his watch before standing. “We should get going. We don’t want to be late.”
“Late? We’re going to the scene of a crime, not showing up to t
he office.”
There was something about her edgy sarcasm that rubbed him the wrong way, but that wasn’t the part of Tamika Rayder that had Roark twisted in conflict this morning. The sexy allure of this gutsy and tenacious woman appealed to him in ways he’d never thought of before. She wasn’t the type of woman he was normally attracted to and yet, she was just the type of woman he thought he might need at this moment in his life.
That last observation was oddly confusing, and that wasn’t a feeling he wanted to keep. “I’m going out to the car. Be there in five minutes if you’re coming along.”
As he turned and walked out of the kitchen without waiting for her to say another word, his stomach twisted at the thought of him running from someone, or something. Roark never ran from a challenge or a fight—it wasn’t in his nature. Yet, his legs couldn’t carry him away fast enough from the woman who was awakening things in him he’d never known existed.
Chapter 9
Special Agent Pierce Rawlings looked like he should be on the front page of GQ. Dressed in a black suit, crisp charcoal-gray shirt, no tie and laced leather shoes shined to perfection, he stood in front of the cottage, appearing as out of place as Tamika had felt the first day she’d arrived.
“Nice to meet you,” Pierce was saying as he pulled his sunglasses off and extended a hand to her.
Roark had introduced them and she’d been standing there ogling the very attractive, dark-chocolate-complexioned FBI agent with the ominous black eyes.
“Nice to meet you too,” she managed to say and accepted his hand for a quick shake.
“We should get inside.” Roark started toward the door, and Pierce immediately followed.
With the formalities over, Tamika stepped forward. “I have the key.” It was a reminder to the men who were charging ahead of her without a means to get into the cottage. They both stepped to the side and let her pass them, and she hunted the key out of her jacket pocket. She hadn’t brought her purse with her, had just stuffed her cell phone in one pocket, keys in the other.
“Fire Brigade’s coming in at nine, so we’ve gotta make this quick.” Pierce’s voice wasn’t as deep as Roark’s and he didn’t sound as if he were barking a command or suppressing his rage, the way Roark usually did.
“How do you know when they’re coming?” she asked as she pushed the door open and stepped inside. The charred scent was still strong and filled her nostrils in seconds after entering through the hallway.
“I’ve got someone on the inside at the Brigade and the MPD. They said they think the fire started in the upstairs bedroom.” Pierce was standing to her left, and he nodded ahead of them toward the front of the house.
Tamika took a breath. Pressing her lips together she pushed aside her personal feelings and stepped firmly into the role of investigator. “My mother’s room. It’s the largest one in the front. We can go up these back stairs.”
When she glanced at Roark, saw his intense gaze steadily focused on her, she almost faltered. For whatever reason, there was an urge to sigh and admit that next to the day she’d entered her father’s office after he’d died, this was the worst moment of her life. Instead, she turned away from him and led them both around a corner and down another hall to the second set of stairs in the cottage. These were used mostly by Tuppence to take clean linens and other supplies up and down without guests seeing her. “The fire stayed pretty focused on this front half of the house. It hadn’t started to spread too far before the Fire Brigade arrived.” She talked as she walked, looking at everything from the ceiling to the walls and the floors.
Focused now, letting the scents filter through her mind without any emotional attachment was easier. Char patterns started on the floor and spread halfway up the wall in the hallway just before the first bathroom on this end of the floor. She remembered the wall was covered in a pale green wallpaper with tiny pink flowers. The parts of the paper that hadn’t been scorched to a sooty black hue were bubbled and already starting to peel from the incessant heat. The char pattern stretched back toward the bedroom, and she followed it.
“From their preliminary findings, the Brigade noted the flames were most intense in this room here,” Pierce noted.
Still staring at the blackened path, she tamped down on how hot it must have been in here during the fire and how frightened her mother and Tuppence were. “Started here, burned here the longest.”
“And quickly spread down this hallway into the bathroom. First victim made her way up the other set of stairs, grabbed second victim and dragged her out into the hallway, but something happened, and second victim was injured. Firefighters found both down in the hallway, that way.” Pierce pointed toward the stairs they’d came up.
“First victim is Tuppence Gregory. She’s been working here for fifteen years,” Tamika said as she stepped into the bedroom, her fingers shaking slightly. “Second victim is my mother, Sandra Paulette Rayder. She was in this bed.”
Tamika stared down at the floor as she walked. Her pristine new designer tennis shoes crackling over the ash of carpet burned nearly to the floorboards. “Fire burns up in a V-shape pattern.” Walking around the bed to the side closest to the window, she turned back and went to the other side, where there was a nightstand, about ten feet from the double-door of the closet. “See, this is a narrow V-shape, spreading out this way.”
She pointed down to the floor and walked back out into the hallway, where she kneeled down and touched her fingers to the floorboard. Burned to a crisp. This fire had burned hot and fast. And her fingers were still shaking. Yanking them back, she stood and walked toward the bedroom again. Pierce and Roark were still standing in the room, Roark on the side of the bed closest to the window and Pierce looking in the closet.
“Smell that?” She inhaled deeply.
Pierce nodded, his nostrils flaring as he sucked in air and released it. “Yeah.”
“Gasoline.” Roark said the word with such finality, it seemed to reverberate throughout the room. “Did the doctor mention finding any drugs in your mother’s system?” he asked her as they stared at each other across the bed.
“No. And I didn’t think to ask. There was so much going through my mind last night, I never even thought of it.” Shaking her head was the equivalent of Tamika mentally kicking herself for not thinking to ask that very important question. They’d found the succinylcholine when they’d performed her father’s autopsy. For her mother, she’d need to request a tox screen, and then the doctor still might not do it based solely on her suspicions.
She looked down at the nightstand, which was barely burned, but the spot on the floor just three feet from it was scorched the worst of any other spot she’d seen so far. The char pattern pointed here. “He poured the gasoline right here. Not enough to be a puddle, but enough to get it going.” She stepped closer to the bed, or what was left of it. The frame was still intact, the mattress, sheets and pillows burned to a crisp. “My mother always laid on this side of the bed. It was closest to the door. She took a fluid pill every day for high blood pressure, so frequent trips to the bathroom to pee throughout the night were common. He started this fire while she lay in this bed watching him.”
“How do you know she wasn’t asleep?” Pierce asked.
“It was too early. And I wasn’t back yet. As long as I lived under my mother’s roof, she could never get into bed and go to sleep until she knew I was home. It didn’t bother her when I lived on my own, but if I was expected to sleep under the same roof as her, she wouldn’t let her head hit the pillow until I was settled in my own bed, or at the very least in the house behind a locked front door.” That habit of Sandra’s had created some very tense teenage years for Tamika.
“There’re lots of different ways to classify an arsonist,” Pierce began.
“We’re looking for a killer,” Tamika corrected him.
She turned to see both men staring at her.
“You think whoever killed your father in that fire at his office a year ago cam
e here to try and kill your mother last night?” Pierce’s head was tilted, his gaze inquisitive. As if she’d taken too long to answer, Pierce switched his focus to Roark, who was still standing by the window. “In between her parents, he stopped off in London to kill your mother. Why?”
That was the billion-dollar question.
When neither of them spoke, Pierce continued. “Cade sent me the letter your mother wrote to her father.”
Roark lifted a hand to run a finger over his clean-shaved chin. “And what’d you think?”
Pierce shrugged. “They were definitely familiar, and this didn’t seem like the first correspondence they’d shared.”
“So old friends?” Roark asked.
“Your mother was born here,” Tamika added. “My father was born in Virginia.”
This time Roark focused on her. “Do you have something against long-distance relationships?”
Tamika had something against this guy’s voice, the way he stared at her—dammit, everything about him arousing her until she wanted to rip both their clothes off and mount him. She swallowed, trying to ease her now very dry throat before replying. “I already told you I don’t think they were having an affair.”
Pierce had moved from where he was standing, staring down at the bed and then over to the windows. “Cade sent me pictures of the scene from the Hyde Park house. Fire started in the bedroom there too. That says this is personal for him. He wants these women at their most vulnerable, undressed and in their bed for the night. It’s also their most comfortable location.”
She listened to his assessment but still had questions. “My father was at work, and why do you think it’s a man doing this?”
Pierce nodded. “Right. It doesn’t fit. And most arsonists are men. Socially isolated and lacking coping skills to deal with whatever it is that’s really pissed him off.” This last comment was said in a way that made it seem as if she should’ve known that as a fire investigator. Part of it she did know, but she’d wanted to know specifically what he was thinking in this case. When she’d been investigating her father’s case, she’d presumed the arsonist was someone with a mental defect, perhaps a disgruntled employee that was now dealing with depression. She hadn’t ruled out that being a man or a woman. He walked over to the window now and looked out. “Did your mother normally pull down the shades at night?”