“No one calls you that.”
“Not to my face.” She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, anyway. What matters is finding someone to call everyone down for the announcement. And to keep them there long enough for David to do his worst.”
That’s where Leslie came in. If...
“That’s why you asked me about Leslie last night, isn’t it? Because you needed a third and she and I are close?”
“Yes.” No beating around the bush.
“And you wanted to know if we could trust her to help us without saying anything to anyone.”
Well, yes, but... “I was thinking, if she’s been...hurt...too, then she’d be more able to go all the way with this.”
“She wasn’t raped, if that’s what you mean.”
Chantel hadn’t thought she was. “But she’s been physically abused.”
“Yes.”
And there it was.
“By who?” She asked the case-solving question. All that would be left would be getting someone to testify to the truth.
“I don’t know,” Julie told her.
“Have you asked?”
“Yes.”
“And she won’t tell you.”
“She says it’s best for me if I don’t know.”
She couldn’t believe that Julie, as she now knew her, would have accepted that answer.
“You buy that? That it’s best for you to not know?”
“What I think is that it wouldn’t matter if I did. What I am certain of is that nothing would be done about it. That’s what Leslie said, too.”
“And you believe her?”
“I did until this morning.”
“You think you can convince her to believe differently, too?”
“I know she’ll agree to help us. What have we got to lose? The worst that can happen is that David Smyth doesn’t take our bait, your mystery is solved—just make sure Colin isn’t the one who did it, please—and we all go home with no one the wiser.”
“Exactly. Colin can’t be the one. I have to make sure I’ve got him well and truly occupied someplace else the entire time this is going on.”
She couldn’t deny his effect on her.
“I’m thinking that instead of having him in the main hall hearing the announcement with everyone else, I’ll stick him in the room with the old safe in it—guarding the family riches. Guests will be able to find him there to ask him questions and he’ll have preset answers to give them. Answers that will lead them to the real killer—if they pay attention, if they find a letter that will be hidden in another part of the house. And a knife that’s going to be planted in a bedroom where one of the dead bodies is found.”
“Who’s going to be playing the original two dead bodies?”
“That’s already been left to Leslie to figure out.”
“She’s going to help us,” Julie said with an energy about her that seemed different. Or maybe just wishful thinking on Chantel’s part. Maybe guilt at using the other woman, lying to her about who she was and what she was doing there, was driving her to see things that weren’t there.
“She’ll have no problem keeping our secret. She’s had a lot of practice.”
She’d left Chantel another perfect opening, one she had to take. “Who do you think is hurting her?”
“Same person her son’s school thought was hurting her. Not that anyone did anything about it but sweep it under the proverbial rug. It’s her husband, Chantel. It has to be.”
She had confirmation of her truth.
But she wasn’t nearly as happy about that as she’d thought she’d be.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
COLIN DIDN’T TRUST HAPPINESS.
Chantel Johnson had swept in and nothing made sense anymore. He didn’t recognize himself. He’d go out to eat. Order his usual. And think that it tasted better than he remembered. He heard himself laughing and thought it sounded strange. Julie hadn’t locked herself in her room since he’d been home from Japan—almost a whole week now. He noticed the way the roses smelled when Julie had them in a vase on the table in the dining room.
Sex was...like he was still a teenager. Only a hell of a lot better at it.
And at work—he’d found himself seeing sincerity in people. Taking them at face value.
And he knew better than that.
What was worse, when he was at work, any time he was apart from Chantel, he longed for her with the stuff poems were made of.
And none of it made him happy. With every day that passed, he grew more and more uncomfortable.
If he didn’t know better, he’d think he was falling in love.
In his worst moments, he knew he was.
And yet...he still didn’t trust her. Not completely.
He believed in her, though. Believed she meant well and knew she had Julie’s best interests at heart as she talked her sister into attending the library gala in spite of the fact that David Smyth Jr. was going to be there. He was forever indebted to her.
“You ever think about having kids?” he asked her one Monday, five days before their murder mystery debut. He’d read the script and hadn’t been thrilled about the flirtiness of her character, but he’d agreed that it, coupled with his greedy obsession with the valuables locked in the safe, added greater depth to the plot—and would, therefore, make for a much more successful evening.
“Every once in a while,” she said, answering his question about kids as she gazed out at the ocean.
They were on his boat—a small, fifty-foot yacht—anchored far enough offshore to be in a world of their own but close enough to be back to shore for an early night. She’d brought a bag and was staying at his place until morning. She stood at the rail on the back deck, watching the sun set.
She’d worn a jacket, as he’d advised, but only had it buttoned up halfway. Her blond hair lifted off her shoulders now and then as a small breeze picked up. Colin was pressed up against her back, holding her.
Didn’t matter what the woman was doing. How she looked. Where they were. He wanted her.
Lately he’d been thinking about wanting kids with her, too.
“How about you?” She turned her head to look at him over her shoulder. “You’re so good with Julie, so patient. You’d make a great dad.”
He didn’t think so. “I haven’t given it all that much thought,” he said out loud.
“Well, you must have thought of it some, since you brought it up.”
They weren’t drinking. While the boat was fully engine equipped, it was also valuable and always prey to the whims of the ocean. He didn’t consume alcohol when he was captaining it.
“I guess I have thought about it,” he said now. Dusk had fallen. “Just never in terms of doing something about it.”
As though he was thinking about it now? They were spending pretty much every night together—though sometimes not meeting up until late—but that was because their time was limited. She’d be leaving. Why was he talking about kids as though they had some kind of future together?
Because he wanted one?
He’d told himself, in the beginning, that he’d cross that bridge when they came to it.
Surely he wasn’t thinking they’d come to it.
His thoughts skittered through the night. Bouncing off the truths he wasn’t ready to see?
“I don’t think I’d be good at parenting,” he told her. Just so she’d know he wasn’t moving in that direction on purpose.
“You’d be great at it,” she told him without hesitation. Which made him a bit angry. For no good reason.
“I’m always going to see danger and do whatever it takes to prevent it from happening. To their detriment.”
It’s what he’d done with Julie. Instead of build
ing her up, giving her the strength to face a tough court battle, he’d agreed to take the safest way out and sign those damned papers.
“A parent’s job is to see the dangers and prevent them,” she said with a note of bitterness to her voice that he hadn’t heard before.
And he thought about what Julie had said about the night the two of them had spent together. About how Chantel had cried over the death of her friend.
But what would that have to do with parents?
“You sound as though you’re speaking from experience.”
He’d tried, several times, to talk to her about that night she’d spent with Julie. She’d distracted him with sex. Every single time.
And he’d let her.
Because...they were only together for a while. She was leaving.
Even though he wasn’t happy feeling out of control, these had been the happiest weeks of his life...
“My stepfather tried to have sex with me when I was fourteen.”
The words fell so baldly, so unemotionally, on the wind, he was left feeling as though he was watching from afar. Seeing a woman in a movie.
Until he felt the rage. The need to find the guy and wrap his fingers around his neck...
“You said ‘tried.’” He focused on the facts.
“He came into my room and pulled me up out of my desk chair. It wasn’t late, but my mother had a migraine and was in their room, asleep.”
Money, privilege, didn’t mean safety. It didn’t mean trust. To the contrary. Money gave you the power to do whatever you wanted and get away with it.
He hadn’t realized her parents were divorced or that her mother had remarried.
And didn’t like the feeling of not knowing such an elemental thing about her. Even after their almost four weeks together.
He couldn’t stand there and let an unknown man walk into fourteen-year-old Chantel’s room and do nothing about it. He wasn’t made that way...
“I tried to scream, but he had his hand over my mouth before I could get more than a squeak out. He ripped my blouse open.”
She was facing the ocean. Colin wanted to pull her more tightly to him, to keep her safe from the evil that lurked everywhere, but he let his arms drop as he stepped up to the rail beside her.
He understood now why she was able to reach Julie when he could not. They were kindred souls.
And he felt helpless again. As helpless as he’d felt the night his baby sister came home to him completely broken.
“He grabbed me. And it hurt,” Chantel said in that same strong monotone. “He turned me around and told me what he was going to do to me. I’ve never been as angry as I was in that minute.” She turned her head to look at him. “I didn’t think, I just spun around so fast he lost his grip. I hurled my knee up as hard as I could and ran for my mother.”
There was more. He could see it in her eyes. “Mom didn’t believe me at first. Not until I didn’t come home for days and the bastard showed no signs of caring that I was gone. Then she realized that when he’d told her I’d hit on him, he’d been the one who was lying. She’d believed him at first. Believed that I’d hit on him. You’d never betray your child, Colin. You’d be a parent your child could always count on. In the end, that’s all that matters.”
He wasn’t sure she was right—that protection was all that mattered—but he wanted to believe she was.
Wanted everything about her to be true. Including his love for her.
* * *
SHE HAD TO get out. The words were a litany to Chantel as she worked her shifts Tuesday and Wednesday. The stuff with her stepfather...she couldn’t believe she’d told Colin. Couldn’t believe she actually remembered in such detail. Or that she felt so...strongly...about it.
She and Daniel were on days through Thursday. She had Friday, Saturday and Sunday off. Long enough to get through the gala.
Have a day to deal with the fallout.
And be back to work on Monday.
Her time with Colin was coming to a close one way or another. Whether she and Julie and Leslie were successful Saturday night or not, she couldn’t keep pretending.
She’d never told anyone, not even Jill, the full extent of what had happened that night in her bedroom—how close she’d come to being another statistic. Why in the hell she’d poured it all out to Colin, she had no idea.
They’d been on his boat for a romantic dinner. But his talk about not being a good dad had reminded her what Julie had said about saving Colin from himself by giving him a chance to put Smyth away instead of signing away his right to do so.
She’d had to show him what a bad parent looked like. He didn’t bear even the remotest resemblance.
They’d had dinner. And sex.
Later that night, after sharing a nightcap with Julie, they’d made love again, in his bed. She’d fallen asleep in his arms.
She hadn’t woken up once all night long.
She was in too deep.
She’d awoken the next morning, had breakfast with Julie and Colin and then rushed to the resort to switch cars and get home to her apartment to scrub off the makeup, get her hair up into its ponytail, don old jeans and her work boots and get to the station.
She’d told Wayne that she had confirmation that Morrison was beating his wife. And had come clean with him about the news she’d heard from Max and discussed the plan that was in place for Saturday night.
He didn’t like her involving Leslie and Julie—two untrained civilians, not to mention victims—but when she’d remained adamant to the good it would do both of them to regain some personal honor, as well as the fact that there was no way anyone from outside their society was going to gain entrance that night without raising questions that could sabotage the entire operation—even the caterer was family—he’d finally conceded.
And, as she pointed out, if the plan worked, two hundred or more people, including the police commissioner, would be present.
And if it didn’t, no one except the four of them would know there’d even been a plan.
In the meantime, working so closely with Leslie was exactly what she’d been aiming for before beginning the undercover assignment. She was winning Leslie’s trust. If they were successful in bringing Smyth to justice, then she had every hope of convincing Leslie to trust the system to bring justice to her husband, as well.
If it didn’t, she and Leslie would have forged the friendship she needed to get inside the woman’s house, into her home life and find the evidence she needed to make it happen.
It was all coming to a head. And then a close.
She told herself she was glad.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
DINNER WAS BEING served at round tables set for six in the main lobby of the new Santa Raquel Public Library. Linen tablecloths, fresh flowers, Waterford china and sterling silver were all part of the gala affair.
Chafing dishes were on every table, allowing the patrons to serve themselves.
An hour before the doors would open, Colin surveyed the room. Everything looked perfect.
Julie and Leslie were in a room upstairs with Chantel, helping her get into costume. Some sexy outfit he had yet to see.
He’d dressed down for the evening in an old tweed jacket borrowed from a college theater department—so he’d been told—and brown pants bought off the rack and not tailored to his form. He was ready to play the part of down-on-his-luck, avaricious and greedy heir to the castle.
His sister came downstairs first.
“You look beautiful,” he told her, watching as she came toward him, her head held high. In a dark blue, strapless gown that hugged her slimness, she was wearing a diamond brooch their mother had left her.
“I feel beautiful.”
He didn’t know that he’d ever heard her
say such a thing. But he was more and more open to the surprises she had in store for him.
A seventeen-year-old-kid had left him. He was eager to get to know the twenty-seven-year-old woman who was emerging.
“Leslie will be down in a minute,” she told him. “She and Chantel had some last-minute things to go over.”
“That surprise twist you three have been planning,” he said, grinning. They’d been like giddy kids, plotting to take their guests by surprise. They’d insisted that he be kept in the dark as well, because it played into the evening’s unraveling.
He knew who’d “done it,” of course. Just not exactly how the winner was going to reach that conclusion. There were several possible ways. The beauty of the evening was that no one would know until it happened.
Much like his own life was turning out. He didn’t know until it happened what was coming, but he was beginning to look forward to the possibilities.
“I’m thinking about asking Chantel to marry me.” He didn’t need Julie’s permission. Nor did he doubt her approval.
He was just caught up in her smile. In the miracle of having Julie fully alive again, even if just in bits and pieces. In the knowledge that Chantel would be sleeping in his bed that night.
And wanting her place there to be permanent.
He was embracing the concept of trust, if not fully indulging in it himself.
“What do you think?” he asked his little sister, who was standing there gaping at him.
“I... Not before tonight’s performance, right?” she asked. Inanely, he thought. It wasn’t like anything more than money rested on the night’s entertainment. The real event taking place was Julie’s first face-to-face appearance with David Smyth. And Leslie and Chantel’s support that was going to be with her all the way.
“Of course not before tonight’s performance,” he told her with a grin. And then, when understanding dawned, he added, “I’m not going to distract your new best friend away from you when you need her most. Or any time you need her.”
“Maybe you should sometime.” Her response was more of the completely unexpected.
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