The Complete Novels of the Lear Sister Trilogy

by Julia London

  Right. Where? “Bloody rotten hell,” Flynn groaned.

  Fortunately, although Marlene couldn’t remember where she was, she could remember her address, but was passed out cold by the time they reached it. A quick search through her purse and Joe found keys. It took the combined efforts of Flynn and Joe to drag Marlene into her upscale condo and deposit her carcass on the couch. When they were quite satisfied she’d not expire, Joe (being the sort of chap that he was) wiped down all the surfaces with a kitchen towel, and they slipped out, leaving a snoring Marlene behind.

  Once they had cleared Marlene’s neighborhood, Joe asked Flynn what he’d learned about Wasserman.

  “Quite friendly, that one. Likes to chat it up,” he said. “But I don’t believe he’s our man.”

  Joe snorted. “Bullshit. Of course he is. Think about it—he’s the first guy to arrive on the scene. There’s no evidence of forced entry—”

  “It was four o’clock in the afternoon. She might have left the door open at that hour,” Flynn interjected.

  “Okay, but what about the dog?” Joe shot back. “She’s found stabbed to death in the master bedroom, her dog is found stabbed to death in the master bedroom, but his dog is just roaming free in the kitchen? And don’t forget, no one heard the dogs bark all afternoon, so the dogs probably knew the perp. So who does that leave, Sherlock? Her mother and her husband, and her mother has an alibi. Her husband doesn’t.”

  “I haven’t quite worked it out,” Flynn said truthfully. “But you can’t dismiss the fact that a paroled armed robber with a history of assault is suspected in two recent robberies in the area.”

  “All right . . . but what about the visit we paid to the waterfront? That guy has an alibi a mile long that says he wasn’t anywhere near the area that day. Thought that black eye convinced you of that.”

  “Hardly. If not him, perhaps someone like him.”

  “Okay, so say we go with your robber theory,” Joe continued. “The dogs would have barked, dude. And no one heard a dog bark all afternoon. It was Wasserman, I am telling you. So now our task is to figure out why Wasserman might want his wife dead. And if you ask me, going to a shindig like this not two weeks after burying her is not cool.”

  “He was actually quite reverent of her memory this evening.”

  “Uh-huh. And the chicks hanging all over him?”

  “Merely passing along their condolences to a bereaved, yet wealthy chap,” Flynn said with a grin.

  Joe looked at him sidelong as he pulled into the parking lot where Flynn had left his rental. “You really believe it wasn’t him?”

  “I really believe it.”

  Joe sighed, shook his head. “This is the problem with the U.K., you know. Not enough homicides to give you guys some instincts.”

  Flynn laughed, opened the passenger door. “See you tomorrow, eh?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” Joe said.

  Flynn got out, waited until Joe drove away before getting in his car.

  Then, instead of pointing his car home, he drove in the direction of the Feizel mansion to have the last word with Rachel Lear.

  When he arrived back at the mansion, the party was clearly winding down. Several happy guests were on the drive, laughing and screeching at one another as they attempted to find their automobiles. The two footmen were ushering them into the nearest vehicle they could and directing traffic.

  Flynn parked at the bottom of the drive and walked up to the house. He did not go in the front door, however, but kept walking straight on, into the shadowy drive that led up to the service entrance.

  He heard Rachel’s laugh as he rounded a flower bed, then saw her near the garage in the company of the bartender. They were laughing, talking low. Flynn stopped, stepped back, beneath the shadow of a tree. He couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, but he got the distinct impression that the chap wanted Rachel to come along with him. After some giggling and nattering on, she gestured behind her, to the mansion. After a few moments, the chap walked on, shoving his hands into his Members Only jacket as he strolled down the drive.

  Splendid, Flynn thought. He stepped out of the trees, looked back to where they’d been standing. Rachel was there, walking just outside the service entrance with something draped over her arm. But instead of proceeding down the drive, she paused near the rubbish bins, had a quick look around, shoved the thing on her arm into her bag, had another quick look around, then stepped behind the bins . . . and knelt down, out of his sight.

  What in God’s name is she about?

  Flynn couldn’t stand it. He moved in that direction, but he heard her voice and stopped again.

  “Stop it,” she was saying. But to whom? “You want to live like this for the rest of your life? Then stop it.”

  The shrill sound of an angry mewling cat startled Flynn, and it got louder and louder as he stood there. At least he thought it was a cat—it might also have been a shrieking banshee.

  Then Rachel suddenly screeched, and the animal howled, and a horrible noise of chains and breaking glass and God knew what else could be heard as she suddenly appeared from behind the rubbish bin and began running down the drive.

  Flynn stepped in her path. Rachel shrieked again, clamped a hand over her mouth once she recognized him, grabbed his arm, and very nervously glanced over her shoulder. “What are you doing here?” she demanded in a very hot whisper.

  “One might ask the same of you.”

  “I’m—”

  She was interrupted by a sudden flood of light everywhere, the sound of a door swinging open, and a male voice calling, “Boots?”

  But Rachel was suddenly and wildly waving her hands at Flynn, gesturing for him to run, and she obviously meant it, for she was running. Flynn looked back, saw the shoulder of a man. “What the hell?” the man exclaimed, and Flynn did what Rachel suggested.

  He ran.

  Chapter Eighteen

  He caught her just past the garage, and with a firm grip on her elbow, forced her to run to his car faster than he would have thought possible in those high-heeled boots. Opening the passenger door, he shoved her inside, then rushed around to the driver’s seat, turned over the ignition, and threw the auto into gear before he asked, “Why are we running?”

  “Because I just did something I shouldn’t have done!” she exclaimed breathlessly, twisting in her seat to peer behind them as he drove around the circle drive and down again.

  “What?”

  “I just broke the law, okay? At least I think I did, but I’m not really sure.” She turned round to face front again, but scooched down into the seat so that her knees were jammed up against the dash.

  “You broke the law?” he said in disbelief as he waited for the electronic gate to slowly slide open. She must have done, for she looked dangerously close to tears. And then there was the blood on her hands. Streaks of it.

  “I had to!” she said frantically. “You wouldn’t believe what those people do! Is anyone following us?”

  Flynn looked in the rearview. “No—”

  “Good! Okay, okay, turn left,” she insisted as he carried on through the gate. “Turn left, turn left—left!”

  Flynn jerked a hard left and sped down the street until he came upon a stop sign. He hit the brakes hard, got hold of his senses. “Whatever you think you’ve done, Rachel, it will be much easier to face it than to run from it,” he said sternly. “Tell me what you’ve done and I’ll help you.”

  “I set their cat free. Come on, let’s go,” she said, gesturing for him to drive on.

  “You did what?” he asked again as he peered at the blood on her hands.

  “Those people chain their cat to a tree! Can you believe that? Of course I had to let it go!”

  He still wasn’t certain she hadn’t perhaps pick-axed someone to death as the blood on her hands would indicate. “Let me see if I have this—you set their pet cat free?”

  “Yes! Yes, I did! It’s not right to keep a cat chained. It goes en
tirely against their nature! I couldn’t stand to see it, so I let it go. In fact, if you’d really like to know, I was going to steal it, but the damn thing had a different idea,” she said, looking at her hands for the first time. “Oh my God,” she said.

  “You’re bleeding rather badly.”

  “The cat had some claws,” she said with wonder.

  “Most felines do.” He put the car in gear, turned right, heading for Blackstone Boulevard.

  “Wait—my car is back there. Where are you going? And why are you here?”

  “We must clean your hands. No telling what sort of ugly kitty germs you have there, and as to why I’m here, I am asking myself the very same thing.”

  “But my car is just around the corner and you can just drop me there—”

  “I rather think not,” he said calmly. “I have something that should do the trick.”

  “Where?” she asked, her voice full of suspicion.

  “My place.”

  “Your place! I can’t go to your place.”

  “And why not? Have you committed to trawling the city and freeing more cats tonight?”

  “No! It’s just that . . . Don’t you have a blonde waiting for you somewhere, Charlie?”

  “Actually, I prefer Flynn instead of Charlie, and if you must know, I can hardly be held responsible when a drunken woman attaches herself to me and refuses to let go.”

  Rachel did not look convinced.

  “Honestly, Rachel, I intend to bandage your hand. I’m not the sort to bring a girl home under false pretense and shag her,” he said firmly, although the thought of shagging her did indeed cross his mind, as it had several times since meeting her. And was it a cruel hoax of his imagination, or did she seem slightly disappointed by that declaration?

  Rachel wasn’t disappointed, exactly. She was absolutely mortified.

  First, the thought of shagging the English guy had crossed her mind plenty of times, but that little premenstrual water retention problem she was having was out of control, building up like a dam in her, and if she didn’t get out of this skirt soon, she was certain the dam would, literally, break. And she couldn’t put her pants back on because she had wadded them up and stuffed them in her bag in order to free the cat. She’d look like a bag lady if she tried it.

  Second, in the event the dam did break, she was wholly unprepared for it, in spite of owning an enormous box of tampons that took up half her bathroom. Honestly, she could have sworn she put a couple in her giant bag, but for the life of her, she couldn’t find any in there.

  And third, she was starving, because Mary the caterer had stated, pretty emphatically, that the food was bought and paid for by the Feizels, and as they hadn’t invited anyone to eat it, she certainly wasn’t going to invite them to eat it.

  The upshot was that Rachel had hardly had a bite today, save a couple of shrimp, and was starving so badly that her stomach was making really weird and frighteningly gluttonous noises that Flynn couldn’t hear over the car’s engine, but would most definitely hear at his place. “I can’t,” she said again, sliding back up to a sitting position to get some oxygen to her brain.

  “Of course you can.”

  “I really can’t.”

  “I won’t accept no as an answer, at least not until we’ve got you properly cleaned up. And then, naturally, I’ll need to contact the authorities and report you,” he said, all stodgy and British. Rachel gaped at him. He flashed her one of his gut-sinking grins. “Not really. I rather imagine they’d think you were completely off your trolley and trot you off to some sort of institution straightaway.”

  “Or they might issue a citation against the Feizels, did you ever think of that? I’m of half a mind to call the humane society,” she insisted.

  “Yes, why don’t you? And then you can explain to them that while you feared for the poor puss’s safety, you set it free in the wilds of Providence and haven’t the slightest idea where they might pick it up.”

  “Good point,” she said reluctantly.

  “Frankly, I don’t quite understand,” he said, turning a comer, “why you didn’t simply put a spell on the poor thing—you know, bewitch it a bit?” he said, and put a finger to his nose and wiggled it, Samantha Stevens style.

  “I suppose that’s your attempt at being funny?”

  “Can’t really say for certain what that was,” he said cheerfully, and turned into the parking lot of Corporate Suites, Inc.

  “Now where are we going?”

  “This is home, for the time being.” He turned off the car, grabbed her bag and the door handle at the same time.

  “I thought you said you were staying with friends,” she said suspiciously.

  “I did,” he said with a wink and popped out, walked briskly around the front of the car to her side, and opened her door. “Come on, then.” He offered her his hand.

  Rachel reluctantly took it—yep, big and warm, just like she remembered. His fingers closed around her hand, and by some miracle of science, he managed to pop her out of his car.

  “Have you got a coat?” he asked once she was standing at the side of the car, looking up and down her body.

  “Not with me,” she said, pulling her lavender shawl around her. Flynn clucked his opinion of her lack of preparedness, shut the door, opened the backseat door, reached in, and withdrew the trench coat she had seen him wear. Without a word, he draped it around her shoulders, then pulled it together under her chin. “There you are.”

  Yes, there she was, in an awfully nice coat, made of some sort of silky but sturdy trench-coaty fabric and lined with cashmere.

  But the best news of all was that it engulfed her.

  Still smiling, Flynn put his arm around Rachel’s waist, took her bag, and slung it over his shoulder. “What in the hell have you got in here?” he asked as he pulled her into his side to lead her to the entrance of the corporate suites. “Rather feels like a lorry-load of bricks.”

  It was nice being at his side like that, wearing his coat, and even nicer being pressed against a hot guy. She didn’t think she’d ever been pressed up against such a firm and masculine body, and enjoyed it so much that she was reaching the happy point where she didn’t care if her skirt exploded off her or not.

  They entered the foyer; some kid behind the counter looked up and smiled, his eyes going wide when he saw Rachel. “Hel-loh, Mr. Oliver!” he said cheerfully.

  “Cheers,” Flynn said, and proceeded to lead Rachel across the standard-issue hotel foyer to the elevator. Inside, he punched five and looked up at the floor display. And the whole time he was holding Rachel against him, as if it were the most natural thing to do. It even felt natural.

  When at last they came to the door of his apartment, she asked him who it belonged to.

  “My company,” he said, and pushed the door open, gave Rachel a nudge across the threshold.

  The place looked like a sort of sterile bachelor pad— small and really plastic. A tiny kitchen, completely equipped in miniature appliances, was off to the right, with a nice little bar separating the kitchen from the even smaller dining area.

  The living area had a couch and two chairs, a run-of-the- mill coffee table, which was covered with newspapers and work papers and a John Grisham novel. There was also an end table with a huge mauve lamp that matched the mauve frames of the really blah seaside pictures on one wall.

  On one chair was an assortment of laundry—either there to go out or having just come in, she couldn’t really tell. But she could tell with just a casual glance that he was a boxer as opposed to a brief man

  “Doesn’t exactly have a homey feel to it, does it?” he quipped as he tossed his keys onto the dining table, where a stack of mail, several files, and a laptop resided. He put her bag next to his laptop. “Make yourself at home, will you, while I fetch the instruments of my torture,” he said and disappeared into a darkened door that she assumed was the bedroom.

  Rachel walked further into the room, reluctantly draped hi
s trench coat across the back of a chair at the table where he’d left her bag, and stood there, afraid to sit.

  “Come on then, let’s have a look.”

  She turned toward the sound of his voice. He was holding a brown bottle and some cotton balls. “Madam, your surgery awaits,” he said, bowing a little, and stepped aside so that she could enter the kitchen.

  Rachel gathered her shawl about her and picked up her bag.

  He ushered her to the sink, took her bag from her hand. “Must have something frightfully important in that very large container vessel you have there, seeing as you won’t let it out of your sight,” he said as he put it on the counter behind her. Then he turned on the tap water, picked up a little sample bottle of Anti-Bacterial Dial, and, taking her hand in his, put a little soap in her palm, then put it under the warm water.

  “Ouch!” she said as the soap hit the deep scratches the ungrateful cat had left.

  “Rather nasty, really,” he opined as his fingers began to move on her, gently sudsing the wounds, taking care to clean the deeper scratches, then turning her hand over and washing the back side in the same, delicate manner. Each time his finger moved against her skin, Rachel could feel the electricity of it firing up her arm and into her chest.

  His hands were magical—strong, yet gentle. She suddenly pictured those hands on her breasts . . . and remembered herself, jerked her gaze up. He was calmly rinsing the soap from her hand; he had a wonderfully handsome profile—very Anglican, with a thin, straight nose, a strong chin, a strong brow—

  “Now the other, if you please,” he said, gesturing for her left hand, and wordlessly repeated the same process, shaking his head when he saw a really deep scratch that ran up her wrist, and that sexy strand of hair fell over his eye.

  But the caress of his fingers on her wrist was almost her undoing, and now she was seeing images slide past, images of that very same hand, purposeful and commanding, on other parts of her body—

  “Am I hurting you?” he asked quietly, glancing at her with a hint of a smile on his lips.