Confessions of the Heart

by Amanda Stevens

She frowned. “It…might have been.”

  “Sometimes a place like this can play tricks on the imagination.”

  She nodded vaguely, but didn’t agree or dispute him. Instead she glanced around, lifting her hands to rub her arms as if suddenly chilled.

  He felt the same way. “Let’s get out of here,” he muttered.

  He led them outside to a low stone wall that over-looked the river. They both sat down, and after a moment, when the eeriness of the mission began to fade, he said, “What are you still doing in San Miguel? Last night you said you were leaving first thing this morning for Houston.”

  “I had car trouble.” She turned her dark gaze to his, and something stirred to life inside Ben. Passion, yes, the kind they’d experienced last night across the river. But something else, too. Something he didn’t want to put a name to.

  A mild breeze drifted up from the water, lifting a strand of her blond hair, then settling it artfully back into place. She’d pulled her hair back today in the way she’d worn it the first time he saw her. The style that made her look elegant and sophisticated. Cool and unapproachable. Untouchable.

  Last night she’d worn it down, and it was as if freeing her hair had unleashed something wild inside her. Something needy and desperate. Something that made Ben go hot at the thought of being in bed with her.

  He wished liked hell he knew what she was thinking. She had a great poker face, one that had probably served her very well in the courtroom.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked softly.

  Her voice did all kinds of bad things to his insides. To his mind. To his resolve. “No,” he lied. “Why?”

  “You seem so…preoccupied.” She glanced toward the mission. “This place must hold a lot of bad memories for you.”

  “Then you know what happened here,” he said grimly.

  She nodded. “I can’t imagine what it must be like for you, coming back here to the place where it happened. How can you stand to be here?” Her gaze took on a glint that Ben thought was slightly accusing.

  He frowned. “It’s just a place.”

  “I know, but still…” She shuddered. “You lost someone here that you loved.”

  He glanced away from her piercing eyes to stare at the river. “Maybe I should explain something about Katherine and me…about our relationship.” He turned back to Anna. “I didn’t love her. I never loved her. Toward the end, I came to despise her.”

  Chapter Nine

  Those words, spoken in such a calm voice, chilled Anna to the bone.

  Despised her?

  He’d despised Katherine? Anna closed her eyes briefly, trying to let his words sink in.

  “But you must have loved her when you married her,” she finally said. “Gwen called it love at first sight. She said the two of you couldn’t keep your hands off each other.”

  He grimaced as his gaze went back to the river. “The thought of touching her, of ever having touched her, makes my skin crawl.”

  Somehow his pronouncement was like a dagger through Anna’s heart. He wasn’t talking about her, and yet she felt as if he was. He hadn’t betrayed her, and yet it seemed as if he had. An unreasonable anger welled inside her, and she had to struggle very hard to keep it subdued. “Then why did you marry her?”

  He paused. “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Was it her money?” The bitterness in her voice shocked Anna. She had no right to feel this way. No reason to feel this way, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. Why had he married Katherine if he hadn’t loved her? Why had he kissed Anna if…

  The two events were not the same. She was not Katherine.

  But she had Katherine’s heart. It was beating inside her chest at that very moment.

  The thought of touching her, of ever having touched her, makes my skin crawl.

  Would he feel the same about Anna if he knew? Would he despise her, too? Would he be unable and unwilling to ever touch her again?

  “It wasn’t the money,” Ben said.

  “Then what was it?”

  “Lust, I guess.” He ran a hand through his hair. “But it was more complicated than that. Katherine was a difficult woman to know. People either adored her or hated her. There was no middle ground with her. And the people who loved her the most, often ended up despising her. She had a way of using up the best in people and then discarding them like yesterday’s trash.”

  “If you felt that way about her, why didn’t you leave her?” Anna asked.

  He stared at the river with a brooding frown. “I wanted to, but there was Gabby to consider. She’d formed an attachment to me by then, and the poor kid had a hard enough time with a mother like Katherine. I couldn’t just walk away.”

  “But some people might say she wasn’t your responsibility,” Anna said carefully.

  Ben’s jaw tightened. “Gabby became my responsibility the day I married her mother. If I learned anything as a cop it’s that you don’t walk out on a kid.”

  Anna thought of all the custody cases she’d argued in which the children had been nothing more than pawns in the divorcing couple’s ongoing battle. She was suddenly, deeply ashamed that she’d played any part in tearing a child’s life apart.

  “Hey, are you okay?” Ben put a hand on her arm, and Anna jumped. She couldn’t help it. Even so slight a touch from him had a powerful effect on her.

  His features tightened at her reaction. “Sorry.”

  “No, it’s okay. I’m just…a bit jumpy.” She shrugged. “It’s this place…what you just told me…”

  “I never should have said anything. I keep forgetting you’re a stranger.”

  His gaze deepened, and Anna’s stomach fluttered in awareness. “I know,” she said softly. “I feel the same way. But I don’t understand why.”

  He didn’t respond but his gaze was all over her. Anna could tell that he wanted her as much as she wanted him, and that was the strangest part of this whole strange situation. She knew she was still an attractive woman in spite of everything she’d been through, but she’d never possessed that intangible quality that brought out the pure animal lust in men.

  Judging by her photographs, Katherine had had that quality in abundance. Acacia Cortina had it, too. But Anna didn’t. She’d never been the type of woman who was driven by her sexual urges, and men picked up on that. Men were put off by that. She enjoyed sex, she supposed, but she never particularly craved it. Had never been the one to initiate lovemaking even during her short marriage. Her lack of ardor had been a frequent complaint of Hays’s.

  But with Ben…

  Anna could feel something building inside her just looking at him. With Ben, she was ready to throw caution to the wind for the first time in her life. She was almost—but not quite—ready to initiate sex with a man who was a virtual stranger.

  “What are you thinking?” His gaze was deep and knowing.

  Anna had to glance away so he couldn’t see the truth. “I was thinking about what you just said. People either loved or hated Katherine. If she aroused such strong emotions in the people around her, do you think it’s possible…” She trailed away.

  “What? Go ahead and say it.”

  “Do you think it’s possible that someone was here with her that day? Maybe she didn’t take her own life.”

  Anna thought that he would be shocked by her suggestion, but instead he merely glanced at her. “You’ve been talking to Emily Winsome, I see.”

  Anna was the one who was surprised. “You know her?”

  “I’ve met her a few times. She was one of Katherine’s groupies.”

  “Groupies?”

  “For lack of a better word. Every year Katherine picked one or two of her students to mentor. But she was more than just an adviser to them. She became their guru. They came to her with all their problems. Hung on her every word. They worshipped the ground she walked on. And she would invite them here to spend summers with her. Her retreat, she called it, although I never was too clear on what they stud
ied.”

  “And Emily was one of Katherine’s…protégées?”

  He nodded. “The students would stay in one of the guest cottages out back, but they pretty much had the run of the place.”

  “How did Gwen feel about these retreats? You told me yesterday that she resented your marriage to Katherine because it took her sister’s time and attention away from her. What about Katherine’s students? Didn’t Gwen mind the time and attention Katherine gave to them?”

  “Not at first. She used to be a part of Katherine’s inner circle, but then later, when she and Katherine started having problems, she became little more than a glorified secretary.”

  “How did she feel about that?”

  “Knowing Gwen, she resented the hell out of it, but Katherine controlled the purse strings. She didn’t have a choice but to do as Katherine said.”

  “Couldn’t she have gotten a job?” Anna asked. “Moved out on her own?”

  Ben gave a sharp laugh. “Gwen has never worked a day in her life. She has no idea how to function in the real world. Katherine saw to that.”

  What a strange family, Anna thought. “Emily told me that Gwen and Katherine had a falling-out before she died. She said Katherine cut Gwen out of her will. Is that true?”

  He nodded. “Pretty much. She gets an allowance, enough to get by on, but that’s about it.”

  “Do you think Gwen knew that Katherine had changed her will before she died?”

  His gaze met hers. “You’re pretty quick, aren’t you?”

  Anna shrugged. “Money has always been a powerful motivation for murder.”

  “Then you must also know that when Katherine cut Gwen out, she divided her estate between Gabby and me.”

  “Yes, I do know that,” Anna said. “But you didn’t kill her.”

  He turned at that. “What makes you so certain? You hardly know me.”

  She shrugged again. “I don’t know how I know it, but I do. If I thought there was the slightest chance you’d murdered your wife, do you think I’d be here with you now?” She waved a hand toward the mission. “Here, of all places.”

  “Why are you here, Anna?” His gaze was so deeply compelling, she couldn’t look away. She could lose herself in those eyes, she thought, and become…whatever he wanted her to be.

  “I was drawn here,” she said helplessly. “I had to come.”

  “Because you think Katherine was murdered?”

  “I don’t know. Emily seems convinced of it. She said that Katherine wasn’t the type to commit suicide.”

  He fell silent for a moment. “Did Emily also tell you that she was in love with Katherine?”

  Anna stared at him in shock. “In love with her?”

  “She became obsessed with her after the summer she stayed with her. That was before I came here, but even after Katherine and I married, Emily would still call at all hours. Drop by without notice. Katherine thought her devotion was amusing for a while, but then she got bored with her. She even took out a restraining order against Emily.”

  “Oh, my God. How did Emily react to that?”

  “Not well,” Ben said with a grimace. “She was just a kid infatuated with an older teacher. When she told Katherine how she felt, Katherine laughed in her face. Emily was devastated. She threatened to kill Katherine and then take her own life.” His gaze met Anna’s in the mottled sunlight. “But I bet she didn’t bother telling you that, either, did she?”

  ANNA WAS RELIEVED when Emily didn’t show up for dinner in the dining room that night. She still wasn’t certain how she wanted to handle the information Ben had given her earlier. Her first instinct was to ignore it and not get any more caught up in Emily’s claim that Katherine had been murdered than she already was.

  But it bothered her that Emily had come to her for help without being honest about her own involvement with Katherine. She should have told Anna about the threats and the restraining order because withholding the information now made her look as if she had something to hide.

  Still, Anna had a hard time imagining Emily as a killer. And if she had murdered Katherine, why would she be here now, in San Miguel, stirring up the proverbial hornet’s nest? To throw off suspicion? Why would she need to? Katherine’s death had been ruled a suicide. Legally speaking, the case was closed.

  No, Anna just couldn’t see Emily as the killer—if there had indeed been a killer. But it was ironic, she supposed, that Emily and Ben had pointed the finger at each other.

  Why Anna had decided to accept Ben’s word about Emily’s infatuation with Katherine without corroboration, she wasn’t quite sure. But where her feelings for Ben were concerned, she wasn’t certain of anything. Her intense attraction to him made no sense, but it was there all the same, real and so powerful it took her breath away just to look at him.

  With no plans for the evening, Anna went straight up to her room after dinner. It was too early to sleep, but she got ready for bed anyway. Slipping between the covers, she propped herself against the pillows and reached for Ben’s book.

  She’d gotten well past the halfway mark the night before, and the disturbing images of the murders he’d painted so graphically had been floating around in the back of her mind all day. The victims—all women—were killed with a bullet wound to the head, but before their executions, they’d been tortured. The hearts had been removed postmortem, but for what purpose, no one knew. None of the organs had ever been found, but that sort of mutilation was usually indicative of a ritual-style killing.

  Anna’s stomach churned as she continued to read. She learned things she didn’t want to know but would never forget.

  Yet as unsettling as the book was, she couldn’t put it down because it also gave her an amazing insight into Ben’s psyche—not so much for what he said about himself, but for what he didn’t say.

  He didn’t dwell on his own personal ordeal with Scorpio, but Anna could read between the lines. And she remembered what Gwen had told her that first day in San Miguel. The scars on his hand and face… Scorpio did that to him. And the scars on the inside are even worse. I don’t think Ben ever recovered from that summer.

  Long after Anna had finished the book and set it aside, she lay in the darkness of her room, staring at the ceiling and trying to imagine what that summer must have done to Ben. What it had cost him.

  For that whole summer—and ever since, Anna suspected—the case had been his whole life. He’d lived, breathed, dreamed of bringing a brutal serial killer to justice. And when he awakened one night to find Scorpio in his apartment, his determination and dedication had become an obsession.

  Before Scorpio, Ben had been a high-profile cop, the one reporters went to for interviews and expert analysis of crime scenes because he was not only knowledgeable, but highly personable and photogenic. The cameras loved him. He was destined to go all the way to the top in the Houston Police Department.

  But Scorpio ended all that. Scorpio took everything from him—his looks, his career, very nearly his life. And what the killer left behind was a haunted man. A man who couldn’t put the past behind him because it was there, in front of him, each and every time he looked in the mirror.

  ANNA DIDN’T THINK she’d be able to sleep at all that night, but sometime after midnight, she finally drifted off, only to come awake suddenly at a noise somewhere nearby.

  She lay very still, listening to the night, telling herself the sound had been a dream. But as she huddled underneath the covers, the noise came again. Floorboards creaked in the hallway outside her room. The hotel was either settling or someone was walking past her door.

  Anna’s first thought was that perhaps Emily had returned from San Antonio much later than she’d planned. Or maybe the other guest—Dwight Gump—had come in from the field, although Emily had said his room was in the other wing. Maybe he was disoriented, drunk…

  Maybe it was Acacia. Or Margarete.

  Or Scorpio…

  Anna pulled the covers up to her chin, all the while tel
ling herself she was letting her imagination get the better of her. But she couldn’t stop trembling. And she couldn’t stop the images of Scorpio’s victims flashing strobelike through her head.

  Finally, unable to stand the suspense any longer, she got up quietly and started across the room. When the boards screeched beneath her feet, she stopped. Outside, the creaking ceased.

  If someone was out there, they’d undoubtedly heard the noise from inside her room and knew that she was up and about. And now they were out there, listening to the quiet, just as she was doing in her room. It was almost as if the two of them were holding a collective breath.

  Then, in one swift movement, Anna crossed the floor and pressed her ear to the door. Nothing moved. Nothing creaked. If someone had been out there, they were probably long gone by now.

  Or still out there, waiting, daring her to make the next move.

  Anna wasn’t about to open the door and find out.

  Turning back to the bed, she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. A shadow crept along the balcony and then was gone.

  A surge of adrenaline caused her heart to knock painfully against her chest. She didn’t know what to do. She was trapped between the creaking floorboards in the hallway and the shadow on the balcony. She couldn’t open either door to escape.

  The notion flitted through her head that she should call down to the desk for help. But…did the Casa del Gatos even have a night clerk? Anna had no idea if anyone would even be about at this hour to take her call.

  The police then? Or Ben?

  And tell them what? That she was hearing and seeing things after reading a book about a serial killer? Floorboards in a one-hundred-year-old hotel were suddenly creaking. A shadow had moved on her balcony.

  Anna laughed nervously, the sound startling in the silence. Okay, so her imagination was running away with her.

  Check the locks on both doors, she told herself, and go back to bed. There was nothing to worry about. Nothing to be afraid of.

  But once she was settled in bed again, she didn’t dare close her eyes until the gray light of dawn filtered in through the windows.