To Trust a Stranger

by Karen Robards

  The world spun as she remembered, and for a hideous, horrible moment Julie feared she might faint. Mac’s arm tightened as if he sensed her sudden weakness. She closed her eyes and rested heavily against him and counted to ten and forced the dizziness away by sheer force of will. Then Josephine whimpered, the slightest sound, and tried to pull away from Julie’s hand. Julie realized that she was holding the dog’s muzzle too tight even as the murmur of approaching voices made her shudder. Forcing herself to remain in the present, to remain focused, she loosened her grip on Josephine and apologetically cuddled her closer, drawn back from the precipice just in time. She could not, would not, let fear overwhelm her. If she succumbed to the mindless terror that hovered near, she might very well make some sound or do something that would reveal their presence, thereby endangering Mac and Josephine as well as herself.

  But once she was in control enough to really listen, she realized that this was not the monster returned. At least one of the voices was all too familiar. This was—Sid. Sid and a woman.

  Julie’s spine stiffened. Her head rose like that of a doe’s scenting danger.

  “It’s Sid,” she whispered.

  “Don’t move, and don’t make a sound.” Mac’s voice was scarcely louder than a breath. His arm around her hardened into an unbreakable band as though he feared she might pull away from him, might dart out and confront her husband there and then. Mac shifted position without loosening his hold on her, maneuvering so that her back was against the wall and he was in front of her, as if to both shield her and keep her in place. Julie once again got a good look at the gun in his hand. He had not lowered it, or relaxed in any way. His attention seemed to be divided equally between her and the newcomers who were now talking unconcernedly in the hall just a few yards away.

  Julie realized that Mac considered Sid’s presence a threat.

  Before she could get all the implications of that sorted out in her head, her husband’s voice came to her clearly.

  “. . . plenty of time,” he said in a jocular tone.

  “I guess I can tell her I had to run an errand, but I absolutely, positively have to be back by three.” The woman’s voice was young, giggly—and almost as familiar as Sid’s. Julie froze, poleaxed.

  “If you’re in a hurry, we could always do it right here on the steps.”

  “Oh, Sid.” A high-pitched giggle. Rapturous silence. Then, from a little bit farther away, as though they were climbing the stairs: “What time does your plane leave?”

  “Four. God, you’ve got such a nice, tight little butt. . . .”

  Even as Julie registered that bit of insult that had just been added to injury, the voices faded into indistinctness. Or, at least, Julie could no longer hear them distinctly, which worked just as well. There was another, muffled giggle, followed by distant footsteps and the sound of a door closing. She realized, with the kind of distant clarity that was a hallmark of certain dire situations, that Sid and another woman were in her bedroom. She felt as if, like Lot’s wife, she’d witnessed something she wasn’t supposed to witness and had been turned into a pillar of salt where she stood as a result.

  She would never breathe, never move, never feel anything again.

  “Come on, we’re getting out of here.” Mac’s voice was a growl in her ear. Pillar of salt or not, he was moving her, thrusting his gun down the back of his jeans and taking Josephine from her and wrapping his hand around her wrist and literally dragging her from their hiding place.

  With no will to resist, Julie allowed herself to be dragged: through the hall, the dining room, the kitchen, the garage, while visions of what she was leaving behind swirled through her head. Sid’s Mercedes was parked in the garage. The big, black Mercedes that he drove so proudly as a symbol of his success.

  “Wait,” she said hoarsely, and freed her wrist from Mac’s hold with a sudden yank. Before he could stop her, she was back inside the house, in the cool hush of her own kitchen, quick and quiet as a cat as she snatched what she needed from the pantry cabinet. Mac was already coming across the kitchen after her as she brushed by him again on her way back down into the garage, illusive as a drop of mercury as he reached for her, silent and focused and totally intent on her task.

  With a flip of her hand and two quick turns of her wrist, she had the Mercedes’ gas cap off. Then she upended the five-pound bag of sugar she carried, and, carefully using one corner as a funnel, poured the contents down the tank.

  “What the hell . . . ?” Encumbered by Josephine, Mac wasn’t fast enough to stop her. He came to a halt a pace away, looking at her like she’d suddenly sprouted horns and a tail.

  “Sid loves this car,” Julie said with savage satisfaction, screwing the lid back on and closing the little door. Only a small amount of sugar had spilled on the floor. She kicked it under the car with her toe so that no telltale sign remained.

  “Remind me never to tick you off.” A quick smile just touched his mouth as Mac grabbed her wrist again and pulled her out of the garage. Julie crumpled the sugar bag into a tight little ball as she was hauled bodily down the driveway.

  “Get in,” Mac ordered when they reached the Blazer, jerking open the door. He took the sugar-bag ball from her and tossed it into the backseat. A quick glance back at her house told Julie that the curtains had been drawn across the master bedroom’s windows. A stab of some fierce emotion—fury, she thought, more than pain—made her grit her teeth.

  “That was Amber,” she said through her teeth, looking at Mac. “The no-good dirty rotten bastard is doing Amber in my bedroom. On my bed.”

  The thought made her so mad she wanted to spit.

  “Get in,” Mac said again, practically pushing her inside. This time she complied—she really had no choice—and he dumped Josephine in on top of her and closed her door. Seconds later he slid behind the wheel, tossing the white lawn-service sign into the backseat where the sugar bag and Josephine’s rejected collar and leash and no telling what else already took up space.

  Josephine stood on her lap, wagging her tail and staring up into Julie’s face, her expression worried, as if she somehow sensed that a crisis was occurring around her. Mac leaned across, opened the glove compartment, extracted a doggy brownie from it, and tossed it into the backseat.

  “Go get it,” he said.

  Josephine, way ahead of him, had looked around at the first stretch of his hand toward the glove compartment and was already springing like a mini-kangaroo over the seat as he spoke.

  “So who’s Amber?” With another quick, frowning glance at Julie, Mac got the car under way. Julie was barely aware of the changing scenery that meant they were moving. She felt numb, the kind of numb that signified deep psychic shock.

  And why not? The life she had known for the last eight years had just been blasted into oblivion.

  “She works for me. She and Meredith. At Carolina Belle. I don’t believe this.” Julie began to laugh, the sound high-pitched and unnatural to her own ears. “No wonder Sid needed Viagra—to keep up with her! She’s only twenty—the same age I was when Sid met me. She’s a brunette, like me. And last year she won Miss Angel of Beauty. He’s replacing me with me.”

  “Men do that a lot.” Mac’s voice was even. The glance he sent her way was stark with concern. “There’s a certain type they like, and they go back to it again and again.”

  “Oh, so now I’m a type.” Julie bared her teeth at him in a feral travesty of a smile. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Hey, it could be worse. At least you’re a beautiful, sexy type.”

  This attempt to make her feel better, if that was what it was, failed miserably. Her fists clenched. “I hate him so much I want to kill him. I want to do him harm.”

  A flicker of a smile lightened his expression. “That sugar in the gas tank thing was a pretty good start. You know, that car cost about eighty grand.”

  “Yeah.” There was a wealth of pleasure in Julie’s voice. Then it faded. “Of course, insurance will cover it. H
e’ll just get another one.”

  “Look, I know you’re hurting, I know you’re upset, but you need to focus on the big picture here. You got him right where you want him. He just handed you his head on a plate.” Mac fished his cell phone out of the console and punched a button. “Hang on a minute. I want to make sure Sid’s walk on the wild side gets recorded for posterity.”

  Before Julie could reply to that, someone on the other end of the phone answered. The voice was distant and faintly muffled, but she could hear every word.

  “Mac, man, where you at? Rawanda’s been looking for you—seems Ed Barundi came stomping in, all hot because his girlfriend found out about the background check we ran on her and dumped him—and she said you’re not answering your cell.”

  “Yeah, well, never mind that now.” Mac frowned, and hung a left that had them heading back toward downtown. “You’re working on the Laura Simmons thing, right?” There was an affirmative sound on the other end. “That puts you about five minutes from here. I need you to come on into Summerville as quick as you can and get as much audio and visual as possible on a couple shacked up in the upstairs front bedroom at 451 Magnolia in the Sutherland Estates subdivision. You got that?” He repeated the address.

  “Who you got in there?” The voice sounded interested.

  “Just do what I tell you,” Mac growled. Then, before the sputter at the other end could resolve itself into words, he added: “Catch you later.”

  Then he disconnected.

  Julie frowned at him. “Who was that?”

  The phone rang shrilly before he could reply. He glanced at it, grimaced, apparently at the number that was displayed on the caller I.D. readout, hit the power off button, and dropped the phone back down into the console. “My partner. That was him calling back, too. Sometimes he wants more information than is good for him. Don’t worry about it. We need proof that Sid’s shacked up with your employee in the marital home so that it doesn’t deteriorate into just a he-said, she-said kind of situation. Even if it’s just the two of them leaving the house together. Whoever said a picture is worth a thousand words knew what he was talking about, at least in court.”

  “I’m going to have to fire Amber,” Julie said numbly, losing focus as some of the ramifications of what she had just seen started to occur to her. “How does this sound? She walks in from her long lunch and I meet her at the door and say, You’re fired for screwing my husband. She’s worked for me for over a year. I liked her.”

  “Probably you shouldn’t go back to work right now. Give the worst of the shock time to wear off.”

  “Take two aspirin, and fire her in the morning?” Julie smiled without humor, then frowned, thinking back. As far as she’d known, Sid had only ever met Amber casually, on the very few occasions when he had stopped by the shop. If there had been signs of what was going on, she had missed them. “She’s probably been sleeping with Sid for most of the time she’s been working for me. I had no idea. I can’t believe I had no idea.”

  “That’s how it usually works.” There was a certain rough sympathy in his voice.

  “How it usually works stinks.”

  “Yeah.”

  Julie was outraged; she was sick at her stomach; she was frightened and sad and angry and a thousand other emotions all at the same time. Then yet another unwanted ramification popped into her head.

  “I’m going to have to tell my mother I’m getting a divorce.” It was a groan.

  Mac smiled faintly. “You say that like it’s the worst thing in the world. What, do you have one of those mothers from hell?”

  Julie tipped her head back against the seat, closed her eyes and shook her head. “My mother is wonderful. She’s super, fantastic, one of a kind. I love her. But—my being married to Sid means a lot to her. Sort of like I won the ultimate prize. When she finds out I’m getting a divorce, she’s going to just die. She’ll probably try to get us into counseling or something. And she’ll definitely drag my sister into it. Then Kenny—my sister’s husband; he works for Sid—will get dragged into it, too, and when I still insist on getting a divorce everybody will have to choose sides and Kenny’ll lose his job and the girls—my nieces—will be destitute and . . .”

  “Whoa,” Mac said. “It won’t be as bad as all that.”

  Julie straightened in the seat, clenched her fists and looked at him. “Yes, it will. It will be just that bad.” A lump rose in her throat and she swallowed painfully. “How could Sid do this? When we got married, I thought we would be married forever. I was so happy.”

  Her voice broke.

  Mac’s lips compressed. The glance he shot her was unreadable. “You’ll be happy again. Think of this as a pothole in the road of life. You’ll come out on the other side as good as new.”

  Julie made a disbelieving sound. “How do you know? Were you ever married?” A hideous thought occurred to her, and the lump was forgotten as her eyes widened. Another blow was more than she could bear. “You’re not married now, are you?”

  Mac shook his head, and Julie found that she could breathe again.

  “Not now. For about nine months five years or so ago.”

  “You’re divorced?”

  Mac nodded.

  “What happened?” Her voice was hushed, as if she was asking for the details of some dreadful accident.

  Mac shrugged. “When I got fired from being a cop, my wife decided that she couldn’t deal with a husband who was not only an embarrassment but couldn’t pay the bills. She left me. Best thing that could have happened to me. Of course, I didn’t think so at the time.”

  His insouciant attitude hid a world of remembered pain, Julie was sure. She reached out and laid a consoling hand on his jeans-clad thigh.

  “She must have been insane.”

  Mac gave her another of those inscrutable looks, and covered her hand with his. His hand was far bigger than hers, long-fingered, broad through the palm, bronzed, utterly masculine. And warm. Very, very warm. Just like the muscled thigh beneath the jeans. Lately, it seemed, she had craved warm.

  “Funny, I was just thinking the same thing about Sid.”

  It took a couple of seconds for that to sink in. When it did, Julie felt her heart skip a beat. She drew in a deep, cleansing breath.

  There were two ways to look at what had just happened, she thought. One: Sid had betrayed her. Or, two: Sid had set her free.

  It was Julie time, she told herself as she had once before. Only now, there was nothing and no one, not even her own conscience, to stand in the way of her going after what she wanted.

  She looked at Mac.

  “What are your plans for the afternoon? Do you have any, or are you free?” Her tone was politeness itself.

  But something in her voice or expression must have been off kilter, because he looked at her carefully.

  “I’m as free as I want to be. Why?”

  Julie smiled.

  “Because I want you to take me somewhere where we can be alone and take off all my clothes and fuck me until I scream.”

  19

  “WHAT?” MAC COULDN’T BELIEVE HIS EARS. He had a sudden mental vision of a small gray mouse with a head full of careful plans looking to the left, looking to the right, stepping cautiously into the road—and being flattened from behind by an eighteen-wheeler. His bodily response was so sudden and enthusiastic that it was painful. His mental response was less clear-cut. “Darlin’, you want to be careful what you say. Somebody just might take you up on that kind of offer one of these days.”

  “I want you to take me up on it right now. I want you to take me somewhere we can be alone and take off my clothes and . . .”

  “I heard you the first time,” Mac interrupted hastily, not sure he could live through the exquisite agony of hearing it again.

  Julie smiled, unfastened her seat belt, curled both long, slim, tanned and utterly bare legs beneath her on the black leather seat—did the woman never wear stockings? he wondered testily—and leaned forward to
put a hand on his shoulder and her tongue in his ear.

  “Jesus,” Mac said, and drove off the road. Gravel from the shoulder flew every which way before he got the car straightened out and all four wheels once again on the pavement. By then Julie was back in her seat, her seat belt refastened, smiling at him like a cat with its eye on a nice, plump canary.

  He had a feeling that he was earmarked for the role of canary.

  “Don’t you want to?” Julie asked, giving him a look that would have melted a glacier.

  His instant, instinctive answer was, more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. He would gladly have surrendered one or more body parts for the privilege. But there were other important considerations to keep in mind, not the least of which was that his original objective here was not nailing Sid’s wife, but nailing Sid. Sid was the key to finding Daniel. He was more sure of that with every passing day. He’d just had a major break: he’d managed to access All-American Builders’ files from Sid’s home computer.

  Hard to believe Sid couldn’t come up with a better password for his business files than Vader, as in Darth Vader of Star Wars fame. Sid used to use that name on a vanity plate on the front of his black Porsche when he was a teenager. The car, license plate and all, had made a big impression on the little kid Mac had been then. The moniker was still as appropriate as ever. In fact, more so. It fit Sid to a T, just as it always had. Like Vader, Sid was corrupt almost all the way through.

  Of course, most people probably didn’t know that once upon a time—Mac had no idea if he still was—Sid had been a big Star Wars fan. Daniel had been, too. Mac, as little brother, had soaked it all up.

  And it had just paid off.

  Thanks to the finger-sized memory chip he carried on his key chain for just such emergencies, the contents of those files were dangling from the Blazer’s ignition at that very moment. As soon as he’d accessed the information, he’d pulled the business end of the memory key from his ring, plugged it into an open USB port, and downloaded. The whole operation had taken perhaps a minute. When he got home, he would transfer what he’d captured to his own computer and examine it at his leisure. If what he hoped was on there somewhere actually turned up, all he would have to do was make a few calls to set in motion the ultimate payback.