by Leslie Kelly
And he drew her back into his arms.
15
Lottie
I LOVE MORNING SEX. I love the laziness of it, when every stroke is accentuated and every touch lingers. At least, that’s the kind of morning sex I’d had with Simon.
This morning was no exception. Despite my concerns—and the stress we were both under—the minute I saw that look in his eyes, I knew everything else could wait. This was far more important.
Especially if there were any chance I was still leaving the next day. Because, as of yet, I hadn’t figured out a way to get him to ask me to stay.
Lying on Simon’s chest, I leaned down and met his mouth in a deep, wet kiss full of promise and hunger. He cupped my face, wrapping his fingers in my hair as he so loved to do. I loved the way he played with my hair—so sensuously, reverently almost.
Ending the kiss, I reached down and shoved the covers away, wanting to see him. Wanting to watch us. A sexy, confident smile signaled his approval.
Straddling him, I cupped his sex against mine, not letting him enter me yet, wanting to do much more before we reached that delicious point. In the bright light of day, I looked down at him, studying his handsome face and his stubbled jaw. I stroked his chest, then bent and pressed my lips against his scar, saying nothing. Nothing needed to be said.
I continued kissing my way across his chest, dipping my tongue into the hollow of his throat, then lower so I could swirl it over his flat nipple. He jerked beneath me, thrusting up in reaction. I hissed as he slid a tiny bit into me, loving the feel of him without the separation of a condom. I wanted his hot skin, just him, but I knew we couldn’t be so foolish.
He appeared to agree. “You feel amazing. So hot, so wet…but…”
“I got it,” I murmured, reaching over to the bedside table and grabbing a condom from the box lying there. My position gave him access and he took advantage of it, sucking my nipple into his mouth and savoring it completely.
Groaning, I stayed still, loving the thorough attention. My body began to move, through no volition of mine, until I was rubbing my wet lips against his erection, dying—just dying—for another forbidden taste.
I like kids. Would he like kids?
I forced the thought away and tore the condom open. He took it out of my hands, which were shaking too much to deal with it. Scooting back, I watched as he covered himself, making a mental promise that someday—hopefully someday soon—I would have him without any barriers. Any separation whatsoever.
“I need you so much, Lottie,” he whispered as he shifted me back into position over him.
“I…need you, too.” I’d almost said the wrong word. Almost admitted I loved him. But I knew he wasn’t ready to hear that yet. Not while living under this cloud.
So I slowly began to move, sliding down onto him, taking him into my body. Imprinting the beautiful sensation into the recesses of my memory.
Just in case the cloud never disappeared. And this was all we had.
SIMON LEFT after breakfast. I know he absolutely hated to go, not wanting to leave me alone here. But since we’d gone through every inch of the place yesterday, I felt pretty safe. “Every door and window is locked and I’ll barricade the front door after you,” I’d said as I followed him out, practically pushing him out of the house.
Promising to be gone only an hour or two, he left, and I went straight to my laptop. I wished, for a second, that I knew a little more about computers because I’d dearly love to try to track down whoever had been piggybacking on Simon’s network. But my knowledge was pretty basic.
I did, however, have a whole lot of experience with that modern marvel, Google. So, not even certain what I was looking for, I went to the familiar site and started typing names into the search bar. I started with the most pressing situation— Simon’s ghost.
Louisa Mitchell turned up nothing useful and a million sites that meant absolutely nothing to me. So I moved on, suddenly wanting to know more about Charleston.
Certainly the police in Charleston had searched for Simon’s attackers this way, but it was worth a try. So I typed in what I had. And using just the suspects names, Linda and Joseph Harrington, I again got a huge amount of hits.
Most of the first few pages were about the attack in Charleston, but the rest ranged from engagement notices to promotion announcements to articles on economics. Pages of them, and obviously too much to sort through. “This won’t work, the names are too common.”
I went a step further. Added in the mysterious Uncle Lou and the city of Philadelphia.
Which still went absolutely nowhere.
“Dammit,” I muttered, still trying to catch that thought.
I kept playing around with different combinations, using quotations here and there. With no luck.
Finally, realizing my eyes were beginning to get blurry, I thought about the fact that I had never even finished the job I was sent here to do. I’d gotten some good stuff on Josef Zangara for my professor, but I hadn’t even sent him all the information I’d collected. So opening my file of notes, I did a quick spell check, intending to zip them right out to him as an attachment.
I barely paid attention as the misspelled words popped up for verification or correction. Most were just formal names the software didn’t recognize. I was a pretty good speller. And honestly, I was so anxious to get back to work on Simon’s situation that I almost just said to hell with it and sent it without finishing. But there were a couple of typos, so I stuck with it. No sense having my first important, paid job look sloppy.
Then another box came up, with a misspelled word. Also a typo.
“Mrs. Zangara.” My eyes focused on what I’d written. Sighing, I said, “Obviously your name was not spelled Loussa unless you were one loose-a woman.”
Grabbing my handwritten notes to ascertain what the heck the woman’s real name had been, I got it and went right back to the document on my computer scene.
It wasn’t until I’d corrected the spelling that the word actually sunk in to my brain. I froze, and at that moment, that elusive, annoying little uncaptured memory burst into my mind like a dazzling ray of sparkling sunshine.
“Oh, my God,” I whispered. “Louisa Zangara.”
Louisa. Like Louisa Mitchell, the woman who’d been bothering Simon’s uncle. Louisa was not exactly an uncommon name but it wasn’t run-of-the-mill, either.
That’s what had been bugging me since last night. Some part of my brain had obviously remembered seeing the name before, when looking into the Zangara case, but I hadn’t been able to pull it into focus.
“Sorry, professor, you need to go back on the back burner.”
Immediately flipping back to the search screen, I typed in several new words. Louisa Mitchell. Louisa Zangara. Seaton House.
And immediately found what I had been searching for all along.
“This can’t be true,” I whispered, staring blankly at the words swimming before my eyes. I had to read it four times before I believed it.
The article was a brief one, from a small town newspaper outside of Philadelphia. It was dated three years ago and was a local interest piece about a woman becoming a centenarian. A Mrs. Louisa Zangara had just celebrated her 100th birthday.
At her side was her loving family, including her son, numerous grandchildren and even some great-grandchildren. Among them, Louisa Mitchell.
That, however, wasn’t what had my heart pounding out of control in my chest. No, the absolute stunning part was when I saw the list of names of the other attendees of the big birthday party. And when I saw the group picture accompanying the article.
There were two familiar names in the article. And two familiar faces in the picture. One of those people was alive and sitting in a jail cell in Charleston.
The other had fallen to her death one hot night in June.
The Harringtons were the great-grandchildren of Josef Zangara. And the siblings of Mrs. Louisa Mitchell.
The mysterious Lou had been
their sister. The identical twin of the woman Simon had killed.
THOUGH STUNNED by what I’d realized, I somehow managed to keep my head together. I felt certain I had figured out the whole sordid story of what had happened to Simon and to his uncle. I had no idea why, but Josef Zangara’s great-grandchildren apparently shared an obsession with Seaton House.
When they couldn’t get Roger Denton to sell it to them, they’d killed him. Perhaps they’d assumed Simon would sell right away, not wanting to bother with a broken-down old hotel far away from his busy lifestyle. Or, perhaps the Harringtons hadn’t done their homework very well and hadn’t realized Roger had an heir. I couldn’t imagine how furious they must have been, not only when they made that realization—but also when Simon proved as stubborn about selling as his uncle had been.
Having murdered once, maybe it had been easier to plan it a second time. Louisa had done the dirty work here at Seaton House, but she’d let her twin sister and their younger brother go after Simon in Charleston.
“Oh, God, Simon, where are you?” I asked as I went to the front window, staring outside for probably the twentieth time in an hour. I’d tried his cell phone but either he had it turned off, or else the whole town of Trouble was buried under a cellular curse.
Finally, knowing I’d lose my mind if I didn’t keep myself occupied, I decided to go back to the attic, to see if there was anything more I could find out about Zangara and his family. There were still trunks I hadn’t gone through.
Careful to take the key Simon had given me, I propped the door open with a chair. Our prankster hadn’t taken out any lightbulbs since my attic adventure, and it was broad daylight, so I felt pretty comfortable about being up here alone. My only fear was that I might be too far away to hear if someone tried to sneak into the house. I made a point of going down and checking every ten or fifteen minutes.
Working my way farther back into the attic, I sat in the dusty cavern, going through yet another trunk of old records. The place was utterly silent, not a pipe rattling or a hint of breeze blowing under the eaves. And I began to feel a little more anxious. I was, after all, alone on the top floor of an immense building where a murderer had recently been lurking. And that building stood alone near the top of a mountain.
“Wish I’d told Mark to bring on the cavalry,” I whispered, my own voice sounding awkward in the silence.
A few seconds later, however, the silence was broken. I heard a strange sound. Strange, and yet familiar just the same. It sounded electronic, a quiet double ding that was totally out of place in this setting. For a second, I had a mental lapse and thought I’d brought my laptop with me. Because the sound was reminiscent of the one my e-mail system made when I had incoming messages.
My laptop, however, was downstairs, on the first floor. I hadn’t brought it up here. There was no way in hell that’s what I had heard.
Genuinely curious, I walked toward a shadowy corner of the attic, certain the noise had come from an area behind a huge sheet-draped piece of furniture. Tugging the sheet off, I shrieked a little bit when I caught sight of my own reflection in a warped mirror on the front of an old-fashioned armoire.
Dropping the sheet to the floor, I walked in a circle around the piece. It wasn’t until I’d stepped all the way behind it that I realized the floor beneath my feet sounded different here. Less solid. Almost…hollow.
I saw the opening for the trapdoor the moment I looked down. “Son of a bitch,” I whispered, suddenly absolutely certain that there was some kind of secret room down there. A place Simon and I had overlooked when we’d searched before.
The place where his ghost had been hiding.
The ballsy girl inside me was reaching for the handle two seconds before my brain screamed hold it. Though I’d been sitting here in silence for a very long time, that computer sound had to have come from below this door. And unless I was mistaken, a computer didn’t stay on and keep accepting incoming messages for very long without somebody using it.
Somebody’s down there.
I slowly backed away, bringing my fist to my mouth to keep myself from shouting. I didn’t want to scream in fear—what I really wanted to do was yell, “Come out here, you witch,” so I could confront the woman who’d been part of a plot to kill the man I loved.
But I’m not stupid. If it was, indeed, Louisa Harrington Mitchell hiding in that hole, she was most likely armed. I already knew she was dangerous—murderous, in fact.
So still walking backward, never taking my eyes off the trapdoor, I shuffled along the attic floor. Bumping into a piece of furniture, I winced and muttered a curse, then bit my lip, telling myself to stay quiet, not to alert the woman that I’d figured out she was there.
I almost made it. The stairs were a few feet away. But something—my tentative footsteps, perhaps—had given me away. Because, to my horror, I saw the trapdoor slowly begin to rise.
And I ran.
16
Simon
WHEN SIMON PULLED UP in front of Seaton House and saw Lottie running along the cliffs in the backyard, he nearly lost his mind. He’d never felt closer to insanity than he did right then—the sight was something that terrified him more than anything he’d ever experienced.
Nothing during the long drive up here had prepared him for it. He’d been driving quickly, wanting to get back to her, of course, but since the trip into town to see the lawyer hadn’t offered any information they hadn’t already figured out, he hadn’t been feeling particularly anxious.
Then he heard her scream and saw her running.
And saw the woman running behind her.
“Oh, God,” he snapped, immediately cutting the steering wheel to the right and driving his car up onto the grass, almost to the front steps. Out of view of the back lawn.
He hadn’t been able to make out what the blond woman had been holding in her hand. But if it was a gun, the very last thing he wanted to do was put Lottie in any more danger.
Not even yanking the keys out of the ignition, he leapt out of the car and charged around the side of the house, using the outbuildings and trees to hide his approach.
“Stop running,” the woman called. “I want to talk to you.”
Lottie, who had taken refuge behind the huge boulder they’d once ducked behind, said nothing. Smart girl.
Simon crouched behind a scraggly hedge, mostly devoid of leaves, watching as the blond woman approached the cliffs, looking one way, then the other, trying to figure out where Lottie had gone.
This had to be Louisa Mitchell, the woman his uncle’s attorney had confirmed had been harassing Roger Denton incessantly before his death. And now, as he darted from the hedge to the corner of the old storage shed, he saw something glittering in the woman’s hand and knew she was holding a gun.
She had to be desperate. She wasn’t even going to try to make this look like an accident. Though, Simon was sure, if she could get Lottie close enough to the cliffs, she’d probably try.
Going around to the other side of the small building, he made one more quick dash, until he again caught sight of Lottie. She’d shimmied up the side of the boulder and was trying to get on top of it. In about five seconds, the woman with the gun would round the corner and see her.
Simon wasn’t about to risk it. He was preparing to make an all-out run for it, to charge the woman, counting on having the element of surprise. But before he could do it, she spotted Lottie. And his heart stopped.
“Get down or I’ll shoot you right now,” the woman called, still oblivious to Simon’s presence a few yards away.
Lottie, however, wasn’t oblivious. She looked past the woman and saw him there. They quickly made eye contact, but she didn’t make a single gesture that might tip her attacker off.
Smart? The woman was brilliant. And she had more guts than any man he’d ever met. Because slowly, calmly, she nodded at the woman and slid down the rock, wincing slightly.
Later, when he had her alone, he’d peel off her shirt and k
iss the skin of her stomach, which he knew she’d just scraped. Then he’d kiss every inch of the rest of her body to make sure she was alive and safe and his.
“You’re Louisa Mitchell, I presume?” Lottie said. Then she raised her voice, and Simon knew she wanted him to hear what she said. “Louisa Harrington Mitchell?”
The woman visibly started. From a few feet behind her, Simon saw the way her whole body went rigid. “How did you figure out who I am?”
“You were sloppy,” Lottie snapped. “You left a trail a college student like me could find so you’ll certainly never get away with whatever it is you’re trying to do here.”
Simon immediately stiffened as well, shocked as the implication washed over him. Harrington. He knew that name, it was imprinted in his mind.
This woman was connected to the couple who’d attacked him.
Lousia didn’t move and her arm—the one with the gun at the end of it—didn’t come down. “And just what is it you think I’m trying to do here?”
Lottie shrugged, still appearing calm, though he knew she had to be terrified. He’d looked down the barrel of a gun. It sure as hell wasn’t fun. “You’re obviously trying to scare Simon into selling this house. But killing me isn’t going to accomplish that—he’ll never let you have it.”
The woman laughed. That sound was almost worse than the sound of a gunshot because Simon instantly realized she was completely willing to kill again. “If your crazy lover killed you, then threw himself over the cliff in remorse, who do you think will care if someone else comes along and buys this old relic?”
Lottie’s face went pale. Simon stepped forward, determined to stop this now, but she narrowed her eyes and gave a tiny shake of her head, telling him to stay back. Maybe she was waiting for a sign—some signal that the woman had let her guard down. She’d tell him when he could make his move, obviously having a better view of what was happening.