by Lisa Jackson
“From whom?”
“My mother. My brother.”
Paterno’s eyebrows elevated. “You don’t strike me as the kind of guy who lets himself be led around by the nose.”
“Depends on whose doin’ the leadin’,” Nick drawled, his blue eyes sparkling in challenge and even Paterno’s lips twitched. “I figured it was time. The other night convinced me.”
“Because Mrs. Cahill got sick?”
“Because she nearly died.” Nick’s grin evaporated. “As you said, it was a good thing I was around.”
Paterno nodded and scratched the back of his neck thoughtfully. “So where was your husband?” he asked Marla.
Good question. “Out. On business.”
Paterno picked up a report, adjusted his glasses and said, “It says here the 911 call came in at 11:50 p.m.”
“That’s about right.” Nick crossed his legs, propping one battered Nike on his other knee.
Paterno wasn’t satisfied. “Pretty late for business, don’t you think?”
She bristled a little, heat climbing up the back of her neck, though she, too, wondered about her husband’s mysterious whereabouts. What was he up to? Why didn’t she trust him? And why did she feel she had to defend him to this cop who was just doing his job? “Alex doesn’t keep banker’s hours.”
“Neither do a lot of us.” Anthony Paterno dropped the page onto his already overburdened desk, then folded his hands over the entire messy pile of papers. “Mrs. Cahill, can you think of any reason why anyone would want you dead?”
“You think someone is trying to kill me?” she asked, her heart pounding. It was the second time within a couple of hours that someone had suggested what she’d tried to shrug off as paranoia.
“If your story is accurate, then someone deliberately got in the path of your car. Now your thinking’s still a little fuzzy, so I wouldn’t jump to too many conclusions on that alone, but you did nearly die the other night and I was just wondering if anyone could have given you something to make you vomit, knowing you might suffocate?”
“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “I ate with my family downstairs. It was the first time I’d come down to take a meal with them and I had to have soup as my mouth was still wired shut. Later I had something to drink. I kept water or tea or juice near the bed and it was usually brought up by someone on the staff. But I wasn’t given any different medication or anything.” She decided to be as forthright as possible with the detective. Leaning forward, she placed her elbows on the edge of the desk. “I guess I’d better tell you that I thought there might have been an intruder in my room that night.”
“Hell, yes, you’d better tell me.” Paterno’s head snapped up. His gaze narrowed. “Who?”
“I don’t know. I was asleep and thought I heard someone, a man, whisper ‘Die, bitch!’ as he hovered over my bed, but when I really woke up and turned on the lights, no one was there. I even checked the bedroom floor but the only thing I accomplished was to convince my daughter I’m certifiable and should be locked in some kind of lunatic asylum.” She sighed. “The upshot was that no one was in the house who shouldn’t have been.”
“But you ‘felt’ that someone was there?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t bring it up before because I can’t say for certain. I’ve got a serious memory problem, I’ve been having crazy, disjointed dreams and I might have imagined the whole thing. Maybe it was part of a nightmare.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“No,” she admitted, her blood turning to ice when she thought of the feeling that someone was hovering over her bed. So close. So evil. So intent on doing her harm. “I—I’m not sure about anything. Even today when we visited my father. He was certain I was someone else, someone named Kylie and I . . . I can’t remember enough to prove him wrong.”
“He’s pretty sick, isn’t he?”
“Very,” Nick answered. “The nurse thought it might have been his painkillers talking.”
“But you don’t know if he was rambling or there was some truth to his accusation.” Again the hound-dog face was turned toward Marla as Paterno scratched a note to himself. “So, I’m asking again. Who do you think would want to harm you or kill you?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
Paterno’s gaze swung to Nick. “You seem pretty close to all this. Have you got any ideas?”
Nick hesitated. “I haven’t been down here long enough to figure it out. I know that my brother has been working odd hours, and he keeps to himself more than I remember in the past.”
“And the corporation’s got financial troubles.”
“Its share.”
“Why would Mrs. Cahill’s husband want to kill her?”
“No one said he did,” Marla cut in. “Alex wasn’t hovering over my bed that night,” she added indignantly. She would have recognized Alex’s voice. But he wasn’t home, was he? He had to be called back to the house. Could he have snarled his threat, dashed out of the room and . . . what? Gotten into his Jag and driven to a late meeting . . . “It wasn’t Alex.”
“Be that as it may, is there any reason he’d want you dead? Have you got a lot of life insurance? Does he have another woman? Does he think you’re involved with someone else,” he asked, and his gaze traveled pointedly to Nick again.
“I don’t think so.”
The chair creaked as Paterno pushed himself to his feet. “We don’t have enough here, no concrete evidence that someone’s out to kill you, to warrant police protection.”
“I’m sure I don’t need it,” Marla insisted. “The house is a fortress.”
Paterno didn’t look convinced. He clicked his pen nervously. “No security system is foolproof. If your intruder was real, that proves it.” Sifting through the pages on his desk, he pulled out a copy of a pencil drawing.
“This is a composite sketch of the man we think killed Charles Biggs. One of the nurses on staff got a look at him and talked to the police artist.” He handed the sketch to Marla but the shaded drawing meant nothing to her, nor to Nick. “Now,” Paterno turned on his computer and typed rapidly, “we took this, did a computer enhancement and came up with this.” An image of a mustached man in squarish glasses and a thrusting jaw came into view. Paterno rotated the screen and Marla gazed at the face of a stranger.
She shook her head.
“How about now?” Paterno clicked on a key and the mustache disappeared.
“No . . .”
“And now?” The glasses came off.
He tried several different combinations, adding beards and changing hairlines and color, but each image was just another stranger to Marla. “You have to remember I don’t even know my own family,” she admitted.
“What about you?” Paterno asked Nick.
Leaning forward, Nick studied the images as the detective flipped through them again. “I don’t think so,” he finally said and Paterno, a disheartened expression converging on his oversized features, snapped the computer off. “We’re looking for Pamela Delacroix’s daughter,” he said. “She’s married to a guy named Robert Johnson. Haven’t found her yet.”
“I’d like to talk to her when you do,” Marla said. “To offer my sympathy, if nothing else.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” the detective promised.
They talked for a few more minutes, then Paterno seemed satisfied that the interview was over. “Okay, that about covers it for today, but if anything else happens, I want to hear about it.”
“You will,” Marla agreed as she and Nick stood. “I don’t suppose you’ve located my purse?” She hoisted the shoulder strap of the handbag she’d taken from her closet onto her shoulder. “I should have had it with me that night.”
“It’s still missing?” Paterno frowned, chewed, clicked his pen. “I’ll have the scene checked again.”
“Thanks.”
The phone on his desk jangled. Detective Paterno snatched up the receiver and wedged it between his shoulder and ch
in as he answered. “Paterno . . . yeah . . . no, I’m just finishing up here. I’ll be down in five.” He hung up and reached for his jacket. “I’m serious about this. If anything happens out of the ordinary, give me a call.”
“You got it,” Nick promised.
By the time they walked out of the station, night was falling over the city. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee,” Nick offered as they waited at the crosswalk and a crowd gathered on the corner. Rush hour traffic clogged the city. The smells of exhaust and rain were heavy in the air.
A chilly blast of air ripped through the streets, catching in the hem of Marla’s raincoat and blowing the short strands of her hair from her face. Nick’s hand was at her arm, his offer hanging in the wintry air.
“I don’t know,” she said, though she longed for more time with him, time alone, time to sort out her feelings.
“It’s just coffee.”
The light changed. They hurried across the street in a tide of pedestrians. “I should get back before dinner. I haven’t seen Cissy since this morning and I put the baby down around noon.” She smiled up at him wryly. “I am a mother, you know, and therefore have a few motherly duties.”
“Then we’ll get a cup to go,” he said as they stepped into an elevator and rode to the third level. They didn’t touch on the way to the pickup. Marla’s jaw ached and her head pounded with a thousand nagging questions, none of which she could answer. Who was she? Why did her father think she was someone else? Why couldn’t she remember? Would anyone really want her dead? Why, when she was married to one man, was she so perilously attracted to another?
She leaned against the seat and closed her eyes. The sounds of the city—the rumble of engines, whine of wheels, honk of horns—faded as Nick switched on the radio and some country song filled the interior. What was she doing even having coffee with Nick? It was sure to spell disaster. She had only to think about last night and remember how easy it was to fall victim to temptation. Even now, at the thought of his hands bunching in the satin, delving beneath it to skim her skin, her breath caught in the back of her throat.
What would be the sin?
Her marriage was a facade. She didn’t even sleep with her husband.
Why not take a step on the wild side, discover the woman she sensed was hiding in Marla Cahill’s life, in her house, in her skin?
Opening her lids a crack, she watched Nick from the corner of her eye. Rugged. Male. All honed features. Sinew and muscle. Tensile strength and quick mind. She bit her lip. As if he had somehow divined the turn of her thoughts, he slashed a look at her that cut right to her center. Blue eyes found hers and locked for a heartbeat. He felt it, too. Here in the confines of his damned truck with the city pulsing around them, oncoming headlights daring to breach the intimate darkness of the truck’s interior, Nick felt the fire. The want.
In that split second, she responded—immediate and incendiary, hot as a devil’s breath and far more dangerous.
Don’t go there, she warned herself and hugged the passenger door. You have too much to think about right now—someone might be trying to kill you. You don’t really know who you are. Kissing Nick would only lead to more. Touching. Caressing. Pressing hot skin to hotter flesh. Just like last night, when you were nearly caught. You would be making the worst mistake of your life and you could lose everything: your husband, your children, your home, your own self-respect.
She squeezed her eyes shut, tamping down the unwanted emotions.
“Don’t worry,” he said as he slowed the truck. When she opened her eyes, she found him hunting for a parking space. “You’re safe with me.”
Oh, yeah, right. About as safe as I would be with a lit match in a pool of gasoline!
She smiled at the thought. “Maybe you’re not safe with me, brother-in-law.”
“That, lady, is a given.” He parked not far from the waterfront, half a block from Ghirardelli Square where the brickfaced buildings surrounded a courtyard and clock tower.
Nick zeroed in on a coffee shop that specialized in exotic flavors. They ordered to go, sampled from a tray of muffins and scones, then carried their steaming cups outside. Fog curled in gentle wisps through the streets that were guarded by old warehouses now housing shops and boutiques. Thousands of tiny white lights glimmered in the trees while lampposts gave off a bluer, more ethereal glow.
“Maybe you should tell me about us,” she said as they walked together around a mermaid fountain in the square. “You know, where we met. What we did.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Try to roll back the years, will you? One of us would like to catch up on her memories.” Cradling her cup in her hands she took a sip of the warm latte and licked a bit of foam from her lips.
Nick caught the motion and glanced away. “I guess you’ve got a point.” Sipping from his paper cup, he looked down at her. “It all really started about oh, sixteen, maybe seventeen years ago. We were in our twenties and we’d known each other all our lives because our parents ran in the same social circle.
“I was always getting into trouble—one thing or another. Usually booze or women or both were involved. I had trouble staying in school, and didn’t like it, much to my mother’s embarrassment and my father’s disgust. He had to bail me out time and time again, but I just never quite fit into the Cahill mold.”
“The rebel.”
“Yeah, well, at the time, you seemed to like it.” Together, in an ever-dwindling crowd, they walked along the sidewalks.
“It’s seductive,” she admitted, hating to think she was the kind of woman who liked to step onto the wild side, who found dangerous men who lived by their own rules attractive, but knowing there was a grain of truth to it.
“You changed your mind about me.”
“How?” She took a long swallow of coffee, felt it warm her from the inside out as she studied the lines of his face, the hard angle of his jaw and the way his dark hair fell over his forehead.
He scowled into the night. “I guess you finally decided you wanted to settle down. You started making noises that way but I wasn’t ready. About that time Alex decided you’d be the perfect wife. For him.”
“And I just went along with it?”
He snorted. “You never just went along with anything, Marla. But you were a flirt and got your kicks out of pitting the two of us against each other,” he said, his words tainted with a never-forgotten disgust. “I got sick of it and you got married.”
“So you didn’t come to the wedding.”
“Didn’t see any reason to be a hypocrite.” His nostrils flared slightly. “I couldn’t envision myself toasting best wishes to the bride and groom, so I was a no-show.”
“And that was that?” she asked.
“The short and abbreviated version. Didn’t want to bother you with details. Besides, it’s all water under the bridge now.”
“Is it?” she asked, lifting a doubting eyebrow as she recalled the passion of the night before.
“It has to be.” His eyes turned a darker shade of blue. He grabbed her left hand suddenly and lifted it up so that her wedding ring glimmered in the lamplight. She gasped and nearly sloshed her coffee onto her coat. “Last night aside, you’re still a married woman, Marla.”
That was the damned truth. “I know,” she said. “Oh God, how I know.” Wrestling her hand from his, she added, “We both agreed we made a mistake. But I still want to know everything, Nick. Everything about us.”
“Jesus.”
“I mean it,” she insisted, turning her face upward, feeling the mist against her cheeks, daring to meet his angry gaze with her own.
He finished his coffee, then crumpled his cup in his fist. “There’s no reason to dredge it all up again.”
“Isn’t there?”
“Nope.” He tossed his cup in a trash basket and she linked her arm through his as they walked along the shop-lined street, dodging other pedestrians and cars, smelling the salt in the breeze.
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��Don’t you think I deserve to know the truth?”
“What good would it do, Mrs. Cahill?”
“Maybe none, but I keep getting mixed signals from you. One minute I feel like you want me, the next you’re pushing me away.”
“Let’s get something straight, okay?” he said. “I always want you.” Her pulse leaped at the admission, at the anguish she saw in his features. “And I’ll always push you away.” Her heart ached and guilt sliced through her soul, the same brutal guilt she saw reflected in his night-darkened eyes. So this is what it felt like to be star-crossed lovers, to be fated to never be with the one man she loved, to feel the intense heartache that would certainly follow her like a shadow for years to come.
At that thought she closed her eyes and tried to get a grip. She didn’t love Nick. Couldn’t. She didn’t even know him. Or herself. What was wrong with her? And why in God’s name did she feel such pain to think she threw away a future with him? “I understand what you’re saying, believe me, and I’m not trying to be difficult or to open old wounds, old pain, but I think it’s important that I know everything about myself,” she said earnestly, studying the lines of his face, the ravage of emotions that pulled his skin tight over his bones and caused his mouth to curve downward. “Everything,” she repeated, refusing to back down. “No matter how hard it is to take. No matter how painful. I want it all. The good, the bad, the ugly.”
“You might not like what you see.”
“It has to be better than imagining and fantasizing and fearing and just plain not knowing.” Determined, she grabbed his elbow, her fingers locking over the rough leather of his jacket. “Tell me the truth, Nick. No matter what it is.”
“Everything?” he asked, and she saw something shift in his gaze; noticed the change from stubborn refusal to something far more treacherous. The air between them seemed to sizzle as his gaze dropped from her eyes, to her mouth and then lower to the hollow of her throat where she felt her pulse pounding wildly. Erratically.
“Yes. Everything. I want it all.”