Taking the Heat

by Brenda Novak

  “Let’s go to my room where we can lock the door, then.”

  He cupped the fullness of her breast. “Tell me you have birth control,” he said. “I don’t want to leave any surprises behind.”

  “I’m on the Pill, remember?”

  “I got the impression you haven’t been very diligent about taking them.”

  “I have since I met you.”

  He gave her a cocky grin, glanced toward the kitchen to make sure they were still alone, and slid his hand down her shorts.

  His fingers worked their way inside the leg of her panties, and Gabrielle gasped. “I see you haven’t forgotten anything,” she said, her nerves humming.

  He nuzzled her neck as his fingers found the most sensitive part of her. “That’s the problem, I have a long memory.”

  Gabrielle closed her eyes and let her head fall back, no longer able to think clearly for the pleasure coursing through her. “We might not have forever, Tucker. But we have tonight.”

  “Then we’d better make the most of it,” he said and, just as he brought her to the brink of climax, stopped long enough to pull her down the hall.

  “TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED the day your wife died,” Gabrielle said. She was resting comfortably in the crook of Tucker’s arm, still damp with sweat from making love.

  He lightly caressed her bare back. “Why do you want to talk about that?”

  “Because I don’t want the mystery of it standing between us. I want to know what you know. Maybe I can see something you’ve missed.”

  “Me and my wonderful defense team?” he asked, mixing sarcasm with skepticism.

  “At least I’ll be able to start coming up with my own theories as to what really happened.”

  He kissed her forehead. “You’re grasping at straws.”

  “Humor me.”

  Using the hand that was in a cast, he propped up his pillow and began to play with a lock of her hair. “We had an argument, which wasn’t in the least unusual.”

  “Did your arguments ever get violent?”

  “Not really. She tried to hit me a few times. I held her arms but never struck her.”

  “What was your argument about the day she died?”

  He released her hair in favor of her breast. “Are you sure you want to go into this? Isn’t there something more pleasant we could be doing?”

  She covered his hand with her own, delighting in the intimacy of having nothing to hide from him. “I want to know. I want to feel like an insider in your life, okay? Come on. What was the fight about?”

  He gave up trying to distract her and kissed her fingers instead. “Peggy.”

  “Who’s Peggy?”

  “She was my nineteen-year-old secretary at the real-estate office. Andrea thought I was sleeping with her.”

  “Were you?” Gabrielle said, pulling her hand away.

  “Relax.” He nipped softly at her shoulder. “I wasn’t sleeping with anyone, not even Andrea most of the time.”

  Gabrielle softened, but only marginally. “Then why was she accusing you?”

  “I think she wanted me to be having an affair.”

  “What? No wife wants her husband to—”

  “Andrea did,” Tucker said. “Then she could blame me for our marriage falling apart and have a good excuse for her own actions.”

  Gabrielle considered this as she stroked the light dusting of hair on his chest. She couldn’t get enough of touching him. “Hansen once told me you hired a private detective who caught her cheating on you.”

  He chuckled but there was no humor in it. “I did, but that wasn’t all she was doing. She was taking drugs, staying out all night.”

  Gabrielle couldn’t imagine why any woman would turn to drugs and having affairs if she was married to a man like Tucker. She herself had never felt more satisfied. When she was with him, the terrible feeling of displacement she’d known since she was a child disappeared. “What kind of drugs?”

  “Mostly Ecstasy, I think. Who knows?”

  “Who was she sleeping with?”

  “Not a regular boyfriend or anything. Just some guys from the gym where she worked out, people she partied with. I knew I couldn’t convince her to go into rehab unless I could get her to admit she had a problem. So I hired a private investigator to help me get the facts. I thought if she was faced with proof, she’d have to quit with all the denials.”

  On impulse, Gabrielle pressed her lips to his warm neck, hating the pain and anger he must have experienced. “I’m sorry.”

  “By then it didn’t hurt me. I just wanted to get her straightened out for Landon’s sake.”

  “But that’s why you were always arguing, because of the drugs and the other men? Is that what you argued about the day she died?”

  He gazed beyond her, out of the window. The moonlight drifting through the cracks in the blinds illuminated his stark profile. As reserved and unapproachable as he could sometimes be, Gabrielle had to admit she found him beautiful. Irresistible.

  “That day she was supposed to meet me at home after work so I could take her to a psychologist,” Tucker said. “I thought maybe counseling would help our marriage, help her overcome her drug habit. But when I got home, she wasn’t there.”

  “Where was she?”

  “At the gym, working out. So that’s where I went.”

  “What did you do when you found her?”

  “I lost my temper and demanded she come home with me. It was a stupid move, because the whole aerobics class heard me, and they all testified against me later. But I was so tired of how conscious she’d become of her body and her almost insatiable desire for male attention. It all seemed so shallow and pointless when she had a little boy who needed her to be a real mom.”

  Gabrielle pulled the sheet over them both as the swamp cooler kicked on, pumping a cool breeze through the vent in her room. “Did she go home with you?” she asked, snuggling close again. She loved Tucker’s body, loved being able to entwine her legs with his.

  “At my insistence, but she was furious that I’d caused a scene. When we got home, she stormed inside, changed her clothes and said she was going out again. It was almost time for me to pick up Landon from his friend Matt’s house. He’d stayed at school late to rehearse his class play, and Matt’s mother had taken him home because I thought Andrea and I were going to be at the counselor’s. Landon and Matt were supposed to perform the play that night. I told Andrea she needed to go with us, and she responded by telling me I was dad enough to handle the job. She had no interest in watching a bunch of fidgeting kids forget their lines.”

  “But one of those kids belonged to her!” Gabrielle said in surprise.

  He sighed. “She wasn’t thinking straight. Toward the end, she never was. She’d say and do anything she could to hurt me. She even used Landon.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. My neighbor said it was because I cared more about Landon than I did about her.”

  “So did she go to the play?”

  “No. I followed her out to the garage, where we argued some more. Then I had to leave to pick up Landon. I told her if she cared about her son, she’d be home when we got back. But when we returned, her car was gone. I assumed she’d gone out with her friends.” He leaned on his elbow to look down at her. “I never saw her again.”

  Gabrielle held his whisker-roughened jaw. “So how did they convict you?” she asked.

  He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. “God, you want to hear about that, too?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it was a damn circus act.”

  “Why?”

  He scowled. “The prosecution brought tons of witnesses to testify about our rocky relationship—people from the aerobics class, neighbors who overheard our arguments, teachers who knew we were having a tough time. Then they brought in people who’d seen me fight at my brother’s karate school—some I’d beaten in various kickboxing matches—who testified to the damage I was capab
le of causing with no weapon but my hands and feet. The D.A. made a big deal out of the fact that I’d hired a private investigator and knew about Andrea’s extramarital affairs and—”

  “And so you became the violent, jealous husband. You had a motive and the weapon.”

  “It didn’t help that only a few months earlier we’d purchased big life-insurance policies.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “My older brother had just hired on with a financial planning firm. To support him, we let him do a financial plan for us, and it called for bigger policies.”

  “No good deed goes unpunished.”

  “Exactly. Even something as innocuous as that came back to bite me.”

  Suddenly, an idea occurred to Gabrielle, and she sat up. “Wait, did anyone hear your argument in the garage the day Andrea died?”

  “Two different neighbors,” Tucker told her, “one across the street, and one who was just getting out of his car two doors down.”

  “Good!”

  “Good?”

  “Yeah, you wouldn’t have had an opportunity to kill Andrea and dispose of her body between the time the neighbors heard you arguing and the time you returned with Landon, right?”

  “Wrong. When I got to Matt’s house, his mother told me his father had taken them out for pizza and had just called to say they were running late. She asked me in, but I was still angry with Andrea. I went for a drive instead, trying to cool down and decide what I should do about her.”

  “You were all alone?”

  “For close to an hour. I gave Matt’s mother my cell phone number, but she didn’t call for almost forty minutes. Landon and Matt were late for the play, and plenty of people remembered that, too.”

  The excitement Gabrielle had felt died quickly. “That gave you the motive, the weapon and the opportunity.”

  “Now you’re thinking like the D.A.”

  “So…do you have any idea what might’ve happened to Andrea? Know anyone else who might’ve been just as frustrated as you were?”

  Tucker scratched his chest. His body was still tense enough to let Gabrielle know he didn’t like pursuing this subject, but she’d been honest with him in her desire to know. It was one thing to have blind faith in his innocence. It was another to hear his version of the events.

  “They found her car in Saguaro Lake three days after she disappeared. Because it was February and the weather was still cold, there hadn’t been a lot of activity out there.”

  “There wasn’t any fiber evidence or anything inside it?”

  His laugh was more sincere this time. “You’ve been watching too many of those true crime shows.”

  “They always find fiber evidence.”

  “If there was any evidence that pointed to someone besides me, the police covered it up.”

  “What about your defense team? Weren’t your lawyers able to come up with anything?”

  “There was no body. My attorney kept saying they couldn’t convict me without a body. Without a body, they couldn’t even prove there’d been a murder.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “So much for that theory.”

  Gabrielle bit her lip. “So where is the body?”

  “That’s the million-dollar question.”

  “Couldn’t your private detective tell you anything?”

  “I’d fired him a couple of months before Christmas. I had plenty of proof to convince Andrea that she couldn’t lie to me anymore, and I didn’t feel I needed him. She wasn’t killed until February.”

  “She could’ve killed herself. Did they drag the lake?”

  “The only evidence in the car was the heavy rock on the gas pedal. Someone ditched it after the fact.”

  “Well, her murderer could’ve been one of the men she was seeing, right?”

  “The two men I knew she’d been with had alibis, and my lawyer really didn’t want to focus on the extramarital affairs. She said it would only make me look more guilty.”

  It was getting late, but Gabrielle didn’t want to sleep. She wanted to solve this so their problems could disappear. Covering a yawn, she said, “Wasn’t there anyone else who looked even a little suspicious?”

  “Not until recently.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Remember that neighbor I mentioned?”

  She nodded.

  “I just found out he and Andrea had an affair a couple of months before she died.”

  Gabrielle’s fatigue instantly fell away. She rose onto one elbow. “Where was he during the time she was supposedly murdered?”

  “He claims he was at work.”

  “Can he prove it?”

  “That’s what I need to find out.”

  “Wouldn’t the police have checked?”

  “They don’t investigate everyone the victim knew. In a case such as ours, the husband’s usually the killer, and the police had a ton of circumstantial evidence pointing to me. I’m sure they figured there wasn’t any need to waste man-hours searching for other suspects. Nothing that raised any questions ever came to light. Why muddy the waters? They believed they already had their perpetrator, so they turned me over to the D.A., who worked her ass off to get me convicted. Case closed. The police and the district attorney looked good to the media, the citizens of Phoenix could sleep better at night, and I went to jail.”

  Gabrielle considered the scenario. What had happened to Tucker seemed grossly unfair, yet she could see how easily the police could be persuaded that they already had their man. “But it wasn’t you. Do you think this neighbor might have done it? Does he seem like a man who’s capable of something like that? Do you have any idea where he might have hidden Andrea’s body?”

  Tucker’s lengthy pause made Gabrielle wonder about his thoughts. “Which question do you want me to answer?”

  She slugged him playfully. “All of them.”

  “Sean doesn’t strike me as the type, so don’t get your hopes up.”

  “But where would—”

  He silenced her with a kiss.

  “What—”

  “Shh,” he said, kissing her once, twice, three more times.

  She stubbornly tried to talk again, but he only used the parting of her lips to deepen his last kiss.

  “Wait,” she muttered. “I’m not satisfied yet.”

  He pulled his head back and grinned at her. “Neither am I. And it’s my turn.”

  A NOISE WOKE Tucker out of the deepest sleep he’d known since his escape. Still filled with the lazy contentment of having made love to Gabrielle several times, his mind and body rebelled at the prospect of returning to complete awareness. But warning bells were ringing in his head, telling him he had to focus. Why, he didn’t know, until he lay blinking at the ceiling and realized the noise that had finally penetrated his sleep was a series of footsteps.

  Someone was moving around in the trailer.

  Angling his head toward the door, he tensed to listen. Was it Landon? It certainly couldn’t be Allie walking down the hall.

  He slipped his arm out from beneath Gabrielle and eased out of bed. He was just reaching for his jeans when someone tried to open the door. Fortunately, he’d locked it to keep Landon from walking in on them. But the rattle was enough to wake Gabrielle.

  “Where are you going?” she mumbled, blinking sleepily at him. “It can’t be morning yet.”

  Another man’s voice intruded before he could answer. “Gabby?”

  Gabrielle sat bolt upright, her hair tumbling wildly around her face. “Oh no, it’s David,” she whispered, turning panic-filled eyes on Tucker.

  “Tell him you’ve got company,” he told her.

  “I can’t tell him that!” she said, scrambling out of bed.

  “Why not? You’re divorced.” He thrust one leg into his pants, then the other. “You have the right to see other men.”

  “But he wouldn’t—” She raked her fingers through her hair, looking miserable. “He’d be hurt.”

  The door handle jiggl
ed again. “Gabrielle? What’s going on? There’s a little boy sleeping in my room.”

  Tucker grimaced. “His room?”

  Gabrielle was too busy pulling on a robe to bother responding to his comment. “I’m coming, David. Just a minute,” she said.

  Then Landon’s voice rose from behind the door. “Who are you? Where’s my daddy? Is he gone? Did you take him away?”

  Gabrielle cast Tucker another worried glance as he quickly buttoned his jeans. “Landon, he’s still here, baby,” she said, tightening her robe. “Don’t you worry about anything, okay? I told you that you don’t have to worry.”

  “Okay.” The relief evident in his son’s voice made Tucker feel slightly better, until he heard small feet pattering down the hall toward the kitchen. Tucker didn’t have to see what was happening to know Landon was going to the couch in search of him.

  “Shit,” he muttered, heading for the door. His flight or fight instinct was kicking in pretty heavily, but he wouldn’t run without Landon, and he certainly didn’t want to hurt David. He knew Gabrielle cared about her ex a great deal; he wanted to leave what was said up to her, if possible.

  “Gabby? Tell me this kid isn’t who I think it is,” David persisted, his voice now leery.

  Tucker reached the door at the same time as Gabrielle and paused. “What are you going to do?” he asked softly.

  She stopped him from turning the knob. “It’ll be all right. David’s always been a good friend to me. He’s guessed some of the truth already. I’m going to tell him the rest and ask him to trust that I know what I’m doing.”

  “That’s taking a hell of a chance,” Tucker said.

  “You don’t know David. He’s more generous and kind than most people. He won’t let me down.”

  “Gabby! Open the door!”

  Tucker frowned irritably. “What the hell is he doing, showing up in the middle of the night, anyway?”

  “He’s been worried about me.”

  “I’ll bet,” Tucker said, but he moved aside so she could unlock the door.

  By the time he was facing David, Landon was running toward them, complaining that his father was gone. When he spotted Tucker, he quickly dashed a hand across his face to wipe away tears. “There you are,” he said, a sulky note in his voice.