Connor had spent three days trying to locate Baylee, only to come to the conclusion she wasn’t in San Madrid, wasn’t at Kit’s, wasn’t with Quinn. Her Range Rover was still parked in the driveway at Gloria’s guest cottage but hadn’t moved in days. That left staking out her father’s place. He would have to send Cade out to do it. If she spotted him lying in wait, she’d take off for sure.
A bit distracted, his hard, cold eyes chanced a glance down at the nude, petite woman lying on the bed, waiting for him, waiting for him to get into the mood, waiting for the Viagra he’d taken to kick in.
Since he’d first experienced sex at the ripe old age of fourteen, he had had a penchant for a particular kind of woman. They had to be very feminine, very petite, almost delicate-looking—and beautiful. A therapist had once told him his taste in women probably had something to do with the fact that the women he desired were the polar opposite of his domineering mother.
Connor didn’t doubt the guy had nailed it on the first try, because it wasn’t so much their coloring that got him hard, they could be blonde or brunette or redhead, it made no difference to him, but they absolutely had to be petite—and lately they had to be young. At thirty-seven, he had a penchant for this particular call girl, who was barely nineteen. He knew that for a fact since he’d been using her services for a year. As he stared down at Lola, he didn’t care what name she used, he did his best to focus on her body.
He had to concentrate. His headaches were back. The blackness wanted to descend. Through the black edge of vision, he realized how much Lola resembled Baylee.
He’d had a fondness for Baylee Scott since the first time he’d looked at her that way. At the time she’d been fifteen, a visitor to his parent’s house, and a guest at Collin’s birthday party. Connor had been twenty-seven.
He remembered that brown shit she’d had all over her hair the other day and settled on the memory of her golden blonde hair, her fine-boned features, and those sultry deep aquamarine eyes.
Once again, he did his best to focus on the image of Baylee’s natural B-cup breasts, not the augmented ones under him. He remembered the one night he’d spent with her in that hotel room. He’d made it count. After all, after years of trying to get close to her, he’d finally played out his fantasy, a fantasy he’d been savoring in the back of his mind for years.
The Viagra finally kicked in, or it might have been the memory of having Baylee in bed beneath him that did the trick. But the more he thought of Baylee now, the more he wanted to strangle the bitch.
Through the migraine beating its own drum in his head, his mind wandered to the e-mail he’d received that morning. The message had been simple and direct and effective, a one-line threat that read: You will die just like the Parkers.
The e-mail had royally pissed him off. Things were spinning out of his control. He didn’t like feeling out of control. When that happened he sometimes blacked out and didn’t remember doing things.
But the e-mail made him all the more determined to protect what was his. They would all be better off when Baylee and Kit were out of the picture. But first, they needed to find the hit man, the killer responsible for bringing this whole thing to a head. The guy seemed to know everything about them. Jankovic was supposed to work on that. As soon as the son of a bitch got into town—he was taking his sweet time getting his ass to L.A.
Connor’s mind was on other things, splintering into pieces in fact. His migraine came back with a vengeance. The blackness descended as it so often did these days, and he lost himself inside the hole that the blackness brought with it.
By the time he’d come back to reality and looked around the room, he’d already finished fucking the hooker. He crawled out of bed and went into the bathroom to flush the condom.
When he came out, he walked to the bar in the bedroom and poured himself a stiff shot of Johnny Walker Blue. He stood there drinking, letting his mind clear. It would all work itself out; with planning, with precision, he would find Baylee. He’d let Jankovic deal with Boston, Kit and maybe even Quinn. That’s another bitch that had caused them problems in the past and would definitely pitch a fit when her two best friends ended up dead.
After downing the drink in one swallow, he felt a little better. He grabbed a robe, threw open the door to the bedroom, and told Cade, “Your turn, little brother.”
CHAPTER 7
The mean people had come back.
Terrified, three-year-old Baylee Scott cowered under the covers, clutching her blue bunny.
Her little body shook as the shrill angry voices coming from outside her bedroom door grew closer—and louder. To block out the noise, she put both of her hands over her ears to muffle the sound as the shouts grew meaner.
She huddled further down in the bed. But the loud, mean people wouldn’t go away. And she could still hear the words as they got uglier. She could hear two women yelling bad words at her mama, words she knew she was not supposed to repeat.
Every so often, Baylee recognized her mama’s voice as her mama shouted back at both women to leave, to get out of her house before she called the cops. But both women were so angry they yelled right back at her mama. Baylee could tell by the tone in her mama’s voice that she was really angry. But despite her mama getting madder and madder; the mean people weren’t leaving.
Baylee thought the argument was about her daddy. But that couldn’t be right because her daddy wasn’t even at home. He’d gone to some place called Francisco to make another picture. That’s what her daddy did; he made pictures for Hollywood. People could see his pictures if they went to theaters or they could sometimes watch them on television.
The day he’d left to go out of town, he hadn’t taken her with him, even though she had cried and begged when he had loaded his bags into the yellow car that had taken him to the airport.
He had promised if she stopped crying and helped her mama while he was gone, he would buy her a superstar Barbie. Even though she wanted the doll more than anything, she still would have liked to have gone with her daddy.
As she listened to the grownups continue to scream at each other, the little girl desperately tried to get her mind on something else. She missed her daddy. She closed her eyes and remembered the time he had taken her to the studio with him. She had eagerly crawled into his lap while he sat in his director’s chair and watched the other people he called actors say their lines. Then her daddy would yell “cut” and the actors would stop talking until he yelled “action” again, and they’d say more lines until the picture was done.
But this time he’d gone out of town and Baylee had stayed home with her mama. She loved her mama, but she wished her daddy were here now. If her daddy were home he would make the mean people stop yelling at her mama.
She closed her eyes tight to shut out the argument. She tried hard to picture the superstar Barbie at the toy store. Her mama had promised they would go shopping tomorrow to pick out the doll. The only reason they hadn’t gone today was because today had been Mother’s Day and you weren’t supposed to spend mother’s day at the mall shopping but doing stuff together, spending time together.
That’s why Baylee and her mother had spent the day baking cookies and planting seeds in the garden and making pretty construction paper cut-outs.
At that moment, the little girl heard hitting noises, a slapping sound. It sounded like her mama was in trouble and needed her help.
She bit her lip, trying to work up her courage to crawl out of bed. When the argument grew louder, she slowly made her way out from under the covers and ran to the door, opening it just wide enough to peek out.
Sure enough, she saw her mother arguing with two women. The taller woman had blond hair. Baylee recognized her as Kit’s mother. But Kit’s mother was mean. She almost slammed the door shut because she didn’t like Kit’s mother at all.
Wide-eyed, mesmerized by the scene on the landing, the little girl kept her eyes locked on the other woman with long black hair and dark eyes. She’d
never seen her before, but she looked mean because she was yelling mean things in her mama’s face.
Baylee knew she needed to move, to go outside into the hallway to help her mama. As the three of them stood on the upstairs landing, Baylee could tell her mama was mad. Her mama demanded they get out of her house again, or she’d call the police.
And then all of a sudden from the other side Kit’s mother moved in and slapped her mama. Terrified, Baylee cringed. She wanted to move, to run out into the hallway to make them stop. But her stomach tightened. Fear locked her throat. Her feet refused to budge. She tried to push the fear away. But she couldn’t move.
Just as she started to open the door further and step out into the hallway to yell at them to stop, the woman with black hair shoved her mama, and Baylee watched her mama fall backwards down the stairs.
She heard her mama scream, a shrill cry that lasted all the way down to the bottom step. She heard a dull thud hit the floor. And then nothing. She saw the two women look at each other. She saw them smile before they turned to walk down the stairway.
Baylee opened her mouth to scream. But no sound came out. Instead, she ran back to the bed. Terrified, in a desperate attempt to hide, she scooted underneath the bed just in case the mean people came to get and hurt her, too.
She only hoped they wouldn’t look under the bed.
Trembling, Baylee stayed hidden like that for a long time. She finally fell asleep.
At dawn the next morning, when she opened her eyes, the first thing she remembered was her bad dream. It still scared her to think about the mean people. But despite her fear, she crawled out from underneath the bed. She listened, waiting to hear any little noise outside her room. Slowly she opened the door and peeked out into the hallway. She didn’t hear a sound. The mean people from her nightmare were gone.
She crept to the landing and looked down, fearful of what she might see. But her mama wasn’t there. Baylee rubbed her eyes and looked down at the bottom of the stairs again.
All of a sudden Baylee started crying, “Mama. Mama. Mama. I want my mama.”
Alarmed, Tanya Lincoln, the housekeeper, appeared at the bottom of the stairs. The small black woman started walking up the steps toward the child. “What’s the matter, baby girl? What’s wrong?”
“I had a bad dream.”
As soon as Tanya reached Baylee, she crouched down in front of the child and lifted her chin to get her full attention. “Well, for goodness sakes, baby girl, tell Tanya all about it. What happened?”
It was then she noticed Baylee shaking like a leaf, trembling so hard as if she were scared to death. She scooped her up. “It’s okay, baby girl. Bad dreams can’t really hurt us. They’re just dreams and not real.”
Baylee rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. “My mama fell; she got hurt.”
“Oh baby.” Tanya brushed the hair from Baylee’s face. “We’ll find your mama. Let’s go see if she’s still sleeping.” Tanya hugged the child to her chest and tweaked Baylee’s nose. “It’s still early. I bet your mama’s still snuggled down under the covers just where you should be. It’s not even seven o’clock yet. I just got here myself a little while ago.”
As Tanya made her way down the hall toward the master bedroom, she told the little girl, “You’ll see your mama’s still sleeping, that’s all. And then you’re going back to bed for a little while.”
As Tanya knocked on the door of the master bedroom, Baylee’s arms snaked around the housekeeper’s neck. If only her mother were on the other side of the door. They waited and waited, but her mother wasn’t in bed at all. In fact, she wasn’t anywhere in the house.
She and Tanya looked and looked and looked, searching every room.
But little three-year-old Baylee had seen her mother for the very last time.
Baylee woke in a sweat, in a panic mode that made her gulp for air. The dream was back. It had stayed away all during her pregnancy, and then afterward, she’d been too exhausted and sleep-deprived from new motherhood to do much sleeping or dreaming about anything other than her newborn.
It had to be at least two years since she’d dreamed about that night. She thought she’d put it behind her for good. But the visit with her father, the stress-filled time spent in the house today, Dylan’s insistence she talk about her mother, must have brought the nightmare back again.
Feeling uneasy, she crawled out of bed to check on Sarah. As she tip-toed down the hall, she couldn’t help but think even after all these years the imaginary mean people had certainly left their mark behind.
CHAPTER 8
Just before noon the next day, Jake and Kit pulled into Dylan’s driveway and parked behind Quinn’s red Miata. As they unloaded the car with all the food Kit had brought, she turned to Jake. “When do you think the house will be ready to move into? I’m getting anxious.”
Even though Jake had been glued to her side, never letting her out of his sight for the past couple of days, Kit kind of liked it. Inseparable, she decided, sounded a good deal better and more romantic than babysitter. And that’s what he’d been doing since the kidnapping.
If it hadn’t been for a faceless man she wouldn’t know if she passed on the street, she might be dead now. And because of that, she had a renewed appreciation for life. In fact, there was no better attitude adjustment than staring death in the face, or in this case, a furious, crazy Collin Boyd, and getting a brand-new outlook on the future.
She didn’t intend to waste a precious second getting on with her life, which included moving into the Crandall House, the old relic Jake was revamping from the inside out.
“Getting excited about moving in?” The two extra crews Jake had added to the remodeling job had accelerated the progress considerably, but the work still had a ways to go. They had both chewed fingernails down to the quick watching the place come together enough to look like an actual home, instead of a rundown rattle trap built in 1888.
Looking over at Kit’s willowy body, her long silver hair pulled back in a ponytail, Jake still couldn’t believe his good fortune. He was so close to having what he wanted it scared him shitless. “You still want to have the Memorial Day cookout there even with all this going on?”
She’d thought of nothing else, except maybe Collin and her upcoming testimony at his hearing. Add in worrying about Baylee’s situation with Connor and little Sarah and some days it was all too much to deal with.
But the get-together might serve one purpose. It might get their minds off things even if it was only for a few hours. “You bet. And I think we should go ahead and move in,” she pointed out as she unloaded the first few trays of food from the back of the car.
He wanted to give her the world, but his practical sense kicked in as he picked up an additional tray of food. “Kit, we can’t move in if they’re still updating the wiring and the plumbing. I’m certain we won’t even have electricity for another week.”
As they made their way up to Dylan’s front door, she glossed over what she saw as a minor inconvenience. “Silly details. It’d be like camping out. Think about it. As long as the shower in the bathroom downstairs works, which it does, that’s all we’d need. Think how it will feel waking up in that round master bedroom.” Even loaded down with the food, she did a happy dance before wiggling her butt. “I promise I could make you forget all about wiring or plumbing. And we could make our own electricity.”
“You’re crazy, you know that?”
“That’s me. Crazy Kit. I thought we established that already.”
He sighed. “Actually the downstairs is further along than the upstairs is. I guess we could move in a bed, christen the master bedroom. You really want to go ahead and move in?”
In the light-hearted vein of a woman in love, she teased, “Jake Boston, do I hear a hint of hesitation? Are you trying to backtrack, get out of this whole thing already?”
He laughed. “Nope. I’m committed. Definitely committed.”
“You make it sound like a death sentence. If
it doesn’t work out, we can always…”
“Uh-uh, no backing out for me. I was thinking more along the lines of—when do we set a date?”
“Oh Jake.” She almost lost her hold on the food containers.
At that moment, Baylee opened the front door with all the enthusiasm of a woman who had been waiting for male strippers to show up.
“Hey, what took so long? Sarah’s been asleep for twenty minutes. And a hungry Quinn has been here for half an hour grumbling about no food. You know how she gets when she doesn’t eat.” But then Baylee noticed the bewildered expression on Kit’s face. “What’s wrong?” Baylee reached to take the food Kit was holding.
Kit shot a look at Baylee. “So what if the man of my dreams has lousy timing? He chooses now to bring up setting a date for the wedding.”
Baylee stared at her friend. “Ohmygod. Well, that’s better than evading the subject entirely, right?” Eyeing the terror-stricken look on Jake’s face, she chuckled. “Better come up with a date before he changes his mind.”
“Good thinking,” Kit decided, looking over at Jake.
Dylan joined Baylee at the door, and she automatically handed off the food to him and took several of the other containers from Jake. Baylee turned to Dylan. “Looks like we have a wedding to plan.”
“Okay. I’ll go dig out a bottle of champagne. We can celebrate over lunch. This smells great, by the way. What’s on the menu?”
As Dylan turned to go find the champagne, Jake dumped the rest of his food containers on Baylee, who rolled her eyes and said, “Looks like you two need some alone time. I’ll just go set some of this food in front of Quinn. Surely there’s something in here that will tide her over until we get to the main course.”
Jake followed Kit into the entryway, and immediately grabbed her arm, pulling her back from the rest. “I’d planned on putting the ring on your finger without an audience. Honest. It’s just that if we’re doing this now, here…” He pulled a small box out of his jeans pocket. “There’s no candlelight, but the sentiment is heartfelt. I had this delivered this morning.”
Deeper Evil (The Evil Secrets Trilogy Book 2) Page 10