Lover in the Shadows

by Lindsay Longford

  “Until morning.”

  “All right,” she said, and opened her mouth to his as he lowered himself over her, blotting out the light.

  And in that moment it seemed to her that he changed, blurred, shifted, and she couldn’t find him. She had the strangest sensation that she was grasping smoke, air, but then, suddenly, she was stroking his ribs, the solid muscles of his back, and he was inside her, driving, thrusting, until lights burned behind her eyelids and he became her entire universe. “Who are you, John Harlan?” she whispered, rocking to his thrusts and lifting higher, yearning for the light-spangled heat he was promising with each thrust. “Who are you?”

  His rhythm slowed. “Only a man. A man who needs you tonight, Molly. Nothing more. Take me. Let me take you. Please.” Then, faster and faster he drove her, drove himself, and she took him with her to that place where darkness burned golden, as gold as the gold of his eyes.

  Once, much later during the night, Molly found herself on top of him, her thighs gripping his flanks, her head arched back as she sought release from the tension again building within her. She had never understood before Harlan that passion was a state of being, an actual place, and, having discovered it with him, she longed with all her being to go there again.

  As she strained toward that end, his voice, low and gritty, urged her on, encouraged her to go where she needed to, told her that he would find her there. He lifted his head and took her breast in his mouth. His teeth grazing the nipple, scraping, he took her deeper into his mouth until the spring inside her burst, twanging and whipping through her, and she collapsed, spent, onto him, her hair falling like a curtain over his face as the moonlight turned the sheets to silver and his pale face to marble. Against her cheek his hair was damp and warm to her touch.

  She fell into sleep, her arms curled around him, his wrapped around her, and, held safe next to his powerful heart and chest, she didn’t dream and she didn’t think about death and dying and blood-spattered walls.

  When she awoke, he was gone.

  He’d drawn the sheet over her and placed the cordless phone on the pillow he’d picked up off the floor and returned to the bed.

  Sitting upright, Molly lifted the edge of the sheet and crumpled it. She’d taken a risk, letting him into her house, her bed, her heart. She’d thought it would be all right because he was taking a risk, too. But she hadn’t known that she wouldn’t be able to separate her body from her heart, her soul. She hadn’t known the risk would be so enormous.

  She would never again have a lover like him. Whatever happened from this night forth, she recognized that he’d claimed her in some primitive way and no one ever again would touch her, not in the ways that John Harlan had. With his leaving, he’d taken part of her with him.

  She hadn’t expected that when she’d opened her door to him. That was a risk she’d never thought of.

  And even knowing she would take it again.

  When she went downstairs for breakfast, she saw that he had bolted the doors behind him.

  The chain on the kitchen door felt warm, as if Harlan had slid it into the slot only moments earlier.

  The cat was curled in front of a bowl of milk in the sunlight streaming through the open shutters. Reaching down to pet him, she ran her hand along the length of his sunshine-warmed spine, and he arched into her hand, rumbling silently under his sleek black fur, the vibrations passing into her being.

  John Harlan had left.

  He’d taken her gun with him.

  And all the locks were in place.

  When he came, shortly before noon, she knew he’d returned this time to arrest her. He didn’t need to say the words. His face was bleached white, pain splintered the gold of his eyes and his mouth was a thin, angry line.

  “This is an official call, then?”

  “Yes. Arresting you wasn’t my choice. The order came from the state’s attorney’s office. I said there wasn’t enough evidence. But there was your bracelet, you see. And your fingerprints on the knife with Camina’s blood. And, finally, your fingerprints were found on a gallon container of gasoline half a mile into the woods from the cabin.”

  His words were worse than a nightmare. None of what he was suggesting was possible, and yet his words were so logical, so sane. “We always kept gas cans in the shed. For the boats. Of course my finger prints would have been on the cans. That’s not proof of anything!” She rubbed her eyes.

  He didn’t hide behind his sunglasses and she saw his anguish. He didn’t have to tell her he was at her doorstep unwillingly. Tired lines scored his mouth, the crevices around his eyes. Underneath his flat tone, she heard his frustration. “There’s more. This morning Dr. Bouler identified a crown found in the rubble at the cabin as one he’d made for your brother. They figured you killed him for the rest of the estate.”

  “I see.” And she did. But this time she knew she hadn’t done anything. Could prove it. “Didn’t you tell them you’d followed me around for most of this week and that I couldn’t possibly have killed my brother?” She asked, but she would have bet her life that he’d even admitted to what had happened between them last night.

  “I told them. Everything.” His mouth was tight. “I’ve been officially reprimanded.”

  She nodded. Reid was dead, she was going to jail, but she wasn’t going to go down without a fight. “You’ll say the same things in court? If I’m put on trial?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re still investigating the murders? Even with the reprimand?”

  “Yes.” He frowned. “The prosecuting attorney believes there’s enough presumptive evidence to charge you and take it to trial. And the department wants closure.” He started to reach out to her but let his hand drop.

  “All right. Can you give me time to change and call my lawyer?”

  Ross Whittaker stayed in the car. Molly was glad. Somehow she found the strength to face Harlan, her memory of the previous night filling her and keeping her chin up as she listened to his perfunctory recital of her rights.

  While she dressed, she called Bob Nolan and asked him to meet her at the county jail. Harlan snapped the handcuffs around her wrists without saying a word and led her out to the unmarked car.

  As he placed his open palm on her head to keep her from bumping it on the car, Molly looked at him and said, “It does make a difference, doesn’t it? All the risk wasn’t mine alone?”

  His fingertips flexed in her hair. “I couldn’t have imagined what a difference.” Pain was a jagged edge underneath his drawl. He leaned down so that only she heard his final words as he shut the car door. “I thought last night wouldn’t harm you. I never reckoned it would destroy me.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Bob showed up with Paul in tow as Harlan parked the car in back of the jail. The three men stayed by her side until Harlan, with a scowl at Paul, disappeared. His last glance at Molly seared her with its reminder of the night, and the chill that had begun creeping back vaporized.

  The crown was definitely Reid’s. Paul said it was unique and easily identifiable as the one he’d made for Molly’s brother. Paul posted bail for her, and couldn’t quit explaining about the stupid crown. Molly let his words roll over her.

  “God, Molly, I don’t know what to say. This is a mistake. Everybody in the county knows you didn’t kill Reid. Or Camina. Hell and damnation.” He tugged his mustache. “I knew the damned crown was Reid’s the minute they brought it to my office. There was that millimeter shoulder all around the tooth, the gold collar at the bottom. The rest was porcelain. I knew it was my work. I pulled Reid’s records. I wouldn’t have involved you, but what else could I have said?”

  “It’s going to be okay, Paul.” Molly would have laughed if she could have found an extra ounce of energy. She was the one facing jail, but she was reassuring Paul. She was suddenly struck with the memory of similar times while they’d been married. She’d forgotten how often he’d left the hard decisions to her and avoided confrontations and un
pleasantness.

  He was still her friend and he’d shown up to post bail for her. That counted for a lot.

  But he was a rumpled, worried teddy bear when what she needed was a dangerous panther. She glanced around the pea-green station walls and wondered where Harlan had vanished to. She thought she saw his broad-shouldered shadow down a hall, but it turned out to be someone else. Harlan would find her when he was ready to.

  “Can I go now?” she asked Nolan.

  “Sure, honey, but God almighty, I never expected you to be pitched into the middle of a mess like this.” Nolan scratched his bald head. “I’m thinking you’re gonna need a better lawyer than this old country legal beagle, Molly.” He took her by the elbow. “Come on, sugar, I’ll drive you home.”

  Turning away from Paul, who hovered at her side, Molly said, “I want to go to your office first, Bob. Okay? I need to talk with you.”

  “Sure. Hey, Paul?”

  “Yep?”

  “Molly and I are going to stop at my office, so you can go on along.”

  “Paul, thank you. For being here. For posting bail. You know I’ll pay you back when all this is cleared up.” She reached up and hugged him. Instead of his burly chest, she felt Harlan’s hard planes and muscles.

  “Hey, don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s only nickels and dimes. What else are ex-husbands for, if not to have deep pockets? What’s mine is yours, babe.”

  Molly shook her head. “And what’s mine is yours. I know.” She should have been exhausted, but adrenaline was keeping her fueled at such a pitch that all her senses seemed sharper. Colors were almost painfully bright, sounds unpleasantly loud to her acute hearing.

  After Paul left, she collected her belongings. She was overwhelmingly grateful that she hadn’t had to spend the night in jail. She didn’t want to think about the several hours in the room with flaking green paint and no privacy.

  She rubbed her ink-stained fingers against her cream-colored skirt. She would throw the skirt and blouse and jacket away as soon as she got home. She never wanted to see the outfit again.

  There would be an explanation for what had happened.

  She would find it.

  Or John Harlan would.

  In the meantime, she would take steps to protect herself.

  From the corner of her eye, she thought she glimpsed him once more as she and Nolan left, but she didn’t look in that direction, not wanting to be disappointed once more.

  She needed him, and she didn’t understand it. Like the cat, Harlan had come into her house, her mind, and made himself at home, entering and leaving as he chose. She needed him, but not because he could save her from what was happening. No, she needed him because during the long hours of the night, he’d become part of her. If someone had told her that the cells of her body had merged and become one with his, their DNA blending into one whole, she would have believed it, because that was how she felt.

  She was incomplete without him.

  At Nolan’s office, she told him to draw up a new will while she waited. She would sign it before leaving.

  “Honey, you don’t want to rush into something like this.” He’d always been overly cautious, and her father had respected that quality. It was one of the reasons Nolan had been their family’s lawyer ever since her father had gone into business. Nolan had drawn up every document anyone in their family needed. He knew everything about the Harrises. “Let me think about this first.”

  “No. The police think I’m guilty of murder. I know I’m not. But someone is. Someone who can profit from my death or by making me look guilty. I want my will changed. Today,” she insisted stubbornly. “I’m not leaving your office until you do what I’m asking, Bob. I know you’ll have to go through all the legal steps, but at least you can get the intent down now and I can sign it. That will count for something.”

  “I don’t like this, Molly. It’s very irregular.” He glared at her. “Your dad wouldn’t want you handling the situation like this. With Reid dead, there’s the ranch to consider. His will to be probated. You inherit all that.”

  “Look, Bob, keep it simple, okay?” She leaned forward on his desk. “Draw up an instrument that leaves anything I have as of this date to the hospital cancer fund.” No matter what Harlan had implied, she refused to believe that some far-reaching conspiracy could involve the whole hospital board. Nevertheless, she changed her charity bequest.

  Straightening, puzzled, she looked out the glass door of his office. She’d heard Harlan’s gritty drawl, almost as if he’d spoken in her ear. She shook her head.

  If she eliminated the hospital board as suspects, that left her with Paul, Susie or Susie’s husband. Molly didn’t know Susie’s husband. It was easier to think he’d been behind what happened to her even though she couldn’t figure out the why or how of it. All she knew was that she didn’t want to think Paul was the one who had plotted against her.

  But she was taking precautions as fast as she could.

  She was going to survive.

  When Nolan reluctantly shoved the hastily typed document in front of her, Molly read it thoroughly and made one change. “I want Camina’s family to be included. I didn’t think of them until now. They’re still in Costa Rica.”

  Nolan made the alteration and had her initial it. All the way back to her house, he nagged her, until she wanted nothing more than to walk into her house and shut the door behind her, locking out all noise and interference.

  When he finally left, she stripped off her clothes and carried the cordless phone with her into the bathroom. Alone in the white room, she left the shower curtain open and wished briefly that Harlan had left her the gun. Scrubbing her back, she decided that maybe it was better he’d taken it with him.

  Heaven help her if someone else got hold of her gun. She didn’t even want to think about how her situation would look if that happened. Her gun. Found somewhere in suspicious circumstances. If that happened, she’d have no chance of ever digging her way out of the hole she was in.

  Molly scrubbed her body with the washcloth until her skin was blotchy and almost raw. She wanted the smell of the jail out of her nose, off her skin.

  Harlan drummed his fingers on the wadded up sheet of his bed as flipped through the pages of reports. The initial call from the fishermen. The blood matches. He raked his hands fiercely through his hair. He wanted to be with Molly. He should never have made love with her last night. But he had. And now, his soul merged with hers, he sensed even more powerfully than ever before the nature of the wickedness that stalked sweet Molly with her innocent, trusting eyes.

  He tried to hurry, but the pages stuck together, flew apart, scattered onto the floor. “Damn!” He gathered them with one fist, pages out of order, and stilled as he saw three sentences on one of the reports.

  She was alone in her enormous, unsafe house, alone on the bayou in the dark.

  He would never reach her in time.

  She dragged a long white muslin nightgown over her still-damp skin and raked a comb through her shampooed hair. With its long sleeves and squared neckline it looked more like a dress than a nightgown, and, like her nightshirt, it had pockets. She slipped the cordless phone into one pocket and went downstairs. For the first time in a week, she planned on making a cup of hot milk and taking it upstairs with her to bed.

  Defiantly, Molly slammed the shutters closed while the milk was warming on the stove. When she dumped in a spoonful of Ovaltine, the milk in the cup foamed over onto the counter. Wiping up the sticky mixture, she thought again about the morning she’d come to on the floor after Camina’s murder. She’d been asleep then, right here in the kitchen. She hadn’t been walking around in a daze.

  Remembering that, she considered all the ways of drugging people. The pills Paul had given her hadn’t even made her drowsy. She stirred in the last of the Ovaltine slowly, the milk turning beige-brown as she let the powder dissolve. Who knew about drugs?

  Well, she did, of course. Through her job as dental
supply salesperson, she could think of several ways she could have managed a tidy little drug trade on the side if she were so inclined. She would have been caught eventually, though. But what would have made her walk in her sleep and never remember it? Who else had access to drugs?

  Her spoon clicking against the cup, Molly wished Paul weren’t so obvious an answer. Was he in financial trouble? Click, click. The spoon trembled in her hand. Paul had always overextended himself. But surely, if he’d needed money, he would have come to her and asked for some. Wouldn’t he have?

  She sipped from the cup. The milk was too hot, and she left the spoon in it for a minute to hasten the cooling. Tapping the spoon against her teeth as she carried the cup and pot to the sink, Molly thought about her curious amnesia and the description Harlan had given of her behavior. No wonder he’d thought she was on drugs.

  But she hadn’t been. She didn’t remember taking one of the sleeping pills the night Camina had died. If she didn’t buy the idea that she’d been in the grip of a weird sleepwalking episode, like those people who found themselves going on nocturnal binges, there had to be another, rational explanation. One she hadn’t found yet.

  Flexing his fingers, Harlan shut his eyes, tried to concentrate. And for the first time couldn’t. Now, when he needed to focus his energies more than he ever had in his life, he failed. He swallowed. Wiping away the sweat dripping into the corners of his eyes, he blanked out everything. Into that emptiness, Molly’s face, thoughtful, washed clean, hovered for an instant.

  Disappeared.

  Harlan slammed his fist against the edge of the rosewood and growled.

  Lifting the skin off the milk with her spoon, she dropped it onto a paper towel and threw it into the waste can. For one whimsical second, she looked to see if Harlan had left the Luger there, but the waste can was empty.

  Just at the edge of his senses, he saw her. Sweat poured off him. He could hear his skin sliding, popping. If he could…