“Molly.” Harlan sent his voice low to her, willed her to hear him. “Molly, give me the gun. Don’t put it down. Don’t give it to him.” Not naming her brother, Harlan hoped to distance her from the light-haired man playing on her familiar memories, on the patterns of a lifetime. She’d told him she was linked closely with her brother. He hadn’t believed it. He hoped she didn’t think of those links, any links, in these seconds as a bank of clouds licked away at the edge of the moon.
He would have one chance. Only one.
“Hey, Sissy,” Reid wheedled, “who you going to listen to? Your twin? Or some stranger? Let me have the gun, Sissy, please. If you don’t, he’ll kill me.” Truth was a knife edge in his voice.
Harlan heard it.
Molly heard it.
“Molly, sweetheart, Reid killed Camina. And your parents. If you put down the gun, he’ll kill both of us.”
Molly’s hands were shaking and the gun swung wildly between them. “What do you mean, our parents?”
“I had to, Moll. I needed money. For the ranch. Dad threatened to cut me out of the will because he thought I was losing money, throwing it away on schemes. They weren’t schemes, Sissy,” Reid added earnestly. “They were plans. Business arrangements. It wasn’t my fault that the hurricane wiped out one crop, or that two of the biggest investors pulled out of that shopping plaza I was building. Everything would have worked out if Dad would have given me more time, but he wouldn’t. He was going to take everything away from me, Sis. The ranch, the farm. Everything in Costa Rica. I would have been nobody.”
“Oh, Reid, how could you?” Tears glistened on Molly’s pale face. “You killed them? For money?”
“I needed money, Sis.” Reid took another step toward her. “You know what the kicker was? I didn’t know until too late that Daddy had already changed the will and left everything except the Costa Rica property to you. I had to have money, Sis, but I didn’t want to hurt you. You’re my twin. But I had to. You can see that, can’t you?”
“And Camina, Reid? Why did you have to kill her?” Harlan asked, watching him, watching Molly’s stricken face, watching the slow drift of clouds over the moon.
“She found the vial of Ketamine. She tried to blackmail me.” Reid’s voice was growing tired and petulant. “I didn’t want to hurt you, Sissy. I only needed to get control of the money. At first I thought maybe I could make you think you were having a nervous breakdown—that’s why I started with the Ketamine. I could have gotten power of attorney then. Nolan, the old fool, wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But then Camina tried to blackmail me. I tricked her into meeting me. I was going to pay her off, but she hit me! With the oar! I had to kill her. She didn’t give me any other option.”
“Oh, Reid.” Molly’s voice died away.
“Well, she didn’t, Sissy.” Reid scowled, justifying himself. “So I thought maybe if you were accused of Camina’s murder, you’d be sent to jail. I stuck your bracelet under the dock and smeared the kitchen with blood and washed it down so that it would look like you were covering up what you’d done. Jail wouldn’t have been so bad, would it? But that didn’t work, either. That’s why I needed everybody to think I was dead. You can see I had to make the police do something, and they didn’t seem in any hurry to arrest you, thanks to your tame cop here,” he said, motioning contemptuously to Harlan. “I thought the cops would think Paul was lying about the crown, and they’d suspect him of trying to kill you and me. Or suspect you and him. It didn’t matter. It was my crown—I had it replaced in Costa Rica. I had an associate fly me in so that my passport would be stamped for the right time and I’d have an alibi. It was all planned, but everything went wrong right from the get-go, Sissy.”
The clouds swallowed up the moon.
In that second, Molly heard Harlan’s voice. Move, Molly, get away, get away! She turned, confused, not able to see anything in the sudden darkness, her eyes not adjusted to the lack of light.
Reid grabbed her arm, wrenching the gun from her.
As he did, an enormous shadow leapt toward Reid, over him, blanketing him.
She saw Reid, Harlan, Reid, twisting and turning, fighting for the gun. In blurs as the shadows thinned over the moon, she saw Harlan, his shape wavering, changing, and she trembled as if she were standing in icy rain.
Run!
But she couldn’t. Her brother. Her lover. Their shapes mingling with a third that she couldn’t believe. Reid had the gun in his hand when the clouds thickened over the disk of the moon and the shot cracked, shattering the night. A second shot cracked, and Molly ran toward the shadows that coalesced, condensed, separated.
Her brother lay on the ground, his fingers gripping the gun. Kneeling next to him, Molly touched his face, heard him sigh, felt his light breath like a mist. “Aw, Sissy, it wasn’t supposed to end up like this.” He turned his head away from her.
The mist drifted away, vanished.
Molly saw Harlan crouched at one side, holding his shoulder. As she stared, he blurred into shadows, seemed to move, and yet he was unmoving in front of her, his great golden eyes watching her, filled with desolate need as she stayed by her brother’s side. She wanted to call his name and she couldn’t.
His sleek black head tilted, turned, and the shadows drifted and vanished, taking him with them.
Molly.
Her name lingered on the air like a sigh.
There was blood on the ground where Harlan had been. Tracking the blood spots, dark against the blades of grass, Molly made her way in the fitful light of the clouds and moon to the hibiscus hedge by the driveway. Under the hedge, his sides heaving and laboring, the huge black cat lay. Blood coated his fur, and, as she stroked his head, tears dripping onto his matted fur, his golden eyes dimmed and closed.
Molly.
She patted his great black head for a long time in the dark until finally, her throat closing against tears, she returned to the house and phoned the police, using the cordless phone Harlan had insisted she purchase.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
When Molly saw Harlan’s dark, low slung car nose its way up the driveway, she was too dazed with grief and loss to understand the meaning of his appearance as he stepped out of the car and stopped three feet away from her. His hair was rumpled and his face was grim and withdrawn as he looked at her. Parallel grooves tightened the corners of his mouth.
He didn’t touch her. When she remained on the porch steps, her arms around her waist, he spun on his heel and strode away.
Ross Whittaker was beside him, the two of them began the procedures that would categorize and label the events that had happened. As she watched, uncomprehendingly, a helicopter from the local television station appeared within minutes and hovered above them, casting an eerie light over the scene as the blades whomped and whomped in the air.
Harlan had been with her at the dock.
The cat had been with her all these nights.
The cat had been with her at the dock.
She had followed the trail of Harlan’s blood to the dying cat.
Molly jumped as Harlan glanced up at her from the dock’s edge. So far away, yet he’d turned to her as she’d thought about him.
His head tilted, he slid his sunglasses to the top of his head and studied her for a moment.
A van from the county morgue screeched up and halted, the driver and attendants waiting for the moment they could wrap up Reid’s body. Harlan, who’d walked up to the van, said nothing, his dark presence just there, watching her.
She didn’t know how to explain her brother’s last moments, but she heard Ross say as he looked at the Luger and her brother’s wound, “The fool tripped and fell on the gun. He shot himself.”
She let it pass. Anything else would have been impossible to explain.
For one dizzying second, everything flashed to the moment she’d awakened to find the knife in her hand, and she thought she’d imagined those moments on the pier, that Harlan had never been there, twisting an
d turning in the shadows with Reid, but suddenly Harlan, kneeling next to Reid, glanced up at her and when he did, everything was in his unshuttered eyes.
He flipped his sunglasses down and turned away.
When they left, she walked back down to the hibiscus hedge, but the black cat’s body had vanished.
During the week that followed, when she was awake, Molly thought she saw Harlan everywhere. Asleep, she dreamed of him, dreamed of the cat and his glowing eyes, of golden corridors with twists and turns and her lost, needing him and unable to call his name.
She cried once for Reid when she remembered his last words, “It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this.” She tried to remember him as he’d been before greed had turned him into a stranger, into something evil that walked the earth in disguise.
And every night in her dreams she sought Harlan, called to him, yearned for him, and wept silent tears as the image of the cat blurred and merged with Harlan’s dark shape.
One night, close to morning, she awoke to find Harlan sitting at the foot of her bed. Dark jacket, dark slacks, hair smoothed back, he was as she’d first seen him.
Her heart labored with the need to tell him everything she felt, her lungs strained for air, and, transfixed by his glowing eyes, she couldn’t speak. The heat radiating from him wrapped around her, made her long to touch him.
But she couldn’t move. Too much had happened. Too much wickedness and strangeness. Too much she didn’t understand because it turned everything rational inside out.
He finally spoke, his words rough and urgent, tormented, their rasp like a scrape against her skin. “You asked me that night who I am, Molly.”
She remembered.
He was utterly still. “Do you still want to know?”
At last she moved. Pulling the sheet up to her chin, she said, “Yes, John Harlan, I do.”
He shrugged out of his shoulder holster and unclipped the beeper and handcuffs from his thin belt. “I’m a cop. I’ll always be a cop. I love what I do. I like hunting down evil and destroying it.” He laid the holster on the floor, the handcuffs next to them.
“I know.” She was shaking with fever and excitement and the hunger that he aroused in her. And something more, something she recognized only in bits and pieces until now.
He unbuttoned his shirt, draped the black silk over the end of her bed. “I’m a man.” He unzippered his expensive slacks, letting the belt slither to the floor, the pants crumple over them. “I’m a man, Molly. A man who needs you and who wants you so much he can’t breathe without you.”
He slid out of his black silk boxer shorts and tossed them to one side. Naked, he stood before her. “I am what I am, Molly. A cop. A man. And what you see before you.”
He was the most magnificent creature she’d ever seen, sleek and smooth, his thighs muscular and powerful as he stood, waiting for her acceptance or rejection. He tilted his head to one side as he watched her with his golden eyes and let her reach whatever decision she would. In all his power and beauty, he waited for whatever she would say or do, offering her himself, naked and vulnerable, placing himself absolutely in her power.
And she knew him. Had always known him in her heart, in her soul.
Rising on her knees, Molly crawled the length of the bed to him. Before she reached him, though, he stretched out his palm to stop her.
As she watched, his shape changed, expanded, contracted, and in the shadows blurring before her, she saw the cat that had come to her house that morning long ago, the cat that had stayed by her side and kept her sane, the cat that had saved her, protected her through the terrifying nights. Harlan appeared, the edges of his shape blurring, shifting, in a constant state of change.
“I know,” she said softly. “I don’t understand, but I know. And, knowing who you are, I want you, John Harlan.” Before he could stop her again, she wrapped her arms around him, pulling him to her.
He arched back. “Wait, Molly. You have to know everything before you decide. There are no guarantees.”
“I don’t need guarantees,” she murmured against the heat of his chest, his neck.
Keeping his arms at his side, he said, “I don’t understand everything that happens to me. All I know is what my grandmother told me. Nahual. The Guatemalan Indians believe that every child has a nahual. It’s your shadow, your spirit, and it goes through life with you. It’s your double, your animal counterpart. It’s supposed to be a secret until you’re grown, but my grandmother wouldn’t tell me what my nahual was until she was dying.”
“But that doesn’t explain this—” Molly motioned toward his blurred shape that altered even as she watched and held him. She heard his voice but it drifted to her from the shadows in her arms.
“I watched my brother’s execution.” Harlan’s voice was soft and she had to strain to hear him. “I loved him so much that I couldn’t stand what was happening. I believed he was innocent, and I was wrong, but I couldn’t understand that my brother had a core of evil inside him that had let him kill, callously, carelessly, and lie to me.” Harlan’s face contorted with loss. “And I still loved him. Even as I watched them fit the hood over his face, looked at his eyes for the last time, I still loved him and I screamed his name. And in that instant, when I lost control, something happened to me. I was myself, I was him, I was the person standing next to me.” In the shadows of her bedroom now, he became himself, the shape holding under her stroking hands.
Molly clung to him, afraid that he would vanish and she’d lose him forever.
“It only happened that one time, but I began sensing things that I didn’t understand, that I had no way of knowing rationally. I hadn’t allowed myself to care about anyone after my brother died. I was afraid of what would happen if I lost control of my emotions. But then I saw you at your parents’ funeral. I was driving by. I’d heard about the murders and I couldn’t resist checking out the people at the funeral. I saw you.”
He stretched out his hand to her, let it drop back to his side. “Your head was bent and I only saw a brief glimpse of your face, but I couldn’t get you out of my mind, and the incidents began happening more and more frequently. I had no control over them. Things began to happen at night when I slept and I would have dim memories of having gone places, learned things that I didn’t know how I’d learned. Nonlanguage things, just and understanding. And, finally, I understood that my spirit self and physical self had joined in those moments when my brother died, in those moments when I lost control and opened myself. After your parents’ funeral my subconscious somehow believed that you needed me.” The intensity in his voice shattered her.
“Oh, I do,” she breathed against the shadowy form that was Harlan.
“And I wanted you more than I’d wanted anything or anyone in my life.” His voice rose from the smoke in front of her and was the loneliest sound she’d ever heard. “But it’s your decision, Molly.” He was there, in front of her, the shifting shapes stilled as he waited. “I am as you see me.”
She stroked his smooth hair and tried to find words for what she felt.
“Molly, I don’t know what the future holds for me. For you if you let me become part of your life.”
“You already are,” she whispered, holding him, holding him, finding the words at last. “You’re part of me, my flesh, my soul.” She pressed her mouth to the skin covering his thundering heart. “I could never let you go. Never again.”
Letting her face brush against his chest, Molly stroked him in wonder, let her hands trace the sleek muscles that had given her pleasure, let her mouth slide against the miracle of him and she knew that whoever, whatever he was, he was hers. She dipped and picked up his handcuffs together, linking her wrist to his, “and don’t you dare forget it. Not for as long as you live.”
His laugh rumbled through his chest as he flicked the lock open and tossed the handcuffs aside. “I need both hands, sweetheart.” He lifted her over him and twined his fingers in her hair, angling her face as he bent and k
issed her, his kiss a claiming of his own, deep and consuming, sending her spiraling into pleasure before she could tell him that nothing mattered except him, that she loved him more than she could ever say, so, with her hands skimming over him, speaking for her, she told him of her love in a language beyond time, her body speaking to his, answering the need in him, answering his hunger, giving to him as he gave to her in the morning sunlight streaming into her room.
As she sank under him, surrendering as he surrendered to her, Molly heard in the distance a cat’s curious yowl.
And then Harlan kissed her, touched her, and there was only silence and him, John Harlan, her lover from the shadows.
ISBN: 978-1-4603-6337-9
LOVER IN THE SHADOWS
Copyright © 1994 by Jimmie L. Morel
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Silhouette Books, 300 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017 U.S.A.
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