by Janet Dailey
Sam felt her fingers dragging at the front of his shirt. He began stripping away the layers of wet clothes, from him and from her, not caring what he tore. It was all beat and hurry as he tumbled her onto the bed, rolling with her, his mouth running impatiently over her rain-slick face, his hands relentless in their greed to touch and explore.
With a new aggression, Kelly rolled onto him, taking her lips on a frantic race over his body. But it wasn’t enough. She moved onto him, gasping in sharp delight as Sam gripped her hips and sheathed himself in her, filling her. Not just physically. Even in her confusion, Kelly understood that.
She threw her head back, her body bowing in slim arch with the strain and the wonder. One sane part of her mind registered the thought that she didn’t want to love him, she didn’t want to need him. Then her hands were sliding over his chest and she was bending down to his lips.
Closing her eyes, Kelly let him take her away to a place where reality slid out of focus, and where love was more than just a word.
When the last shudders left them, Kelly lay half draped over him, her head pillowed on his chest, moving with the gradually slowing rise and fall of it. Her own breathing had begun to level out, the vague stirrings of misgivings starting to return. But for the moment, she was lulled by the idle stroke of his hand over her damp hair.
“What do you feel now?” Sam murmured, his voice a low rumble in his chest that vibrated against her ear.
“Satisfied,” Kelly admitted. “Very satisfied.”
There was nothing for a long minute except the soft patter of the rain against the windowpanes. She thought he had accepted the answer she had given him.
“But?” Sam challenged, a faint edge to his voice. “I think I heard one at the end of that.”
“Touching, kissing, making love. Maybe that’s all there is,” she said as his hand stilled on her hair. Levering herself up on one elbow, Kelly pushed her hair back to look at him, seeing the impatience and the denial in his eyes. Yet she argued softly, “Maybe it doesn’t go any deeper than that.”
“Speak for yourself.” Smoothly Sam rolled her onto her back, following to prop himself above her. “As for me, I don’t deny I love your body. I love your breasts.” He touched one. “I love having your long legs wrapped around me.” He ran a hand from her hip to her thigh. “Half the time, more than half the time, I only have to look at you to want you. But, listen close, I love the woman inside this body more.”
The conviction was there, in his eyes, his voice, his expression. “How can you be so sure?” Kelly wondered, frowning slightly.
Tenderly he touched a finger to the small crease between her brows and smiled sadly. “How can you be so unsure?”
“Very easily. Sam, my life has been turned upside down in the last week. I’m not sure I have a job, maybe not even a career, and you come along.” She smoothed a hand over the ridge of his jaw, liking the hardness of it, the strength that was there, an innate part of him. “I could be grabbing at you for security. If that’s all it is, it wouldn’t last. I need to get my life in order, Sam. I need to sort things out.”
“Sort away.” He caught her hand and pressed a kiss in the palm of it, his gaze never leaving her face. “Just make sure you keep me in mind.”
“It will be impossible not to.” Kelly smiled, very aware of his hard length molded to her side.
“Good. But there’s something else you should know.”
“What?”
“I want to have children and see if I can’t do a better job of raising them than my parents did raising me. I want you to be the mother of them. I want you in my life. And I want to be in yours so you’d better make damn sure you make room for me.” An eyebrow arched in mild warning.
But Kelly shivered all the same. “You scare me.”
He dropped a kiss on her lips. “That makes two of us then, because you scare the hell out of me.” He rolled away from her and off the bed, all bronze skin and tapered muscle.
“You don’t really expect me to believe that, do you?” Kelly sat up.
Their clothes lay in sodden piles on the floor. Sam scooped them up and glanced back at her. “I certainly do. I’ve never let myself get close to anyone before. Never let myself care. If you don’t care, you don’t get hurt. If you don’t want too much or expect too much, you aren’t disappointed. It was safer that way.” He paused a beat, holding her gaze. “Maybe you and I are two of a kind in that respect. I know I never wanted to care about you. I resisted it every time I was around you. I was so busy fighting against caring that I fell in love with you...and gave you the power to hurt me.”
Sam waited another beat and then grinned. “Be kind.”
But Kelly couldn’t smile back. She was too stunned by the way he had exposed his feelings to her, made himself vulnerable. Sam Rutledge vulnerable – the combination seemed contradictory and yet it made her feel warm inside, almost at peace.
Sam carried the wet clothes into the bathroom and paused when he saw the array of feminine items arranged along the counter next to the porcelain sink.
Makeup, brushes, hair spray, combs, lotions, it was all there. His ex-wife had probably left her things sitting out on the counter of their bathroom, but Sam couldn’t recall noticing them. He picked up a jar of cleansing cream and smelled the edge of the lid. It was Kelly, fresh, silky, subtly sexy.
A rivulet of water from the wet clothes in his arms trickled down his thigh. Turning, Sam dumped them all in the tub. Mrs. Vargas could think whatever she liked in the morning. He spotted a swatch of torn lace in the wet heap and smiled. Whatever she thought, she’d be right. He grabbed a towel off the rack and went back to rejoin Kelly.
Kelly wasn’t surprised when Ollie Zelinski and a lieutenant from the team heading up the manhunt for her father arrived at the house to question her the next morning. Anticipating it, she had written down, in detail, everything that had happened the night before, omitting only the personal parts about her mother’s death and the reasons her father gave for drinking. She had finished her notes shortly before Sam returned to have a cup of coffee with her.
“Any objections if I stay?” Sam asked after Mrs. Vargas had ushered Ollie and the lieutenant into the morning room.
“No,” the lieutenant replied, a man by the name of Lew Harris, in his fifties with a paunch and a tired look. “In fact, I’ll probably have some questions for you.”
“There’s coffee in the urn,” Sam said. “Help yourself.”
The lieutenant did, but Ollie sat down. “I’m sorry about this,” he said to Kelly.
“It’s routine, I know. I’ve been a reporter long enough to know about police procedures.” Kelly could guess why Ollie had come along, and it wasn’t to offer sympathy or moral support. They had been friends in the past and she suspected that he hoped she would trust him enough to tell him things she might be reluctant to tell someone else. He was doing his job. She recognized that.
“Here.” She passed him the sheaf of notes she had made. “I wrote down everything while it was still fresh: what he said, what he’d eaten, what he was wearing when he left, anything I thought might be significant.”
Ollie glanced through them, then handed them to the lieutenant. Automatically, Harris reached inside his jacket and took a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket. He slipped them on, then sent a quick smile at the others.
“The eyes are the second thing to go,” he said, then patted the bulging line of his stomach. “The waistline is the first.”
It was an old joke, but Kelly managed to smile at it. He began reading her notes. She sat and watched, conscious of the tension building. Finally he tapped the papers on the table to even out the edges and glanced sideways at Ollie.
“At least now you know what Dougherty’s defense will be,” he said. “He’s going to claim someone else was there arguing with Fougere.”
“Is that so imp
ossible?” Kelly challenged smoothly.
“Impossible? No. Unlikely? Highly. Am I surprised that he would make such a claim? The only thing that surprises me is that he didn’t include some sort of vague description of this alleged third party.”
The rain had stopped sometime in the night. A shaft of sunlight came through the window in the morning room, penetrating the broken cloud cover. Kelly could hear the muted, chopping drone of a helicopter, one of several inching their way over the vineyards on the estate, whipping up air to dry the wet grapes before mold could set in.
“Then you think he’s guilty.” Kelly didn’t have long to wait for a response.
“As sin,” the lieutenant stated, then shrugged, a little self-consciously. “Sorry, I know he’s your father, but that’s my professional opinion-”
“Lew took part in the investigation into the baron’s death,” Ollie explained.
“I see,” she murmured.
Sam shifted in the chair next to hers. “Kelly doesn’t want to believe her father is capable of murder. I guess no daughter would, regardless of what kind of man her father was.”
“Let’s just say I still have one or two doubts,” Kelly suggested, aware she was the only one in the group who did.
“Miss Douglas, where your father is concerned, we have motive, opportunity, and the proverbial smoking gun.” Harris ticked them off on his fingers and explained the last. “The murder weapon, seen in his hands and bearing his fingerprints.”
“Were there other fingerprints on it?”
“Of course.”
“Have you identified them?”
“We have one set of prints we haven’t identified,” Ollie admitted. “The other two belonged to workers here at Rutledge Estate. The mallet-is a tool of their trade, so to speak.”
“Wouldn’t it be ironic if the third set belonged to the person who really killed Baron Fougere?” Kelly suggested, more to irritate than out of any real belief they would.
“Kelly, we have a preponderance of evidence against your father,” Ollie began patiently.
“All of it circumstantial. You have a witness who can place him on the scene beside the body with the murder weapon in his hand. But you have no one who actually saw him commit the crime. Your so-called motive is the assumption that Baron Fougere caught him in the act of willful destruction of property. Which suggests he was surprised. If that’s the case, why didn’t he hit the baron with one of the gas cans he was carrying? Why did he put them down and pick up a mallet?”
“Maybe Fougere had it. He heard a prowler and picked it up for protection,” the lieutenant theorized. “Then the two struggled over it. Your father took it away from him and hit Fougere with it.”
“Or maybe there was a third person there. Someone who argued with the baron, then hit him.” Kelly returned to her father’s story with growing stubbornness. “Have you been able to determine the whereabouts of all the guests at the party at the approximate time of the baron’s death? Were any of them absent from the terrace then?”
“You and I were gone,” Sam reminded her. “I took you home.”
“But I can’t swear you were with me when he was killed,” she countered. “I don’t know what time we left the party. I wasn’t wearing a watch that night and I didn’t look at the clock when I got to my room. For all I know, you could have driven back to the winery instead of the house, seen the baron there, argued with him, then hit him.”
“You’re reaching for straws,” Sam said roughly. “What possible reason would I have to kill him?”
But she had a point to make and she was determined to make it. “You tell me. I know when Baron Fougere announced before dinner that Fougere and Rutledge would be uniting in California, you looked far from happy about the news.”
“It came as a surprise.” The hardness was back in his features. “I knew it was being discussed, but I hadn’t been informed an agreement had been reached.”
“And you were unhappy about it,” Kelly persisted.
“I wasn’t entirely pleased, no.” The answer came out clipped, curt as the demand that followed it. “What the hell are you doing, Kelly?”
“Trying to prove a point.” She swung her gaze from him back to Ollie and the lieutenant. “There might be others who had reason to want the baron dead, who might have profited from it in some way. But it’s much easier to accuse a known drunk, isn’t it?”
Ollie found the diplomatic path. “His guilt or innocence will be for a jury to decide.”
“Beyond a reasonable doubt,” she reminded him. “And as of now, I still have reason to doubt.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Kelly,” Ollie said and meant it. He pushed back from the table. “I think we’re finished here, Lew.”
“Right.” The lieutenant sounded almost relieved and quickly gathered up his things.
“I’ll walk you to the door.” Kelly stood, already regretting some of the things she had said. Sam went with her when she accompanied the pair to the entry hall. “No hard feelings?” She extended a hand to Ollie, more to make peace than as a parting gesture.
“None.” He gripped it warmly.
“I guess somebody has to be the devil’s advocate,” she said in defense of the unpopular position she had taken.
“Why not the devil’s daughter?” Ollie smiled.
“Thanks. I should have known you would understand.” She smiled back, relieved that she hadn’t alienated her childhood friend.
Sam added his good-byes to Kelly’s and closed the door when the two men left. Smoothly he turned back. Kelly stood motionless against the backdrop of the hall’s gleaming marble, her attention already inwardly absorbed by her thoughts. Yet, for all her stillness, there was an energy about her, restless and contained. It seemed to vibrate from her and make the house feel alive.
“Care to tell me what that was all about?”
“What?” She frowned blankly, then flashed him a faintly impatient look. “You surely didn’t think I was serious when I suggested you could have killed Baron Fougere. I told you I was only trying to make the point that there might be others who had both motive and opportunity. I don’t, for one minute, think you did it.”
“I’m more concerned that you are starting to believe your father is innocent. You’re heading for a fall, Kelly,” he warned.
“It isn’t that I believe he is. It’s more that I have to find out whether he is or not, for my own sake, for my own sanity. I can’t keep wondering.”
“What is it going to take? A confession?”
“I don’t know.” She lifted her hands in a mixture of frustration and irritation. “I just know that right now there are holes in the case against him.”
“You hired a lawyer to defend him. That’s MacSwayne’s job. Not yours.”
“Have you ever taken a good look at the figure of Justice, Sam?” she asked, her lips curving in a faint smile. “Not only is she blindfolded but the scales are tipped, too. We both know he’ll make a lousy witness in his own defense. And if I’m called to the stand, I’ll have to testify that he got violent when he was drunk. What jury in the world will believe a man like that is innocent, even if he is?”
“So what are you saying?” His eyes narrowed on her.
“I’m saying he was a terrible father, and he isn’t much of a man, but I don’t want him convicted for that. If he goes to prison, I want it to be because he’s guilty. Is that so difficult to understand?” She was half angry with him and showed it.
“No. What’s difficult to understand is how do you propose to go about proving it? And why do you feel you have to be the one to do it?” he countered, matching the sharp edge in her voice.
“Who else will? And the only way to prove anything is by eliminating all other possibilities. The only way I know to do that is by asking questions.”
Katherine paus
ed at the top of the stairs. “Asking questions about what?” One delicate hand slid along the rail as she began her descent.
“About who might have killed Baron Fougere.” Turning to face the staircase and Katherine, Kelly was once again in control of her emotions, something she had difficulty with around Sam.
Her reply had Katherine pausing in mid-step before resuming her descent. “What a question. As painful as it may be for you to accept, it was your father.”
“He insists he didn’t. He says someone was with the baron, that they were arguing.”
Something flickered in her expression, but when Katherine spoke, her voice was smooth as glass. “That is ridiculous.”
“So everyone keeps telling me.” Kelly was still angry enough to want to provoke some kind of reaction. “But if -he didn’t, who did? Someone named Rutledge, maybe?”
Katherine stiffened. “I hope you, don’t expect me to reply to such an absurd question.”
“Are you satisfied now, Kelly?” Sam murmured.
Suddenly all the confusion and uncertainty came flooding back. What on earth was she doing? She sighed and shook her head. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Sam is right. I owe you an apology.”
“Nonsense.” Katherine touched her arm. “You have been under considerable strain these past few days. In such situations, we all tend to act and speak out of sheer desperation.”
Kelly wondered if Katherine knew what a powerful motivation desperation could be. She certainly did. Too much hinged on what would happen these next few days. Her job, possibly even her future. She couldn’t sit silently by and wait. She had to act.
Chapter Twenty-One
A playful wind tugged at the hem of Kelly’s skirt when she stepped from the car onto the roadside’s grassy verge. Her heel sank briefly in a small mound of gravelly soil before she moved to firmer ground and closed the car door. The solid thunk of it was a harsh-interruption of the vineyard’s peaceful stillness.
Then all was quiet, dominated once again by the rustling wind whispering through the vine leaves and the distant hum of traffic. Kelly glanced at the Jeep parked in front of her rental car, a pair of large, smoke gray sunglasses masking her eyes from the brightness of the morning sun. A scarf of raw silk, patterned in gold’s and rusts and greens, covered her hair, the long ends of it wound around her neck and knotted at the back to secure the scarf in place.