Don't Go Home

by Janelle Taylor

  “Wait a minute,” Matthew interrupted, furrowing his eyebrows. “What?”

  “A plan came to me, and I wanted to walk around with it. That’s what I’ve been doing for the past two hours.”

  “A plan to catch the killer,” he repeated a little too sarcastically.

  “That’s right, Matthew. I do have a brain, too, or did you forget that?”

  “Mia, this isn’t a children’s game at your school. This is life and death.”

  “How dare you?” she snapped. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “I think I’m someone who cares about—”

  He caught himself just in time. “About getting to the bottom of my brother’s murder and your sister’s flight. About finding the truth. I don’t have time to listen to plans that won’t help me seek justice for Robert.”

  “You arrogant jerk,” Mia said. “Well, I’ll tell you what. You don’t have to listen to my plan. I’ll just put it into motion on July tenth and handle it myself. The plan doesn’t require you or your help in any way.”

  “July tenth” he repeated. “What are you talking about?”

  “I thought you didn’t want to hear it. I thought you didn’t want to listen to children’s games.”

  “Mia, if you’ve cooked up some dangerous scheme that’ll get you hurt, I need to know so I can stop you.”

  “You really are a jerk.”

  She stormed into the bedroom and slammed the door.

  Matthew realized that was the second time in twelve hours that he’d provoked her to that. Had she really left this morning to formulate a plan, or to escape him and what had happened last night? Had she been plotting on her own as a means to shut him out as he’d shut her out?

  Once again, he had questions and no answers. He was getting really tired of that.

  He let out a deep breath, got up, and threw open the door.

  “Get out,” she snapped. She sat at Margot’s desk and faced away from him.

  “I want to know what you’re planning.”

  “As I said, Matthew, it doesn’t concern you. In fact, I’m quite comfortable with proceeding on my own from here. So why don’t you just leave?”

  She turned around then and shot him a glare that told him she meant every word she said.

  “Maybe I will,” Matthew said. “Just to teach you a lesson.”

  “How many times will I have to call you an arrogant jerk in one morning?” Mia asked. “Just get out.”

  “Fine,” he snapped.

  “Fine.”

  “Fine,” he said louder.

  “Fine,” she yelled.

  The dog next door started barking, and suddenly, someone was pounding on the wall that Margot’s bedroom shared with the apartment next door.

  “Now look what you did,” Mia said, lowering her voice. “You’re going to get my sister evicted. She’ll come home, thanks to my plan, and she’ll have no home to come home to!”

  He stared at her for a moment. “Look, let’s just both get out of here, get some fresh air. You can tell me your idea.”

  “Gee, thanks,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, okay? I’m serious. I want to hear it.”

  She lifted her chin. “If you’re not going to treat me like an equal partner in this—in this ... whatever it is we’re doing working together, then forget it, Matthew.”

  Man, but she was exasperating. “Okay. You’ve got a deal.”

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Fine.”

  “I’d like the last word,” she said. “For once.”

  “Fine.”

  They both tried, but neither could resist a smile.

  “No way,” Matthew said. “Absolutely not.”

  “Like I said, my plan doesn’t require you—or your approval—Matthew.”

  “Mia, listen to me. It’s too dangerous. Way too dangerous. There’s no way in hell I’m letting you do that.”

  Mia took a deep breath and stared out at the Atlantic Ocean. The truce they’d formed five minutes ago was certainly short-lived. From the moment they’d left Margot’s and walked the few blocks down to the promenade with a couple of bacon-and-egg sandwiches and large coffees, her back had been up about telling Matthew the details of her idea. And before she’d even had a chance to flesh it out for him, he’d interrupted with his absolutely nots.

  Yes, her plan was dangerous. But if she didn’t think she could handle it, she wouldn’t have raised it.

  And what gave him the gall to even think he could tell her what she could and couldn’t do? The man was more than impossible. More than infuriating.

  “Letting me?” Mia asked. “Last time I looked I was a grown woman.”

  “A grown woman who must watch a lot of television,” Matthew said. “This isn’t an episode of Law and Order, Mia. It’s real life.”

  Mia sighed. “Matthew, on July tenth, Margot is expected to show up at MacDougal’s Bar and entice someone into cheating. Someone who is going to end up dead if the pattern holds. And I’m going to stop that from happening.”

  “By getting killed instead?” Matthew asked.

  “By being very careful.”

  “Mia, you’re not dressing up as Margot and taking her place on July tenth to see what goes down. There’s no way in hell I’m letting you do that.”

  There it was again. Letting you do that. Did he really think he could stop her?

  Her plan was a good one, the only one that would work, and it seemed very simple. Margot had received instructions to show up at a certain bar on a certain night at a certain time, and Mia was going to take her place. Since there were no instructions other than where and when, Mia figured she’d just wait and watch and see what happened. Who approached her, perhaps. And when the killer made his or her move, Mia would be ready.

  As ready as she could be for a murderer, that was.

  Suddenly, her stomach turned over and then twisted into a knot.

  “Mia, we have no idea what the details of that night are supposed to be or who we’re dealing with,” Matthew said, pulling his coffee out of the bag. “We’d be going in blind.”

  “We?” she asked, eyebrow raised. “So you’re with me on this?”

  A vein was working in Matthew’s temple. “Let me think it over, figure out how we could possibly do this and guarantee your safety at the same time.”

  “Matthew, I don’t think we can guarantee my safety,” Mia said. She took a sip of coffee. “There are no guarantees with anything in life. The only guarantee with my plan is that I’ll know I did everything I could to lure your brother’s killer out of the woodwork. Even if it’s a failure, I’ll know I tried to help when I had the power to do so.”

  He looked into her eyes, his expression unreadable, and she wondered what he was thinking.

  He stood up, walked to the railing and stared out at the ocean, then turned back around and sat down. “We’ve got five suspects. Norman Newman and the four widows. Let’s exhaust the possibilities that one of them is our killer before we send you in to do your sister’s dirty work—”

  “Please don’t talk about my sister that way,” Mia snapped. “We don’t know what led Margot into that line of work or why she chose to keep doing it.”

  “We know it was important enough for her to give up love for it,” Matthew commented. “She made a job—a sleazy job—more important than her relationship with a man she loved, a man who loved her.”

  “First of all, we don’t know that Margot loved Justin,” Mia pointed out. “We don’t know anything about her or her situation.”

  She hated how true that was. How could two sisters who’d lost their parents at such a young age become so distant from each other? Instead of reaching out for each other, they’d gone their separate ways, looking to fill the void elsewhere instead of with each other.

  It was crystal clear that they were both still looking.

  “So, partner, how does my compromise sound?” Matthew asked, his blue eyes locked with hers
.

  Was he charming her? Manipulating her? She couldn’t tell. Damn.

  “I know what an equal partnership is, Matthew,” Mia said. “Don’t call me partner if you don’t mean it. Don’t try to manipulate me into doing things your way. I won’t stand for it.”

  He looked at her, then glanced out at the ocean for a long while. Finally he turned back to her and held her gaze. “Equal partners. I’ll even shake on it.”

  When his large hand enveloped hers, she felt the jolt from the nape of her neck to her toes.

  “Let’s concentrate on the widows today,” Matthew said. “I’m a little sick of Norman Newman at the moment.”

  “More than fine with me,” Mia agreed, unwrapping her sandwich. She took a bite, savoring the crispy bacon. “Matthew, you said we had five suspects—Norman and the four widows. Are you saying you’re really willing to investigate your sister-in-law?”

  He took a slug of his coffee. “I don’t know. I only know there are four widows of the four victims and that she’s one of them.”

  Mia wanted to grab his hand and put it to her heart, tell him she understood how hard it was. But she couldn’t. He wouldn’t let her.

  “Laurie left a message on my answering machine letting me know that she’s coming back early from a visit to her parents,” Matthew continued. “She said she needs to be in the home she shared with Robert, not running away from the memories they built. She’s going to leave the baby with her folks for the rest of the week, to give her some time to grieve without affecting Robbie.”

  “I can understand that. She sounds like a strong woman,” Mia offered.

  “If, of course, she didn’t kill Robert and the other men,” Matthew said flatly.

  “But based on what you know of her, you highly doubt she was involved in any way?”

  “Ninety-nine percent, I’m sure,” Matthew said. “But I need to be smart about this. I learned a long time ago that people can often not be what they seem. And that whether out of desperation or depression—whatever—people can be reduced to doing just about anything.”

  Mia wondered if he was thinking about his mother. She’d bet on it.

  “What do you think is our best way of approaching the investigation of Laurie Gray?” Mia asked.

  “She invited me for dinner tomorrow night,” Matthew said. “Why don’t I tell her I’ll be bringing a guest? Over dinner, we’ll ask some questions in a very careful manner.”

  “Who will you tell her I am?” Mia asked.

  “A friend of mine,” Matthew said. “It’s the truth, isn’t it?”

  They locked eyes, and she nodded. But she was thinking that friends didn’t go around doing what they were doing last night.

  Right here, right now, Mia Anderson was taking a bubble bath.

  The thought that one thin bathroom door separated him from her naked body was almost too much to bear. Much like turning her away last night had almost been his undoing.

  He lay on Margot’s uncomfortable leather beige sofa, so like his own, and wondered whether Mia wore her hair up or down in the tub.

  Whether those silky blond tresses were streaming over those soft, creamy breasts.

  His zipper straining against his erection, Matthew imagined himself in the tub with her, lathering her with soap, their bodies slick against each other... .

  Damn, he wanted her.

  “Matthew?”

  Please join me in the tub and wash my incredible body from head to toe... .

  Very curious, he got up and hurried to the bathroom door. “Yes?” he called through it.

  “I was just thinking about something Margot and I used to do when we were kids,” she said, her voice light. “The two of us loved bubble baths. While one of us was in the tub, the other would sit outside the bathroom door and wait her turn, and we’d talk and talk and talk. I guess knowing you’re out there in the living room made me think of it.”

  Matthew had to control himself from flinging open the door, stripping off his clothes, and joining her. “My mom had to bribe my brother and me to take our baths,” he told her.

  Mia laughed. “Not me and Margot. We did all our best talking with the bathroom door just slightly ajar and one of us sitting outside. It was easy to talk through tough kid stuff when you couldn’t see the other person’s face.”

  Matthew tried to imagine himself and Robert talking about anything as kids, let alone making a ritual out of it. “You and Margot were clearly close once. What happened?”

  Mia didn’t answer for a moment. “Puberty mostly,” she said. “Margot became the most popular girl in school, and I became the most invisible. Actually, I take that back—people knew who I was because they were shocked that I was Margot Daniels’ twin sister.”

  “Shocked? Uh, didn’t you look exactly alike then, too?” Matthew asked.

  “Hardly,” Mia said. “It was more like I was the ‘before’ and she was the ‘after’ in a makeover session.”

  “Okay, now you’ve lost me,” he said. “You’ll have to explain to me how identical twins can look so different. “But first, how about if I crack open the door so we can hear each other a bit better. It’ll be like old times.”

  “That would be nice,” she said.

  He opened the door just slightly and slid back down on his butt against the wall just outside.

  “To answer your question,” she said, “one becomes adept at cosmetics and blow-dryers and mall shopping for stylish clothes and flirting, and the other is a flop at it all.”

  “A flop? Or just not interested in that kind of stuff?”

  “I guess I wasn’t interested,” she confirmed. “I preferred to spend my money on books or music than on cosmetics and clothes. That didn’t make me too popular with the boys.”

  “I find it hard to believe that you didn’t have teenaged boys salivating over you.”

  “Trust me—not a one. Not too hard to believe when your sister looks like every boy’s dream. Like I said, I always looked like the ‘before.’ What was interesting was that it really seemed to bother the girls at school.”

  “The girls? Why?”

  “They just couldn’t believe that I’d choose to look like a plain Jane when I could look like Margot so effortlessly. It bothered them that I seemed to shun popularity, shun what I could have.”

  “God, I wish people would just leave other people alone,” Matthew said. “Even when you grow out of adolescence, there’s still so much crap, so much of people trying to make you live up to their expectations.”

  “I know. I found that out when I got married. My ex wanted a certain type of woman, and he created her.”

  “What do you mean?” Matthew asked. If she was a plain Jane in junior high and high school, she’d certainly blossomed into a swan at some point. The woman was drop-dead gorgeous.

  “I mean that he wanted me to look a certain way, and I wanted to make him happy, so I changed how I looked.”

  “Are you trying to tell me you’re not a natural blonde?” he asked, laughing.

  “Exactly.”

  “I’d bet anything that you’d look amazing as a brunette,” Matthew said.

  “My ex-husband didn’t think so.”

  “Mia, if you don’t mind my saying so, your ex-husband sounds like a guy who didn’t know what he had.”

  She was quiet for a few moments. “Did you go through a lot of that—people wanting you to live up to their expectations of you?”

  “Well, I guess with women,” he said, not sure he wanted to be on this track.

  Then again, perhaps it was a good way to make her realize that he didn’t have commitment in his blood.

  “Oh?” she asked.

  “I’d get into relationships, and the girls and later women would have all these expectations of me, even though I made clear that I wasn’t looking for a relationship, wasn’t looking to get serious. They’d get serious, call me a jerk, and that would be that.”

  “You’re not trying to cry ‘misunder
stood,’ are you?” she accused in a teasing tone.

  “Not misunderstood. Not listened to. I’d say it’s the biggest problem between men and women. Not listening. When someone says they’re not interested in commitment, the other person should believe it.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “I do have to agree with you about listening. If only I’d listened to what my ex-husband was saying when we first met, I would never have gone on a second date with him. But I heard what I wanted—or I ignored what sounded wrong to me.”

  Now they were both quiet.

  “Matthew, I’m about ready to get out of this tub before I shrivel up like a prune, but I forgot to bring in my robe,” she said. “Would you mind getting it for me? It’s right on the bed.”

  “Sure, no problem,” he said and headed off to fetch it.

  Pink terry cloth had never looked so sexy. Her full-length robe lay on the bed she’d slept in last night, and he was tempted for a moment to lie down and just inhale the scent of her.

  Get a grip, buddy, he told himself.

  He grabbed the robe and headed back to the bathroom door. “Uh, Mia, I’ve got it. Should I come in?”

  The door opened a bit more, and a delicate arm poked through.

  “Here,” he said and handed it to her—or tried to. The robe caught on the doorknob, and she ended up swinging the door wide open.

  She stood naked before him, her hair damp around her shoulders. She gasped and stared at him. He stared back. At everything there was to see.

  He unbuttoned his shirt, slowly at first to see if she’d tell him to go to hell or at least to stop, but she didn’t, and then he practically ripped it off his chest. His pants followed the shirt in a heap on the floor.

  She still said nothing.

  He walked toward her and pulled her into his arms and kissed her hard, so hard that they banged against the wall. This time there was no hesitancy on her part. She met his passion with equal fervor.

  “Oh, Matthew,” she breathed into his ear, and his entire body shuddered.

  He picked her up in his arms and pressed his lips to her mouth, his tongue probing inside the sweet softness of her. He trailed kisses along her neck, in her ear, across her collarbone. He let his tongue flick over her breasts, and as he licked and suckled the rosy tips, he carried her out of the bathroom and laid her on the thick, soft carpet in the living room.