Her tiny shrug was barely noticeable.
“I spent more evenings in that bar than I want to remember. Do you think you’re the first woman who’s ever come on to me?”
“Of course not.”
“But you’re the only one whose offer I accepted. If all I’d wanted was an affair, I’ve had more opportunities than I could count. Some of Sandra’s best friends made offers. Women we worked for, women who worked for us and total strangers made offers. Yours was the only one that ever tempted me. It wasn’t just the sex. It was you.” His voice dropped to little more than an earnest whisper. “I wanted you.”
When she looked at him, there was yearning in her expression and disbelief in her eyes. In whom, he wondered, was her faith lacking? Him? Or herself?
“What time is it?”
He checked his watch. “Almost nine.” The sun had long since set, and dusk had given way to night. With a moon that disappeared behind fleeting clouds and distant stars, it was a good night for snooping. It was a better night for not snooping.
She stood, shook her clothes, then stepped into her shorts. When she started to pull her shirt on, he stopped her. “Torment me for a while. Leave the shirt off.”
She looked at him, apparently debating the wisdom, then tugged the shirt on over her head, anyway. Before he could feel too disappointed, though, she slid her hands underneath the shirt and, with a little wriggling and maneuvering, brought out the skimpy little top of her bikini. With a smug smile, she dropped it in his hand, pushed her feet into her shoes and headed for the truck.
He looked at it—two small triangles that not quite adequately covered her breasts, the rest all narrow strings to tie here and there. It was enticing enough on. It was too enticing off, because now she was naked underneath that thin, worn shirt. Now, if he slid his hands beneath the shirt, it would be just his skin against hers. Rough and callused against unbelievably soft, with nothing to hide the swelling his touch would cause, nothing to conceal the tightening of her nipples, nothing...
Ah, hell, he didn’t need her to torment him. He was doing a damn fine job of it himself.
After putting on his shoes and shirt, he joined her in the truck, where she was blotting her hair with one of his towels. He watched until she was done, then, without a word, he started the engine and drove back the way they’d come.
She directed him onto a narrow dirt road that ran into another, then finally onto the road to the resort. There he drove onto the grass behind the trailer that housed Blue Water’s on-site offices, shut off the engine and retrieved the flashlight under the seat. “You can wait here if you want.”
Hannah shook her head. While she had little desire to go snooping through Brad’s office, she had none at all to wait alone in the truck, not in this spooky place.
And it was spooky. In broad daylight the burned-out hotel simply looked sad. In the pale moonlight, it looked eerie, a macabre jumble of shadows, plans gone wrong, betrayals and loss. A woman had died in those ruins—not a very nice woman, by all accounts, but even so, she hadn’t deserved such a death. Before this was all over, it was possible that Mick’s death could be traced back to the ruins, too, as well as her own. And Brad would live his life as he always had, unsuspected by the law, untouched by guilt, unfamiliar with remorse.
Damn his soul.
Mick unlocked the trailer door, then called for her to join him inside. With one last look at the hotel, she did so, pulling the door shut behind her.
The trailer wasn’t overly large—maybe eight feet by thirty—and was divided into three areas. The middle, where she found herself, was a common area. It was into one of the offices on the end that Mick went, using the flashlight to show the way.
“Do me a favor. Stay at the window and let me know if you see or hear anything.”
She did as he asked, adjusting the blinds to give her a clear view of the road as it came out of the woods and into the parking lot. Behind her, she could hear drawers opening and closing, papers being shuffled. “It would have been a beautiful place.”
There was a pause in activity, then it resumed. “Yeah. Exactly the sort of place where I would never go for vacation.”
She glanced at him over her shoulder, then directed her gaze outward again. “Today when you came back from the city, for the first time you looked like a successful businessman. Most of the time no one would ever know to look at you that you have money.”
“Having money was never my goal. I wanted to build houses and know that I’d done a good job. I wanted the responsibility, as well as the advantages, of owning my own company. I wanted my name to be associated with quality work and fair and honest business practices.” He made a derisive sound. “Jeez, I sound like a sap.”
“No, you don’t,” she said quietly. “But you don’t sound like a good partner for Brad. Making money is all he cares about.”
“Well, darlin’, if I’d known back then everything I know about him now, I never would have become his partner. It would have been better for us all if I hadn’t. Without all that money, my marriage to Sandra would have ended long ago, so she would still be alive, and you and I wouldn’t be in such trouble.”
“So what will you do now?”
“If I don’t go to prison?” He was silent a long time. “I don’t know. Blue Water Construction is done for, no matter what happens. I guess I could bring back Reilly Homes. Or maybe I’ll just start over with something new.”
She wondered how much interest he might have in something old, like the Last Resort. It would certainly be a challenge, and he wouldn’t have to worry about making too much money.
She smiled tightly. She’d been listening too much to Sylvie. With the state her life was in right now, marriage, a future or even a relationship should be the last thing on her mind. She had nothing to offer any man with Brad’s threats hanging over her, and nothing at all to offer Mick except the truth about that night. Even that, thanks to Brad, was worthless now.
“There’s nothing here,” Mick said, then dryly added, “Of course. If there’s any evidence anywhere that points to a frame, Brad’s not going to leave it here for me to find. It’ll be at his house here or at home or at the office in Oklahoma City.”
“Want to go there?”
“It’s too late tonight, but tomorrow, yeah. We can check my house, too—see if Sandra left anything connecting them lying around.” He returned everything to the way he’d found it, did a quick search of his own office, then they left the trailer.
The stench of smoke that had hung heavy in the air yesterday was nothing more than a faint odor tonight, with the breeze. It gave little more than a hint of the tragedy that had occurred there—tragic for everyone but Brad of course, she thought bitterly.
They returned to the motel and Mick walked her to her room. After unlocking the door, she looked up to say good-night, but he spoke first. “I’m sorry about all this, Hannah.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“If Brad hadn’t wanted me out of the way, he never would have forced you into this.”
“If I hadn’t borrowed money from him, then defaulted on the loan, he never could have forced me. There’s plenty of guilt to go around, but none of it’s yours.” It was hers, Brad’s and maybe Sandra’s, but not Mick’s.
She started to go inside, then turned back. “My swimsuit top?”
He let it dangle by the strings. It looked so delicate and small compared to his hand. Just the sight stirred a tingle of desire deep in her belly. “Maybe I’ll give it back next time we go swimming.”
“Maybe? There won’t be a next time without it.”
“You could always go topless—or take Sylvie’s suggestion.”
She thought about their too-brief time at the lake—the cool water, the sweet breeze, the lazy pleasure of being out at night with nothing special to do. If she’d discarded her swimsuit along with her clothes, Mick would have done the same, and they might not have even made it into the water. She remembere
d too well the sight of him naked, remembered too easily her body’s response to him. They would still be back there in the moonlight.
Rather than pursue a conversation that threatened to become more intimate than she could bear, she shrugged. “We’ll negotiate for it then. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She went inside and was about to close the door when he spoke.
“Hannah? I had a nice time.”
Slowly she smiled. “So did I. Good night.”
Chapter 6
It wasn’t a long drive to Oklahoma City, a short distance to I-40, then straight down the interstate, but it seemed to take forever. Hannah stared out the window. After a lifetime of wishing she was anyplace but Sunshine, tonight that was exactly where she wanted to be—at home in her dreary little town in her drab little motel, worrying about how to pay for a new roof or running clean towels and extra blankets to guests.
Or maybe doing wicked things in bed with Mick.
She’d seen little of him today. After breakfast cleanup he’d disappeared with Sylvie and hadn’t reappeared until after a trip to the hardware store in Yates. The rest of the day he’d kept busy doing minor repairs in the guest rooms. When she’d asked him at lunch not to, he had ignored her and gone right back to the job afterward. She hadn’t wanted his help, but she’d been so damned grateful for it. It had given credence to Sylvie’s assertion that running the motel was easier with a man to help. Mick never would have let the place get into its current state of disrepair. Where she would have had to spend a fortune on repairmen, he had the skills and the tools and needed only supplies.
But his stay here was temporary, and so was his help. Whatever the outcome of the sheriff’s investigation, he would soon leave the Last Resort, Sunshine and her. She couldn’t allow herself to start depending on him.
The offices of Blue Water Construction were nothing like she expected. Knowing Brad, she’d been looking for someplace stunning, expensive, elegant. Instead, it was merely a small suite in a strip of nondescript offices, with a dentist on one side and a tax service on the other.
Mick smiled knowingly at her expression. “We don’t often bring clients here. Usually we meet at their homes or mine or Brad’s. Or, in some of our larger subdivisions, we use the model home for on-site office space.”
Dim lights burned in the secretary’s office, along the narrow hallway and in the office he identified as Brad’s. His own office, at the rear of the building, was dark, the door closed.
They went to Brad’s office first, where the interior was much more what she had envisioned. At the doorway, a serviceable, commercial-type carpet gave way to a beautiful Berber. Instead of cheaply paneled walls, these walls were heavily textured and painted pale ivory. There was blond wood, rich leather, lots of metal and glass. It was all very elegant, all very expensive.
She would bet Mick’s office had industrial carpet, a beaten-up desk, gray metal file cabinets and chairs that were strictly utilitarian. She’d once thought he wasn’t her type, but he was definitely her style.
While he sorted through Brad’s desk drawers, she circled the room, studying the art that adorned the walls. Four large paintings, all heavily and elaborately framed, and she would be hard-pressed to describe them as anything other than blobs of paint on canvas. Either she was seriously artchallenged, or Brad had been suckered out of a tidy sum of money.
“What do you think?” Mick asked from too close behind her.
“I think I regret Mom throwing out my rainy-day pictures when I was a kid.”
“According to Brad, this guy’s an artistic genius. Personally I like paintings where I can actually identify what I’m looking at. I’m not much into impressionism or post-modernism or whatever this is.” He gave the room a sweeping gesture. “There’s nothing here.”
Of course not. They couldn’t be so lucky. If there had been any incriminating evidence in the first place, Brad had either destroyed it or secured it someplace—like a safe in his house—where they couldn’t get to it.
“Let me check my office, then we’ll head on over to the house.”
She followed Mick down the hall and into an office the same size as Brad’s. That was the extent of the similarities, though. This room was plain, with little to distract its occupant from serious work. The best that could be said about the dark gray carpet was that it was durable. The desk and file cabinets were wood that had seen better days, and the padded chair behind the desk was tattered and worn, the leather repaired in one place with a strip of silver duct tape. There were rolled-up blueprints on every surface, and hand-scribbled notes covered the bulletin board that hung near the desk.
The only personal items in the room were two photographs, in simple black frames with plain white mats. The man in the center of both pictures was an older version of Mick, with gray streaking his dark hair, but still sinfully handsome. His mother was mostly gray, too, and plump, her face lined with creases from life, hard work and frequent smiles. The two elderly couples, she assumed, were his grandparents, married more than sixty years and still happy. And the younger couple...
“My sister Janey and my brother Tom. My folks, my dad’s folks and my mom’s. This is Janey’s husband and their kids—” he gestured toward a group in the second picture “—and this is Tom’s wife and their twins. This was taken at a family reunion a couple of years ago.”
“You look like your father.”
He smiled, pleased with the observation.
“Why weren’t you and Sandra there?”
The smile faded, making her regret the question. “She didn’t like being reminded that I come from a family of farmers. She refused to go anyplace that didn’t have a luxury hotel. She never liked my family, and they’d given up trying to include her. She didn’t want to be away from her twenty-two-year-old lover for more than a day or two. She hated me.” He shrugged. “Take your pick.”
“They look like nice people.”
“They are. When they met Sandra just before the wedding, they weren’t impressed. They had hoped I would marry someone like Tom’s wife, someone like Janey. Like you.” He murmured those last two words as if not meant for her to hear. Part of her wished she hadn’t. Part of her was glad she had. “For my sake they tried to accept her, tried to welcome her into the family, but she refused to be welcomed. The only thing she wanted was for them to stay out of our lives. She had no interest in family reunions, family holidays or family, period. Not even in having one of our own.”
A family of her own had long been one of Hannah’s dreams, and one of Sylvie’s dreams for her. How disappointed her grandmother would have been if Hannah had married a man who’d refused to fulfill that dream. How disappointed she would have been.
She turned away from the photographs. “Last night you searched your office at the trailer, and tonight this one. Do you think Brad might have planted evidence against you?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him. He murdered my wife to get me out of his way. He burned down the resort to get out from under the debt. What’s planting a little evidence?”
Hannah waited in the hall while he shut off the lights, then preceded him to the front door. “Is Blue Water really so valuable without you?”
“Brad used to say that he was the dreamer and I was the builder of dreams.” He grimaced at the flowery language. “Good builders aren’t that hard to find. Dreamers, whose dreams can be made reality without breaking the bank, are. He’ll hire somebody, not as a partner but at salary, and they’ll continue business as usual. Brad will have all his profit and most of what used to be mine. Yeah, it’s a valuable deal.”
She still couldn’t quite grasp it. Killing one person and sacrificing two others, simply for money. She could never be that desperate, and she knew desperation.
Their next stop was the house Mick had shared, at least for a time, with Sandra. Located in one of the city’s newer, more exclusive neighborhoods, it was exactly what she’d expected—big, beautiful, costly as hell. It was a grand house that
declared, “We have money,” in every way she could think of—from the ornate electronic gate in the wrought-iron fence that circled the property to the elaborate landscaping to the imposing bulk of the house.
It was so far from the Last Resort that the two buildings didn’t belong in the same universe. How could the man who’d built this showplace for himself spend even one night in her falling-down motel? How could she fantasize, even for an instant, that he could want to stay at her place?
They followed the broad drive to a side entrance protected by a porte cochere. He let them in through glass doors, then shut off the alarm and turned on the lights. They were in an entry with soaring ceilings, marble floors and gorgeous oak paneling. The hallway stretched to the opposite side of the house, where more glass doors led to another porte cochere. Bisecting the corridor in the center was another hall. Doors opened into elegant rooms, and straight ahead, the most beautiful and intricate staircase she’d ever seen curved gracefully to the next floor.
“What do you think?” Mick asked. “Does it take your breath away? Leave you speechless? Make you a little jealous?”
She was more than a little jealous, she acknowledged as she nodded. The money spent on this marble floor could remodel and refurbish the Last Resort with plenty left over. The wood paneling could keep it running into the next century, even with no guests. The chandelier that sparkled above them could give Sylvie a life of leisure. And any of it could stir a yearning in Hannah. After living the way she had her entire life, she couldn’t even begin to imagine living with such beauty, such money-is-no-object luxury.
“This is probably the most beautiful house I’ve ever built,” Mick said, rubbing the toe of his boot along the edge of the Persian rug, “and from the day I started it, I hated it.”
She gave him a sharp look to see if he meant it. She wanted to believe he did, wanted to believe that he no more belonged in such opulence than she did. He looked as serious as she’d ever seen him.
“Want the grand tour?”
The Overnight Alibi Page 13