Shattered Blue: A Romantic Thriller

by Jane Taylor Starwood

  “That works for me,” Matt said. “I want to swing by my place to check on things anyway.”

  “All right,” Shane said. “Doug and I will do a little shopping, then we’ll meet you at my place for dinner.”

  “See you in a few,” Matt said before he climbed into the cab and drove away.

  Doug watched him go, then told Shane he was going to find the men’s room.

  She climbed into Doug’s Hummer and settled herself in the passenger seat. She found herself wishing Gram could have come. It had been so wonderful to see her. The thought that her grandmother and Doug might move to her little corner of New Mexico made her so happy. It was amazing how many things she felt happy about at this moment—not the least of which was driving toward home in a big red pickup truck. She missed him already.

  Still smiling—she couldn’t seem to stop—Shane leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

  THIRTY

  As he neared the turnoff at San Miguel, Matt looked at the thunderheads towering over the Black Range. Rain. Surely they’d get some now. But overhead the sky was an innocent, clear blue. In the rearview mirror, the sun was an orange fireball sliding below a ragged purple horizon.

  He made the curving right turn, looking forward to driving up his hill, thinking how quickly this place had begun to feel like home once he’d found Shane. He’d been with his share of women, maybe more than his share, but not one of them made him feel the way Shane did, in or out of bed.

  And the sex. My God, the sex. None of Vanessa’s tricks could come close to matching the intensity he’d experienced last night with Shane. He didn’t even know how to describe it, which was just as well, because words could never do it justice. The nearest he could come was “soul mate,” and that wasn’t even close. Some things weren’t meant to be reduced to words.

  A few minutes later, as his truck jolted down the access road, Matt was still thinking about Shane. A broad streak of lightning lit up the sky over the Black Range, outlining its dark peaks in eerie silver just as Matt reached the top of his hill. Thunder rumbled as he opened the door and climbed out of his truck, leaving the headlights on.

  The air was heavy with the smell of approaching rain, and Matt smiled as he turned and popped the seat forward.

  He was leaning into the truck, reaching for his duffle, when he heard a sound close behind him. Footsteps?

  Puzzled, frowning, he started to back out of the truck. He turned his head and caught a glimpse of an arm clothed in dark green. Then a sharp, shocking pain seared the side of his neck.

  Knees buckling, vision blurring, waves of dizziness and nausea slamming through his body, he went down on one knee, fighting to stay conscious as darkness rose up to swallow him. His last coherent thought was of Shane, and then the stunning pain, like a nest full of wasps, erupted against his ribs, and the world went black.

  Shane smelled the promise of rain in the air the minute she stepped down from Doug’s Hummer. Fiona trotted up to wind around her legs. She picked up the sleek, black cat and scratched behind her ears.

  “Miss me, Fiona? Yes, I know you’re hungry. Dinner’s coming right up.”

  She released the cat to unlock the kitchen door. Doug came around the Hummer carrying two shopping bags and they went inside. Shane turned the outside and inside lights on. She heard thunder rumbling in the distance, echoing from peak to peak.

  “Sounds like we might get some rain,” she said, smiling at the thought. “Just put the groceries on the counter, Doug. I have to feed my menagerie, then I’ll start dinner.”

  When she turned toward him, she saw the gun in his hand: a black, evil-looking thing, pointed straight at her heart.

  A cold jolt shot up her spine. “Doug?”

  She looked at his face and saw the hard gleam in his eyes.

  Of course she was scared. She’d be crazy not to be; he had a gun pointed at her. But beneath the fear, stronger than the fear, she was angry, furious, enraged, because her dear, sweet grandmother loved a man who didn’t exist. He’d tricked Gram, played her for a fool. She was planning to marry this bastard—whoever he was.

  Whatever was going on here, whatever he was after, she wouldn’t let him get away with hurting Gram like that. She’d do whatever she had to to survive, and then she’d make him pay.

  He had to be the phone whisperer. She recalled that sinister voice on the phone and started to shiver, feeling the familiar trembling deep in her belly. She pushed it away. She couldn’t let herself panic. If she stayed calm, she’d get through this.

  Where was Matt? He must be up on his hill, or on his way down here. Oh, God, don’t let him step into the middle of this. She had to keep Doug busy, keep him distracted.

  “Your name isn’t Doug Galvin, is it,” Shane said.

  “You just keep calling me that. Even if I told you my real name, it wouldn’t mean anything to you.” His voice was clipped and sharp, with no trace of the lazy Southern drawl.

  “Okay, Doug, then why don’t you tell me what you want? If it’s the money my stepfather supposedly sent me, you’re out of luck. I don’t have it. It doesn’t exist. It’s nothing but a fairy tale.”

  A slow smile spread across the face of the man she knew as Doug Galvin. “Oh, it exists all right,” he said. “I was Ray’s cellmate, Shannon. You’ve had it all along, you just didn’t know it.”

  Shane felt her eyes go wide, the blood leave her face. He was in prison with Ray? “I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t care what you believe. Sit in that chair and cross your wrists behind you.” He gestured toward a ladder-back chair with his gun hand while he fished a length of nylon clothesline from one of the grocery bags.

  Shane stood where she was.

  “Don’t make me shoot you. I like you, believe it or not. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “I suppose you like Gram, too,” Shane said. The words tasted bitter in her mouth.

  Doug laughed, slipped back into his drawl. “Yeah, actually I do. I’m kind of sorry I had to use her that way.”

  “You’re a fucking cold bastard.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s a handy trait in my line of work. The chair, Shannon. Now.”

  Matt’s consciousness climbed up out of the depths, his mouth tasting of metal, nausea churning in his gut, pain zinging along every nerve in his body. He didn’t know where he was, what day it was.

  And then he remembered. Someone had jumped him from behind. A sharp, electric pain in his neck, over his ribs. A stun gun? What the hell?

  Shane. Where was Shane? And Doug. Some maniac was running around with a stun gun. He had to get to them, warn them, call 911.

  He had to get to Shane’s house, use her landline.

  He tried to get up, but he couldn’t move. He was lying face-down on the ground and something heavy was on top of him, pushing against his shoulders, his back, his legs, weighing him down. He opened his eyes but couldn’t see anything. He took a deep breath and his nose and mouth filled with dust and bits of straw.

  Straw—he was lying under bales of straw. And he smelled something familiar, an oily stench that stung the inside of his nose and burned the back of his throat.

  Gasoline.

  He started struggling against the weight that pinned him.

  “Hello, Mr. Brennan,” said a cheerful male voice. “You’re awake, I see. All the better.”

  Matt went still, blinking the stinging grit out of his eyes. Dimly, through an opening between two leaning bales, he saw a face. A face with dark eyes and dark hair and a short, dark beard. For a moment he thought it was Doug, and then he focused on the horn-rim glasses. Not Doug.

  Matt coughed, trying to clear the dust and the oily tang of gas fumes from his throat. “Who are you?” he said. “What do you want?”

  The man laughed. “I should think what I want would be all too obvious. I want to kill you. To be more precise, I want to burn you to death. As to who I am, that’s a bit more interesting.”

  This guy was
a psychopath. Or maybe he was hallucinating. Maybe all this was a shock-induced nightmare.

  “And since you’re not going to be around to give away my little secret,” his captor said, “I’ll tell you who I am. I’m Jordan Ripley.”

  Shane’s stepbrother? He was lying. Jordan Ripley was dead.

  The guy was still talking. He seemed to like the sound of his own voice.

  Matt tried to shake his head to clear his mind, but the movement made him dizzier, made his stomach roil with nausea.

  “That’s right,” the voice said. “I’m Shannon’s stepbrother, the evil twin. Oh, did you think I was dead? Eaten by sharks? People are so easy to fool, Mr. Brennan. A suicide note, a little blood, and poof! I’m a ghost.” He laughed again, and a chill ran along Matt’s ravaged nerve endings.

  This was no hallucination. He was trapped beneath gas-soaked straw bales, and the man who’d put him there, the man who meant to burn him to death, was Shane’s stepbrother, Jordan Ripley. And he was no zombie.

  “Did she tell you about the little game we used to play?” Jordan asked him. “Oh, you needn’t answer, I can see by the rage on your ruggedly handsome face that she did. Well, I’ve come to finish the game—after she gives me the money, naturally.”

  “There isn’t any money, you fucking maniac.”

  “O ye of little faith. Of course there is.”

  Matt heard a familiar scratching sound, the sound of a match being struck, and a tiny flame appeared in the opening between the two bales.

  “Unfortunately,” Jordan said, “your part in the game is over. You lose, Mr. Brennan.”

  For a brief moment, that tiny flame became Matt’s whole world. He froze, unable to take his eyes off the dancing tongue of fire.

  Shane, he screamed silently. Shane, I love you.

  The match disappeared and he started to struggle again, pushing with all his might against the bales that pinned him.

  Then he heard a deep-pitched whoomph as fire leaped across the gas-soaked straw. He smelled smoke, felt the heat on the bare skin of his face and hands.

  A powerful engine roared to life: Jordan was taking his truck. He heard him shout above the revving of the engine, “Ready or not, little sister, here I come!”

  Matt screamed his rage as his truck moved away, headed down the hill, headed toward Shane. “Don’t you touch her, you sick fuck!” he screamed. “Don’t you dare touch her!”

  Acrid, oily smoke poured into his throat, choking him. He coughed it out, and then he stopped screaming and channeled every ounce of his rage into kicking and shoving at the rough walls of his burning prison.

  He had to get to Shane.

  THIRTY-ONE

  She had no choice. She turned the chair away from the table and sat down, crossing her arms behind her. She thought about trying to trip him, but he had the gun, and if it went off, even if it didn’t kill her, the sound would bring Matt at a run.

  While he tied her hands behind her, it occurred to her that Doug didn’t seem at all concerned that Matt could walk in on them at any moment. He wasn’t even keeping an eye on the door. He should be watching for Matt, shouldn’t he? Unless he knew something she didn’t. Unless there were someone else involved, someone who’d gone after Matt.

  No. Please, no.

  She started to struggle then, and Doug jerked the clothesline tighter around her wrists and leaned so close to her ear that she recoiled from his warm breath.

  “Be a good little girl,” he whispered, “or I’ll go straight back to Phoenix when I’m done here.”

  Shane froze. For the first time, despair rose its bleak head. She sat stiffly as Doug tied her ankles to the chair legs.

  He retrieved his gun from the table and stood looking down at her.

  “Now,” he said. “I’m going to help you help me. Ray sent you a package before he went to prison. What was in it?”

  Shane blinked, tried to think through the haze of fear fogging her mind.

  “The package, Shannon.”

  “Wait, wait a second, I’m trying to remember. It was stuff from my apartment, nothing special. Books, CDs, keepsakes—”

  “What sort of keepsakes? Any jewelry?”

  “What? No, no jewelry. The government took all of that.”

  “What else?”

  “I can’t— Wait. The geodes. I think the geodes were in that package.”

  Doug smiled, his eyes alight with avarice. “Geodes? Where are they?”

  Shane turned her head toward the living room. “In there,” she said, “over the fireplace. But they’re not that valuable. The government didn’t think they were worth confiscating.”

  Doug wasn’t listening. He was striding away from her, into the living room. She watched him turn on the lamps, then take down the first geode, the one her father had given her just before he died. He peered into the crystal-filled rock, then raised it high over his head.

  Shane cried out. “No! Oh no, please don’t—”

  He threw the geode hard against the tile floor. She heard it shatter, saw a million shards sparkle as they sprayed across the room. Tears filled her eyes, spilled down her cheeks. No. No.

  Doug went down on his knees, searching among the shards. She heard a low growl escape his throat as he stood and picked up the next geode, smashing it as he had the first. What was he looking for? They were rocks full of crystals, that was all, worth nothing smashed to bits.

  Shane struggled against the ropes while Doug’s attention was elsewhere, but he had done too good a job and struggling only pulled them tighter.

  She watched Doug smash the largest geode, the one with blue-white crystals that Ray had given her for her twenty-fourth birthday, the last one she’d celebrated in Manhattan.

  Doug got down on his knees, searching on the floor. He held up a crystal, studying it in the light, and then he laughed.

  He walked back to the kitchen, holding the crystal in the palm of his hand.

  “Do you know what this is, Shannon?” he said.

  She looked at the large, bluish-white stone he was turning and twisting in front of her. She could see now that it wasn’t a quartz crystal; the edges were too rough and irregular. She shook her head.

  “What you’re looking at is a rough-cut, blue-white diamond, worth somewhere in the neighborhood of four million dollars. It’s been right under your nose all this time. Right under your nose.”

  Shane stared at the stone, then at the intense light in Doug’s eyes, which seemed to reflect the gleaming of the diamond. “You’ve got what you came for,” she said. “Take it. Take it and go.”

  Just then she heard the sound of a powerful engine: Matt’s truck was pulling up to the house. She had to warn him. “Matt!” she screamed. “Don’t come in! Get the police!”

  Doug laughed, but Shane hardly registered his odd reaction. She heard the truck’s door slam. Either Matt hadn’t heard her, or he refused to leave her. He was coming in. She looked at Doug. He was watching the door, too, but still holding the gun on her, so she couldn’t do anything but scream. “Matt, no! Run!”

  The door flew open and Shane blinked in shock, her words of warning dying on her lips. The man walking casually into her kitchen in a dark green warmup jacket wasn’t Matt. This man was tall and slender, with straight brown hair, a neatly trimmed beard and black horn rims. Without the glasses, he’d look like a younger version of Doug.

  Stunned, looking from one man to the other, her mind stirred with a memory, but she couldn’t pin it down. Something to do with Beth, with the gallery.

  The younger man smiled at her. That smile was so familiar, but what she was beginning to suspect was simply not possible, and her mind rejected it.

  She watched, nearly holding her breath, as he removed his glasses and laid them on the counter, keeping his back to her. She kept watching as he took his time rinsing his hands in the sink, drying them on a paper towel, which he then spread on the counter, his movements slow, meticulous. She watched as he bent over to
remove something from his eyes, one at a time: contact lenses. She saw him place the dark lenses carefully on the paper towel.

  She watched as he straightened, turned slowly toward her, and gazed at her out of cold gray eyes.

  Shane’s eyes widened and her body jerked in a spasm of shock and fear. It couldn’t be, but it was.

  Jordan.

  She stared at him, her heart pounding painfully in her chest, fighting to hold back the tide of panic that threatened to drown her. She struggled to get her mind around it, but it was impossible. Jordan, not dead. Jordan, in her house, looming over her, piercing her with his eyes.

  All at once she knew with perfect clarity what he was trying to do: He was trying to turn back the clock, trying to turn her back into the terrified child she once was.

  She couldn’t let him do that, couldn’t let the panic give him what he wanted. Getting out of this alive, and saving Matt—if Jordan hadn’t killed him already, and she couldn’t let herself believe that—depended on her ability to stay calm, to think clearly.

  She was not a child. She was not helpless. Even tied up, she wasn’t helpless; she had her mind, she had her will to live. He couldn’t take that away from her, not as long as she was alive and conscious. She would not give in to him. If he won in the end, if she went down, she would go down fighting.

  She lifted her chin and glared at him in defiant rage. “Where’s Matt?” she said, her voice strong and clear. “If you hurt him, Jordan—”

  She hadn’t been aware of Doug since Jordan walked in, but now he spoke.

  “What’s going on here, Clark?” Doug asked. “You two know each other? Why did she call you ‘Jordan’?”

  Jordan sent him a killing look. “Shut up, Galvin. This is none of your business.” He turned back to Shane. “It’s just between us, right, little sister? A game we never got to finish.”

  “Sister?” Doug said. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on between you two, but I found what we came for. Let’s get out of here.”