by Tami Hoag
She stretched up toward him, and he brought his mouth down on hers. Elizabeth welcomed him, welcomed the sensual fog that was filling her mind.
Her left hand was still entwined with his right, arms were trapped between their bodies. He turned her hand and brought it against him, molding her fingers along his erection. Then he turned her hand and pressed it to her own body, wringing a gasp from her. The sense of doing something forbidden only added fuel to the fire inside her.
“Want me,” Dane whispered. “Say you want me.”
Elizabeth panted, her lungs grabbing air and puffing it out between swollen, parted lips. “I . . . want . . . you . . .”
Power surged through him. And passion. And something he wouldn’t put a name to. Everything else in the world ceased to exist, leaving just the two of them and desire. She was the only woman in the world, and she was going to be his.
He let go of her hand and caught her skirt, crushing the fabric in his fists as he raised the hem. Elizabeth arched into his touch, helpless to do anything else but gasp for breath. The edge of the counter was biting into her back, but she was only dimly aware of the discomfort. Her focus was on the hunger that was threatening to devour them both.
She gave herself over completely. And when the end came in an explosion of sensation and desperation, she sobbed, frightened by the intensity of it.
The idea terrified her. He couldn’t mean that much to her. He couldn’t mean anything because she was pretty sure she didn’t mean anything to him.
She turned away from his gaze, not wanting him to see the bleakness she was certain he would find in her eyes. Hiding from him. She focused her attention on mundane things—the way the last of the daylight fell in through the window in a dusty gold column, a gold that almost matched the color of the stolen scotch that sat on the counter. God Almighty, they were in the kitchen. She felt stupid as the realization struck her. She hadn’t even noticed. She’d been so caught up in need that their surroundings had receded into oblivion. Not once had it entered her mind that they were making love in the kitchen.
No. Not making love, Elizabeth. Having sex. Love wasn’t going to enter into this partnership. She wouldn’t delude herself into thinking otherwise. Dane Jantzen didn’t love her. Why that fact should have made her feel all hollow and achy inside, she couldn’t imagine. She should have been used to being used by now.
Dane eased himself away from her, hating leaving the warmth of her body, hating more breaking the deeper connection between them—the one he wouldn’t have admitted to feeling even to himself. He arranged himself and zipped his jeans automatically as his mind puzzled over what they had just done. What he had just done.
Christ, he’d taken her in the damn kitchen. Standing up. He hadn’t even given her the courtesy of comfort. He hadn’t even undressed her. What a bastard he was, accusing her of being a whore, then taking her while the truth of her innocence was still hanging in the air around them like the scent of fresh spring rain.
The cynic in him tried to remind him that she had allowed it. But she didn’t look happy about it. She looked embarrassed and ashamed.
He lifted a hand to touch her hair and she moved a step away, just out of reach. “Elizabeth—”
“Maybe you should go now,” she murmured. “Like I asked you to before.”
Dane slicked his hands back over his hair and sighed. He didn’t need more complications in his life right now. He didn’t need a woman like Elizabeth. But he’d sure as hell had her, and he couldn’t just walk away.
“That didn’t go quite the way I thought it would,” he said softly.
Her eyes widened, and anger flared in them. “Are you saying you came here expecting to—?”
“No. I’m saying I’ve been thinking about it since the moment I first saw you,” Dane admitted candidly. He brushed back her hair, dropped his hand, and carefully touched his thumb to the scar at the corner of her mouth, wondering how long it would be before she told him how she came by it.
“Isn’t that just like a man?” she complained.
“I wanted it,” he said bluntly. “You wanted it.” When she started to protest, he pressed a finger to her lips. “Don’t say you didn’t, Elizabeth. Your panties will tell a different tale.”
She narrowed her eyes and fumed, and Dane thought of how bleak those eyes had looked a minute earlier. “I didn’t mean for it to happen this way.”
“I don’t think it should have happened at all.”
“Hush,” he whispered, bending his head to kiss her cheek. “Don’t say that.”
He told himself he didn’t want her to regret their intimacy because he didn’t want this to be his only taste of her. That was the truth. Part of it.
“There’s no reason we shouldn’t be lovers,” he said.
The words came as a surprise to him, but not the logic behind them. If they set the ground rules now, if they both knew what they were getting, then they could both walk away unscathed in the end. It was simple, neat, the way he liked things.
“Well, for starters, I hate you,” Elizabeth said matter-of-factly.
Dane gave her a grin. “You’ll get over it.”
She shook her head, thinking of the bigger issue. “I don’t think so. I don’t need the trouble. Besides, I’ve sworn off men.” She backed away a step and lifted her shoulders in an apologetic shrug. “Sorry.”
Dane took a step back too, his expression closed. Elizabeth figured he wasn’t used to ladies saying no, and he probably didn’t like it, but that was tough. He stood there for a moment, a gleam of speculation in his eyes. But he doused it and took another step toward the door, and Elizabeth caught herself wishing he would try a little harder to change her mind.
“You know where to find me,” he said as if it didn’t matter much to him one way or the other.
She congratulated herself on her resolve as she watched him drive out onto the road and disappear in a cloud of dust and a glow of taillights. But even as she stood there, resolute, there was a hollow pang in her chest.
The telephone interrupted her melancholy, ringing as suddenly and loudly as the starting gate bell at Churchill Downs. Elizabeth jumped to answer it, thinking—hoping—it would be Trace. Her temper had burned off, but not the need to see him and talk to him and try to reach him. She snatched up the receiver on the kitchen wall, smiling with a premature sense of relief. “Hi, honey, I—”
“Bitch.”
The word stopped her cold. She just stood there, stunned, her brain scrambling to shift gears. The silence on the line became so absolute, she almost had herself convinced she’d imagined the voice. Then it came again, like a dog growling, low and menacing, eerie and evil.
“Bitch.”
Elizabeth opened her mouth and closed it like a fish gasping for air. No sound came out, no air went in. The sense of violation was sudden and sickening. Someone was invading her home. She looked around wildly, as if she expected to see the caller standing in her kitchen doorway. There was no one. The house was dusky and silent. She was alone. The word brought with it an oppressive sense of dread and vulnerability. Alone.
“Whore,” the voice growled.
Shaken and shaking, Elizabeth turned and slammed the receiver back in its cradle, then jerked it back up and dropped it to the floor.
“Whore.”
She stared in horror at the receiver swinging down along the baseboard, too terrified to rationalize an unbroken connection. Then she jammed both hands down on the cradle and kicked the receiver as if to make sure it was dead this time. A dozen irrational thoughts ran through her head—it was Helen Jarvis doing her exorcist voice, it was Brock tormenting her, someone had seen her with Dane through the kitchen window, the killer was still running loose—
The killer was still running loose. And she was the next worst thing to being a witness.
We haven’t exactly made it clear whether you saw anything incriminating or not. . . .
A loud bang sounded beyond the back do
or, jolting Elizabeth to action. She stumbled away from the phone and ran for the stairs to her room, slamming her shoulder into the doorjamb as she lurched toward the nightstand. She fell to her knees and yanked open the drawer. Her fingers fumbled through a tangle of scarves and scented lace-edged hankies, finally grasping cold hard steel.
The gun was Brock’s. One from his collection. A stainless-steel pearl-handled Israeli Desert Eagle .357 Magnum automatic. Elizabeth closed both hands around it and lifted it out of the drawer. The thing was unwieldy and weighed a ton, but she felt safer with it in her hands than she did without it. She sank down onto the rug with her back against the bed, and clutched the gun to her, the flat side against her chest, barrel pointed toward the wall. And she sat there and waited as day faded into night, with nothing but fear and silence for companions.
MIDNIGHT HAD COME AND GONE BEFORE TRACE ROLLED HIS sleek racing bike into the old tumbledown shed they were using for a garage. He propped the bike against a stack of bald tires, trudged out of the shed and across the weedy lawn, hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans.
He didn’t like coming home to this house. He especially didn’t like coming home when he knew his mom was liable to grill him like a cheese sandwich. Where you been, Trace? Who with? Doing what? He would have liked to have harbored some hope that she wouldn’t know anything about the sheriff hauling him in and him providing Carney with an alibi, but that was about as likely as a snowstorm in hell. Aside from being a reporter, she was a mom, and moms sniffed out stuff like that quicker than a hound on a trail.
Determined to prolong the inevitable, he sat down on the back step, dug a cigarette out of the pocket on his T-shirt, and fished a book of Red Rooster matches from his jeans. He lit up and took a deep drag, fighting the urge to cough it all out. He didn’t really care for smoking, didn’t think it was a habit he would keep for long, but he would keep it for a while because it made him feel tougher, more like a man. He knew it wasn’t good for him, but since nothing much going on in his life at the moment seemed good, he had a hard time caring.
He took another long pull and concentrated on the sound of a door banging against the barn while his lungs burned. There was another storm brewing. Lightning flashed across the night sky like a strobe, and thunder grumbled in the distance, a mirror image of what he was feeling inside—turmoil, anger, uneasiness, as though something were about to happen but he didn’t know what, couldn’t say how the feelings would escape. Restless, he smashed the cigarette on the cement step and flung the butt out into the yard, pretending it was a basketball and he was the star guard of the Duke Blue Devils shooting a three-pointer to win the NCAA tournament at the final buzzer of triple overtime.
Of course, he wasn’t. He was a long, long way from it, and that knowledge weighed on him like a stone. He wouldn’t go to Duke to be a Blue Devil or anything else. He was stuck here, in Minnesota, in a dump of a house with no friends but Carney Fox. Christ, did life get any worse than that?
“Well, if it isn’t the Lone Stranger.”
Trace winced at the edge in his mother’s voice. Life did indeed get worse. His stomach churned at the thought of what would come. They would end up fighting, like always. She would try to get him to talk to her, he would push her away. They didn’t seem to be able to do anything else. It was as though they were caught up in a continuous loop of time, like on Star Trek, where they just kept on reliving the same conversation over and over.
He looked over his shoulder at her and his eyes widened at the sight of the gun she held propped against her left shoulder as she stood in the doorway with her arms crossed over her chest. It flashed silver as a beam of the yard light caught on it, flashed as bright and dangerous as the lightning overhead. Trace bolted to his feet and swung around.
“Jesus, Mom, what are you doing with that thing?”
Elizabeth glanced down at the Desert Eagle as if she had grown so used to its weight in her hand she had forgotten about it. She debated telling Trace about the call, but it seemed less menacing now that he was here with her. It was just a call. A voice on the phone. A shiver ran down her arms at the memory of that voice, raising goose bumps in its wake.
“I was feeling a little jumpy,” she said. She nudged the screen door open with her hip and stepped outside, her eyes going automatically to the sky. The wind had picked up and shook the trees like pompons, rattling their leaves together. The barn door banged and thumped.
“They’ve got a suspect for Jarvis’s murder,” she said, dropping her gaze to her son. “But then, you’ve heard all about that, now, haven’t you?”
Trace looked away, the muscles in his jaw working. He jammed his hands at the waist of his jeans and sighed the sigh of the oppressed teenager. “Why don’t you just go ahead and do it?” he challenged.
“Do what?”
“Bitch me out and get it over with.”
Elizabeth pressed her lips together and tamped down the urge to do just that. She didn’t want to fight with him, really, she didn’t. Beneath the urge to rail at him and shake him and scream out all her frustration, what she really wanted was to hold him to her and take them both back to some point in the past before everything had started to go wrong between them. Back before Atlanta, before Brock and all his money, back to San Antonio, where they had come as close as they ever had to living a normal life. She wanted to go back to a time when he had still been sweet and trusting, and she had felt in control, the all-knowing, all-powerful mama, able to heal hurts and hug away tears. It seemed the years had taken away whatever power she had had or Trace had imagined she had had. He was sixteen now, nearly half her age, and perfectly able to see she wasn’t anything but mortal and couldn’t fix things with a kiss.
“Trace, I can’t hear about you giving out an alibi for Carney Fox and not be upset about it,” she said. “He’s a suspect in a murder investigation.”
“Yeah, well, he didn’t do it.”
“You know that for a fact?”
He glanced away, dodging her question, dodging her gaze. Lightning flashed as bright as a spotlight on his face, illuminating what he didn’t want her to see—the brooding look, the secrets. Elizabeth felt her heart sink, and a mother’s panic seized her by the throat and squeezed. She descended the steps and rushed toward him, driven by a need that threatened to overwhelm her. Trace started to turn away, but she caught him by the arm with her left hand and held on, her fingers biting into firm young muscle.
“Answer me, dammit!” she snapped, raising her voice to be heard above the gathering storm. “Do you know he didn’t kill Jarrold Jarvis? Were you there?”
Trace jerked away, wrenching his arm free and rubbing at it, scowling. “He didn’t do it. We were playing basketball.”
It was the same line he had fed Dane, and Elizabeth imagined Dane had heard the same flatness, the same ring of falseness she was hearing now. He was lying. Good God in heaven, he was lying about a possible murderer. Her son, her baby, the child she had held in her arms and dreamed such dreams for. Thunder cracked overhead and another flash of lightning cast everything in sharp, eerie relief, like a scene from an old Hitchcock movie, turning those dreams into a nightmare. The child had grown into someone she didn’t know, couldn’t reach; the baby was a face in her mind, a small voice calling to her from the end of a long, dark tunnel.
“Dammit, Trace!” she sobbed as the rain began to fall. “Tell me the truth!”
But he just looked at her, silent, drawing into himself, pulling his cloak of adolescent isolationism around himself like a force field. The rain streaked down across the lenses of his glasses and turned his T-shirt transparent in big splotches.
“I’m going to bed,” he said, backing away, his voice soft between the rumbles from heaven.
Elizabeth was rooted to the spot, the rain pouring down over her, drenching her, beating against her skin like a thousand fingers. She watched him disappear into the dark house, panic tearing at her inside, clawing to get out. She wanted to run
after him, to grab him, to scream, but it wouldn’t do any good. She couldn’t reach him—not emotionally, not the way she wanted to, needed to—and she couldn’t stand the idea of trying, only to fail. Tonight of all nights, she didn’t have the strength for it.
So she stood in the rain, crying, the water pelting against her face like rocks, the weight of it dragging at her skirt. She stood until the strength drained out of her legs, then she sank to the ground and sat there, her hair hanging in wet ropes around her face, the Desert Eagle tucked against her as she hugged herself and rocked and wished with all her heart that this was just a nightmare instead of her life.
Chapter Thirteen
THE SMELL OF CARAMEL ROLLS TURNED THE WARM AIR in the kitchen buttery and sweet. Dane shouldered open the door and shuffled in, bleary-eyed, the tails of his black polo shirt hanging outside his jeans. It was after seven. He had overslept and was irritated with himself because of it. It was irrational to think he should be able to function in top form on little or no rest while the burden of a murder investigation weighed down on him, but he caught himself thinking it just the same. Great Dane, the hero, the gridiron god, possessed of superhuman strength and character. He gave a bitter half laugh as he poured himself a cup of Mrs. Cranston’s strong black coffee.