Guilty as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 1)

by Rosalind James

  “The alarm hasn’t been tripped,” she told Jace, “or you would’ve heard from the company. But Lily said she could see a light moving around. Somebody came onto the property and left, do you think?”

  “How did Tobias sound on the phone?”

  “Angry. Growling. Barking.”

  “Then there was something he really didn’t like, and no kind of false alarm. He doesn’t bark at squirrels.” He was passing the turnoff to his cabin, and Paige wished she could see it from the road. She’d like to have seen lights on, to have known Lily was there and safe. In another minute, Lily’s house came into view. Faint light from inside, and nobody’s truck parked conveniently in the drive, signaling their presence. Jace pulled to a stop and said, “Night-vision goggles in that duffel. Hand me a pair and take one for yourself. I’ll show you how to switch them on and put them in infrared mode so you’ll see heat signatures. That’s what we’re looking for.”

  She wanted to ask him when he’d thought of those, but she didn’t. She put the goggles on instead, and the darkness outside turned a bright green, the fence and shed standing out as if she were standing in a differently-colored daylight. Jace had the truck’s lights off now. He pointed, and she saw. A barely visible, glowing shape moving off to the left, all the way past the chicken coop.

  Jace had picked up the shotgun, and now, she unholstered her weapon. The moment she did, her mind flipped the switch from anger to action. Jace had turned off the overhead light, and when he opened the pickup’s door silently, dropped to the ground, and didn’t close the door again, she did the same. Then she was following his pale, glowing form, getting his hand signal at the edge of the fence.

  You go right. I go left.

  She did it. The goggles were heavy, trying to drag her head down, and she had to resist their pull to look up. The wind was blowing up here, sighing and singing in the evergreens, and as they moved through the dark, she heard the yip of a coyote, coming from someplace close. An answering cry, then an eerie wail. She kept going, turning her head every few steps to keep track of Jace.

  Around the shed, and the figure came into view again, together with a sudden flurry of small forms. The chickens. And from the right, the pack of coyotes in full bone-chilling howl.

  Jace was already there, grappling with the figure near the coop, and she heard nothing but the wind, nothing but the coyotes. She saw somebody else, though, in the distance, then heard something like a rasp of wood, then a crash. She was running, stumbling, her depth perception thrown by the goggles, and she was there. Her hand on the person’s arm, pulling it out and up behind them. “Police,” she said, barely realizing she was saying it. “You’re under arrest.”

  A solid figure. A man. He was twisting, trying to get out of her grip. She started to shout. “On the gr—”

  She thought for a long moment that she’d been Tased. A shock of pain, then another one. And a third. She kept her grip on the man but was stumbling away, and the pain continued.

  “Shit!” the man yelped. “Holy mother—”

  Another sting, and Paige saw them. Hundreds of tiny bright-green specks.

  Bees.

  She was still hanging on desperately, but she couldn’t kick the man’s legs out from under him. Her gun hand had gone up to ward off the bees, and she forced it down and shouted, “Get on the ground! Now!” Then somebody else was there, knocking the man in the back, shoving him to his knees.

  Jace. She said, “Bees. Bees,” and he said, “I know. Back off. Go get the woman. She’s on the ground. Hold her there.”

  Paige’s face was swelling. She could feel it. Little lumps of fire on her cheek, her upper lip, her ear, her neck. A buzzing in her ears, the cackle of chickens, the wailing of the coyotes. She was wading through a nightmare, going toward a pale-green figure rising to her knees, getting a foot in her upper back and kicking her to the ground.

  “Stay down,” she ordered. “I’m armed.” She dropped down herself, planted a knee in the woman’s back, and called out to Jace, “Got her.”

  “Got him,” he called back. She heard another wail, now. Far off, fading away, then coming closer, and the coyotes had stopped. A siren. The police, finally.

  Jace was moving toward her, shotgun in one hand, dragging somebody by the arm with the other. “On the ground. Now,” he told the man. He hesitated a moment, and Jace said, “If you don’t do it, I’ll hurt you.” He sounded exactly like he meant it. The man obeyed.

  Paige said, “We’ll keep them here until the cops come,” and Jace nodded.

  “Did you get stung?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Five times? Ten? Not sure. Felt like a lot. You?”

  “A few times. He was knocking the beehive apart, I reckon.”

  She was feeling the pain now. In fact, her face was on fire. Jace said, “Are you allergic?”

  “No. Just sensitive. I’m OK. It’ll swell more, that’s all.”

  Silence beneath them, but when the red-and-blue lights were finally visible, the siren turned off, the woman beneath Paige began to struggle once more, and Paige said, “Stay down, asshole,” and kneed her in the back again.

  The woman gasped. “You little bitch.”

  Oh, yeah. This was going well. She called out across the yard, “Paige Hollander and Jace Blackstone. We’ve got a couple intruders here. Light us up.”

  No answer, but a minute later, Paige’s vision was split into starbursts of pain, and she recoiled. Jace was grabbing at her, and after a moment, she realized why. He ripped the goggles off, and she gasped, shut her eyes, and tried to breathe.

  She didn’t hear the person approaching until he was almost there. “Police. Drop your weapons and get on the ground.”

  She did it, and so did Jace. Right down into the dirt. She said again over the throbbing pain in her head, “Paige Hollander and Jace Blackstone. We have intruders.”

  “Hands over your head,” the voice said. “And tell me again.”

  The woman on Paige’s right stirred and said, “Chris? It’s me. Tell her to let me go. She attacked me and dragged me here at gunpoint.”

  Jace said, “Sergeant Worthington, I presume. Here’s your sister Jennifer. I can’t wait to hear the rest of it.”

  Jace needed to see how bad Paige’s face was. “Sensitive” didn’t sound good to him, and the bees were still buzzing around. Sergeant Worthington got stung, yelped, and swatted, and Jace felt all the satisfaction of it. Sometimes, it was good to lie quietly on the ground, and an angry, disturbed beehive was definitely one of those occasions.

  It was another ten minutes or more, though, before he got to check on Paige. When Worthington finally had handcuffs on his sister and her husband—surely not an experience any officer would relish—Jace said, “Paige has been badly stung. I need to take her into the house and check it out.”

  “You can’t,” Paige said. “I didn’t bring my purse. The keys are in there.”

  “Hand me that torch, mate,” Jace told Worthington, and when he didn’t comply, added, “Flashlight. Let me check.”

  Paige was right. She was sensitive. Her upper lip was three times its size, and her ear and cheek were puffing up, too. He asked, “How do you feel?”

  “Not bad,” she mumbled through that fat lip. “My throat’s fine. I told you. I’m sensitive. I need a steroid shot, that’s all. It doesn’t matter.” She asked the woman beside her, “Why would you do this? You heard Brett Hunter say he’d pull out of the project if something happened to me.”

  Jennifer said, “Because that was a lie. Obviously it was a lie. He’s not going to leave a profitable project like this on the table because somebody messed with your chickens and bees. He was just saying that. This is business.”

  “Joke’s on you,” Paige said, “because my sister’s already made an agreement with Hunter for her land. You’re making your brother arrest you, you’re facing charges for malicious mischief and a lawsuit, and your reputation’s going to be toast, and it’s all for nothing. It wa
s going to happen anyway.”

  “What sister?” Jennifer asked. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Her husband didn’t say anything. He hadn’t said a thing so far, in fact. Dragged along, Jace would bet anything, and wishing like hell that he’d married somebody else. Paige said, “I’m not Lily Hollander. You didn’t even get the right woman. I’m Lily’s sister Paige. I’m with the San Francisco Police Department. Like I said. Joke’s on you.”

  Life didn’t always give you that moment of pure satisfaction, but this time, it did. Until Paige suddenly said, as Worthington was leading Jennifer’s still-silent husband to the patrol car, “Lily.”

  Jace asked, “Lily what?”

  “Something’s wrong with Lily. Something bad. We need to find her. We need to go.”

  Worthington tried to stop her. Paige didn’t listen. The truck was blocked by the patrol car, so she told Jace, “Run,” put the goggles over her eyes again, and did it.

  Her leg hurt, and so did her face and her shoulder. She ignored all of them. Down the paved road, around the corners. Jace was out in front of her, his long legs eating up the ground. Her lungs told her she hadn’t done anything aerobic in a month and that she had too many bee stingers in her body, and she ran anyway.

  Please, Lily, she thought. Please be at Jace’s. Lily had said before that if somebody broke in, she’d run through the woods. If she hadn’t made it to Jace’s, though… where would she be? A bear, Paige’s treacherous mind tried to say. A mountain lion. The pulsing waves Paige was getting felt like that. Like fear, not pain. Like terror.

  Less than five minutes to get down the road, and Jace had turned onto the gravel side road, was running uphill. They were almost to his house. She could hear something, now. The deep, husky sound of a very big dog barking.

  Tobias was outside the cabin. One front leg tucked up against himself, crashing all the same into the front door, then doing it again. And barking. He turned at sight of Jace and Paige, and Jace ran up the stairs, his tread light, motioned Tobias back, and shoved the door open, moving inside with care and deliberation, shotgun first.

  It was unlocked. Or more like—the lock was torn out, because the frame around the deadbolt was splintered. In the stone-flagged entryway, a metal box lay crumpled. The panel to the alarm, prised out of the wall.

  The lights were off, and Jace didn’t turn them on. Paige slipped past him, signaled to him. I’ll go upstairs. You check down here.

  He nodded. There was no sound, but there was somebody here. She felt it, and she knew Jace did, too. No car. No truck. But somebody was here. Lily would have slipped out the back again while the person was breaking in the front, taking on Tobias. She was out there in the dark, and somebody was hiding here, waiting for Jace. Paige hoped.

  She moved up the stairs weapon-first, placing her feet as silently as she could. When a board creaked underfoot, she didn’t freeze. She kept going. Another creak.

  Nothing.

  No door to the bedroom, nothing but shadowy space. The heat-registering goggles weren’t picking up anybody, either. She swept the drapes at the two windows aside with a quick hand. Nothing.

  Bathroom.

  She’d cleared the door when the figure came at her from the right, from behind another door. Water heater, she registered even as somebody jumped onto her, smashing down on her gun hand with something very hard. The clunk of the revolver hitting the floor, and Paige felt a prick at her throat sharper than the bee stings, and then the warmth of blood.

  “Don’t move,” the woman said, her voice low. Shaking. Furious. “I’ll kill you.”

  Noise behind her, and the world lit up. Paige got that starburst again, had to close her eyes. The woman was shouting. Screaming.

  “I’ll kill her! I’ll kill her! Stop!”

  Jace skidded to a stop. He put a hand out for Tobias, but Tobias had already stopped, too.

  Charlotte from the reception desk. Standing behind Paige with a knife at her throat. Too far away. Twelve feet. He couldn’t risk rushing her.

  She was dressed in jeans and a navy-blue sweatshirt, but her hair wasn’t red. It was blonde, and long. A wig, Jace thought. Because this was who Charlotte wanted to be. A seductive blonde. The woman in red.

  She probably engages with him, and then breaks it off rather than openly pursuing him, Dr. St. John had said. Charlotte, who’d blushed when he’d come into the gym. Who’d looked at him and looked away. He’d sent her into the locker room after Paige when she’d hurt her leg. He’d asked her to call 911—after she’d hit Paige in the head and tried to kill her. He could tell that had been her. He could see it. He could smell it. The willingness to kill.

  He focused in. Focused hard. Charlotte held the knife to Paige’s throat and said, “Put the shotgun down on the floor. Slowly. And then kick it away. Now.” Like she’d watched too many cop shows.

  A low growl rumbled out of Tobias’s deep chest, and Jace could tell that his eyes were fixed on Charlotte, that he’d leap at the smallest sign. Charlotte’s hand moved, the knife sliced, Paige flinched and closed her mouth against a cry, and a line of red snaked down her throat. “Do it now,” Charlotte said.

  Jace did it. He sent the shotgun only a couple feet, though. She wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. He kept his voice level, too. “Why do you want to do this? What are you after?”

  Charlotte said, “I don’t want to do it.” The tears came to her eyes, the hand holding the knife wobbled, and the stream of red down Paige’s throat grew. “I wasn’t going to hurt you. I just came to talk to you. But you never let me. You kept leaving with her.”

  “How did you know somebody was here?” Jace asked. Keeping it steady. Keeping her talking. Keeping her from escalating. “I’ve been gone.”

  Something else flickered across Charlotte’s face. Anger. “You must think I’m dumb. I was watching. I’ve been watching. I saw the light come on. I knew you had come back.”

  “From where?” She blinked at him, and he asked, “Where were you watching?”

  Her eyes shifted. “I don’t need to tell you that.”

  “No, you don’t,” he said, “but how will I do what you want if I don’t understand?”

  “I’ve been watching,” Charlotte said again.

  Jace said, “You had my phone number and address from my membership application. You had my occupation, too. How did you figure out who I was? That took some good detective work.” He even managed to sound admiring. She thought they had a special bond? He’d work that. Right up until he killed her.

  “I started watching you a long time ago,” Charlotte said. “I looked in the window one time and saw a stack of books on the table. I took a picture and I blew the picture up until I could see the name. And then I looked you up. I found out.”

  “Ah,” Jace said. “Author copies. Very good. So what are we doing here? What does Lily have to do with any of it? Let her go, and we can sit and talk.”

  Charlotte’s hand jerked again, and this time, a noise tried to escape Paige. The stream of blood was threatening to become a river, and there was no tourniquet in the world for that. He had to act. He had to do it now. “No,” Charlotte said. “They say not to let her go. They say I have to get rid of her.”

  Three things happened very fast. The closet door beside Jace opened and Lily leaped out. Paige’s elbow drove into Charlotte’s solar plexus, doubling her over. And Tobias sprang. The dog leaped through the air from a standing start and sailed into the woman, knocking her flat and standing over her. Jace shouted, “Hold her!” but Tobias was already there, growling in her face, and Charlotte screamed.

  Lily was there, too, though. Wrestling with Charlotte for the crowbar she still held in one hand, slashing at her hand, her arm with something small.

  Jace’s razor. She must have grabbed it from the bathroom when she’d heard Charlotte breaking in. And then she’d hid in the closet.

  “Keep your filthy hands,” Lily gasped, finally wrenching the cro
wbar from Charlotte, “off my sister!”

  Charlotte was crying now, great gulping sobs. Blood welled from long, deep scratches on her arm and hand, and the blonde wig sat askew. “Stop,” she begged. “It hurts. I didn’t mean to… I didn’t…”

  Lily didn’t listen, and neither did Jace. He motioned Tobias off, flipped Charlotte over without much care, wrenched her hands behind her back, held both her wrists in one hand, and sat on her.

  Charlotte barely seemed to notice him. She had her head turned to the side, was still looking at Lily. “Wh… what?” she asked. “Who… what? But I got you. I got you! I won! You can’t… come back. You can’t come back.”

  “I can come back,” Lily said. “I did come back. I’ll always come back for my sister. You lose.”

  Not two halves of the same person at all. Two sisters with a whole lot in common. Because Paige was behind him, saying, her voice not shaking a bit, “I’ve got you covered with a shotgun, Charlotte. You move, and I’ll blast your brains all over this floor.” She asked Lily, “Where’s your phone? Call 911. Tell them to bring a cage, too. Because this woman is going to be locked up for a long, long time.”

  Lily called. She didn’t ask for a cage. She asked for the police. “And you need to send an ambulance,” she added. “Fast. Right now.”

  “She doesn’t deserve an ambulance,” Paige said. “And she doesn’t need one. She’s barely scratched. She rides in the cage.”

  “Not for her,” Lily said. “For you.”

  Jace would have sworn that Paige didn’t know what she was talking about. He almost laughed.

  They’d won. Twice. He sat on a weeping Charlotte, held her bloody wrists in his hand, and told Paige, “You’re a wee bit damaged, baby. Half your face is twice its size, your neck is bleeding, and your hand looks like you’ve mangled it. And bloody hell, but I love you.”

  Paige ended up with a shot of adrenaline, antihistamine, and steroids that wasn’t any fun at all. When she was shaking under a heated blanket in Emergency with a couple stitches in her neck, with Jace on one side of her holding her hand and Lily on the other, she told them, “S-s-see? I was right. Bees are b-b-b-ad.”