Beth sat back in her chair, staring at her friend. “Dylan?”
“How well do you know him,
really
know him?”
The question pressed down on her chest, making it hard to breathe. “Why?”
Janine let out a ragged breath. “Jesus,
Bethany, it might
be nothing, but … when
I was going through Lance’s office, I found a file buried in his bottom drawer. A file labeled ‘Dylan.’”
“A file?” Beth whispered. “What kind of file?”
Janine frowned. “About an investigation Lance was working on.”
The restaurant started to spin. “An investigation?”
“Over the years Dylan has brought quite a few companies to their knees, forcing some to close their doors, in other cases sending management to jail. He’s always been heralded for seeking out corruption. But from what Lance had in his files…” Janine took Beth’s icy hands. “I’m sorry.”
The chill Beth had been unable to shake spread deeper. Denial chased close behind, but couldn’t catch up. Lance had never mentioned a word about investigating Dylan, but then, they’d made a point of never discussing Dylan.
I don’t care about the risks, she suddenly remembered him barking into the phone while in the mountains. I care about what’s in those files. If you’re not up to the job—
“What?” she asked now. “What are you sorry for?”
Again, Janine hesitated.
“Tell me!”
“There’s no easy way to say this, but there was enough
evidence in that file to make a strong case against Dylan for corporate sabotage.”
Beth curled her fingers around the edge of the table.
“Corporate sabotage?”
Janine frowned. “It gets worse, Beth. There were …
pictures.”
“What kind of pictures?”
“All I can guess is that Dylan discovered the investigation and was trying to put a stop to it by blackmailing the D.A.”
Somewhere along the line Beth had entered a hideous alternate universe, and she couldn’t seem to find her way out. “Blackmail?”
“The pictures were of the D.A. in a rather … how shall I say? Compromising position with what I’m assuming is a prostitute. There were notes, too.
Notes demanding Kent
step down or face exposure.”
Horror and disbelief crashed down from all directions, pummeling. Beth drew a hand to her stomach, tried hard not to be sick. “There’s got to be some mistake.”
Janine
leaned across
the table and lowered her voice. “I wish to God there was. But until we know more, you have to be careful.
I wouldn’t go back there, if I were you.”
“What are you saying?”
Beth demanded.
Janine looked her dead in the eye. “I know you’re not capable of murder, Bethany. But Dylan St. Croix is.”
* * *
Janine was wrong. There was some kind of mistake. That was all. Beth had only to ask Dylan when he got home, and he’d explain.
They’d probably both end up laughing about the misunderstanding.
But until then, she stood on his back porch, staring toward the west, where the sun slipped toward a massive cloud bank hovering over the horizon. Soon, twilight would take over.
Zorro chose that moment to make his presence known, weaving between her legs with a loud meow. Beth instinc
tively swooped the big black-and-white cat into her arms
and held him to her chest. Dylan
had brought him here the
night Lance died, and he’d been making sure he was cared for ever since. That
was hardly the act of the calculating,
twisted individual Janine described. Dylan was a man of passion, not malice.
Passion.
The word settled like a rock in Beth’s stomach. Detectives Zito and Livingston had
offered passion as a
reason why she might have killed Lance. A crime of passion, Yvonne
Kelly kept calling
it. An explosion of emotion resulting in horrific consequences.
Beth and Lance had
never shared passion. But Lance
and Dylan…
“You and Lance were hardly the devoted cousins your grandfather wanted everyone to think you were.”
“How could we be? The only thing we had in common was something two men should never share.”
The memory chilled her. Born cousins, but raised as
brothers, Lance and Dylan had shared a complicated relationship Beth had never understood. On the surface, they
appeared civil. They played their roles to perfection. But beneath the pretenses, Dylan’s passions clashed violently with Lance’s addiction to image and power.
Beth couldn’t begin to imagine how it must have galled Lance to approach Dylan about the artificial
insemination.
The humiliation. The shame. To keep his
perfect, orderly world intact,
Lance had possessed no choice but to turn to
his cousin and ask him to provide a basic human function
Lance could not. He’d had
no choice but to let Dylan in
on his dirty little secret.
To Lance,
that would have been playing Russian roulette.
Maybe that’s why he’d been investigating Dylan. To
protect himself. To have a trump card in case Dylan
decided to expose how far Lance had been willing to go to protect his secret.
Maybe Dylan found out about Lance’s file. Maybe—
Zorro squirmed free, making Beth realize how tightly
she’d
been holding him. Frowning, she closed her eyes and
hugged her arms around her waist, refusing to travel further down that dangerous, dangerous path. She wanted to just turn and walk away from the ugliness of it all, go back to
the mountains, to before. But she wasn’t a coward anymore, wasn’t a scared little girl. She was a grown woman carrying the child of a man who’d promised to never hurt her.
Opening her eyes, Beth found that somewhere along the
line, the sun had dropped below the thick bank of clouds, leaving nothing but darkness in its wake.
* * *
He found her on the back porch. Wearing a loose cotton
shift, she stood with
her back to him, hands curled around the railing he himself had installed. Darkness stole detail, but her rigid stance threw him back to that chilling night two weeks before, when he’d found her sitting in that chaise lounge, rocking vacantly.
She was retreating. He’d forced himself to stay gone all
day, believing she needed time to come to terms with the
chaos of the past twenty-four hours. But he’d been wrong. Not even the cool evening breeze eased the tension clogging the air.
A bad feeling settled low in his gut. He moved silently behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. The urge to ease her back was
strong, but instinct warned him to go
slow. “How are you feeling?”
She stiffened at his touch, his voice, but slowly, she turned toward him. “How did Lance know you’d keep his
secret?”
The question caught Dylan with the force of a sucker
punch. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting her to
say, but it certainly wasn’t this.
“I gave him my word.”
He repositioned his hands, sliding one to her waist, the other to her nape. “Why?”
“You gave him your word,”
she repeated
mechanically.
Her eyes were dull, glazed, determined. “But
how did he
know one day you wouldn’t want to
take everything back? That you wouldn’t blow the whistle and expose his deception?”
“I don’t go back on my word. Lance knew that.”
Suddenly he realized the shadows beneath her eyes had nothing to
do with nightfall. “Why the questions?”
“You could have destroyed him,”
she whispered.
His gut
tightened. The woman standing only inches
away was not the woman he’d made love to
twenty-four
hours before. This woman was tense, on guard, caught in a vortex he didn’t even begin to understand.
“What’s going on?”
he asked as levelly as he could.
Bethany glanced toward the three steps leading from the porch, where her cat lay bathing himself. The night was quiet, only
a few crickets gearing up for the long hours
ahead.
“Tell me about the
Trigon Investigation,”
she
said.
”
Trigon
?”
Suddenly Dylan was
ten years old again, grabbing at
marbles scattering down a hill.
With cold certainty, he realized that while he’d given Bethany space today, somebody had filled it with poison. “What about the Trigon Investigation?”
On a cloud of jasmine, the evening breeze pushed a strand of hair to her face. “Anything.”
Dylan’s fingers itched to slide forward, to skim across her cheekbone, but he
kept his hand at the base of her
neck. He didn’t want to think he
was trying to hold her in
place, while she steadily slipped away.
“Trigon was a forest products company in financial
trouble. To cover their losses, they
not only clear-cut old-
growth forests, but contaminated the drinking water of a small town in central Oregon through illegal
dumping.”
“And you brought them down?”
she asked.
“I spearheaded the investigation.”
“How did you know?”
An odd light glinted in her eyes. “What do you mean, how did I know?”
“What made you go after them?”
she persisted.
Frustration boiled inside him. He didn’t want to talk about ancient history. He didn’t want to talk about Trigon. He wanted to talk about them, to tell her what he’d found out today from Zito. Yes, her fingerprints were on the fire poker, but the detectives could find nothing
concrete linking
her to the murder.
“A tip,” he told her. “I found out through a tip.”
“What kind of tip?”
“Jut a tip,”
he said as patiently as he could. “What’s going on here, Bethany? Why all the questions?”
And why did she look at him like she’d never seen him before,
hadn’t made love to him the day before, didn’t carry his child?
As if on cue, she drew her hands protectively against the small swell of her stomach. “Can you think of any reason why Lance would have been investigating you?”
Dylan went very still. Deadly still.
“Investigating me?
What the hell are you talking about?”
Her gaze met his. “I’m talking about corporate sabotage, Dylan. I’m talking about an investigation Lance was
conducting. I’m
talking about blackmail and extortion. I’m talking about you.”
Chapter 14
T
he transformation came over him immediately, shadows
of concern
tightening into hard lines of
fury. The green of his eyes darkened. Even the whiskers that had looked enticing only minutes before became sinister.
The breath backed up in Beth’s throat. Her heart
pounded so hard she wondered if Dylan
knew how hotly the blood poured through her body. He stood close enough she had to look up to see him, and yet, the inches between
them felt
more
like a
gorge, one that widened, deepened, by the second.
“Corporate sabotage?”
he asked in
a dangerously quiet
voice
that chilled her to the bone. “Blackmail?”
She shivered, not used to feeling any kind of chill around Dylan. “Yes.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
he demanded. The angry disbelief in his voice resonated through her, but she couldn’t let intensity knock her off course. She had to know. She had to pull the weeds from their path
before
they choked out everything else.
“Trigon went out of business as a result of your inves
tigation,”
she said as
levelly as she could. “Their CEO committed suicide.”
She hadn’t thought it possible,
but Dylan’s expression
darkened even more. “They were crooks, for crissakes.”
Earlier, the distinctive scent of jasmine had brought a smile to her heart. Now, the sweet scent snaked through her as tightly as the vines curled around the porch railing, making it difficult to breathe, much less continue.
“What about the D.A.?” she persisted. “What about pictures of him and a prostitute? Demands that he resign or face exposure?”
“Christ almighty,” Dylan bit out. Abruptly he released her and backed away. She’d never seen his eyes that cold, that remote, as though he looked at Judas and not the woman he’d made love to barely twenty-four hours before.
“I’ve been worried sick about you and the baby, but that’s not what’s eating at you, is it? It’s me. It’s us. You’re wondering if you made a mistake up there on the mountain. You’re wondering if you gave your body to a criminal.”
The dangerous U-turn sent her heart slamming against her ribs. “I’m just asking a few questions,” she insisted.
“And I’m answering them,” he said flatly. “But you shouldn’t even have to ask. You should know.”
The chill inside her spread, reaching clear down to her soul. More than anything she wanted to cross the ravine between her and Dylan, put her body to his and curl her arms around his waist. Shivering, she reached instead for the blanket of numbness that had served her so well over the years.
“We’ve been apart a long time,” she reminded softly. His eyes caught fire. He started toward her, but stopped with violent abruptness, like a big, beautiful, charging Rottweiler at the end of his chain.
“Don’t,” he ground out, so still now that he barely looked alive. “Don’t hide behind pretenses. Don’t pretend
you’re pulling back because of my career choice, when we
both know damn good and well it’s because of what went down on that mountain.”
He paused, scorched her
with his eyes. “You’re scared. Hell, I’m scared, too. But pretending this is about my career isn’t going to help.”
Everything inside her that was female cried out to go to him, but she couldn’t move. “I’m not pretending.”
“Then that makes it even worse.”
The simple statement cut deep, because it was true.
“Who have you been talking to?”
he demanded. “Who’s pumped you full of lies?”
She shook her head, not wanting to drag Janine into this. “It doesn’t matter.”
He swore softly, the words a direct reflection of the stark disappointment in his eyes. Then he turned and walked away.
Panic stabbed into her throat. “Where are you going?”
she asked, hurrying
after him.
He kept right on going, striding around the side of the house to the driveway, where his Bronco sat parked. “Away.”
“Dylan—”
He pulled open the door and pivoted toward her. The night was dark, making the glow in his eyes more
pronounced. “I don’t trust myself with you right now. I don’t trust myself not to put my mouth to yours and kiss some
sense into you.”
Something deep inside started to crumble. “Dylan—”
He didn’t give
her a chance to finish. He stepped into the Bronco, closed the door, and gunned the engine. Before
her heart could even beat, he was gone.
Beth stood there numbly, arms wrapped around her waist. She’d hurt him. She
hadn’t meant to, had only wanted him to refute what Janine had told her, but by even asking the questions, she’d violated something between them.
Too late, Beth realized the truth. Trust. She’d violated
the trust.
And to Dylan, a man who abhorred pretenses and
swore by the
truth, questioning his ethics was tantamount
to stabbing a knife in his heart.
* * *
No matter where Dylan drove, no matter how fast, he
couldn’t get away
from the sting of Bethany’s questions. She’d just stood there firing one after another, relentless curveballs, an assassin on a mission.
A corporate saboteur? Blackmail?
It was an outright lie, but
with cold certainty, Dylan
could see his cousin creating such a file. Insurance, Lance
would have called it, a way to make sure Dylan never let it slip how far Lance had been willing to go to maintain
the image of the
perfect, virile man who could one day be
governor.
But blackmailing Kent English? Dylan couldn’t figure
how that fit in. He’d heard whispers that the embattled D.A., long at war with the press, might
be leaving office,
and now he had to wonder. Who stood
to benefit from the
D.A. stepping down in shame? Who would go to such dramatic measures to ruin English?
The answer settled in his gut like
a jagged weight. He
could think of only one person. But that man was dead.
Dylan had been a private investigator too long not to
connect the dots. Someone
had
been blackmailing the D.A., someone who stood to gain from his demise. And now Lance,
the heir apparent, was dead, killed in cold
blood.
Dylan took an abrupt turn, his mind racing as fast as
the
car. If anyone knew what
was really going on with Lance,
it would be the woman his cousin had tried to pawn off
on Dylan. Lance had been blinded by her stark beauty and forceful personality, but Dylan had recognized a man-killer when he saw one, and made damn
sure their brief relationship never made it to the bedroom.
Lance might not have been so smart.
Janine never missed a chance to look down her nose at Dylan. Hell, she might have even hatched the idea of investigating
Dylan’s role in the fall of Trigon Industries, just to teach him a lesson. And if anyone knew about Lance’s dirty dealings, it would be her.
Less than fifteen minutes later, he entered the renovated brownstone where she had her apartment and took the stairs two at a time. He wasn’t about to take the fall for his cousin’s misdeeds, or a murder he didn’t commit. If English found out
Lance was behind the blackmail…
He
knocked at Janine’s door. Loudly.
From inside, the haunting sound of Celtic music drifted through the cracks. He was raising his hand to knock again
when the door came open, and she greeted him with a glass
of wine in her hand. “Dylan,” she said, and smiled. “I figured it was only a matter of time before you showed up.”
He looked at her
standing there in some slinky black outfit, blond hair
loose and flowing around her face. Fury
pounded through him, but he held
the dangerous emotion in check. Now was not the time to lose it.
He stepped inside her shockingly white apartment and
quietly closed the door. “We need to talk.”
* * *
He found Bethany in his bedroom
shortly after mid
night, standing in a pool of moonlight and staring out the window. The room was dark, save for the candles flickering from the dresser. She no longer wore the soft
blue
shift from before, but a pair of fanciful pajamas, a tumble
of dogs and cats against a cream background.
Emotion tightened through him, the need to go to her, hold her. The earlier anger had faded into a calm
understanding. He could only imagine what it must have felt
like for her to listen to Janine’s accusations, the
shock.
The horror.
But she hadn’t accused him.
Hadn’t turned on him.
She’d simply asked questions, giving him the opportunity to tell her the truth.
Instead, he’d exploded.
The danger of passion, he knew. Yes, he believed there was honesty in passion, but he also knew it could take possession of rational thinking and lead a man to act like an idiot.
“Bethany.”
Through the window, her gaze met his. There was a calm serenity in her eyes, an otherworldly quality that sent his heart hammering even harder. Quietly, he crossed the room and put his hands on her shoulders, just like he’d
done four hours before, when he’d found her on the porch. Then, he’d been filled with questions and uncertainty.
Now, the need to apologize drove him.
“Are you okay?”
he asked
quietly.
She inhaled a raspy-sounding breath.
“You’re back.”
“I never should have left.” Never should have let emo
tion take over. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry
for blowing up.”
Beneath his hands, he felt her stiffen. “Don’t
apologize,
Dylan.”
“I shouldn’t have walked out
like that—”
“You’re a man of principles,”
she said, meeting his gaze in the window. “I may not always agree with your methods, but I know there are some lines you
won’t
cross.”
God help him, he could hardly believe he’d heard her
right. “You believe me when I say that file contained lies?”
“Yes.” She didn’t even hesitate.
But somehow, tension remained. “You’re amazing,”
he murmured, easing
her back against him. His body hard
ened at the contact, the need to reclaim her tangling with the need to take it slow. “If you’ll let me, I’d like to give you something else pretty damn amazing.”
She started to turn toward him, but he held her in place, sliding a hand along the soft cotton of her pajamas to press lightly against her stomach. He spread
his fingers wide,
extending from her mound to her breast.
“Dylan,” she whispered, but he lifted his other hand to press two fingers to her mouth.
“I want to make love to you,”
he said in a strangled voice he barely recognized as his own.
Heat poured
through him in blinding waves as he slid his finger along her bottom lip. “I
need
to make love to you. To be inside you. To feel your arms and legs around me. To feel you beneath me and over me.
Feel you come unglued.”
Her reflection showed her eyes go wide and dark, as though he was torturing her rather than making love to her with words.
“But it’s too soon for that,”
he said before she could speak. “As much as I want your body,
I need your heart
first.”
A soft sound broke from her throat, and he literally felt her flesh heat, her limbs go languid. She tried to turn again, but he held her in place.
“I would do anything for you,” he whispered against her silky hair. “Anything.”
The pane of glass showed her eyes glaze over, her lips part. Showed his big hands sliding and roaming, claiming.
“I don’t want you to do anything,” she whispered. “I just want you to hold me.”
The words rushed through him like a long sip of wine. When he’d left she’d been tense and upset, but this time the hours apart seemed to have brought them to a bridge, rather than the ravine of before. But he knew the divide still lurked in the shadows, knew he had to take it slow.
“You deserve more,” he said, letting his index finger slip inside her mouth, while his other hand slid to cup breasts erotically heavy with pregnancy.