Through the window, her gaze met his. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
He tilted his hips against her, felt her inhale sharply when she felt the thickness jutting against her lower back.
“Hurting is part of loving,”
he told her. “But so is un
derstanding.”
He saw her close her eyes, felt her breathe, would have sworn he heard her heart thrumming low and deep. The wall of
windows reflected them like a shadowy erotic
photo, her sinuous body in front of his, his hands splayed wide, possessing the only way he would allow himself at the moment.
Need tore at the walls of restraint. He wanted to carry her to the bed, bury himself inside her, hear her cry his name and his name only. But less than
twenty-four hours
before, the intensity of their
lovemaking had sent Bethany
to the
hospital. As much as he wanted her, needed her,
even more, he needed to protect. It was too soon for passion. She needed
tenderness first.
“I want to kiss you,” he murmured. “All over. I want to taste you. Absorb you.”
Her eyes opened abruptly. “Dylan—”
“Sh-h-h,”
he
soothed, slipping his hand inside her pajama top to cup her breast. It was heavy in his hand. Perfect. “I want to show you how good it can be,” he said,
skimming a finger around
her nipple.
Her head lolled
back against his chest. “Do you enjoy
torturing me?”
“Torture isn’t what
I had in mind.”
She lifted her hands behind her to cup the back of his
head, thrusting her breasts out even further. “Then what?”
He never got a chance to answer. A loud pounding reverberated through the house, the doorbell ringing over and over. Urgent. Demanding.
Bethany spun toward him, eyes wide and alarmed.
He took her face in his
hands and pressed a hard kiss
to her mouth.
“Stay here,”
he commanded softly, then turned and headed out of the bedroom. He closed the door behind him.
Detective Paul Zito
stood waiting on the doorstep. “Dylan,” his friend said. “We need to talk.”
Everything inside
Dylan went very still. He knew that
tone, knew that hard look in Zito’s eyes. Neither had been present at the lunch they’d shared twelve hours before.
“It’s after midnight,” Dylan growled.
Zito frowned. “You don’t need to tell me that, son. But
you do need to tell me
where you were three hours ago.”
“Three hours ago?”
Dylan’s heart started to pound.
“Janine White has been attacked,”
Zito said in a mechanical voice Dylan barely recognized. “It was dark and her assailant wore a mask, but she remembers black jeans and an olive shirt. Surveillance cameras show—”
“Jesus.” Dylan knew damn good
and well what surveillance cameras showed.
* * *
Beth clenched the steering wheel tightly and concen
trated on the blur of red taillights belonging to the car in front of her. The heater roared at full blast, but the chill in her blood deepened at an alarming rate.
Stay here,
Dylan had instructed as
Zito led him away.
Lock the doors and don’t
let anyone inside.
But she couldn’t do that. She couldn’t tuck herself away in Dylan’s house while the
world was
blowing up around her.
Janine.
Everything inside Beth tightened at the thought of her friend. Janine stood to gain nothing helping Beth, and yet, she had tried to help anyway. Now, she lay in a hospital room, badly beaten, and Dylan was downtown being questioned, because he’d been wearing
an olive button-down
and black jeans. Just like Janine’s attacker.
One could have nothing to do with the other, Beth reasoned, but she’d never been a believer in coincidence. Questions gnawed, as relentless as they were punishing. She felt poised on the edge of something dark and horri
fying, the rock beneath her feet crumbling.
Deep inside, she started to shake. It was hard to believe how hideously her life had spiraled out of control in just a matter of days. For a brief deceptive time in the mountains, she’d actually let herself believe that maybe, this time, things would turn
out differently. Maybe the worst was behind them. Maybe the future held the kind of hap
piness she’d always dreamed about. They’d been close, she thought, fighting back tears. So horribly,
beautifully close. If
he hadn’t stormed out of the house in a
fit
of passion—
The thought ratcheted up her pulse.
Passion.
Crimes of passion.
Emotion blurred her vision. No matter which direction she turned, which angle she played, which crime went down, everything kept
circling back to passion. It was like a seductive narcotic, the wild giddiness of it enticing
people to act in ways they wouldn’t normally consider. Nine years ago, desperate, heart breaking, she’d chased after Dylan—
She saw the flash of brake lights too late. The car in front of her stopped abruptly, forcing her to swerve to avoid slamming into its rear. An elk, she wondered fleetingly, then stopped wondering at all. There was no guardrail on this dark stretch of road, just a steep drop-off bouncing down to a row of young pines and the creek they shielded, running horrifyingly fast with snow melt-off.
* * *
He saw her the second he stepped out of the
elevator,
and his heart flat out stopped. She sat in one of the rinky-dink chairs, face buried in her hands. Her shoulders were slumped, her whole body curled into itself. Her hair was loose and hanging toward the floor, dull and tangled, like she’d been running her hands through it the better part of the night.
Early morning sun squeezed through a small window, but not even the prospect of a new day chased the chill from Dylan’s blood. Someone was playing him like a damn fool puppet, and because of that, he’d walked
straight into a trap. Instinct
warned the final act had yet to play itself out.
And Bethany was caught in the middle.
“What
are you
doing here?”
He strode
toward her,
the
question tearing
out
of him more roughly than he’d intended. He just
hadn’t been expecting to see her sitting
there. Hadn’t had
the chance
to prepare.
She looked up abruptly, exposing
him to
bruised eyes and skin parchment pale. He would have sworn he could count
the blue veins streaking beneath the flesh of her cheeks and arms. She looked tired, exhausted.
“Dylan,” she said, standing.
The urge to go to her was strong, to crush her in his arms and just hold her, but the way she hugged her arms around her waist warned him to keep his distance.
“I asked you to wait at the house.”
She shook her head. “I—I couldn’t.”
Her gaze searched his. “What happened? Are you free to go?”
“I can’t leave town,” he said flatly, “but they’re not locking me away right now, if that’s what you’re asking.” Sometimes, being a St. Croix wasn’t all bad. Sometimes, it helped having a buddy on the force. Someone who knew him. Who believed in him. Who was willing to wait for forensics before nailing him to the wall.
“Let’s get out of here,”
he said, reaching for her hand and reminding himself not to crush. Her flesh was cool and clammy, her fingers disturbingly nonresponsive.
“We can’t go out there,”
she said when he headed toward the front door.
“Why the hell not?”
“Yvonne Kelly and company have been camped out all night.”
“I’m not scared of reporters,” he growled. In fact, he downright savored the prospect of giving them a bone to chew on.
But then Bethany lifted her eyes to his, and he saw the fatigue swirling deep. The silent pleading. Maybe he was ready to take on an army of reporters, but she wasn’t.
“The car’s out back,”
she said, leading him to another hall.
He followed, wondering why it felt like she was walking away when he still held her hand. Because she was being so reserved, he knew. Because she was acting as though nothing was wrong, when they both knew the walls were closing in from all sides.
She’d brought her car, the one he’d had moved to his house while they’d been in the mountains. So he let her take the wheel, innately sensing that she needed to be in the driver’s seat.
But still, she didn’t speak. She kept her eyes on the road, her hands on the wheel. She might as well have taken a knife to Dylan’s chest, and calmly, efficiently begun to carve.
* * *
Just looking at him hurt. Just looking at him reminded her of those precious days in the mountains, when the nightmare of Lance’s murder had seemed a whole world away. The sight of those primeval eyes and the jaw always in need of a razor seduced her back to the night before, when he’d stood behind her at the window, so tall and strong and passionate, making love to her with nothing but words. They’d flowed through her and around her, shadows and desire creating the illusion of a bridge.
Funny how a few hours could change everything.
She’d avoided the pines, avoided the creek. But she couldn’t avoid the truth. The past had roared back to life with punishing precision and slapped her hard. For close to an hour she’d sat in her car, surrounded by the cold dark night, trying to breathe. Trying to think. Trying to understand.
Fate had a hideous way of driving home lessons, again and again and again, harder and more brutal, until the message got through. Nine years before, her father and unborn child had paid the price of her stubborn resistance.
This time, she feared the price would be even higher.
The chill in her heart deepened. Dylan sat so close she could feel the warmth of his body, but from the moment they’d slid into the car, he’d gone quiet. Ominously quiet. Because Dylan St. Croix was never, never quiet. He was a man driven by his passions. He shied away from neither controversy nor confrontation. He roared and bullied and rocked the boat until everyone knew exactly where he stood. He never, never rolled over and played dead—if there was something he wanted, he found a way to have it. Even her.
Especially her.
Except now he was silent. And still.
Beth sucked in a deep breath, let it out slowly. Sooner or later, the dam had to break.
“It’s okay,”
Dylan finally said. He took her right hand from the wheel and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “Everything’s going to be okay. You’ll see.”
“Okay?” she asked in a hoarse voice she barely recognized as her own. She couldn’t believe it. This man who’d long accused her of pretending, was now the one living in some fantasy land where their world wasn’t blowing up around them. “Lance is dead, someone’s blackmailing the D.A., and Janine has been assaulted.
How
can you say everything’s going to be okay?”
“Because I won’t accept anything else.”
Deep inside, the tearing continued, faster, more stark than before. “This isn’t about what you’ll accept, Dylan. You might not have a choice.”
She glanced at him, found him watching her through curiously guarded eyes. “I know how the cops think,”
she reminded. “They’ll think maybe you went there just to talk. Maybe Janey was upset. Maybe things got out of hand. Maybe you didn’t mean to—”
“Is that what you think?”
The question was hard, hot. “You think I roughed up Janine?”
“I didn’t say that,” she said as calmly as she could. “I’m just saying sometimes things spiral out of control.” Terribly, horribly out of control. “Isn’t that what you told me the day Lance died?”
“Lance didn’t die. He was murdered in cold blood.”
“I’m well aware of that.” Would be for the rest of her life.
“This is the exit,” Dylan said, and only then did Beth realize she’d been about to drive right by. She steered off the interstate and stopped at a red light, but the past and the present and future kept racing, twisting, tangling into one dangerous dead end.
“You should never have gone to Janey’s,”
she said, trying not to let frayed emotions unravel any further. “You should have let the wheels of justice turn by themselves—”
Dylan shifted, turning more fully to face her. “My cousin was murdered and someone is trying to set me up to take the fall, and you expect me to just wring my hands and see what happens next? How can you ask me to do that when I know damn good and well those wheels are being manipulated? I won’t just lie down and let life roll over me or those I love.”