Still, she’d given.
Never again, she’d promised herself on the cold, slick drive down the mountain. Never, never again would she let herself give in to the kind of desire that burned everything in its path. Passion was intoxicating, but it never, never lasted.
Believing otherwise only led to pain.
She had to focus on Lance now, couldn’t let her irrational reaction to Dylan blur her focus all over again.
“Thirsty?” he asked.
She blinked. “What?”
“Good old-fashioned H
2
O,” he said, offering her the plastic bottle from his cup holder. “It’s nothing fancy and a little warm now, but it’s better than you passing out on me.”
She stared at his big, scarred hand, but
rather than seeing those capable fingers wrapped around clear plastic, she saw them closed around her wrist. She’d felt the strength of his grip, but an unmistakable tenderness, as well.
It had been the tenderness that made her lash out.
Now she forced herself to look from the hand that could play her body like a song, to the hard line of his mouth and those eyes so deep and dark. And for a shattering moment, she didn’t see the uncompromising man who wanted to know if she’d killed the cousin who shared his last name but not his life.
She saw what she’d remembered on the mountain, the reckless boy he’d been, the one who’d coaxed her from her safe little world and made her want to be a little bad. Daring. To take chances she’d never even considered. And from that mirage came the crazy desire to lean closer and soak up the warmth of his body, to feel his arms close around her and hear his rough-hewn voice promise everything would be okay.
But that was impossible, and she knew it.
With Dylan St. Croix, nothing was ever okay.
“No, thanks,” she said, reaching for the door. “I don’t need you charging in and playing hero.” She’d learned the hard way that leaning on Dylan St. Croix was like leaning on a volcano ready to blow. And if she forgot, she had only to drive thirty minutes south of town, where two cold tombstones stood in silent reminder. “I can take care of myself.”
Curling her fingers around the handle, she pulled.
But the door didn’t budge.
“This isn’t a game,” came Dylan’s dangerously quiet voice from behind her. He reached across the passenger’s seat and pulled her hand from the door. “And I’m sure as hell not doing this for fun.”
“Then let me go.”
“I can’t.”
She turned to face him. Only inches separated them, making her painfully aware of the whiskers shadowing the
uncompromising line of his mouth. “Yes, you can.”
“Lance is
dead,
Bethany, and you’re just barely hanging
on. Queen Cutthroat was
ready to crucify you. What kind of man would I be if I just melted into the shadows?”
The breath stalled in her throat. His words were soft, silky, but the warning rang clear. She sat there crowded against the seat, stunned, struggling to breathe without drawing the drugging scent of sandalwood and clove deep within her. Not only was he still holding her hand, but his body was pressed to hers, seemingly absorbing every heartbeat, every breath.
“It’s a little late,” she said slowly, deliberately, “to pretend you care what anyone else thinks about you.”
The light in his eyes went dark. “I’ll say it one more time.” He let go of her hand, but didn’t ease away. “I don’t do games. I don’t do hero. And I sure as hell don’t pretend. That was always your specialty.”
The pain was swift and immediate, driving home the truth. Dylan St. Croix had a penchant for streaking into her life like a shooting star, big and blazing and beautiful, but he’d never really known her. Never understood her. Never loved her. He’d just wanted her. In his arms and in his bed, but not in his heart.
“No,” she said, hoping he couldn’t hear the ragged edge to her breathing. “You just blaze along seeing how many applecarts you can knock over.”
He didn’t retreat as she’d hoped, didn’t pull back to his side of the car. “Sometimes that’s the only way to separate the good fruit from the bad.”
“And what am I?” she asked before she could stop herself.
“It’s not for me to decide.”
“Then why won’t you let me go?”
His lips thinned. “I’ve already told you, Bethany, I’m not into standing on the sidelines and watching someone get raked over the coals. Not even you. I’m not that cold.”
There was a rough edge to his voice, a hoarseness that hadn’t been there before. “I never thought you were cold.”
“What about Lance?” he asked, leaning closer. “Did you think he was cold?”
The urge to pull away engulfed her, but with her back against the locked door, she had nowhere to go. Instead, she reached for the blanket of numbness.
“I don’t want to talk about Lance.”
Dylan lifted a hand to her face, violating the space she’d put between them by skimming his index finger beneath her eyes. “You haven’t cried.”
She swallowed against the tightness in her throat. No way would she tell him she was all cried out, that before that ill-fated night on the mountain, the last tear had spilled from her eyes the night before she married Lance, when she’d awoken with the remembered touch of Dylan’s hands on her body.
“Crying doesn’t help, Dylan. Crying doesn’t change a damn thing.” She squeezed her eyes shut, not wanting Dylan to see truths she couldn’t hide. Not even from herself.
She realized her mistake too late. A woman should never close her eyes on Dylan St. Croix. Never turn her back to him. Never give him an advantage to press. Because he would.
Dylan St. Croix never turned down the killing blow. Out of the darkness his mouth came down on hers, and just like that explosive, snowbound night in the cabin, the bottom fell out from her world.
Chapter 3
S
he
could retreat from the world, build ice palaces where
no one
could touch her, hurt her, but by God, Dylan refused to let her slip away from him. Not again. Pretenses made him crazy. Lies destroyed.
Sex, Dylan. It was just sex. Nothing more, nothing less.
The words tore in from the past, dark. Tortured. After all this time, he still didn’t know if she’d spoken the truth when she’d told him she loved him, or when she’d told him she didn’t.
And he knew if Bethany had her way, he never would. He felt her stiffen beneath his hands, his mouth, heard the sharp intake of breath. But she didn’t lift a hand to his face like she’d done that night in the mountains, didn’t sigh, didn’t open for him.
Frustration
twisted with something darker, something he’d tried to destroy, but that had lain dormant instead. He’d hoped to slice through the remote facade she wore like a tight-fitting bodysuit, to see if he could still reach
her or if after that night she’d traveled so far away, sewn herself up so tightly, that she was beyond even his touch.
He might as well have lifted a goblet of arsenic to his own mouth and drunk greedily.
Bethany wrenched away from his kiss and stared at him through huge, bruised eyes. The breath tore in and out of her.
“Does that change anything?” he asked darkly, buying time to bring himself under control.
She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. “I’m not a naive, passion-drunk little girl anymore,” she whispered, “I’m not my mother. It takes more than a kiss in the dark to break me.”
Like he’d done before. She didn’t say the words, but they reverberated through him. He looked at her sitting inches from him, her hair loose around her face, the mu
tinous line of the mouth that could set his
body to fire.
She no longer wore that slinky robe, and for that, he found himself grateful. But somehow, even in the severe black
pantsuit,
she still managed to look
shockingly vulnerable, wary, but beautiful all the same.
“Who said I was trying to break you?” Maybe he’d been trying to break himself.
A hard
sound broke from her throat. He refused to label
it pain.
“You forget,” she said. “I know you, Dylan. I know how
you operate. But it’s not going to work. You can’t
rattle a
confession
out of me—you lost that ability long ago.”
The words sounded tough, but he’d felt the tremor race through that lithe body of hers. Who was she trying to convince? he wondered. Him? Or herself.
“Careful, Bethany. Some men might mistake that as a challenge.”
She pulled his hand away from her face. “Let me go.” He should, he knew. A smart man would unlock the door and let her vanish into the night all over again. But
he couldn’t do that. Lance was dead, and Bethany had bruises around her wrists. He didn’t want to think about
what other, less visible, wounds she hid. But did.
“You always thought you’d break if you showed emo
tion. But the truth is you’ll break if you don’t. There’s honesty in feeling things deeply. Not shame.”
Through the glow of the dashboard, her eyes darkened.
At the house, he’d seen the wall of ice slide into place, but this time her expression remained naked and raw, like she was bleeding from the inside out and couldn’t make it stop.
“Maybe I don’t feel anything.” The words were soft, brittle, surprisingly candid. “Maybe everything inside me
is cold. Frozen.”
And maybe he was a fool. He never should have come to the police station, never should have left his grandfather’s house. He’d gone there to tell the judge about Lance, but afterward, the silence had been suffocating. The older man had retreated, not showing a flicker of the grief Dylan knew he felt.
“It’s called shock,” he said and knew, “but someone who doesn’t know you could mistake lack of emotion for lack of feeling.”
“And you, Dylan? Is that what you think?”
“I know you’re capable of feeling. At least you used to
be.” Earlier, the years between them had fallen away; now they stacked right back up. “But I don’t know you anymore, and I don’t have a damn clue how you felt about Lance.”
He never had, either. Part of him wanted to hear her express pure, undying love for his cousin. No matter how badly that would sting, at least it would help assure him Zito’s suspicions were as crazy as Dylan wanted them to be. Without that sentiment, he was left standing on the razor fine edge of doubt, and it was slicing him to the bone.
“Did you love him?” he asked point-blank.
She didn’t look away like he expected her to, like she once would have. Through the darkness, she just stared at him.
“Well?” he asked. “It’s not that tough of a question.”
Bethany looked down at the hands clasped severely in her lap, where the gaudy two-carat, emerald-cut solitaire
Lance had given her no longer overwhelmed her slender finger.
“Lance and I had a … complicated relationship.”
“I thought it looked pretty simple.” Though he’d tried not to look at all. Not to know. “He went his way, and you went yours.”
She looked up abruptly. “Not every relationship has to
be fire and brimstone. Sometimes they can be quiet and simple, undemanding. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”
“Relationship? It looked more like a photo-op to me.”
Pain flickered in her eyes, and yet she lifted her chin like a queen. “You have no right to pass judgment on me, Dylan. Not you, of all people. You and Lance were hardly the devoted cousins your grandfather wanted everyone to think you were.”
“How could we be?” Sebastian St Croix had done his best to raise Dylan and Lance as brothers, but they’d been as different as fire and ice. Lance had thrived in the posh world of the Portland elite, old money and timeless hypocrisy.
Dylan had felt like he’d been sent to prison.
“The only thing we had in common was something two men should never share.” And now Lance was dead, leaving Dylan to pick up the pieces, like his cousin had done for him so long ago.
“I’m not doing this,” Bethany said, reaching for the door.
But he didn’t release the locks, wasn’t ready to let her go. “I’m just calling a spade a spade, sweetheart.”
She turned back toward him. “But that doesn’t change anything, does it? Lance is still dead. And no matter what went down between the two of you, the two of us for that matter, he didn’t deserve to die.”
She’d yet to say she loved him. He wondered if she realized that. Worse, he wondered why he cared.
“No,” he agreed, “he didn’t.” But too well, Dylan knew people didn’t always get what they deserved. Or wanted.
Once, a long time ago, Dylan’s
grandmother had given
him a bag of marbles. He’d loved playing with the small, colorful glass balls, had spent hours organizing and sorting them. Then Prince Lance had come over, yanked the bag from Dylan’s hands, and dumped them on the sloping driveway. The marbles had scattered everywhere, and no matter how quickly Dylan tried to scoop them up, they just kept rolling away from him. With sickening clarity, he remembered the sound of Lance’s laughter.
But when his grandfather had caught them fighting, it had been Dylan who got the belt.
Now he studied Bethany through the blue glow of the dashboard lights, the shadows playing against the soft lines of her face. Silky hair cascaded down her shoulders, looking more sable than brown. She’d brushed it, he noted, and wondered if Lance had ever done the task for her. Like he had.
A long time ago.
“Where will you go?” he asked.
“Home,” she started, but he saw the second awareness dawned. Her home was a crime scene. “Maybe a hotel.”
“The media will be crawling all over you there,” he said. “You’ll be safer at my house.”
Her eyes flared.
“Your
house?”
He didn’t stop to think. “It’s isolated, secure. No one would find you there.”
And he really was out of his mind.
She just stared at him. And when she spoke, her voice was soft but cutting, classic Bethany. “That was me on the patio this evening. That was me you practically accused of killing your cousin. It’s too late to pretend you’re on my side.”
No matter where he stepped, they always landed in the same place. “I’m not the one pretending, Bethany.”
She didn’t defend herself as he wanted, didn’t take the bait. She just frowned. “It’s late, I’m tired, and I don’t have the energy for your games right now. Please. Let me go.”
“My God,” he said in a deceptively quiet voice, the one that masked all those sharp edges slicing him up inside. “You’re really just going to sit there and act like that night on the mountain didn’t happen?” He’d told himself he wasn’t going to bring it up, but the fact she was pretending it never happened pushed him over the edge. It happened. She’d come alive in his arms, twisted and turned, begged. “We didn’t even use birth control, for crissakes. I could have gotten you pregnant. Would you have even told me?”
The car was dark, but he saw the color fade from her face, saw her wince.
“I can’t have children,” she said. “You know that.”
The pain in her voice almost made him turn back. Almost. “Are you sure about that?”
She stared at him a long moment before answering.
He
waited for one of her ice walls to slide in place, but her
expression remained naked, bleeding. He could hear the edge to her breathing. And slowly, slowly, fire came back into her eyes.
“Do you enjoy being cruel?” she asked in a cracked voice.
“It’s a legitimate question. We had sex. If there’s any chance—”
“It was a mistake!” she surprised him by shouting. “It was one of those heat of the moment—”
He went coldly still. “Don’t.”
He didn’t know whether it was the edge to his voice or the fury he knew hardened his expression, but something dangerously close to fear flashed in her eyes. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t sit there and insinuate you didn’t know what you were doing. You wanted me every bit as much as I wanted you.”
For a moment he saw the same heat in her gaze, that glaze of passion that had haunted him for so long. But then, finally, at last, a Bethany ice wall slid into place, and she angled her chin. “That doesn’t make it right.”
He wasn’t going to let her do it. Wasn’t going to let her use the heat between them as a weapon against him. “Quit trying to make everything black or white,” he bit out. “It wasn’t premeditated. It just … happened. We were stranded. You needed someone, and I was there.”
A shadow crossed her face. “It was
wrong.”
It took effort, but somehow he resisted the urge to reach across the seat and put his mouth to hers, prove what she tried to deny.
Instead, he let an insolent smile curve his lips. “I thought it was pretty damn right.”
“Dylan—”
“But don’t worry, angel, when I think of that night…” which he tried not to “…I don’t see you naked or hear the way you cried out my name, I see the morning after, waking up alone in that big cold bed. I may be a slow learner, but sledgehammers like that usually do the trick.”
“Then there’s nothing left to say, is there?” she asked in a voice devoid of all emotion.
Because he wanted to crush her in his arms, he released the locks. “Go.”
She did. Without looking back, she pushed open the door and let in a blast of cold, then stepped into the night and vanished in the darkness.
Just like always.
* * *
B.B. King belted out the blues, but with only ten minutes until Shady’s called it a night, few remained to
listen. Two of the three pool tables stood deserted. Only one poor soul remained at the bar. The smoke was actually beginning to clear.
“You know this breaks every rule in the book,” Zito said, running a hand over his scruffy face.
Dylan polished off his scotch and dropped the empty glass on top of a heart carved into the battered wood table. “Depends upon whose book you’re talking about.”
“Since when have I given a damn about any book but my own?”
That’s exactly what Dylan was counting on. After he’d followed Bethany to a hotel, he’d tried to go home and put her out of his mind, but quickly realized climbing Mount Hood blindfolded would be easier.
He needed to know what had gone down in that interrogation room. He knew Zito’s partner, knew the man’s knack for going for the jugular. And it had killed him to wait outside, to not know, to imagine. Had they broken her? Had they made her hurt?
“No one’s making you stay,” he reminded the detective.
Zito made a show of picking up his microbrew and drinking deeply of the local favorite, all the while his speculative, too-seeing gaze trained on Dylan. “Don’t tell me the champion of the underdog is standing by the woman who killed your cousin? Beauty doesn’t equate innocence, son.”