OVER HER DEAD BODY: The Bliss Legacy - Book 2 (9 page)

“No, that’s not what I was going to say.” She clasped Dinah’s wrist “We used to be friends, Dinah, and I hate seeing you like this.”

Dinah put her hand over Cassie’s, meaning to yank it off. Instead she squeezed it.
My God, I’m going to cry. I never cry… except over Gus.

She coughed, pulled her hand back, and brushed at her cheeks. “Deal with my schedule, Cassie. And get us tickets to Seattle ASAP.”

She walked out of the room. In fact, her decision to go to Seattle was perfect. She might be in love with Gus for all the wrong reasons, but she’d get him back, one way or another.

While she was at it, she’d do her part in getting rid of the nun and getting that filthy old mausoleum shut down for good.

“Duke, what are you looking for?” Christiana, wearing running shorts, a high-cut tank top, and carrying a bottle of water, stepped into her home office just as Duke Thomas was closing the top drawer of her desk.

He turned from the task immediately and stepped toward her. “I
was
looking for that bottle of brandy the local station gave us.” His green-eyed gaze scanned her bared legs, then her naked midriff. He hooked a finger in the elastic waist of her shorts. “Now, I’m looking for a little pussy.”

Christiana took a drink from her bottle of water and set it on her desk. “You won’t find either one in my top drawer.”

“How about this one?” He tugged on her waistband until it gaped, raised an eyebrow, and looked inside her cotton pants. “Looks like pussy to me. Nice soft pussy.” Smiling then, he took her in his arms and nuzzled her hair. “And you smell fabulous.”

She knew he’d detoured from her question, but didn’t much care. When she got this close to him, she didn’t much care about anything other than getting closer yet—and she had an hour before her magazine interview. Plenty of time. She pressed her body to his, rested her head on his shoulder, put her nose to his neck and breathed him in. He smelled … expensive. “You’re the one who smells good. Me? I probably smell like a wet dog. I need a shower.” She kissed his neck, then pulled back, again stabbed by curiosity. “And you know darn well I don’t keep brandy in my desk.”

He raised his hands in surrender, arched a brow, and smiled. “I wanted to surprise you.”

Christiana frowned and smiled at the same time. “What are you up to, Duke Thomas?” Her heart fluttered. Expectation unfurled.

He gestured toward her desk, the drawer he’d had open when she walked in.

Walking toward it, she glanced at him from over her shoulder. He looked exceedingly pleased with himself.

She opened the drawer and discovered a box, about eight inches long and covered in velvet. She ran an index finger along the long—
wrong
—form of the box, and the fluttering in her heart stopped, leaving it to sink. Inside the box, resting on black satin, was a double string of pearls. She hated pearls.

Pearls are for tears…
.
That’s what her mother always said.

“They’re beautiful, Duke.” She infused her voice with false sincerity. “Thank you.”

“I saw them last week, at a jeweler’s near the station. They seemed right for you.” If he noticed her lack of enthusiasm, it didn’t show. His pleased expression held.

“Yes, they’re perfect.” She looped them back onto their satin sheet and returned them to in the drawer. “I’ll wear them with my navy blue dress.”
And look like a spinster aunt fresh out of mothballs.

“Now that’s amazing,” he said. “That’s exactly the dress I had in mind when I bought them.” He stopped. “Although they’ll be great on your black silk, too. Isn’t that what you’re wearing for
The Benny Catz Show?”

The Catz show was two weeks away, and Duke was already focused on it. She should have guessed. “The Catz show is more of a twenty-something show, Duke, and black silk and pearls aren’t what you’d call cutting-edge fashion. I’ll look as if I’m attending an Italian funeral.” She’d been down this road with Duke before, so he knew she hated it when he did his Svengali routine, telling her what to wear, what to say.

“Which is why it’s so perfect,” he argued. “The pearls, the carefully arranged hair, the conservative clothing, they’re all about class, real substance—an image of a better saner time. It’s what you’re all about.” He gripped her shoulders and looked deep into her eyes. “Plus, it’s the real you, baby.”

The real you … Christiana didn’t think so, but then she’d been so out of touch with what she was for so long, she didn’t remember. She’d been too busy recreating herself—the way Duke wanted her to be and the role was beginning to chafe.

He kissed her then, brushing his lips over hers so softly he took her breath away.

Her heart thumped wildly, and she closed her eyes, placed her hands on his sides above his belt. The cords of his muscles were taut and hard. She ran her hands up, around his back, splayed them across his shoulders, and pulled him closer.

He deepened the kiss, slipping his tongue inside to taste and tease, then bringing his hands up to cover her breasts. “And while we’re speaking of substance …” He kneaded her breasts, catching her hard nipples in the space between his index and middle fingers, compressing gently.

Christiana drifted into the first simmer of need, the sensual fog that surrounded her whenever Duke touched her. She took his face in her hands, kissed him, long and hard, before pulling away. The kiss still burning her mouth, her lips moist from his tongue, her voice stumbled when she muttered, “I need that shower—”

He urged her down to the floor and stood over her. “What you need is your pants off—and this.” He undid his belt, unzipped himself, and exposed his erection. It emerged from his expensive slacks with a bravado earned inch by extended inch.

Her breath lumped in her throat, and she gasped for air before touching, then kissing the silken tip of him.

“Oh, that’s good. I’ll take all of that you want to give.” He put his big hands on her head.

She took him in her mouth, played with him. He groaned and shuddered, and she worked him more, took him to the edge—but only the edge. When she felt his pelvis thrust, the shudder in his thighs, she yanked off her shorts, stretched out on the floor, and spread her legs. The lips of her labia were already moist and hungry for him, rabid for him.

“Just a tease, huh?” He ran his tongue over his lower lip and smiled. “Can’t wait, baby?”

Of course, he knew he was right, knew the depth of her need, the harshness of her obsession for him. Her impatience to have him inside her, filling her with his thick, hard length.

When she didn’t answer, he chuckled, then knelt and lowered his body to hers. Bracing a hand on either side of her head, he plunged inside her, the stroke so powerful it shifted her up the carpet.

“Oh, God … yes,” she moaned. “More, Duke, more.”

He thrust again, and again …

Christiana tried to restrain the wave of her release, make the moment last—make Duke last. Then his thumb found her clitoris, rubbed and circled it. “Come on, baby. Come on …” He shifted his body, increased the friction, and rocked into her, deep, then deeper still, his moves hot, rhythmic, and demanding.

“Oh, God.” She clenched her eyelids tight, struggled to hold back, savor the anticipation, but it was useless. She came in the usual heart-pounding, mind-numbing rush that left her weak to the bone. One thrust later and Duke released in her on a long satisfied moan.

She lay back, her body slack, tired, sated and deprived all at once.

Duke, heavy on her breasts, groaned, then muttered hoarsely in her ear, “I have to say, Chris, you’re the best fuck I’ve ever had.”

Christiana turned her head, feeling the moisture fill, then seep, from the corner of her eye.

Pearls are for tears …

She wondered if he said the same thing to his wife.

The knock on Mayday’s front door was quick, sharp, and loud.

“Get that, Bridget, will you?” Keeley called over her shoulder, from the top step of the ladder, nearly knocking over her paint can in the process. She wanted to curse. She would have if she hadn’t decided to pull back on her use of bad language, which seemed to have increased with each mishap that came with home renovating.

“Okay,” Bridget said, looking relieved to abandon the task of emptying out the kitchen cupboards to ready them for Keeley’s unstoppable paintbrush.

She was back in seconds.

“Who was it?” Keeley carefully ran a putty knife over the fill she’d smeared over a gash in the wall.

“No one was there. Just this,” Bridget said, holding up a small package. “It’s addressed to you.”

Keeley did another careful drag over the fill in the wounded wall and descended the ladder. “Let’s see.”

She wiped her hands on the front of her coveralls and took the package from Bridget. Plain brown paper. Carelessly wrapped. No postage or shipping labels. Address printed in bold black liner. She turned it over. No return address.

Feeling her stomach flip uncomfortably, Keeley tightened her grip on the package and glanced at Bridget. “You didn’t see anyone?”

“Nope. It was propped against the door.”

The package seemed to heat up in Keeley’s hand.

Bridget went back to her cupboard cleaning. “Probably something from a neighbor. Mrs. O’Neil down the road, maybe. She was always dropping off stuff to Mary.”

Keeley nodded, telling herself she was being foolish, spooked by a plain brown wrapper. No doubt Bridget was right. She tore the tape off one end of the package and pulled back the wrapping.

“It’s a book,” she announced, feeling stupidly relieved. She was reminded again of the way that strange phone call during her first few days in the house had put her on edge. Then she looked at the cover, a lurid near-photographic depiction of a woman tied to a chair with a man behind her holding a knife to her throat. Dripping from the knife, and raised by embossing, were drops of blood so deeply red they bordered on black.
HOLY MURDER
,
the title of the book, was slashed diagonally across the cover in the same dark crimson.

A string dangled from the pages. A page marker. Something jittered along Keeley’s nape as she opened the book to where the string rested. Page 186. Some paragraphs were highlighted in yellow:

“What goes on here is my business,” he snarled. “And you’d be smart to remember that. So do what you’re told—and stay away from the cops.”

She glared at him, challenged him. “I’ll do what I want when I want. You don’t control me. You never did.”

Using the barrel of his gun, he lifted her chin. “I don’t want to control you, sweetheart,” he said, his lips curling, his words soft with threat. “I don’t have time for that. What I want is for you to clear out. Out of my life. And out of this town.”

“And if I don’t?”

His hard, merciless eyes saw the uncertainty in hers. “If you don’t, bitch, someone is going to get hurt. Really hurt. And that may or may not be you.”

Under the paragraphs, and written over the following text in the same heavy ink that was on the envelope, was some rough, childlike printing:

Don’t be stupid and don’t be brave. Get out now. Mayday House is not worth dying for.

Keeley closed the book, placed it on the table, and wiped her clammy palms over the paint-spattered fabric covering her thighs. Her breath crowded her lungs. Her brain grasped for a sense of things. For meaning.

The police. She’d call the police. They’d know what to do.
She pressed a hand to her heart, willing it to settle, stop its arrhythmic, painful thumping against her ribs. The words from the book scattered across her vision, banners of warning
.

… stay away from the cops.

… someone is going to get hurt.

… maybe you.

As threats went, siren clear. She clenched her jaw.

“Keeley, what’s wrong? You’re the color of this plate.” Bridget held up the white dinner platter she’d pulled from the cupboard.

“Nothing. I was wondering who sent this.” She cleared her throat and closed the book, her nerves warring with her growing outrage. Fear and threat, the tools of the mad and the impotent. Terror, the tool of the ignorant and cowardly. She’d thought she’d left them all behind, doing the devil’s work in the dust of Africa. She’d been wrong.

Bridget gave her a bored look. “Like I said, probably a neighbor. Mary had lots of friends.”

Keeley frowned. Mary might have had a lot of friends, but she’d obviously also accumulated some enemies. First the late-night call, now this package. They had to be connected, but how? The voice on the phone hadn’t told her to get out of Mayday House, and any threat had been more of a sexual nature, but whoever sent this—she looked at the lurid paperback in her hand—wanted her gone.

Which was not going to happen.

Mayday was her home and short of a full-scale invasion by an armored tank unit, she wasn’t leaving it.

Needing time to think things through, she took the book into her office and put it in the bottom drawer. She
would
call the police, when she was sure no one else was at risk, and she had something more substantial to give them than an ambiguous phone call and a highlighted passage in a bad novel.

Gus stopped at the first motel he came to in Erinville, the Jasper Inn. It wasn’t much, but it was clean, convenient, and far enough off the highway bypassing the town he wouldn’t hear the road noise.

Besides, he didn’t plan on staying long, not that Mayday House accommodations promised much better.

As distasteful jobs went, this one took first place, but if he played it right—played Keeley Farrell right—he’d be out of here in a few days, tops. But to do that he needed to get close to her and stay there. Twenty-four/seven.

He tossed his leather duffel bag on the second bed in the room, punched Mayday’s number into his cell phone.

“Mayday House, Keeley here.”

“Ms—” He stopped himself. “Keeley, this is Gus Hammond. We talked a few days ago?”

“Oh, yes, the guy with the muscles.”

Gus let that one go. “Have you had a chance to think over Dinah Marsden’s offer to buy your property?”