A Killing Kind of Love: A Dark, Standalone Romantic Suspense (13 page)

It’s all about Kylie now, she reminded herself, and that’s how Holly would want it. She brushed the tears away, leaned her head back on the seat, and closed her eyes.

She couldn’t wait to get home. She’d called her father this morning, told him what had happened—that she was bringing Kylie home, but it was as if he’d barely registered what that meant. Just asked how “Grantman took it.” But he did say he’d be there to help her until she got things settled and got herself a good nanny. That “until” surprised her; it was the first time he’d indicated he was thinking of leaving. But as she still had a business to run—even though it was from home—her dad helping out for a short time would be welcome.

She hadn’t called Gina yet and honestly wasn’t looking forward to it, given Gina’s current . . . strangeness.

“This seat taken?”

She recognized the male voice immediately.

Dan Lambert!

“What are you doing here?” She blurted out, “and where in hell did you come from?”

He gestured forward to first-class, then took the aisle seat, sliding in carefully so as not to wake Kylie. When he was seated, he touched the little girl’s soft hair, his big hand surprisingly gentle. What he didn’t do was answer her first question; instead, posing one of his own.

“How did it go with Grantman?” His eyes, disturbing and unreadable, rested on her.

“Not well.”

“I’m not surprised.” His lips twisted briefly, into what was either a knowing grin or a curl of aversion.

She turned, as much as she could considering the confines of her economy-class seat, and fully faced him. “I’m guessing about as well as it will ‘go’ with you, considering you’re no more pleased by Holly’s decision than he is.” She didn’t intend to sound combative, but she did.

“Me?” He looked down at Kylie, smoothed some of her fine blond hair over the pillow. “Don’t know what you mean.”

His remark and his face appeared guileless, but her gut said otherwise, and Camryn always trusted her instincts. “Paul sees me as some kind of kidnapper, and, as you obviously expected Kylie would be with you, I’m guessing you feel much the same way.”

“I do.” He raised his remarkable eyes to hers, and a shaft of light came through the plane’s window, amplifying their greenish-gray color to a sharp silver, but his expression was relaxed when he added, “But if you were going to steal Kylie, stealing her from Paul and Erin Grantman is the lesser of two evils.”

“And what would be the first?”

“Stealing her from me.” His gaze never wavered from hers. “She’s my daughter, Camryn. I don’t intend to lose her.”

“What do you intend?”

“I haven’t quite figured that out yet.”

“Well, when you do—”

“You’ll be the first to know.”

Having no answer to that, Camryn turned her head and looked out the window. The silence between them filled with airplane sounds; a child crying, the odd hiss of air being forced through the cabin, trays being loaded onto a cart somewhere behind them. She didn’t want to argue, but she did want to set a few things straight—if anything could be set straight in this morass of a situation.

When she turned to face him again, he was still watching her—as if he’d been waiting.
A quiet man,
she thought,
one who doesn’t waste words.

“Look,” she began. “You care about Kylie. I understand that. Appreciate it. But you’re her stepfather; there’s nothing in place giving you any legal rights over her. Why take on a fight you have virtually no chance of winning?”
Walk away. Please walk away. Paul Grantman is enough to handle.

“When Kylie wakes up, she’ll call me Daddy. It was the first word she ever said—and she’s been saying it for over two years. Two thirds of her life. Now that may not be legalese enough for you, but it works for me. There’s one other thing. If Holly had lived, had kept her appointment with Maddox, you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“But she didn’t, and we are having this conversation. And while we’re on the ‘if’ track, how about this?
If
Holly had lived, you might be facing another kind of battle—in the divorce court. What would happen to Kylie then?” Those eyes of his went quiet again. Scarily quiet. “How much do you know about my marriage, Camryn?”

She saw the flash of anger in his eyes, a hint of pain, and a lot of hard-jawed determination. “Enough to know I might have been naive to buy into your loving-father scenario at first blush. Certainly enough to know you’ve been out of Kylie’s life, virtually an absentee father, for the last three months—and that maybe that was at Holly’s request.” He looked at her a long time, then said, “As they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

He was wearing gray slacks and a fine white cotton shirt, no jacket, and she saw his chest expand and contract, heard the rasp of his indrawn breath. Then without a word, he flagged down the flight attendant before again turning his attention to her. “Would you like a drink?”

Camryn ignored his question. “What I’d like is to get things straight between us.”

The flight attendant arrived before he could answer. He glanced at her. “I noticed you drank a merlot at lunch yesterday. Will that do?”

“I do not want a drink.”

“Merlot,” he said to the attendant. “Times two.”

When she left, Camryn rounded on him. “If you won’t talk about Holly, then we’ll talk about Kylie.”

He cocked his head.

“Can I expect you to challenge my guardianship? Will I be seeing you in court along with Paul and Erin?”

“Yes, to the first question,” he said. “And no to the second. I’m not a fan of lawyers. I prefer taking the shortest distance between two points.” Kylie shifted and stretched between them.

“Which means?” Camryn asked, careful to lower her voice.

When Kylie frowned in her sleep and rubbed her nose, Dan again touched her tousled hair. And when one of her pink-socked feet straightened out and dug into Camryn’s thigh, Camryn lifted it to rest more comfortably across her knees.

For a split moment, man, woman, and child were connected.

“Whatever it needs to mean,” he said, lowering his voice as she had hers, so as not to wake the sleeping girl between them. The attendant brought their wine, and Dan handed her one of the glasses. “But for now, I suggest we let Kylie sleep. We’ll sort things out later.”

She didn’t like his smugness, and she didn’t like the wariness seeding in her chest. She didn’t like the idea that Dan Lambert might prove to be more of an adversary than Paul Grantman.

“We have nothing to sort out,” she said, determined to set him straight. “And you should . . . go back to your own seat.”

“I prefer sitting with my daughter.” He gave her an odd half-smile, opened the book he’d brought with him, took a sip of wine, and ignored her for the rest of the trip.

Gina jerked awake, as if she’d been sleeping for hours and was late for a life-and-death appointment. In truth she’d been sleeping for less than fifteen minutes and dreaming . . .

Her body was overheated, slick with a sheen of perspiration; she pulsed with sexual need. The dream was too raw, too erotic, and it had been too long since she’d had sex, too long since she’d been touched.

She closed her legs, swallowed.

Adam was still here. In the room below hers. Her heart thumped in her chest, wild and excited, terrified. But then her heart was always insane when it came to Adam.

He’d have to go, of course. Last night and tonight were enough. Maybe the torrid dreams would leave with him.

She would give him what money she had. Send him away. So far she’d stayed away from him, but if he didn’t go and soon, she might weaken. No!

Her fingers curled around the sheet’s border. Letting him in was crazy—hiding him from Delores crazier still. But she’d hid him because if Delores saw him, she’d want him. She’d play with him to make Gina mad. Madder than she already was.

And Sebastian would kill her—or Adam.

She tossed back the down comforter and swung her legs to the side of the bed. She had to get rid of him. Get him out of the house. Out of her life—where he’d been since she’d lost his baby. She hated him. She had to remind herself of that. She put her hands to the sides of her head, pressed.

I hate him, I hate him, I hate him . . .

Better. That’s better.

She stood, her heart drumming hollowly in her chest, an echo in a shadowed cavern. She headed for the east window. Her room, essentially the attic with two gabled windows and an open-beamed ceiling, had the original wood floors that came with the hundred-year-old house, and her steps across it took her off the rug her bed sat on to the roughness of oak plank floors.

When she was ten and her mother had bought the estate, Gina fell in love with the strangely shaped attic room, had sensed its ability to keep secrets, and loved the idea of there being an entire floor separating her from her mother’s lavish suite on the second floor. She’d fought Sebastian for the attic room and won and had relished its quirks and seclusion ever since, leaving it only for college and her brilliant but short-lived legal career. A career frozen in another time, another place.

Immediately after Delores moved into the house, she’d begun renovating: floors, walls, windows, and aging rooms had fallen under the relentless hands of a series of decorators. Delores wanted to “update the ancient heap of lath and plaster” as she called it, to her version of posh liability—all thirty thousand square feet of it. It had taken upwards of two years to turn classic into gauche, chic into tawdry. Delores had a knack.

When Gina, with uncharacteristic stubbornness, had fought to save the attic and the generous welcoming window seats under the gabled windows, her mother, in an equally rare mood of conciliation, had given way, saying she’d never be in the “goddamn attic” anyway, so she didn’t care. Gina often slept on the padded window seat as a child, dreaming and watching the moon and sun cast their unique colors across the lake.

Her mother said she’d bought the house for its lakefront location and had agreed with the designer that the entire house needed “refocusing.” The result was a renovation catastrophe on a scale only big money could buy, a sprawling, ugly testament to her mother’s ego and terrible taste.

Sitting now in the window seat, Gina pulled up her knees, hugged them. She looked eastward over the lake for a sign of morning and worked to ignore the ache stirring in her head. For the hot, clamoring need wracking her body, she could do nothing.

She’d come home to nurture her hatred for Adam Dunn. But even in this she’d failed. Had she succeeded, learning about his affair with Holly wouldn’t have felt as if her heart was torn from her breast.

Adam had moved from Gina’s arms to Holly’s with the ease of a snake slithering through spring grass. Her face heated, her lips went dry.

I do hate him! I burn with hate for him!

I burn for him.

Loathing that truth, she turned her face to the window. Clouds now darkened the path of early light, delaying morning.

She closed her eyes against them, leaned her head back against the window seat wall, and stretched out her legs. She ran her hand down her belly to the throb at their apex and stroked herself through her thin cotton nightgown.

I burn for him.

“Lift the gown, baby. So much better that way.”

She froze, sat like an abandoned doll, back to the wall, legs straight and open. “What are you—?”

He stood in the dim light, tall, shadowed, wearing nothing but jeans. His feet were bare, his thick, silky hair roughly shoved behind his ears. He was Adam. He was beyond beautiful.

“Doing here?” he finished for her, stepping close enough to block her from leaving the window seat. “Nothing nearly as interesting as you are.”

When he looked pointedly at her hand, she snapped it back to her waist, closed her legs.

“Don’t stop on my account. You know how I love watching you.” He sat on the edge of the seat, faced her, and closed his hand around her ankle, shackling her with warmth and strength. “Remember that time we booked into that Roach Motel—off I-Five somewhere?” he said, his eyes smiling into hers. “You sat on the edge of the bed— wearing that black satin slip I liked. No panties.” He inhaled unevenly. “I pulled up a chair and watched you make yourself come. Didn’t touch you. Not once.” He moved his hand up her leg, stroked under her gown. “Jesus,” he said, his voice a low growl. “I damn near came out of my skin. But you wouldn’t let me touch you. That was your game. You remember?”

She swallowed, said nothing, and tried to force the heated image from her mind: her laughing at her own game, taunting him, then sitting on the edge of that awful sway-backed bed, knees apart . . . masturbating while Adam sat inches away watching her. His vivid blue eyes had turned almost black with need. And he’d kept telling her how beautiful she was, telling her what to touch, how hard he was getting . . .

A woman would pay to have a man look at her like that. And in the end she had paid, with her pride and with her heart. Adam had ruined her. He had betrayed her, over and over again. And he’d ignored their child. Adam was dirt.

But in this darkened room, with the heat from his hand warming her long-cold flesh, none of that mattered. Nothing mattered except his being here in the hours before morning with his fingers trailing over her skin.

“God, you were hot that night. I was going crazy wanting you.” He smiled, a smile she sensed rather than saw. “And that’s exactly what you wanted, wasn’t it? To make me crazy—like you’re doing right now.”

The dark closed around her, and Adam’s voice, the heat of his hand, stopped her breathing. “I don’t think—”

“Good. Because this isn’t a time for thinking.” He slid his hand under her gown, up her outer thigh. She didn’t move, couldn’t move. Then as if of their own volition, her knees, until this moment, locked flush and tight to each other, eased open. A blur of thought followed. Why not? Why shouldn’t she use Adam to cool the boil, ease the rage. It’s what he’d do.

She hated him. She loved him . . .

“I don’t want—”

“Yes, you do. You definitely do, Gina. You want the same thing I want—and I’m going to give it to you.” He pressed an open palm against her inner thigh, let his fingertips lightly brush her pubic hair.