Kiss in the Dark (3 page)

“What was Lance doing here? I didn’t think you two were even speaking. Had something changed?”

“No.”
No way.
Their marriage had ended long before he had walked out the door, long before she took a drive one deceptively beautiful afternoon. Long before she learned truths that violated everything she’d ever believed.

“Then
why was he here?”

“He called and said he had a few things to pick up, wanted to know when I’d be home. He sounded … strange.”

“Strange how?”

“Just … strange. Upset.” Very unLancelike.

“And?”

“And nothing.”

Dylan swore softly. “Don’t hold back from me,” he said, turning her to face him. Inches separated their bodies, their faces, years their hearts. “I’m a private investigator, for God’s sakes. I make a living finding what people don’t want me to know. And I see secrets in your eyes. What, damn it? What are you hiding? Are you afraid? Is that it?”

Deep inside, she started to shake. He was too close. Much, much too close. The mere sight of him ripped her up in ways she hadn’t known were possible, resurrected feelings and desires and dangers she’d tried to bury.

She didn’t want to see him now.

She didn’t want to see him ever, ever again.

“I came home to find Lance dead and the police think I did it. I had blood on my hands. How do you expect me
to feel?”

Dylan frowned. “I learned a long time ago not to have expectations when it comes to your feelings. Still waters run too deep for me. Too cold.”

She angled her chin. “Only because you can’t muddy them.”

“This isn’t about
me!”
he practically roared. He took her shoulders and pulled her closer, forcing her to tilt her head to see his eyes. “This isn’t about us or what happened on the mountain. It’s about what went down in this house a few hours ago. It’s about you. It’s about a whole hell of a lot of questions, and too few answers.”

A hard, broken sound tore from her throat. “You think I don’t know that?” she tried not to cry. The wind whipped up, sending tangled strands of hair into her face. Agitated, she lifted a hand to push them back, but Dylan did the same. Their fingers met against her cheekbone, hers cold, his thick and hot. She closed her eyes briefly, but the sound of a vicious curse shattered the moment. Heart pounding, she looked up just in time to see hot fury erupt in Dylan’s eyes.

It was the only warning she got.

Chapter 2

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S
omething inside Dylan snapped.

He stared at Bethany’s wrists, at the smears of blue and
black circling pale flesh like violent bracelets. She said she’d been hit on the head and the gash there bore testimony to her claim, but clearly she’d been grabbed by the wrists, as well. Grabbed hard. Crushed with more than casual force.

The picture formed before he could stop it, heinous, damning. Bethany as a cold-blooded murderer he couldn’t see. But crimes of passion required neither forethought, nor intent. They simply exploded, destroying everything in their path.

Dylan knew that well.

“Did he do this to you?” he demanded, taking her cold hands and turning them palm up. Deep, crescent-shaped gouges in the fleshy part of her palm told him just how tight she was holding on. The discolored thumbprints on the inside of her wrists turned his blood to ice. “Did he hurt you?”

She gazed up at him, her eyes cloudy and confused, her mouth slightly open. She looked lost and alone standing there in nothing but the pale silk robe, like she’d just rolled from bed and found that while she slept, the whole world had slipped away.

“W-what?”

The thought of anyone getting rough with her, hurting her, chased everything else to the background.

“Lance. Did Lance put these bruises around your wrists?”

Slowly, she looked down, as though just now noticing the discoloration. But she said nothing.

His
mind worked fast, reenacting
the
crime with a
brutal
precision learned from years as a private investigator. He
could almost hear Lance and Bethany arguing, the elevated voices, the desperation. Hear her telling him to leave. See his cousin grabbing her wrists and squeezing. Hurting.

“Bethany.” His voice broke on her name. “Did Lance do this to you?”
Tell me no,
he thought savagely.
Tell me no!

She blinked at him. “Would you care if he did?”

Once, he would have killed. “Answer me, damn it!”

“Let go.” The words were soft, but carried unmistakable strength. Strength the girl she’d been had not possessed. Strength that would have threatened the St. Croix prince.

“Maybe the two of you were arguing,” he theorized ruthlessly. He needed to crack through her control, and a toothpick wouldn’t cut it. “Things got out of hand and Lance lost his cool, got rough. Maybe he even found out about—”

“No!” She jerked her hands from his and backed away.
“That’s not how it happened.”
The wind whipped long
locks of hair against her mouth, but this time neither of them moved to slide the silky strands back. “I told you—
someone knocked me
out when I walked in the door.”

Dylan studied her standing there against the darkness, that
skimpy robe falling open at the chest and revealing too much cleavage.
He didn’t need to be a seasoned detective to see the secrets
in her eyes. The fear. He didn’t need to be a man practiced
in seeing through pretenses to
notice how badly she trembled.

But he did need Herculean strength to keep his hands off her.

Too damn well, too intimately, he knew how passion could blind and distort, make even the most rational person snap like a sapling in a gale force wind.

He’d just never thought passion played a role in Bethany and Lance’s relationship. The thought, the reality that it might have, made him a little crazy.

“If it was self-defense, you need to tell me.” He tried to speak casually now, to match calm with calm, but the horror was like a rusty stake driven through his core. “If he grabbed you, tossed you around—”

 
“No—”

“You wanted him to leave,” he pushed on, needing to hear her denial as badly as he’d ever needed anything. Even her. “He wouldn’t. Maybe he grabbed you. You only picked up the fire poker to protect yourself. You never meant to hurt—”

“Stop!” she shouted, lifting a hand as though to physically destroy his nasty scenario.

He caught her wrist, just barely resisting the crazy desire to pull her into his arms. He knew better than putting a snub-nose to his temple.

“I wish I could stop,” he said as levelly as he could. “But I can’t. Don’t you understand what’s going on here? Lance is dead and his blood is on your hands.”

The change came over her visibly, the glacierlike wall she used to separate herself from the world slipping into place with eerie precision. “I don’t owe you any explanations.”

Come back, he wanted to shout, but for the first time Dylan could remember, he envied her the ability to isolate
herself from what she felt. He wanted to do that now, to shut himself off from the horror and the rage and the fractured grief that splattered through him like vivid splashes of color all mixed together until nothing was discernable except for dark, jagged smudges.

But lack of feeling was her specialty, not his. “You may not owe me anything,” he said, “but the cops are a different story.” He glanced toward the door, where Zito stood watching. “And their questions are going to be a hell of a lot harder.”

She lifted her chin in a masterful gesture of cool defiance that was pure Bethany. “If you’re trying to reenact the crime, it’s not going to work. The fire poker is inside.”

The words were soft, but they landed like crashing boulders. He looked down at his big hand manacling her slender wrist, the nasty bruises completely hidden. It was a miracle whoever roughed her up hadn’t snapped the small bone in two. It wouldn’t have taken much extra effort. Just a little pressure—

He let go abruptly and stepped back.

Slowly, Bethany lifted her eyes to his. “Do you really think I’m capable of murder?”

The night fell quiet, so silent he would have sworn he heard the pounding of his heart, the rasp of his breathing. Or maybe that was hers. Theirs.

Everything else faded to the background, Zito waiting in the wings, the ugliness inside. There was no horror or blind rage, no stabbing grief, no crime to be solved, no betrayal to be forgotten. There was only a man and woman, a silent communion he neither understood nor wanted.

He drank in the sight of her standing there, finally allowing himself to look into eyes he’d relegated to the darkest, coldest hours of the night. They were deep and heavy-lidded, fathomless, liquid sapphire framed by full dark lashes. A man could lose himself in those eyes, swirling and serene, but somehow, always, always, lost.

But they were dull now, huge and unfocused, her pupils
dilated. Long, tangled brown hair concealed a portion of her
face,
but not the smear of blood on her left cheekbone. Nor the fact that no tear tracks marred her features.

Because he didn’t want her to see how badly they’d started to shake, Dylan shoved his hands into his pockets. He tore his gaze from hers and let it slide lower, to the silk garment gaping to reveal the swell of her breasts, the indentation of her waist, the curve of her hips. He couldn’t help but wonder about the negligee beneath, whether it would he pristine, as well, or if at least in the bedroom, she’d displayed a little warmth and creativity.

Like she had with him.

Before.

“Sweetheart,” he drawled, “you’re capable of anything you put your mind to.”

* * *

Beth curled her fingers into her palms, digging deep. The lingering smell of stale cigarette smoke and scorched coffee burned her eyes and throat; the gash at the back of her head throbbed with every beat of her heart. She wasn’t going to wake up. Two detectives really did sit across from her in the small interrogation room, tossing out one nasty scenario after another, as they’d been doing for over an hour.

“So you invited him over, slipped into that skimpy neg
ligee, and tried to seduce him back into your bed.”

“No.”

“You didn’t like being divorced. You wanted your fancy life back. You were a little desperate. Didn’t enjoy being a has-been, the butt of town gossip, like your mama, is that it?”

“No!” The word burst from her with the force of a bullet. The fact they’d finally thrown her mother into the fray pushed Beth dangerously close to the edge. One way or another, everything always circled back to the notorious Sierra Rae.

They were trying to break her, she knew, rattle her, find some way to make her trip. It was their job.

Dylan didn’t have the same excuse.

“This has nothing to do with Mrs. St. Croix’s mother,” Janine White bit out. A longtime friend of Lance’s, then of Beth’s, the attorney had met her at the station without hesitation. The women who’d laughed over martinis sat side by side in the small room, cups of bitter coffee and a tape recorder separating them from detectives Paul Zito and Harry Livingston.

Detective Zito picked up his pencil. “Just trying to establish motivation.”

“There is no motivation,” Janine shot back, “because you’re talking to an innocent woman. Beth did not kill Lance.”

Gratitude squeezed through the icy tightness in Beth’s chest. Janine’s sleek white evening gown made her look more like an Amazon priestess than a savvy attorney, but she had a reputation for being as tough as nails. Even now she appeared amazingly composed, the red rimming her eyes the only evidence of tears Beth knew she’d shed.

“Did you and Mr. St. Croix have intercourse today?”

The question might as well have been a knife. It sliced deep, robbing Beth of breath. Disgust bled through.

Janine recovered first. “This woman’s ex-husband has been murdered!” she said, surging up and slamming her palms down on the table. “What the hell are you trying to prove?”

“You know damn well what I’m trying to do,” Detective Livingston drawled, turning his stony eyes to Beth. “Did he take what you offered and walk away? You felt used and hurt and ran after him—”

“That’s disgusting,” Beth bit out.

The balding detective frowned. “Murder is.”

Beth sucked in a sharp breath, trying not to splinter despite how effectively the detectives thrust the battering ram. For nine years she’d done her best to live a quiet, simple life. She didn’t want the spotlight Lance had developed a fondness for. She didn’t want the passion that
propelled her mother from marriage to affair to marriage. To affair. She didn’t want the chaos Dylan created without even trying.

“A husband who loves me and a couple of kids, that’s all I want.”

“That’s all?”

“Well, maybe a house in the mountains, a couple of dogs and cats, some goldfish.”

The innocence of that long ago day burned. At the time, she would never have imagined how quickly things could fall apart, that within a month she’d tell Dylan that she’d
never loved him, never wanted to see him again. That she would lay her hand against the tiniest casket she’d ever seen. That Lance would sit quietly beside her hour after hour, listening to her cry her heart out. That Dylan would leave town, but Lance would stay. That she wouldn’t see Dylan again for three long years, until the day she pledged her life to his cousin.

That Lance would become blinded by ambition.

That she would be sterile.

That the marriage she’d been so determined to make work would crumble.

That Dylan would suddenly reappear in her life.

That Lance would one day lie dead on the living room floor.

That the fire poker would be in her hands.

“Beth?” Janine asked, touching her hand. “Are you okay?”

She blinked, a steely resolve spreading through her. Slowly, she looked up, meeting Detective Livingston’s hard gaze. “I didn’t have sex with him today, this week, this month, or even this year. And I didn’t kill him.”

The older man leaned forward and steepled his fingers. “Then maybe you’d like to tell me why you were in a negligee.”

“She’s already told you she doesn’t know,” Janine reminded.

“So she’s said.” This from Detective Zito, the tall, strikingly handsome man who’d stood in the shadows with Dylan.

“What about your wrists?” he asked, flipping through the pages of his small notebook. “Who put those bracelets there?”

Beth looked at the nasty purplish bruises, but saw only Dylan’s hands curled around her flesh. “I don’t know.” The claim sounded weak, but she spoke the truth. “I had no reason to kill him. We were divorced. There were no hard feelings.”

“You wouldn’t be the first woman to strike out at the man who walked out on her,” Livingston pointed out.

The pale green walls of the cramped room pushed closer. “That’s not how it happened.”

“Refill anyone?” Detective Zito asked, crossing to pick up the coffeepot.

Beth looked at the paper cup sitting in front of her, its contents long cold. She’d barely taken a sip. The mere smell of the burned coffee made her gag.