Unleashed (19 page)

But that hadn’t been enough. She had to push it, reach out, knowing full well he was going to push her away.

The bad taste she was swallowing back was her own damn fault. But in its own twisted way, that was good. From the beginning, she’d been sure Danny was flirting, teasing, pushing her to make a point. And he’d made it. He could still make her come.

And he didn’t have any lingering tenderness for her and what they had.

Message received, loud and clear.

But he didn’t realize that Caroline wasn’t the same girl who’d loved him so mindlessly years ago. She was tough, she was practical, and she could take anything he dished out. She was just as capable of having hot, sweaty, meaningless sex as he was. If he wanted to use sex to prove that the past was the past and there was nothing left between them…

Bring it on.

Kate felt a rush of anticipation as she spotted Marshall across the crowded cafe. He’d tried to convince her to meet him at a fancier place near his office, but she’d held firm on meeting him someplace casual near campus.

Several people took a second look as he wound his way through the tables, flashing her his killer grin. It wasn’t just his soap star good looks that drew attention his way. In his gray suit, pressed white dress shirt and red tie, he stood out like a sore thumb in a sea of casually dressed students.

As he reached her table he leaned over and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. Her nose filled with the scent of hair gel and expensive cologne. She wasn’t sure she liked it.

Which was, she supposed, the problem with Marshall in general.

Still, she couldn’t help but return his smile as he took the seat across from her. “Thanks for meeting me,” he said, his teeth flashing whitely against skin so perfectly brown she wondered if he got a professional spray tan.

“No, thank you for giving me a reason to have a meal that doesn’t involve hot dogs, mac n’ cheese, or any food that comes in a nugget form.” She smiled up at the waitress as she dropped off Kate’s glass of chardonnay. She winked at Marshall’s cocked eyebrow. “Trust me, Feminist Tropes in Victorian Literature will seem a lot more interesting after I have a couple of these.”

Fine lines fanned out from Marshall’s crystal blue eyes as he returned her grin. “I’m really glad we have a chance to catch up. It’s been too long since I’ve seen you.”

Kate’s cheeks warmed under his frankly admiring gaze and she took a sip of her wine to ease her discomfort. She knew Marshall was attracted to her. She’d known it from the first time she’d met him five years ago when he was starting as a new associate at her father’s law firm.

At the time she’d dismissed perfect, polished Marshall with his soap opera actor good looks as too old, too boring, too
lame
to be anything other than entertaining eye candy. Why in the world would she want to date a lawyer, especially one who worked with her father? But since her father’s death, Marshall had shown himself to be a surprisingly good friend, quietly supportive, always available for a quick drink, coffee, meal, whatever, when she was craving a little male attention. And unlike the handful of other guys she’d tried to date in recent years, he didn’t leave skid marks when she mentioned she had a little boy waiting for her at home.

Friendship aside, she knew Marshall wanted more. There was something really flattering about having a guy like Marshall, gorgeous, successful, eminently eligible, willing to put up with her cat and mouse game after all that time. Especially when more and more lately she was feeling less like a young, sexually attractive woman, and more like a tired old mom, stuck in the grind of life as a single parent and a full time student. Between the constant low level fatigue and the ten plus pounds of baby weight she still carried—although, to be fair, after four years, she supposed the weight was officially hers—she felt about as sexy as the pair of granny panties she was sporting under her jeans.

So it was nice, she reflected as she admired the broad set of Marshall’s shoulders as he slipped off his suit coat, to be reminded that a man—especially a man as physically perfect as Marshall—found her attractive.

So what was wrong with her that she couldn’t just dive in head first? On paper, he was perfect. And therein lay the problem. There were no rough edges, no visible flaws, and something about that made Kate extremely nervous. She couldn’t shake the feeling he was hiding something under all that perfection, though there was certainly no evidence to show her otherwise.

Maybe she was just being paranoid.

“How’s Michael?” Marshall asked, looking at her expectantly.

That was another thing. Though he tried to look all interested and engaged, Kate knew he didn’t really want to hear about Mikey’s latest preschool exploits. She’d seen the zoned out look in his eyes often and knew better not to go into any deep detail. “He’s great. He’s almost mastered the alphabet.”

Marshall nodded absently and took a sip of his drink. Kate shoved back the disappointment. Could she really expect anyone to be as impressed as she was that her four-year-old could almost read already? Maybe like Caroline said, she was being too hard on him.

As though he’d read her thoughts, Marshall asked, “How’s Caroline doing? Is she okay after what happened to Rachael Weller?”

Kate put down her fork as her stomach knotted with dread. Despite Caroline’s assurances that she was fine, not to mention safe, with the private investigator she’d hired, Kate couldn’t stop worrying. “I don’t know. I talked to her earlier. Did I tell you she’s hired some private investigator?”

Marshall leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. “I think you might have mentioned that. What do you know about this guy?”

“Do you remember that whole thing with Alyssa Miles a couple of months ago?” Marshall nodded. “It was his firm that was involved, his brother, actually, who rescued her from her kidnappers. So I guess they know what they’re doing but…”

“What?”

Kate shook her head, hating having to explain away her unsubstantiated hunches to Marshall. He was a typical lawyer, all analytical and demanding evidence. “I don’t know. They’re looking into my father’s murder, and she won’t tell me anything about what she’s been doing for the past week. Which makes me worry that what they’ve found is bad, because Caroline and I usually talk at least once a day, and she tells me everything.”

“Maybe they haven’t found anything yet.”

Kate shook her head and drained her wine glass. “They found enough to drive up to the mountains and get stuck in a blizzard. She finally called me back from some random number in the 209 area code after I left her like ten messages.” She closed her mouth, realized she’d been babbling as she had a tendency to do. “Sorry, I don’t mean to unload on you. It’s just really driving me crazy, not knowing what’s going on with her, especially after everything that’s happened.”

He laid his hand on hers and leaned across the table. “You can always talk to me, Kate. That’s what I’m here for.”

I should kiss him. It would be the perfect moment. Just lay one on him, get this show on the road and quit dancing around the do I or don’t I question
. His thumb stroked across the back of her hand. Smooth, uncalloused, almost as soft as her own. She pushed back in her chair. “I’m going to hit the ladies room,” she said and withdrew her hand as unobtrusively as possible. “If the waitress comes back, will you order me a refill?”

Jackpot
. Marshall watched Kate’s lush, denim clad ass disappear through the heavy black curtains hiding the door to the cafe’s unisex bathroom.

He grabbed Kate’s phone off the table and quickly scrolled through the caller ID until he found the number she was talking about. Then he took a phone out of his pocket. Not his regular cell, but the prepaid one he used to communicate with Patrick and Gates. Though the display said, “unknown caller,” a quick call to the number got him the front desk of the Whiskey Creek Motor Inn.

Shit. Marshall diconnected and quickly dialed again.

Patrick answered on the first ring. “What do you want? I’m about to go in with a patient.”

“Just thought you might like to know Caroline and Taggart are up in Whiskey Creek. As of six p.m. they were at the Whiskey Creek Motor Inn.”

“Son of a bitch. We’re fucked.”

“Not necessarily. Remember, there’s nothing linking you to Anne Taggart or Emily Parrish. Anything they have to go on points at James.”

“That we know of. We still haven’t found the evidence James said he kept.”

Marshall made a scoffing sound and kept an eye on the bathroom for Kate. “I have serious doubts any evidence exists. James was bluffing.”

“I knew James for thirty years. The man didn’t bluff. It’s somewhere. We need to find it. And we need to take care of Caroline and Taggart.”

Marshall thought of Kate with a twinge of guilt. He knew how close Kate and her stepmother were, knew it would kill her if something happened to Caroline. “Maybe we should lay low, see how this plays out.”

“We can’t afford to waste any more time. Thanks to you and your so called clever cover-up, Caroline’s still alive, and she and Taggart have already learned too much. Once the cops figure out James was involved with Anne and Emily’s deaths, don’t you think they’ll take a harder look at who killed him? Maybe they won’t be able to brush Caroline off like they have been. And if they keep looking, what do you think they’ll find?”

“Nothing,” Marshall said firmly. “We have nothing to worry about. We’ve covered our tracks too well.”

“Right, until James’s ‘insurance policy’ gets out. Then we’re all screwed. We have no choice. We need to find that evidence, and get Caroline and Taggart out of the picture before they do any more damage. I’ll go back to Caroline’s house, you rip apart the office one more time and take another look at Kate’s place. And call Gates. Tell him where Caroline is, have him take care of it. And tell him we need it to look like an accident.”

Marshall didn’t bother pointing out that he could tell Gates whatever he wanted, but the scary motherfucker would take care of it in whatever way he deemed best.

He disconnected and tucked the phone back in his pocket as Kate rejoined him at the table. It wasn’t hard to conjure up a look of regret as he told her he had to cut dinner short. In addition to finding out what he could about Caroline and her investigation into James’s murder, he’d been looking forward to making more progress in his quest to get into Kate’s pants.

Instead of ending the evening with at least a kiss and a promise of another date—a real one—in the next couple of days, he was going to make an urgent call to ensure someone else Kate loved was taken care of once and for all.

“Really? You can’t even finish your dinner?” Kate’s full bottom lip stuck out in a pretend little girl pout. Marshall wondered what she’d do if he leaned across the table and nipped her lip the way he was dying to.

“Sorry. Urgent situation with a client,” he said and rose from the table.

Kate sighed and rose to give him a hug. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, savoring her scent as much as the soft press of her body against him.

Not tonight, but soon.

He consoled himself with the fact that he would be the first one there to comfort her when the shit went down. He could feel it now. Kate warm and lush and soft in his arms as Marshall kissed away her tears. She’d turn to him in her grief, defenses down, and he would finally get what he’d wanted from the first day he’d set eyes on Kate Medford.

He was on the phone to Gates by the time the cafe door closed behind him.

D
anny slogged through shin deep powder as he walked along the edge of the road to the diner down the street. The woman working the desk at the motel had assured him he could get a decent meal to take back to the room for himself and Caroline.

It would have been easier to get something at the convenience store next to the motel, but he needed something more sustaining than a bag of chips or a hot dog that had spent days sweating on the roller.

Besides, he needed more time to put himself back together before he went back in that room with Caroline.

Snow was trickling down the tops of his boots and chilling his feet. He sucked in a lungful of freezing air, taking in the cold, hoping it would bring down his core temperature a few hundred degrees.

After all this time, she still burned him alive. He came to the diner and ordered a cheeseburger for himself and a chicken sandwich for Caroline, remembering her thing about ground beef. She’d always contended that it, like hotdogs, was a clearing house for all the parts of the cow they couldn’t use in “real” meat, and refused to touch the stuff.

It bugged him that he remembered that about her. It bugged him that he remembered lots of little shit like that about her. Because it reinforced what he’d already realized was true. Caroline wasn’t like one of the nameless, faceless fucks he’d had over the years, and he was an idiot for thinking she ever could be.

He’d been so cockily sure that there was nothing left but a big empty space where his feelings for Caroline used to live. There was a big space all right, but he’d realized it was crammed full with a thick dark mass of stuff he didn’t even want to begin to look at.

He had a bad feeling there were more masses like that lurking under his surface. Big emotional tumors he needed to excise before they destroyed him from the inside out.

Speaking of bad feelings, there was a call he couldn’t put off making any longer. Even before they’d come up here and spoken with Emily’s parents, the bad feeling had gnawed at his gut. Danny had always had keen instincts, especially when something bad was about to go down. It had gotten to the point that the men he used to command joked that he was psychic.

Now that he knew for sure Emily hadn’t returned to live with her parents after she’d left Harmony House, his instincts were screaming that hers was the body found near his mother’s. There was only one way to know for sure.

Detective DeLuca answered on the second ring. A twenty-five year veteran with the San Mateo County Sheriff’s department, he’d worked on Anne Taggart’s case after she’d initially disappeared, and had unofficially helped the Taggarts over the years as they’d continued their search privately. When the bodies had been found a little over six weeks ago, DeLuca had tipped them off that one of them could be Anne.

Danny was returning the favor, morbid though it was. “Hank, I think I have a lead on that second Jane Doe you found. Emily Parrish. You should be able to check dental records.”

“How did you come up with the name?”

He wasn’t ready to give that information up. He didn’t give a shit about protecting James Medford or anyone else connected to Harmony House, but he had a gut feeling that if word got out the police were investigating James Medford’s connection to this case, Caroline would be in even more danger than she already was. “I’ll promise to give you all the details as soon as I can,” Danny replied. “But for now, the name is all I’ve got.”

Hank’s heavy sigh echoed over the phone line. “You know I can only coast on an anonymous tip for so long. Eventually I’ll have to bring you in for questioning.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Danny promised. “I have some loose ends to wrap up,”
oh like a thousand
, “and I promise I’ll hand the whole thing over in a neat little package.”

“I’ll hold you to that. So Emily Parrish?”

“Yeah, two r’s, grew up in Whiskey Creek. That should narrow your search.”

Danny hung up with DeLuca and immediately dialed Derek.

“We were expecting you to check in several hours ago,” Derek said without bothering with a greeting.

“I’ve been busy. Besides, I’m wearing my watch. You know where I am.” Ever since they’d started Gemini, Danny, Derek, and Ethan wore GPS tracking devices in their watches. At any given time, they could locate one another by the exact latitude and longitude anywhere on the map.

“We still need an update on Emily Parrish.”

“Like I said,” Danny said, smiling through clenched teeth as he took his bag of food from the waitress, “I had some things to take care of.”

Derek barked a laugh into the phone. “Yeah, I bet you did. According to your chip, you left the Parrishes’ nearly three hours ago, and have spent the last two at the Whiskey Creek Motor Inn. Now you’re at the local diner. Let me guess. Caroline’s back in the room resting up and you’re getting a burger to refuel for round two.”

Dammit. Sometimes Danny really resented the hell out of this accountability bullshit. “Well I’m calling you now, aren’t I? At least unlike some people, I don’t blow off my clients for more than twenty-four hours and fail to check in so I can chase a hot piece of ass to the beach.”

“That ‘hot piece of ass’ is my fiancee, dickhead, and point taken.”

Danny quickly filled in Derek on what they’d learned. “You’re sure it’s her?” he asked soberly when Danny told him his hunch about the body.

“Like I said, it’s a hunch, but—”

“In the past your hunches have kicked ass over most of our careful analysis.”

Danny didn’t argue, but he took no pride in it. For all the accuracy of his hunches, most of the time they didn’t come in time to prevent disaster. His feeling that it was Emily up on that hillside with his mother certainly wasn’t going to help her or her baby at this point. “De Luca’s on the ID,” he continued. “But I want you and Ethan to go back up to La Honda, ask around about Emily and James Medford this time. See if you can put them there near the time Anne disappeared.”

“We’ll get on it.”

“How’s Dad?” Danny asked, not sure he wanted to know the answer.

“The same,” Derek said after a pause.

Danny pinched the bridge of his nose. He knew what that meant. Joe was still closed up in his den, drinking vodka by the bottle, the TV tuned to a channel he wasn’t watching as he tried to drown out the outside world. “Did you tell him what we found out?” Danny had hoped that news of progress on Anne’s case would start to pull his dad out of a nosedive.

“He doesn’t want to hear about it,” Derek said. Though his inflection barely changed, Danny could hear the repressed grief in his brother’s voice. Since Anne’s body had been identified, their father had done a complete one eighty. For eighteen years he’d searched tirelessly, single-mindedly, as focused on his mission as he’d ever been as a soldier. But when the news came down that Anne was dead, it was as if all the life drained out of him.

All those years Danny had resented his father for his futile quest to find a woman who didn’t want to be found. He remembered all the fights, all the arguments, all the times he told his father he was an idiot to keep up his search. He never realized the search was the only thing that kept his father going.

And now everything Danny thought he knew about his mother’s disappearance was unraveling. He could only hope that by finding out the truth of what happened to Anne, he could give his father some peace and comfort.

As for himself, it was too late.

By the time he got back to the motel with their dinner, Danny’s hair was soaked with snow and any warmth he’d soaked in from the diner was long gone. Caroline had showered and dressed. Her damp hair rippled down her back and her face was scrubbed clean of makeup. She nodded briefly when he walked in, then turned back to the news program she’d turned on, giving no indication that less than an hour ago she’d been naked underneath him and digging her nails into his ass, silently begging him to fuck her harder.

She’d made the bed too, obliterating any physical sign of their tussle. The bedspread was smooth, pillows fluffed, not a single crease visible in the cases. His duffel bag was zipped and stashed in a corner, and all the towels were hung perfectly straight in the bathroom. Everything was in perfect order, the room untouched, pristine, as though the last few hours hadn’t happened.

It pissed him off.

Danny tossed the bags of food on the little table. “I got you a sandwich.”

She raised an eyebrow and caught a bag before it slid to the floor. She opened the bag and wrinkled her nose as she pulled out a chicken sandwich and fries. “Ooh, breaded and fried and mayonnaise. My cardiologist will love this.”

He sat down in the opposite chair and pulled out his burger. “Sorry it’s not five star, but it was either this or gas station food.”

“You could have at least ordered me a salad,” she huffed.

“Or I could have skipped going out in a blizzard and let you starve,” he said and ripped a bite out of his burger. He watched her pull apart her sandwich and wipe off most of the mayo with a napkin.

By the time he polished off his burger, she was still picking the breading off her chicken breast. He tossed the bag into the garbage and paced, restlessness vibrating through his limbs until he couldn’t sit still. Usually after a good, lusty, fuck he could count on the relaxed satisfaction carrying through for at least a few hours, sometimes even a few days.

But he couldn’t shake the sensation that his skin was too tight for his body, like if he didn’t blow off some of the excess energy he was liable to combust. Leave it to Caroline to change the game on him. He didn’t even have to look at her. All he had to do was smell her from across the room, think about how good she’d tasted, coming against his lips and tongue, how hot and tight she was around him after all that time, and he was right back where he’d been for the last few days. Hard as a spike and pissed the hell off.

Meanwhile, Caroline sat there picking at her sandwich as though she didn’t even realize he was there.

“Just eat it already! Jesus, when the hell did you get so fucking picky?” Christ, it bugged him. The way his practical no nonsense Caroline had turned into such a snob.

Scratch that. She’s not your Caroline, and never was.

The thought jarred him back to reality, reminding him what they were doing out there in the middle of bumfuck nowhere in the first place. “I think the other body is Emily’s,” he said without preamble.

Caroline was shocked enough by the abrupt change in subject that she froze in the act of chewing the bite of sandwich she’d finally deigned to take. Her face went chalk white. She set the rest of the sandwich on the table and pushed it away and nodded slowly. “As much as I hate to think about it, it makes sense.”

“They’re checking dental records and should know for sure within a couple days. In the meantime, I asked Derek if he and Ethan can go back to La Honda, see if anyone can put Emily and James there around the same time Anne’s car was seen up there.”

“Why do you keep calling her Anne?” The anger in her tone was enough to stop his pacing. Caroline sat back in the armchair, arms folded, her dark eyes narrowed in a glare.

“Because that’s her name.”

Caroline pushed up from her chair. “She’s your mother, Danny.”

A fact he had no intention of dealing with, not here, not in front of her. Still, hazy memories forced their way into his mind. A soft hand in his hair. The smell of her face cream as she pressed a good night kiss to his cheek. A soft, slightly off key voice singing “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Little expressions of love, memories he’d buried in the time since she disappeared and he’d convinced himself she couldn’t have cared much about them at all.

He couldn’t let them in until he’d closed the case. If he let them in, he’d drown under the weight of his guilt, his grief. “Right now she’s a case,” he said harshly, reminding himself as much as Caroline. “Just like you’re a case. Nothing more, nothing less.”

Caroline’s mouth pulled tight. “Right. Nothing touches you, does it? Not even the fact that your mother is dead and my husband might have killed her, and maybe killed another girl too.” Her voice caught on a sob and she wrapped her arms around her waist as though she was holding herself together. “How did you get so cold, Danny? How did it happen, and how did I not see it coming? Even after your mom first disappeared, you weren’t like this. You need to deal with this, Danny. You can’t pretend this is just another case, because it’s not. I know you still care about her—”

“You don’t know shit!” he yelled. Her words battered him, cracking the barriers he’d put up so long ago. He couldn’t deal with this, couldn’t deal with her, and the dark soupy mess she threatened to unleash inside of him. He turned on her with a snarl. “You think because we fucked around when we were a couple of stupid kids, you know me? You think because I got you off a few times, you get to go all Dr. Phil and pry into my head? You don’t know anything about me, what I care about. And if you think what happened in this room changes any of that, you’re not nearly as smart as I gave you credit for.”

He waited in dark anticipation for his words to find their mark. A sick, twisted side of him wanted to see her flinch, wanted to see the hurt and devastation on her face. She shook him to his core. All he wanted to do was mete out his own destruction.

Her slow smile and laugh sent a shock wave through him. For the first time it occurred to him that maybe she cared as little about him as he pretended to care about her. “Don’t worry, Danny, I’m not the same idiot who convinced herself she was in love with the first guy she slept with and spent six years fighting tooth and nail for a relationship that should never have moved past high school graduation.” He felt his mouth drop open as she stripped her sweater over her head. “I was too young then, and too guilty, I suppose, to realize sex was the only thing we had between us.”

That young, idealistic idiot inside him wanted to scream in protest. That dumb kid who’d loved Caroline with every cell of his body fought to reject what she was saying.

But Danny shoved that kid right back into the hole he’d been living in for the past twelve years.