by Nora Roberts
again. His goal was to have her firmly planted in his arms at midnight. He gave her plenty of rope, and as the countdown began, firmly reeled her in.
“Don’t you start on me again.”
“Only a minute to go,” he said easily. “I always think of that last minute between years as untime.” When her brow furrowed, he knew he had her attention and slid his arms around her. “Not now, not then. Not anything. If we were alone, I could do what I want with you for those sixty seconds. But it wouldn’t be real. So I’m going to wait till it is. Put your arms around me. It doesn’t count yet. Not for seconds yet.”
She couldn’t hear anything but his voice, none of the noise, the laughter, the excited countdown of time penetrated. As if in a dream, she lifted her arms, wound them around his neck.
“Tell me you want me,” he murmured. “It doesn’t count. Not yet.”
“I do. But I don’t—”
“No buts. It doesn’t matter.” He slid a hand up, over her bare back, under her hair. “Kiss me. It’s not real, not yet. You kiss me, Willa. Just once, you kiss me.”
She angled in, kept her eyes open and her mind blank as she fit her lips to his. So warm, so welcoming, so unexpectedly gentle that she shuddered in reaction. And time ran out on her.
Cheers echoed somewhere in the back of her head. People jostled her in their hurry to exchange New Year’s greetings. And as the seconds slid away from the end to the beginning, her heart ached with it.
“It is real.” It was as much accusation as statement when she drew away. Her eyes glittered with the fresh awareness, and the fear of it. “It is.”
“Yeah.” He stunned her by taking her hand, bringing it to his lips. “Starting now.” He slid an arm around her waist, kept her close to his side. “Look there, darling.” He shifted her just a little. “That’s a pretty sight.”
Even through her own confusion, she had to admit it was. Adam, with his hands cupped on Lily’s face, and Lily’s fingers holding his wrists.
See how their eyes meet and hold, she thought. How her lips tremble just a little, how gently he brushes them with his. And how they stay there, just so, fixed in that bare whisper of a kiss.
“He’s in love with her,” Willa murmured. Emotions churned inside her. Too much to feel, she thought with a hand pressed to her stomach. Too much to think, too much to wonder. “What’s going on? I wish I could understand what’s going on. Nothing’s the same anymore. Nothing’s simple anymore.”
“They can make each other happy. That’s simple.”
“No.” She shook her head. “No, it won’t be. Can’t you feel it? There’s something . . .” She shuddered again, because she could feel it. And it was cold, and vicious and close. “Ben, there’s something—”
That was when the screaming started.
FOURTEEN
T HERE WASN’T MUCH BLOOD. THE POLICE WOULD conclude that she had been killed elsewhere, then brought to the ranch. No one recognized her. Her face was largely unmarred. Just a bruise under the right eye.
Her hair was gone.
Her skin was faintly blue. That Willa had seen for herself when she rushed outside and found young Billy struggling to calm Mary Anne Walker after they’d stumbled over the body. She was naked, and her skin had crisscrossing slashes in it like hatch marks on a drawing.
Very little blood, and what there was had dried on that pale blue skin.
Mary Anne had been sick right there on the front steps. And Billy had soon followed suit, chucking up his share of the beer he’d guzzled in the rig while he was busy getting Mary Anne’s panties down to her ankles.
Willa had gotten them both back inside and ordered everyone who was crowding out on the porch, gawking and talking at once, to come back inside. She told herself she would think about the woman later, the woman with the blue skin and no hair who was dead at the foot of the steps.
She would think about that later.
“Bess has already called the police.” Adam laid a hand on her arm, waiting until her eyes shifted to his. The voices around them were too loud, too frightened. “I should go out there with Ben, stay with—stay with her until the police come. Can you handle this?”
“Yes.” She looked up in relief as Nate came rushing down the stairs. “Yes, go on. Outside,” she said, reaching for Nate’s hand. “Please, go out with Ben and Adam. There’s . . . there’s another.”
She turned and started into the great room. Stu McKinnon had already shut off the music, was using his strong, soothing voice to calm the guests. Willa let him take charge for the moment, while she just stood there staring at her father’s portrait over the fireplace. Those cold blue eyes stared back at her. She could almost see him sneering at her, blaming her.
Barefoot, her dress not quite zipped, Tess barreled down the steps just as Lily came rushing down the hall. “What happened? Someone was screaming.”
“There’s been another murder.” Lily gripped Tess’s hand hard. “I didn’t see. Adam wouldn’t let me go out, but it’s a woman. No one seems to know who she is. She was just there. Just there in front of the house.”
“Oh, my God.” Tess pressed her free hand to her mouth, forced herself to stay in control. “Happy fucking New Year. Okay.” She took a deep breath. “Let’s do whatever comes next.”
They stepped up to Willa, instinctively flanking her. None of them was fully aware that they had linked hands.
“I don’t know her,” Willa managed. “I don’t even know her.”
“Don’t think about it now.” Tess tightened her grip on Willa’s hand. “Don’t think about it. Let’s just get through this.”
H OURS LATER. JUST AS DAWN BROKE, SHE FELT A HAND on her shoulder. She’d fallen asleep, God knew how, in front of the living room fire. She jerked away, struggled away as Ben tried to lift her.
“I’m taking you upstairs. You’re going to bed.”
“No.” She got to her feet. Her head was eerily light, her body numb, but her heart was pounding again. “No, I can’t.” Dazed, she stared around the room. The remnants of the party were all there. Glasses and plates, food going stale, ashtrays overflowing. “Where—”
“Everyone’s gone. The last of the police left ten minutes ago.”
“They said they wanted to talk to me again.”
Take me into the library again, she thought, question me again. Take me through the steps again. And again. All leading to that moment when she had rushed outside to see two terrified teenagers and a dead woman with pale blue skin.
“What?” She pressed a hand to her head. Ben’s voice was like a buzz in the front of her brain.
“I said I told them they could talk to you later.”
“Oh. Coffee? Is there any coffee left?”
He’d already had a good look at her, curled in the chair, her white face a hard contrast to the dark shadows under her eyes. She might be standing at the moment, but he knew it was only sheer will that kept her on her feet. And that was simple enough to deal with. He lifted her off them and into his arms.
“You’re going to bed. Now.”
“I can’t. I have . . . things to do.” She knew there were dozens of things to do but couldn’t seem to think of even one. “Where . . . my sisters?”
His eyebrows lifted as he carried her up the steps. He figured she was too punchy to realize it was the first time she’d called Lily and Tess her sisters. “Tess went up an hour ago. Lily’s with Adam. Ham can handle whatever needs to be done today. Go to sleep, Will. That’s all you need to do.”
“They asked so many questions.” She didn’t protest, couldn’t, when he laid her on her bed. “Everybody asking questions. And the police, taking people into the library, one at a time.”
She looked at him then, into his eyes—cold green now, she thought. Cold and hard and unreadable. “I didn’t know her, Ben.”
“No.” He slipped off her shoes, debated with himself briefly, then gritted his teeth and turned her over to unzip her dress. “They’l
l check missing persons reports, check her prints.”
“Hardly any blood,” she murmured, quiet as a child as he slid the dress down. “Not like before. She didn’t seem real, not like a person at all. Do you think he knew her? Did he know her when he did that to her?”
“I don’t know, darling.” And as tenderly as if she’d been a child, he tucked her under the blankets. “Put it away for now.” Sitting on the edge of the bed, he stroked her hair.
“Just let it go and sleep.”
“He blames me.” Her voice was thick and drunk with exhaustion.
“Who blames you?”
“Pa. He always did.” And she sighed. “He always will.”
Ben left his hand on her cheek a moment. “And he was always wrong.”
When he rose and turned, he saw Nate in the doorway.
“She out?” Nate asked.
“For now.” Ben laid the dress over a chair. “Knowing Will, she won’t sleep long.”
“I talked Tess into taking a pill.” He smiled wanly. “Didn’t take much talking.” He gestured down the hall. Together they walked to Willa’s office, shut the door. “It’s early,” Nate said, “but I’m having whiskey.”
“Hate to see you drink alone. Three fingers,” he added when Nate poured. “Don’t think she was from around here.”
“No?” Neither did he, but Nate wanted Ben’s take. “Why?”
“Well.” Ben sipped, hissed through his teeth at the lightning bolt of liquor. “Fingernails and toenails painted up with some shiny purple polish. Tattoos on her butt and her shoulder. Looked like three earrings in each ear. That says city to me.”
“Didn’t look more than sixteen. That says runaway to me.” Nate drank, and drank deep. “Poor kid. Could have been riding her thumb, or working the streets in Billings or Ennis. Wherever this bastard found her, he kept her awhile.”
Ben’s attention sharpened. “Oh?”
“I got a little out of the cops. Abrasions around the wrists and ankles. She’d been tied up. They couldn’t say for sure until they run the tests, but they seemed fairly sure she’d been raped, and that she’d been dead at least twenty-four hours before he left her here. That adds up to being kept somewhere.”
Ben paced it off for a moment, the frustration and disgust. “Why here? Why dump her here?”
“Someone’s focused on Mercy.”
“Or on someone at Mercy,” Ben added, and saw by the look in Nate’s eyes that they agreed. “All this started after the old man died, after Tess and Lily came here. Maybe we should start looking closer at them and who’d want to hurt them.”
“I’m going to talk to Tess when she wakes up. We know there’s an ex-husband in Lily’s past. One who liked to knock her around.”
Ben nodded and absently rubbed the scar across his chin.
“It’s a long jump from wife abuse to slicing up strangers.”
“Maybe not that long a jump. I’d feel better knowing where the ex is, and what he’s up to.”
“We feed his name to the cops, hire a detective.”
“We’re on the same beam there. You know his name?”
“No, but Adam will.” Ben downed the rest of the whiskey, set the glass aside. “Might as well get started.”
T HEY FOUND HIM IN THE STABLES, EXAMINING A pregnant mare. “She’s going to foal early,” Adam said, as he straightened up. “Another day or two.” After a last stroke, he stepped out of the foaling stall, slid the door closed. “Will?”
“Sleeping,” Ben told him. “For the moment.”
He nodded, moved down the concrete aisle to the grain bin. “Lily’s in on my couch. She wanted to help with the morning feeding, but she dropped off while she was waiting for me to change. I’m glad she didn’t see it. Tess either.” His usual fluid movements were jerky with tension and fatigue. “I’m sorry Will did.”
“She’ll get through it.” Ben moved to a hay net, filled it with fresh. “How much do you know about Lily’s ex-husband?”
“Not a lot.” Adam continued to work, as unsurprised by the assistance as the question. “His name’s Jesse Cooke. They met when she was teaching, got married a couple months later. She left him about a year after that. The first time. She hasn’t told me much more, and I haven’t been pushing.”
“Does she know where he is?” Ignoring his best suit, Nate filled a feeding trough.
“She thinks back East. That’s what she wants to think.”
For the next few minutes they worked in silence, three men accustomed to the routine, the smells, the work. The stables were lit with the morning sun trailing through the open corral door with hay motes dancing cheerfully in every slanting beam. Horses shifted on fresh bedding, munched on feed, blew an occasional greeting.
From the chicken house a rooster called, and there was the jangle of boots on hard-packed dirt as men went about their chores in the ranch yard. No radio played tinny country this morning, nor was the winter silence broken by the voices of men at work. If glances were tossed toward the main house, the porch, the space beneath, no one commented.
An engine gunned; a rig headed out. And the silence came back, a lingering guest at a party gone wrong.
“You may have to push her a bit now,” Ben said at length. “It’s an angle we can’t afford to ignore. Not after this.”
“I’ve already thought of that. I want her to get some rest first. Goddamn it.” The grain scoop Adam held snapped at the handle with the quick flex of his hands. “She should be safe here.”
The temper he rarely acknowledged swirled up so fast, so huge it choked his words. He wanted to pound something, rip something to shreds. But he had nothing. Even his hands were empty now.
“That was a child out there. How could someone do that to a child?”
He whirled on them, his hands in fists, his eyes dark and burning with rage. “How close was he? Was he out there, looking through the windows? Or was he inside with us? Did the son of a bitch touch her, dance with her? If she’d walked outside to get a breath of air, would he have been there?”
He looked down at his hands, opened them to stare at the palms. “I could kill him myself, and it would be easy.” His gaze shifted, skimmed both men. “It would be so easy.”
“Adam.” Lily’s voice was hardly a whisper, quiet fear at the edge of his black rage. With her arms crossed, her fingers digging hard into her shoulders, she stepped closer.
“You should be sleeping.” His muscles quivered with the effort to hold back the fury. “We’re nearly done here. Go on home to bed.”
“I need to talk to you.” She’d heard enough, seen enough to know the time had come. “Alone, please.” She turned to Ben and Nate. “I’m sorry. I need to speak with Adam alone.”
“Take her inside,” Nate suggested. “Ben and I can finish this. Take her in,” he repeated. “She’s cold.”
“You shouldn’t have come out here.” Adam moved to her, careful not to touch. “Let’s go in, have some coffee.”
“I put some on before I came out.” She noted that he stayed an arm’s length away, and it made her ashamed. “It should be ready now.”
He walked her out the back, across the corral fence and to his rear door. From habit, he scraped his boots before going inside.
The kitchen smelled cozily of coffee just brewed, but the light was thin and stingy, and it prompted him to flip the switch and fill the room with hard artificial light.
“Sit down,” she began. “I’ll get it.”
“No.” He stepped in front of her as she reached for the cupboard door. Still he didn’t touch her. “You sit.”
“You’re angry.” She hated the tremor in her voice, hated the fact that anger from a man, even this man, could turn her knees to water. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” It snapped out of him before he could stop it. Even when she backed up a step, he couldn’t block it all. “What the hell have you got to apologize to me for?”
“For everything I haven’t told
you.”
“You don’t owe me explanations.” The cupboard door slammed against the wall as he wrenched it open. And out of the corner of his eye he saw her jerk in reaction. “Don’t flinch from me.” He leveled his breathing, kept his eyes on the cups set neatly in rows on the shelves. “Don’t do that, Lily. I’d cut off my hands before I’d use them on you that way.”
“I know.” Tears swam into her eyes and were blinked brutally back. “I know that, in my heart. It’s my head, Adam. And I do owe you.” She walked to the round kitchen table with its simple white bowl of glossy red apples. “More than explanations. You’ve been my friend. My anchor. You’ve been everything I’ve needed since I came here.”
