Whispers

by Lisa Jackson

  Guilt gnawed at his pride, but he took her into his arms and kissed her. She sighed, her eyes fluttered open, and she smiled, that sexy naive little grin that was always his undoing. “Again?” she asked, yawning, her tousled hair spilling over his arm.

  He kissed her and her lips fit perfectly to his. Her tongue slid into his mouth, her nipples hardened, and within seconds her drowsy body was awake and alive, her blood as hot as his own.

  Her arms wrapped around his neck and he buried his face in the hollow of her breasts before he swept her legs apart with his knees and drove into her as hot and randy as any nineteen-year-old.

  “Kane,” she whispered into his ear as he began to pant. Perspiration broke out on her skin, and she arched up to meet each of his thrusts with her own hungry desire. Faster and faster he moved, holding her close, his eyes squeezed shut as his guilt pounded through his brain. He couldn’t do this, couldn’t betray her, couldn’t love her so much it hurt, only to devastate her and her family.

  And then he came. With a lusty cry and a final thrust, he fell against her, his body melding to hers in a union that was meant to be and cursed by all the demons of hell.

  Tortured, he kissed her forehead, tasting the salt of her sweat, feeling her shudder as her own climax slowed. “I never want to hurt you,” he said, brushing her hair off her face with his lips.

  “You won’t,” she replied, smiling and trusting as she gazed up at him.

  He kissed her again, long and hard, and knew that he had no choice. Despite all his vows to himself, he was destined to betray her, and then, no matter what else happened, she would hate him for the rest of her life.

  Thirty

  “Stop it, you’re making me crazy. What’s the matter with you anyway?” Paige asked, glaring up at Weston from her game of bridge. She grabbed a handful of mixed nuts and plopped an almond into her mouth.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Weston lied and gave himself a mental shake for allowing his emotions to show. He’d been pacing again, back and forth through the kitchen and den where Paige, Stephanie, Kendall, and his father were playing cards. Neal’s wheelchair was pushed into position, and though he couldn’t walk and had little use of his right side since the stroke, he was able to talk and use his left hand effectively enough to handle a weekly game of bridge.

  “Something’s up,” Neal said, one eye narrowing on his son. “You’re always restless when something’s bothering you.”

  “Daddy’s fine,” Stephanie interrupted, and Weston felt a warmth inside him. She was always in his corner, defending him against the world. With her wheat blond hair and sparkling blue eyes, she’d inherited the right combination of genes to make her drop-dead gorgeous. “Leave him alone. Mom, it’s your bid.” Daddy’s little girl. But the others were right. He was going out of his fucking mind.

  Paige, still overweight and forever jangling that irritating bracelet, could see straight to his soul, and it scared the living shit out of him. Sometimes she smiled at him in an eerie way that suggested she had something on him—something life-threatening, something that kept him from crossing her. She’d made hints about it as well. “I’d better never end up dead from an ‘accident’ or something, Wes, because it won’t work. If I have an unexpected early death, the police will come looking for you.” He’d laughed and asked her to explain herself, but she’d only smiled that creepy little grin and said, “I’m not bluffing.”

  “You’re making it hard to concentrate.” Paige sent him a drop-dead look and turned her attention back to the cards. “Either sit down or leave.”

  “You don’t have to go anywhere, Daddy.” Good girl, Stephanie. You tell ’em.

  “You are fidgety,” Kendall said, disapproval edging the corners of her mouth as the dog trotted through the kitchen and stopped at his water bowl.

  Weston couldn’t stand to be cooped up another minute. “I’ve got to run to the office,” he said, and Kendall’s eyes followed him. She’d never trusted him, believed that he chased anything in a skirt. Not completely true, but he had fallen into his share of relationships, bad and good.

  “New business?” Neal asked, always interested in what was happening at Taggert Industries.

  “No, just tying up a few loose ends.” Weston grabbed his keys and walked out the back door. The wind had picked up, tossing the branches of the trees near the garage, and the scent of smoke, riding on the back of a salt-laden breeze, drifted up from a few campfires on the beach.

  He drove away from the house and tried to calm down. His sister was right. He was in knots. For several reasons. First and foremost, Denver Styles had been on his payroll for nearly a week, and so far he’d come up with nothing new on Dutch or any of the other Hollands.

  Nothing. Nada. Zilch. The man just wasn’t doing his job or he was holding out on Weston, probably for more money, which would be a mistake. A big mistake.

  Second, there was the excavation at the most recent phase of Stone Illahee. His stomach cramped and bile rose in his throat. To top things off, Dutch was going to officially announce his candidacy for next year’s governor’s race at a party the following weekend, and the thought of Benedict Holland even having a shot at a position of power anywhere in the state made him physically ill. No, it couldn’t happen.

  He drove like a madman, pushing the speed limit, squirreling around corners until his office came into view. He was supposed to meet with Styles tonight, and he couldn’t wait. Somehow he had to get his money’s worth from the man. In the back of his mind he wondered if he’d been conned. What was preventing Denver Styles from pocketing the cash Weston had given him and reporting nothing? Weston was ready. Either Styles came up with some information, important information, or there would be hell to pay.

  His jaw tightened and his lips flattened hard against his teeth. Weston had never liked being bested, and he’d worked long and hard to prevent just that. So if Styles was going to double-cross him, he’d pay. He’d pay with his goddamned life. Just like those who’d tried to cheat him before.

  At the office building, he unlocked the back door, as he’d told Styles he would, then took the elevator to his private office. He’d just poured himself a stiff shot of brandy and loosened his tie when Denver Styles, dressed in black, strode in.

  Weston motioned to the bar, but Styles shook his head and declined. Instead he leaned against the wall of glass and stared outside.

  “What have you found out?”

  Styles lifted a shoulder. “Not much.”

  Anger spurted through Weston’s veins. “Surely in a week, you’ve dug up something.”

  Styles turned to face him. “A few things. Nothing substantial. Nothing about the night your brother was killed, even though that’s what Dutch is most concerned about.”

  Weston tried to be patient, he knew that it was in his best interest to let Styles give him the information in his own way and time, yet he wanted to strangle the man and shake answers from him. “You think one of his girls killed Harley?”

  “Don’t know.” He paused. “Yet.”

  “What do you know?” Weston asked, and couldn’t hide the nasty little tone in his words.

  “That Dutch is nervous, that he’s worried someone will find out that one of his kids is a murderer, though he’s got no evidence to support his theory, and that when Claire Holland left Chinook sixteen years ago, she was pregnant.”

  Weston was stunned. “Pregnant? Claire?” But Miranda had been the sister who was knocked up. He did a few quick mental calculations. “You mean with her son?”

  “Yes. Sean Harlan St. John. He wasn’t born in July as she claimed but in April, which meant she was pregnant before she met her husband.”

  “The baby was Harley’s?” Weston’s legs were suddenly unable to hold him, and he had to sit down. This was impossible. There couldn’t be another Taggert . . . Harley couldn’t have fathered a boy and yet . . . His mind turned back to another birth certificate, one he’d burned years before, proof that his father hadn�
��t been faithful to Mikki. Bile rose in his throat, and his gut squeezed painfully. There was another heir to the Taggert fortune? His fists clenched. He’d worked so hard to inherit everything and now this kid, this interloper . . . oh shit!

  He felt the nervous beads of sweat form on his upper lip and his ribs seemed suddenly to crush the air out of his lungs. No! No! No! Not now. Not when he’d been certain to inherit everything but a small percentage of his father’s estate. It was already mapped out in the will. Even Paige knew that as a daughter and one who didn’t work at the company, she would only inherit the old house where they’d grown up, but now . . . with Harley’s son . . . no, it couldn’t happen. “Who knows about this?”

  “Just Claire St. John, although Moran’s sure to pick up on it.”

  “Damn it all to hell!”

  “The boy has no idea, and the kid’s supposed father, Paul St. John, has enough problems of his own that he won’t give a plugged nickel about the fact when the truth comes out.”

  “You think Moran will publish this?” The wheels in Weston’s mind were turning, faster and faster, to the inevitable ending, that Sean St. John would be proven to be a Taggert. His father would be thrilled, even though the kid’s mother was a Holland. One of Neal’s biggest disappointments in life was that he had no male heirs to carry on the Taggert name. Kendall had refused to have more children, had gone so far as to have surgery to ensure that she was sterile. Her pregnancy with Stephanie had been miserable, and she wasn’t about to go through the pain, bloat, or emotional roller coaster ride that carrying a baby for nine months had given her. Stephanie had been worth it, but Kendall wasn’t interested in another child.

  So now this problem.

  “I assume Moran will publish anything to smear Dutch,” Styles said. “He hates the guy and with good reason. His father was crippled in a logging accident, never completely compensated for his injuries and the father was abusive, if not physically, then emotionally. Moran’s mother, Alice, left him and the dad at an early age. As it turns out, she ended up living in Portland as Dutch’s mistress, and never had any contact with the kid all the time he was growing up with a drunk bully of a dad.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Weston muttered and thought about his own experience with Dutch Holland. In his mind’s eye he could still see Dutch’s freckled back as he humped on the antique quilt, Mikki’s legs wrapped around him while they fucked like two damned animals. The image had haunted him and he’d had dreams about it . . . disturbing dreams where he’d killed Dutch, then mounted his whore of a mother, but when he’d looked down it wasn’t Mikki Taggert he was screwing but one of the Holland daughters, Miranda or Claire or Tessa.

  “Other than that, I don’t have anything,” Styles was saying, snapping Weston from his hideous reverie.

  “Keep looking,” Weston said, still reeling from the information. At least Styles didn’t appear to be holding out on him.

  “I will. Especially into the night Harley died.” He turned and faced Weston for the first time, and those harsh flinty eyes thinned with a personal vengeance. Weston’s heart nearly stopped. “I’m with Moran. Something about that night doesn’t add up.”

  This was dangerous turf. As far as Weston was concerned, the less anyone cared about the night Harley bought it, the better. Styles reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of paper—a copy of a report and a picture of a gun. “Moran seems obsessed with this bit of evidence,” he said, holding out the pages for Weston to take. “What do you make of it?”

  Weston stared down at the copies. “Couldn’t guess.”

  “The gun was found not far from the body.”

  “I know, but the police didn’t connect it to the crime.”

  “But it’s odd, don’t you think?”

  Not so peculiar, Weston thought, as he snatched the paper from Styles’s hand and folded it neatly. He didn’t want to be reminded that his mother’s gun had been found at the scene. No one claimed the little pistol, and it hadn’t been registered, of course, but everyone in the Taggert family knew that the gun was the one that had been missing from Mikki Taggert’s dresser drawer for weeks. “Yep,” he said, shaking his head and meeting the questions in Styles’s eyes. “Very odd.”

  “You’re telling me that Sean was fathered by Harley Taggert?” Dutch demanded, his face ruddy, a cigar clamped between his teeth as he glared at Denver. They sat facing each other in the bar of the Hotel Danvers, a Portland landmark.

  “Could be. I have to check on blood types yet.”

  “Jesus H. Christ! How long does that take?”

  “Not long. A few days. I might even know by tomorrow.”

  “Why would Claire lie?”

  “You’ll have to ask her that,” Styles replied. He hadn’t touched his coffee laced with brandy, while Dutch was on his second drink.

  “What about the night Taggert died? Did he know about the kid?”

  Styles shrugged. “The only one who knows the answer to that one is Claire.”

  Dutch drained his drink and scowled. “I guess this isn’t the worst news I could get, but it’s not great.”

  “Tell your campaign manager—Murdock—and he can do some damage control.”

  Dutch rubbed his face and sighed. “People are counting on me to run. I can’t afford to be hit in the face with some old scandal. You’ve got to get to the bottom of this Taggert mess, Styles, before my opponent or Moran does. If we know what we’re up against, we have a chance and if not . . . oh, Christ, let’s not think about that. Just find out what happened that night.”

  “I will,” Denver promised, and he meant to do just that, even though his agenda was far removed from Benedict Holland’s.

  After work on Friday, Miranda drove straight to the construction site where the next elaborate lodge, an extension of Stone Illahee, was to be built. According to her father’s secretary in Portland, Dutch was going to be overseeing the site preparation all weekend, and Miranda needed to talk to him before he announced his candidacy at a party on Sunday night. Only Dutch could tell Denver Styles to back off.

  The man was getting to her, no doubt about it. He’d stopped by the office and her house four different times, and all the while she was with him, she was in knots. It wasn’t so much the questions he asked, but Styles himself. Brooding, thoughtful, with features that could change from pleasant to harsh in a heartbeat, he unnerved her. She, who had prided herself on her cool appraisal of any situation, she, who no defense attorney, hostile witness, or volatile suspect, could rattle. This one man had her second-guessing herself, tripping over her own stories, and ready to jump out of her own skin.

  “Take it easy,” she said, driving through the open gate of the chain-link fence surrounding the excavation site. Dust blew across the Volvo’s windshield, and the air smelled dry, without the usual dampness from the ocean. Several pickups were parked haphazardly around the area where trees, grass, and boulders had been scraped from the ground. Dutch’s Cadillac was wedged between a half-ton pickup in primer gray and a station wagon that was a patchwork of colors because of dented and replaced fenders. Dutch wasn’t inside his car, but Miranda spotted him easily.

  Chomping on the butt of a cigar, he stood with a group of workmen, staring at a spot in front of an idling bulldozer that was belching black smoke into the hot summer air.

  The men were grim, talking in low voices, and Miranda, as she slid out of her car, felt her stomach clench with the premonition that something was wrong—very wrong. Far in the distance she heard the first wail of a siren, and, in an instant, as the sound drew nearer, she realized that for some reason the police were on their way. Her steps quickened across the dirt as dread stole through her. What was it? Had someone been hurt on the job? As she approached, she heard scraps and bits of the conversation.

  “. . . been there for years,” a big bear of a man wearing a hard hat and bib overalls mumbled.

  “Holy shit, who?” Another worker, skinny with short-cropped hair and r
imless glasses.

  “No one missin’ that I know of.” The bear again.

  What were they talking about? Who?

  “Never seen the likes of it.”

  “Me neither,” Dutch said, puffing on his short cigar and staring at his feet where the ground dropped off as the bulldozer had taken a huge bite of earth from the spot.

  “Wonder if there’s any ID?”

  Behind Miranda, a siren screamed as a cruiser for the county shot through the gates. Still walking, she glanced over her shoulder as the car slid to a stop near her Volvo. Two all-business deputies climbed out and hurried toward the men just as Miranda reached her father’s side. She looked down the embankment at her feet, to the gaping hole in the earth, where the dirt was wet and fresh, and tangled in the debris of leaves, rocks, and litter was a body—little more than a skeleton with a few rags still clinging to its bones.

  The contents of her stomach rose, threatening her throat. “Oh, God,” she said, as her father finally noticed her.

  “Randa, what’re you doing here? You should be—”

  “I’ve seen bodies before,” she snapped back, but something about this decomposed body bothered her, and as the first drip of premonition slid into her brain, the deputies approached.

  “Okay, what’ve we got here? Jesus! Would you look at that?”

  “Let’s rope it off,” the second deputy said. “Don’t disturb anything else.” He eyed the bulldozer as if it were a tool of the devil, then swept his gaze over the small crowd. “Forensics and the ME will need to see this. No one’s to disturb anything.”

  But Miranda barely heard the command. Her eyes were drawn to the right hand of the corpse and the ring that hung loosely around one skeletal finger. No! It couldn’t be! Her heart dropped. A small cry escaped her lips. “No!” she cried. “No! No! No!”

  “What the hell—?”

  Her knees gave way, and her father caught her by the arms. Pain screamed through her brain. It couldn’t be . . . oh God, please, no. Not Hunter. Not her beloved . . .