Too late, she realized she was gnawing anxiously on her thumbnail. She stopped, dropping her hand to her side. The barely-there quirk of his eyebrow told her she’d been caught.
Damn doctor was like a mind reader. She should’ve known she’d never fool him. She never had before.
He smiled. “It was a long drive, Mrs. Sullivan. Maybe you should invite me inside.”
As if she had a choice. “Of course. Come on in.”
The apartment was in a state of disarray. He could almost forgive her for not inviting him in right away. Half-filled moving boxes were scattered around the living room. Haphazard stacks of sloppily taped boxes filled the corner by the brown leather couch. The matching recliner was buried under an avalanche of clothes.
On second look, he noticed that most of the walls were bare. They hadn’t always been. He could see countless nails still studded in the walls, the only sign that photos and frames had once hung there.
Either she was trying to remove any reminders of the life she had shared with Jack Sullivan or she was in the middle of getting the hell out of the apartment. After a second, Lucas decided it was probably both.
“Almost done packing?” he asked.
She didn’t answer. Instead, she nodded at the couch. “Please, take a seat. Can I get you anything to drink? Water? I might still have a beer or two in the fridge.”
“Thank you, but no.”
Shrugging, Tess disappeared into the kitchen. She returned with a bottle of water. As Lucas relaxed into the couch, his arms spread across the back, his leg folded so that his ankle rested on top of his knee, she drank him in with her eyes before guzzling half of her water. Suddenly, her mouth was so dry. The plastic crinkled as she took deep pulls.
“Why don’t you come join me?” Lucas patted the empty seat next to him.
She recapped her half-empty water bottle and tossed it on top of the massive laundry pile. As tempting as his offer was, she knew better. She could sense the tension in the air. Something big was about to happen.
Keeping her tone light—and staying right where she was—Tess said, “Sorry about the mess. I wasn’t expecting company.”
“Somehow I doubt that very much.” His pleasantness sent chills coursing down her spine. “You had to know that this was coming.”
“I… I don’t know what you mean.”
“Before you left, you said something that stuck with me. Do you remember?” When she shook her head, he told her, “You asked me if I really wanted to do this now. I didn’t ask you what you meant by that because I knew. And, trust me, I’m more than ready.
“Hamlet is a very small community,” he continued as she stayed silent. “We weren’t prepared for what followed you into town. A man dies anywhere else, there’s an entire police force to look into the crime.” Lucas ticked them off on his fingers. “Cops, CSI’s, lab techs, DA’s.” He let out a soft snort. “An ME who isn’t making it up as he goes along. But not in Hamlet. Caitlin didn’t trust outsiders. Most of us don’t, but she took her paranoia to a whole other level. We had the five of us.” He raised his hand again, folding his fingers down as he named them. “Me. Caity. Wilhelmina. Sylvester. Walsh. We had to figure it out all on our own. Well, most of it.”
Tess was following along. “The phone records,” she guessed. “She couldn’t get those on her own.”
“Right. But the thing is, the sheriff wasn’t the only one who sent out to the outside for help.” He let his words hang there for a beat. “Your husband’s toxicology reports came in this morning. It was routine for me, sending out samples to the lab after I performed his autopsy. I knew how he died. I just wanted to make sure that everything backed up my initial report.” A quirk of his lips, a meaningless smile that didn’t quite meet the ice in his gaze. “Imagine my surprise when something came back flagged.”
“Oh.”
“Tox reports indicate that he ingested a liberal amount of Nembutal. Are you familiar with it?”
Her legs folded beneath her and she dropped down on the edge of the recliner. The water bottle slipped from her hand. The peak of the clothes mountain tumbled onto the carpet.
“It’s a sedative,” Lucas told her, as if she didn't already know. “A very strong one, too. Mixed with the alcohol in his stomach, he had enough in his system to knock him out cold for hours.
“Seeing that he took it the night he died, I have to ask myself why he would do such a thing.” Lucas’s shrug was casual. Easy. “And I don’t think he did. I mean, he could’ve administered it to himself, yes, but it doesn’t make sense to me. So next question. Who was close enough to Sullivan to give it to him? No sign of a fight, so he took it willingly. Who would he trust enough that he would accept a drugged drink without thinking twice?”
Tess slumped forward. A pair of panties fluttered to join the pile of spilled clothes on the floor.
She closed her eyes. “Me. It was me.”
“I know,” he agreed, so readily that her eyelids fluttered open again. “And I’ve driven all this way for one last question. Why, Tessa? Why drug him?”
Tess’s bottom lip trembled. Her eyes turned glossy with the sheen of sudden tears. Dashing them away with a shaky hand, she looking imploringly over at the doctor.
“It’s all my fault, Luc,” she admitted. “I know I was supposed to stick to the plan and that was it, but I had to. When you did it, when you… I didn’t want Jack to feel any pain. You’ve gotta understand. It was one last thing I could do for him.”
That’s exactly what he thought. In the hours it took to drive to Tessa, he already worked it all out. She’d never once shied away from what he told her she had to do. After reading the tox report, he kicked himself for not thinking she would do something like this.
It always bothered him that Sullivan hadn’t struggled at all, not even as he tightened the rope. Sedatives crossed his mind when he first began the autopsy; he hadn’t used them, so he didn't look for them. It never occurred to him that Tessa, with her conscience and the feelings she once held for the man, might have strayed from the plan.
When the results came in and he realized she’d disobeyed him, he hopped right in his car. It might have been hypocritical, but Lucas threw the rest of the plan out of the window. He’d been thinking rationally, clinically, when he first decided that they had to wait at least three months before they could chance seeing each other again. Tessa would move from her apartment and he would leave Hamlet behind and they could just start over together.
And then the report came in. One detail, one small thing had the power of ruining everything he worked so hard for. Her soft heart could’ve cost them both. He had to see her because this was one discussion they couldn’t have on a disposable phone or in coded e-mail messages. Lucas had to assure himself that Tessa was still as devoted to him as he was her.
Of course, when his own impulsive need to see her, touch her, talk to her again led him to pack up his car and leave Hamlet in his rearview, he forgot one major thing. That, no matter what, she held his heart in her dainty, little hands. Seeing her beautiful eyes fill with tears made him ache.
“Come here, Tessa.” He opened his arms for her. She pushed off of the recliner, shuffling uncertainly toward the safety of his embrace.
Lucas reached out and grabbed her hand, pulling her onto his lap. As she laid her head against his chest, his fingers ghosted over the tousled waves of her hair. He cocooned her in his arms. He was always amazed at how perfect they fit together. As if they were made for each other.
Tess glanced up at him. His gaze grew so heated as their eyes locked, she felt like she was melting. In moments like these, when he looked at her like that, Tess wondered how she could ever compare this man to ice.
“I missed you,” she admitted. Knowing he was hers at last, waiting for him for these last six weeks, it had been torture. She didn’t know how she was going to make it another six weeks. So what if he came all this way to scold her? She didn’t care. Not when she could hold hi
m.
“I love you,” he told her.
And definitely not when he said that. In a matter-of-fact tone because his love for her was something that just was, so simply stated because it was as part of him as his being a doctor. Forget about melting. Tess burned for Lucas De Angelis.
She snuggled into his embrace. For the first time since they set their plan into motion, she felt like she could breathe again.
25
When they started their steamy, passionate affair more than a year ago, Tess never anticipated what it would become. Lucas admitted that he’d hoped for it since the moment they first met, though he forced himself to wait until Tess came to him on her own. And when she finally gave in and did? What started out as a spark of attraction, blossomed into a firestorm of epic proportions that eventually burned everyone in its path.
It began innocently enough; at least, for Tess, it did. Six years ago, when she was a fresh-faced undergrad student still taking nursing courses, Lucas visited her college campus as a guest lecturer.
Though he was the only doctor in Hamlet, he was extremely intelligent, highly educated, and had a desire to get out of there as often as he could. He wouldn’t leave his sister on her own for long, and Caitlin refused to let him out of her sight for more than a few days at a time, but he used his profession as an excuse to momentarily escape either by taking classes, attending seminars, or giving lectures.
It was during one of those lectures that a young woman caught his attention. Tessa Ryan. From the moment he first laid eyes on her, sitting in the front row as she took notes with a purple pen, Lucas knew she was meant to be his. His one and only. He always understood that his marriage to Caitlin was nothing more than a front; already crumbling, it wouldn’t outlast his initial, all-consuming attraction to a light-haired, golden-eyed co-ed.
At first, it was innocent, mostly because Tessa was too good, too kind, too naive to understand exactly what Lucas wanted from her. They exchanged emails from time to time, with Lucas acting as her mentor. Even after she switched her major from nursing to education, they continued to communicate because the bond they developed was already too strong to break.
It wasn’t long before they fell in love. Though neither one acknowledged it out loud for years—Tess because she clung to her loyalty to Jack, Lucas because he didn’t want to push her away—the affection was undeniably there. As constant as the sun, and nearly as blinding.
They couldn’t acknowledge it, or even hope of acting on it. Lucas was still married to Caitlin. Tess was in a committed relationship with Jack Sullivan, a relationship that Lucas was intensely jealous of as it grew more and more serious while he languished in a loveless marriage he couldn’t quite escape from.
Since she never thought she could have a real future with a married man, when Jack proposed, Tess accepted.
Of course, Lucas immediately tried to convince her to change her mind. Though he’d offered it in passing before, he was dead serious when he said he’d finally divorce Caitlin if only Tess gave up Jack. Tess refused. Lucas had his life. She had hers. He was established in Hamlet and wouldn’t leave—as quick as he was to toss his wife to the side, he wouldn’t budge on that point. Tessa wanted to finish school. She didn’t want to go to Hamlet.
Not yet, anyway.
As much as she cared for Jack, the passion she shared with Lucas wouldn’t die. She forced herself to ignore it, going so far as to stall her engagement to Jack for as long as possible until she simply ran out of excuses.
Three years after he proposed, Tess married Jack in a simple courthouse wedding. That day, she promised that she would give her new husband everything she had. He wasn’t the one who gave her butterflies in her stomach, but he loved her and did his best to do right by her.
It was enough. It had to be.
She emailed Lucas the morning after her wedding and told him it was over. He showed up two days after she returned from her honeymoon, cornering her in the parking lot at the school where she worked before basically begging her to leave her new husband. Caught up in a jealous rage, he forgot that their fling was supposed to be both carefree and secret.
Alarmed by the depths of his reaction, she refused. It didn’t matter that his inevitable divorce to Caitlin was final and had been for years. She owed too much to Jack. She wouldn’t leave him.
Lucas went back to Hamlet alone, already plotting how to change that. And while Tessa managed to avoid contacting him for nearly three weeks after her wedding, she eventually rekindled their long distance romance. She wanted to stay away and she tried to—but Lucas was all too willing to wait. A patient hunter, he let Tessa come back to him, knowing that once she did, he'd never let her go.
And he didn't. Emails and stolen phone calls became weekend-long trysts when Jack was away on business and Caitlin thought Lucas was out of town for his work. All the while, he kept lying in wait. His problem? He considered another man’s wife to be his. The solution was incredibly clear to him from the start.
Get rid of the other man.
Already hatching his plan, Lucas waited. No one—not Tessa, not his ex, not his sister—could tell the depths of his plotting. After Mack Turner, this one would be a cinch. Methodical and precise, he approached it as he would any other operation. The goal? Separating Tessa from Jack Sullivan. Simple surgery.
The doctor was more than capable of it.
Tessa, meanwhile, struggled in her marriage. Six months later, miserable and growing to despise Jack more and more for the sole crime that he wasn’t Lucas, she admitted to her husband that maybe they weren’t cut out for this marriage thing. He had to be thinking the same thing. She knew she was making his life miserable, but he adamantly told her no. Jack wouldn’t let her give up. There would be no divorce. She was in it for life, he reminded her.
Or just his, Lucas pointed out.
It was surprisingly easy to convince Tessa of his plan. Two months of dropping hints, sneaking phone calls, sending untraceable emails and he had her wavering. After another couple of weeks, she agreed that she didn’t see any other way out.
Lucas had always known he was twisted, that a part of him just wasn’t right. Everything was either black or white—he never saw shades of grey. He didn’t want to die alone, so he married Caitlin. Didn’t matter that he didn’t love her, or that he knew she was utterly devoted to him in a way he couldn’t reciprocate. He wanted a partner. He got one.
And when he found himself haunted and obsessed by a striking student in one of his lectures, he knew he would do anything to possess her.
It utterly amazed him that, in the end, his fragile beauty proved she would be willing to do the same for him.
So they planned Tessa’s second honeymoon knowing that a third would follow closely on its heels. Everything, from the nail in her husband’s tire to weaken it to the requested stay in a private room, plus the award-worthy performance she put on for Mason Walsh the night Sullivan died, was plotted to the last detail. Odds were good that one of the deputies would throw her in the holding cells if she was caught driving intoxicated. Everyone in Hamlet knew about the drunk tank—but an outsider wasn’t supposed to. When Walsh locked her up, he was doing exactly what he was supposed to without knowing it.
It was Tessa who went off script.
Lucas hadn’t expected her to insist on calling the Hamlet Inn. Luckily for them, he was able to do some acting of his own as he convinced both Caro and Walsh that he was Jack Sullivan. Though it caught him off guard at the time, he admitted to Tessa later that it had been a stroke of genius. It solidified her alibi, making it airtight since it was “proof” that she had left Jack alive in the hotel room.
He even went so far as to purposely pick the anniversary of his divorce to Caitlin to put his plan into motion because she would be distracted and off her game. The more he pushed, the more he flaunted a “budding” relationship with Tessa, the quicker he thought she'd give up and shunt Sullivan's case off to the side. It almost worked, too, and when
it didn't, Lucas didn't hesitate to go to Plan B.
Really, he thought, Caitlin had no one to blame for her death but herself.
All in all, it was the perfect plot. The only evidence remaining that tied Tessa to any of this was the report he received with Sullivan’s tox results. And since he destroyed that, burning the letter and its envelope in a rest stop bathroom two hours away from Hamlet, there wasn’t even that.
Leaning down, nuzzling his cheek against the silky soft strands of her hair, Lucas told her how he got rid of the one thing that might make someone look closer at the crime. Without a doctor to question the results, the tox report would be buried under hundreds of others like it.
No longer frustrated and annoyed, he took great pleasure in assuring his accomplice that they were home free at last. Breathing her in, snuggling her close, he was at peace for the first time in years. At that moment, everything he planned, everything he pulled off, it was all worth it.
“So that’s it then. We did it.” She sounded amazed.
“Mm-hmm.”
Tessa held onto him for a few seconds more before she abruptly pulled away. He let out a throaty growl at the loss of her warmth pressed up against him. Now that she was in his arms where she belonged, he hated the idea of letting her go. It was even worse when she was distancing herself from him.
Then she went on and said, “Luc, there’s time now. We’ve got to talk.”
His stomach tightened. Nothing good ever followed we’ve got to talk. He ran his hands down her shoulder, trying to maneuver her back against his body. “No.”
“I’m serious.”
“You talk. I’ll keep myself occupied.”
She slapped his wandering hand as it made a bid to slip underneath her shirt. “Lucas!”
“Okay. Fine. I’ll behave.” And, to prove it, he wrapped his hands around her waist, moving her so that she was pressed against his middle again. When she relaxed into his hold and sighed as if there wasn’t anywhere she’d rather be, Lucas felt magnanimous. Even though he was pretty sure he knew what was coming next, he said, “You want to talk? Let’s talk. What’s on your mind?”
Don't Trust Me (Hamlet Book 1) Page 25
