“Your assumption was not wrong,” she said.
He drew his knuckles lightly along her cheek. “You don’t know how happy I am to hear that.”
He deserved some kind of rational explanation, she thought. She was behaving like a nervous bride on a wedding night.
“I know I’m acting weird,” she said.
“The stress.”
“That’s part of it, but it’s more than that. This whole situation just feels so strange. I mean, we’ve only had one night together and I was just starting to adjust to the idea that we might be sleeping together and wondering how things would go between us and now we’re married but it’s not a real marriage. I don’t know. I can’t seem to grasp the concept.”
“Listen to the advice of an expert.” He kissed her ear. “Forget the license and the ring. Concentrate on the sleeping together part.”
Before she could respond, he was kissing her, a heavy, intoxicating kiss—a magic spell of a kiss that set everything inside her gloriously free.
Concentrate on the sleeping together part.
“Ethan.” She gripped his shoulders and kissed him back, abandoning herself to the moment with a kind of desperate, feverish need that was entirely new to her.
“That’s it,” he said against her throat. His voice was thicker and heavier, rich and dense and imbued with dark promises. “You’re getting the hang of it.”
She leaned into him, absorbing his heat into all the cold places inside her, trying to let him share some of her own warmth.
He scooped her up, carried her out of the bathroom, and stood her on her feet beside the bed. Reaching down, he grabbed a fistful of bedspread, blankets, and sheets and tossed them all out of the way with a single, sweeping motion.
She stumbled out of her shoes, holding on to Ethan to keep her balance. He got out of his own shoes somehow, and then they were falling together, down, down, down.
The next thing she knew she was on her back and Ethan was on top of her, levering himself up on one elbow so that he could strip away her blouse and bra.
She slid her hand downward, got a grip on the zipper of his trousers, and lowered it.
When she found him with her fingers, she discovered that he was fully aroused. She cupped him gently.
“Oh, yeah.” In the shadows, his smile was both very dangerous and very sexy. “You have definitely got a good grasp of the concept now.”
A long time later she opened her eyes. The first thing she noticed was the moonlight dancing on her wedding ring. The pale gleam was as delicate and ephemeral as hope and possibilities for the future.
Ethan stirred against her and gathered her close. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that I won’t go back to using my other name,” she whispered. “I’m going to stick with Zoe.” A new name and, just maybe, a new future.
“Zoe Truax.” He leaned over her and kissed her deeply. “Yeah. I like the sound of that. It suits you.”
Chapter Twenty-one
“So,” Harry Stagg said. “Come here often?”
Arcadia contemplated the thin man with the deep, world-weary eyes who sat across from her in the small booth. She had never had a bodyguard before and therefore had not been altogether sure what to do with one.
She had agreed to put up with him only because it had been clear that Zoe had had enough to worry about as it was. Flying off to Vegas for a marriage of convenience to Ethan Truax had caused her a great deal of anxiety. Fretting over her friend’s safety while she was out of town would only make matters worse.
When Harry Stagg showed up in Gallery Euphoria at six-fifteen, Arcadia had suggested that they have dinner out and spend the evening at The Last Exit. The plan had been to buy as much time as possible before taking him home to her silver-and-white apartment. Unlike Zoe, she had a spare bedroom, but it was hard to picture any man, let alone this one, inhabiting it.
“I like jazz.” Arcadia ran her fingertip around the rim of her martini glass. “More than that, I need it. It puts me in another place for a while.”
Harry took a swallow of the fizzy water that he had ordered. “Know what you mean.”
The trio on stage shifted into a Thelonious Monk tune, “Brilliant Corners.” It was a notoriously difficult piece, but Arcadia had heard the group do it before. They could handle it. The piano was leading, the bass and drums moving smoothly into its slipstream.
Harry Stagg blinked a little in muted surprise when the astonishingly clean, compelling music started to flow through the intimate room. Very slowly he lowered his glass. His face was rapt with concentration.
Arcadia gave herself up to the otherworldly sounds, and time shifted into another dimension.
When it was over, neither she nor Harry moved for a while. Then her companion turned slowly back to her.
“Haven’t heard anything that good since the last time I was in New Orleans,” Harry said. There was reverent awe in his harsh voice.
“Took me by surprise the first time, too.” She smiled slightly. “In response to your question, yes, I do come here often.”
“I can see why.”
She removed the little stick from her martini glass and put the olive between her lips. No sense wasting the moment, she thought. This was a golden opportunity to do some digging.
“Have you known Ethan Truax long?” she asked.
“We met a few years ago,” Harry answered.
“In a professional context?”
Harry appeared to ponder that for a moment. Then he nodded. “You could say that. I worked for some people who wanted me to scare him off a case.”
“I assume that plan did not go well?”
“No. Once Truax locks onto a target, he doesn’t unlock. And on that occasion, he was investigating the murder of his brother. I’d have had to kill him to stop him.”
“Zoe told me about what happened to his brother. I gather that, although the man responsible walked free, he later met with an unfortunate accident.”
“Accidents happen,” Harry said.
“You told me that you would have had to kill Ethan to stop him. I can’t help but notice that you didn’t go that far. Does that mean that you draw the line at shooting people?”
“Let’s just say I don’t do it for money,” he said.
“Ah. A small, but profound, distinction.”
“As it happened, I did not have to explain that distinction to my employers. They were reluctant to resolve the problem in that way because they were bright enough to figure out that it would come back to haunt them.”
“Were they right?”
“Probably. Getting rid of Truax would have made life very difficult for them. You see, Truax had already made a lot of waves by that point. He had a stack of evidence regarding money laundering a mile high. Some of it contained links to my employers. He also had tapes of me coming to see him in his office. After I left, he made sure that a memo connecting me to my employers and them to various shady financial matters went into a safe-deposit box together with the tapes.”
“In other words, if he had turned up dead, there would have been more questions than your employers would have wanted to answer.”
“Yeah.”
“I still don’t understand how you and Truax came to be, shall we say, business associates,” she persisted gently.
“I did not like the way in which my employers dealt with the Truax problem. When it was all over, I quit. Went into business for myself.”
“As a bodyguard for hire?”
“I prefer to think of myself as a consultant.” Harry leaned back in the booth and regarded her with his bottomless eyes. “I’ve answered your questions. Feel like answering some of mine?”
“Depends.” She took a sip of her martini. “What do you want to know?”
“I didn’t have time to get the whole story from Truax, but I got the impression that you were in that Candle Lake Manor place together with his client?”
“Yes.”
She smiled. “You could say that. I had myself committed under a false name.”
“Huh. Well, you must have had your reasons.”
“My husband tried to murder me shortly before he disappeared with most of the assets in my portfolio. I had learned too much about his connections to some illegal activities. I was a loose end.”
“Looks like he missed.”
“Yes. He missed. But I was afraid that he would try again. So, I faked my own death, got a new identity, established a trust, and used it to have myself committed to Candle Lake Manor. After I escaped I used another new identity.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“It was.”
“Why go through all that?”
“My husband is a very, very clever and extremely dangerous man. Too clever, perhaps, to buy my convenient death. I thought that if he was still trying to find me, a private psychiatric hospital would be the last place that he would look. The plan was to stay at the Manor for a few months and then disappear a second time. Figured two changes of identity would make it harder for him to track me.”
“What went wrong?”
“Nothing at first. Candle Lake turned out to be pretty much what I had expected, a nice, remote place where rich folks stashed their embarrassing relatives. It wasn’t hard to pretend to be clinically depressed and uncommunicative. They weren’t into serious talk therapy there. Just meds. I flushed those down the toilet. Then I met Zoe.”
“You two became buddies?”
“Yes. Unfortunately for Zoe, the chief shrink, Dr. McAlistair, took a personal interest in her. Wanted to study her. The result was that she was more closely watched than the rest of us. She had more trouble avoiding the meds than I did.”
“But you two found a way out,” Harry said.
“Yes.”
“What’s next?”
“I’m starting over,” she replied.
Harry thought about that. “Me, too, I guess. But, then, Truax seems to have that effect on people.”
“What do you mean?”
“I dunno. It’s hard to explain. Just that if you get into his orbit, things change.”
Luminous music flowed into the silence that followed his comment. When the piece was over, Harry looked at her with a long, considering expression.
“Must have been rough there at Candle Lake,” he said.
“Zoe had to endure it much longer than I did. We escaped a couple of months after I arrived. She was there, on her own, for four months before that.”
“Jesus. Six months.”
“Yes.”
“Must have left its mark.”
“It did,” she admitted. “On both of us. We’ve each dealt with it in our own ways.”
“How’s that?”
“Zoe signed up for self-defense lessons.”
“What did you do?”
“Bought a gun.”
Harry nodded. “Works for me.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Shortly after midnight, Leon stood on the closed lid of the toilet in the cramped motel bathroom. Through the small window he had a clear view of the group gathering in the alley behind the old warehouses. The drug dealing seemed to be a nightly ritual. It didn’t look like a tough crowd. For the most part, the buyers appeared to be teenagers who drifted over from the fast-food restaurant. They bought booze and pills from a couple of older guys who usually showed up around one in the morning.
Tonight Leon planned to arrive before the regular salesmen.
He stepped down heavily and hurried out into the main room. Earlier this afternoon, he had selected several bottles from his emergency stash of stolen Candle Lake meds. His job as security chief at the hospital had given him a good working knowledge of the street value of the pharmaceuticals.
He picked up the sack containing his wares, a small flashlight, and his key. He paused to hang the tattered privacy sign on the doorknob outside his room and then he made his way down the steps and around to the rear of the building.
There was enough light from the motel parking lot to enable him to find the rutted, unpaved road that ran behind the abandoned house and the warehouses. The glow from a nearly full moon helped. He wanted to avoid using the flashlight if at all possible.
The half dozen or so little dears hanging out around the last decayed loading dock did not notice him until he was almost upon them. The first one who spotted him, jumped half a foot.
“Shit, it’s a cop.”
“We’re not doin’ anything,” another one said, voice rising in that annoying whine that was unique to the teenager of the species.
“Yeah, we gotta right to be here if we want.”
Kids, Leon thought. They might be flunking history, English, and math, but they always seemed to know their rights.
“Relax, I’m not a cop,” Leon said. “I’ve got some candy. Anyone interested?”
Ten minutes later and seven hundred fifty dollars richer, Leon started back toward the distant lights of the motel. Seven hundred and fifty bucks. Where the hell did kids these days get so much discretionary income? He’d sure never had that kind of cash when he was a teenager.
He had been planning to leave in the morning because he’d paid cash through tonight and he wanted to get his money’s worth. But he was wide awake and in no mood to sleep. Might as well hit the road now. The seven-fifty would see him clear of Whispering Springs, and he had a feeling it would be good to be gone before Truax came back to check up on him.
Everything had gone sour. Again.
That bastard, Cleland, had not been available when he had called him a second time to negotiate for the woman’s address. When Leon hung up the phone, he had faced the fact that the deal wasn’t going to work. The only other angle, as far as he could see, was to try blackmailing Ian Harper. Harper was the one person left who had something to lose and who might be willing to pay for silence.
He would call his ex-boss from somewhere on the road and hope he’d get lucky. At least Harper was a businessman.
If only his original plan to blackmail the Cleland woman had worked the way it was supposed to. Shit. It was like he lived under some dark star or something.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the movement in the shadows that clung to the boarded-up house. One of the kids, he thought. Swell. He had some more candy. Maybe he could clear a neat thousand tonight.
He stopped and started to turn.
“Hey, kid. I got what you want right here.”
Too late he realized that the figure on the sagging front porch was not a young druggie.
The first bullet took him square in the chest and knocked him down. His first thought was that he could no longer feel the fire of his heartburn. Instead, everything inside him had gone cold.
He was vaguely aware of one of his customers back at the warehouse shouting a warning to his pals.
“Oh, shit, that was a gun. Come on, we gotta get out of here.”
He had come so close to the big score, he thought. But he was screwed again. Story of his life.
He was already losing consciousness when the killer walked closer and put a second bullet into his brain.
Chapter Twenty-three
Zoe put on the white terry cloth robe monogrammed with the name of the hotel and sat in the chair near the window. She picked up the phone and dialed the first number.
“Who is this?” Ian Harper’s voice was thick with sleep and irritation.
She could hear the television low in the background. Harper had evidently fallen asleep watching an old movie. A horror film, probably, one with a plot involving a mad scientist working in a lab.
“Hello, Dr. Harper,” Zoe said. Just talking to him long distance on the telephone made her skin crawl. “I used to be Sara Cleland, but you can call me Zoe Truax now. You probably remember me as the patient in Room 232. The one Forrest Cleland paid you so well to
keep locked up. I wanted to be the first to give you the happy news.”
“Sara?” He was fully alert now. “What’s this all about? Where are you?”
“I just got married. Say hello to my new husband.”
Ethan was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching her. He was naked except for a pair of white briefs. She shoved the phone into his hand. He touched her fingers lightly as he took the instrument from her. She realized she was trembling. Rage and old fears, she thought. She had to get control of both.
“This is Truax,” Ethan said into the phone. His voice was colder than the outer rings of hell. “Zoe and I just got married, and we’ve got a license to prove it. I’m now her next of kin. This call is a formality. I want to be sure you understand that if you try to snatch her I will come after her—and you—and rip apart your business operation there at Candle Lake Manor.”
He ended the call and handed the phone back to Zoe.
She took a deep breath and dialed Forrest Cleland’s unlisted home number.
Kimberley answered on the fourth ring. She sounded groggy and disoriented.
“Hello?”
“Kimberley, this is Sara.”
“Sara?”
“Zoe, now. Zoe Truax.”
“I don’t understand. Where are you? What’s going on?” There was a slight pause. “Are you all right?”
“I’m doing great, Kimberley. Thanks for asking. I just got married, as a matter of fact. Naturally I wanted to give Forrest the wonderful news right away. Is he there?”
“You’re married? But that’s impossible. You’re . . . you’re not well, Sara.”
“Call me Zoe. And get Forrest on the phone, please.”
There was a brief pause. Zoe heard Kimberley’s muffled voice in the background. Then Forrest came on the line.
“Sara? Is that you?”
“I’m no longer Sara Cleland,” Zoe said. “Zoe Truax is my name, Forrest. I wanted to let you know that I will be attending the annual meeting and that I will be accompanied by my husband. If anything happens to me before the big day, you’ll be delighted to hear that Ethan will be happy to vote my shares.”
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