by Jenna Ryan
“An accessory then, willing or un. I’m on top of everything here, Tobias. This is my game, and we’re going to play by my rules. Now fetch me a Magic Marker. A fat red one. And no more of your clever tricks. I’m onto you, old friend. I’m also better than you at subterfuge.”
She knew he rolled his eyes, but like the professional he was, he didn’t argue. Mary chuckled nastily and removed the torn photograph from her pocket.
The missing portion had bothered her at first, but when she’d realized it couldn’t possibly hurt her, she’d simply chalked up another victory and carried on with her plan.
She removed a picture of her own from the desk drawer. She was chortling merrily when Tobias brought her the red felt marker.
“Poor old Anthea,” she said without a scrap of remorse. “She never made it to the conclusion of any film. Story of her life—she always missed the climax.”
Anthea Pennant’s face smiled up at her as she uncapped the marker. “One down—who cares—and one to go. And one and one—” her eyes slid sideways to the door “—and then one more.” She held the picture up in front of her, blowing on the wet ink. “Now you tell me, Margaret Truesdale, who controls the Fates in the end?” Her tone altered until it matched that of her movie character. “I’ll get you, sister. And I’ll do it with the most fitting weapon in the world—the weapon you gave me way back in nineteen forty-eight.”
CANDLELIGHT AND ROSES it definitely was not. But Aidan offered—against logic and his own good judgment—to knock together a batch of Irish stew. Visibly amused, Sam snapped the offer up.
The stew was mediocre and Sam was a glutton for punishment. She ate two helpings, sipped an Irish Cream and spared only one uneasy look at the elderberry wine sitting in plain view on his pantry shelf.
Obviously she’d seen Arsenic and Old Lace, the old Cary Grant comedy about two elderly women whose nephew had been appalled to discover that they not only poisoned lonely old men, but also buried them in their cellar. She actually had the guts to refer to it after dinner.
Raising her liqueur glass to eye level, she studied the creamy gold contents. “Teddy used to take his aunts’ victims to Panama,” she told him. “What do you do with yours, Bro-die?”
“Loch Ness,” he replied, not missing a beat.
The question had surprised him slightly. She couldn’t possibly be drunk. But she could be bold in spades.
Sheer perversity had him pouring himself a tall glass of elderberry wine; truthfully, he despised the noxious brew. “Nessie has to be fed, and she’s a fair hand at keeping se-crets.”
Sam grinned. “Morbid, Brodie. Your Scottish ancestors must turn in their graves when they hear you talk.” She took another sip, then ventured a determinedly casual, “Why did your wife want to poison you?”
His blood turned to ice. If it showed on his face, however, the effect didn’t daunt her.
“You might as well tell me,” she said without a hint of apology. “You have to tell somebody sometime. It’s cathartic to talk. Besides, I already know the worst of it. Was she paranoid?”
Aidan swallowed a mouthful of wine. It tasted sour and weedy. “Something like that,” he answered less irritably than he would have thought possible. “She had a persecution complex. That’s what the doctors called it. She thought the world was against her, and me most of all.”
Sam’s expression grew puzzled. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I doubt if anyone did. She had a lot of hatred inside her and a lot more jealousy.”
“Toward whom?”
“Anyone who could do anything better than she could.”
“Did that include you?”
“Probably.”
“Do you blame yourself for her death?”
That hit home, a swift, accurate gut-punch that Aidan ab-sorbed like a boxer’s blow. “I don’t believe in blame, Sam. She wanted me dead. She wound up killing herself instead. Who knows, maybe she would have taken her own life afterward anyway. Murder-suicides aren’t all that uncommon. There are any number of theories about them. In Domina’s case, killing me would have eliminated the object of her deepest hatred. Remove that and what’s left? Once you’ve killed the thing you dislike most, your hatred needs a new direction. I’m not sure Domina would have bothered to look for one. Better, possibly, to end it in her moment of triumph.”
He suspected it was impulse that made Sam cover his free hand with both of hers. “I think you do blame yourself just a little, Aidan,” she said. “But you shouldn’t. Domina sounds like Mary in some ways. Jealous, spiteful, angry at the world. Only they narrow their world down to one person. For Domina it was you. For Mary it’s Margaret.”
He stared at her slender hands. “And Anthea.”
“I don’t think so. I think Anthea was incidental. Maybe killing her soothed Mary’s frazzled nerves, but I’d guess that her main goal was to keep Anthea from telling us anything. What I can’t figure out is how Mary was able to find her. She had to have gotten there at least five minutes before we did.”
“You said it before,” Aidan reminded her, glancing toward the living room. “Phone taps. Yours and mine. It isn’t hard to do.”
Her fingers curled around his hand, digging in to his flesh. “Should we, uh, check that out or something?”
It had crossed his mind. But then so had a few other things, the kind of things he preferred not to dwell on.
Shoving back his chair with his foot, he rose and headed for the phone. He felt Sam behind him all the way. With a shudder that was only half desire he snatched up the phone and examined it.
“Nothing,” Sam said finally, disappointed. “I don’t get it—unless it’s my phone that’s tapped. I don’t think so, though. I had a funny feeling about all the clicking on the line this morning so I unscrewed the removable parts and looked.” She peered closer, then pointed at the underside of the base. “What’s that?”
Aidan spotted the device. It was the smallest he’d ever seen, not the most sophisticated but adequate if the installer had a computer backup.
Sam sat with a despondent thump, cupping her chin in her hands. “Anthea gave good general directions on this phone,” she mused out loud. “Still, if Mary’s responsible for the tap, she’d have to have done a little searching to find the place—which, I suppose, might explain why she was only a few minutes ahead of us. On the other hand, it doesn’t explain how Dorian Hart found her home.”
She blew out an exasperated breath and started ticking items off on her fingers. “This is getting painfully complicated. All we have are questions, three names and no faces. Dorian Hart, Frank Durwald and Helen Murdoch—which might or might not be Mary’s alias, and a lot of old studio-people who won’t talk.” Flopping back in the leather chair, she folded her arms across her chest. “So what’s the answer, Brodie? Host a dinner party and hope all concerned not only show but that one or more of them also coughs up a confession?”
“No.” Using a shamrock paperweight, Aidan destroyed the little device with a satisfying crunch. His deceptively placid gaze slid to the streaming window, then returned to Sam’s mutinous face. “We go up to my roof,” he said, battling back a smile at the ridge that formed between her delicate brows.
“What’s up there?” She wanted to know.
“You’ll see.” He held out his hand to her. “Coming?”
She remained seated and unmoving for two seconds, no more, then pushed herself from the chair. When she placed her hand in his, he wasn’t sure whether to be pleased by her show of trust or terrified to the center of his bones.…
HE ACTUALLY OWNED a compact disk of Bing, Perry and Frank. Crosby, Como and Sinatra all crooned out mellow, nostalgic lyrics that brought to mind a simpler day, before micro-waves, Virtual Reality and surfing the Net. Sam loved it. She had a very strong feeling she also loved Aidan, but that was not a thought to be dissected at the moment.
Warm rain trickled down her back. Her hair and dress were soaked; her shoes, too. It didn’t m
atter. Like Eliza Doolittle, she could have danced all night and right into the next day.
A clock chimed in one of the apartments below: 4:00 a.m. She should be dead on her feet. Why did she feel so alive and tingly?
Aidan’s hand caressed her spine. His touch brought goose bumps to her skin and a hot, scratchy feeling to her throat. She pressed herself closer, swaying against the lean, hard length of him, savoring the feel of his arousal where it dug into her abdomen.
He must have heard the sound she made in her throat because he moved away to look at her. His features by misty lamplight were somber and unrevealing. Nothing new in that, she decided with a sigh.
He pulled her close again, until her head rested against his broad shoulder. His hand continued to stroke her back, bringing all manner of delicious sensations to her heated skin. “You’re too trusting, Sam,” he said softly.
She roused herself to stare up at him, torn more about whether she should take the initiative and kiss him than about how to respond. “In that case,” she said cheerfully, “we’re even. You’re not trusting enough. Call it a good balance.
“We’re not divvying up a bag of Hershey’s bars. It isn’t that simple for us.”
She ran an experimental finger across his cheekbone then along the line of his jaw. “It is as far as I’m concerned. You’re healthy, aren’t you?”
“That isn’t exactly—”
“It’s important,” she insisted.
The corners of his mouth twitched as if he found her attitude humorous as well as vaguely annoying. “You remind me of a cat I had once. I called her Gracie. I should have called her Francis.”
“As in the talking mule, female version?”
“She had a mind of her own.”
“That has the earmarks of a compliment, Brodie.” Decid-ing it was worth the risk, Sam went up on tiptoe and touched her lips to the side of his mouth. He tasted of salt, rain and sex. “Maybe we’re being a little too analytical here. Maybe you’re afraid I’ll be another Domina, but…well, no,” she amended at his spearing look. “I guess that doesn’t really come into it. I’m sorry. I know better than to make comparisons, especially unpleasant ones. It’s just that you give me next to nothing to go on. You can’t be that relationship-shy.”
“Gun-shy’s the phrase you’re looking for, Sam. And I doubt that you’d feel a whole lot bolder if you’d watched your husband choke out his dying last breath at your feet.”
“An accusing breath, too, I’ll bet.”
“You’d win,” he said dourly.
Aware of his continued state of arousal, Sam wriggled closer, running her fingers through the silk of his brown hair. “Let it go, Aidan,” she suggested. “For tonight, let the past slip away and yourself relax.”‘
“This from the woman who, a few hours ago, wanted to keep things between us on a professional level?”
She lowered her eyes. “I was wrong about that. I didn’t mean it. Well, I did, but only because it seemed like a smart thing to say at the time.” Her head came up in a challenge. “Now, I’m not so sure that thinking every choice through to its theoretical conclusion is the right way to live. Loosen up, Brodie. Go with your feelings. They can’t be that far wrong.”
She arched herself toward him, but didn’t kiss him again. He was the stubborn one now. She wanted him to kiss her.
With his thumb, he grazed her full lower lip. His gaze skimmed her face, coming to rest on her eyes. “You’re like a drug in my veins, Sam,” he said at length. “Potent as hell and ten times more frightening.”
Frank Sinatra sang “New York, New York” in the background. Rain fell from the night sky like a heavy mist. Grainy pools of light spread out around them. They were alone and, for the moment, suspended in time. Sam thought briefly of Margaret’s passionate film embraces and long lost glamour. Then she felt Aidan’s breath on her cheek and swayed into him as seductively as she knew how.
She heard the groan that emerged from his throat and knew it only covered her own. Then his mouth came down on hers, and every conscious thought fled into the warm, wet shadows of the night…
AIDAN HAD NO IDEA how they arrived in his bedroom. He remembered picking her up like some kind of errant knight and carrying her through the living room, but he couldn’t recall navigating the stairway from the roof.
Her kiss had been more than a drug to his senses. She’d tasted like cognac, sweet, with a hint of mystery and delicate danger mixed in. He’d longed to strip off her clothes, piece by tantalizing piece, on the roof, ease her onto the tiles and make love to her in the pouring rain.
He’d checked that urge, but couldn’t, if he’d lived to be a hundred, have hoped to stop himself from wanting her. Damn the woman, namesake of a sixties’ witch. She should have listened to his earlier arguments. He should have made her listen—or left.
In the bedroom, he let her slide, standing, to the floor. Eyes opening, she cupped his face in her palms and regarded him seriously. “Second thoughts, Brodie?”
“No.” Twelfth or thirteenth, but not second. He forced himself to take a deep breath. “But now that you mention it…”
“Pretend I didn’t” Her lips found his again in a kiss that would have caused a dedicated monk to abandon his vows.
Aidan was no monk. Nor was he a masochist. Both his hormones and his heart wanted her badly. And right now he couldn’t drum up a single reason to deny them.
Their clothing was soaked through. Sam’s dress had literally molded itself to her slender body. Aidan took his time unfastening it, allowing his eyes to linger on the swell of her breasts and the gentle curve of her hips. Her legs went on forever, and they were as silky and shapely as the rest of her.
A shiver started deep inside him. His self-possession had blown away during their dance. Only his hunger for her remained—and perhaps another feeling that he refused to acknowledge right then.
“We’ll get the sheets wet,” Sam protested as he guided her toward the queen-size mattress.
“They’ll dry,” he said into her mouth.
She had a fascinating mouth, all sweetness and witchy fire inside. He didn’t sense a tremendous amount of experience, but her lack of inhibition was more than sufficient to send his mind into a tailspin.
His palms, calloused but not rough, traced the outline of her luscious body. The damp red dress fell in a sodden heap around her ankles. Beneath it, she wore a black lace camisole and bikini briefs. Her lightly tanned legs required no panty hose.
She moved against him even as he pulled her hips closer. Panic spiked momentarily in his chest and stomach, radiating swiftly outward as her curious hands ran down his spine to the waistband of his jeans. Then it died and a purely primitive reaction shuddered through him.
With a gentleness he’d forgotten he possessed, he lowered her onto the bed. Sweat replaced rain on his overheated skin. The pulsing in his loins threatened to explode. Closing his eyes, he permitted a groan to climb into his throat. His tongue slid into her tempting mouth, delving deeply, testing, tasting. If fire could be heady, then he was intoxicated, more so than he’d ever been on whiskey.
Her fingers clawed lightly at his back. Her breathing was as rapid and uneven as his own. Raising his head for a moment, he splayed her long, dark hair over the ivory pillowcase, then paused a few seconds longer to drink in her beauty.
She smelled of roses and a walk in the woods. A fine Irish day; a fine Irish lass…Good God, since when had he become a poet? A rueful smile played on his lips. Maybe there was a glimmer of hope for him at that.
His eyes strayed to the creamy flesh of her breast visible above the lace cup of her bra. Bending his head, he touched the hidden nipple, first with his tongue then with his whole mouth. Damp, the lacy fabric only heightened the friction. Her nipple hardened as he suckled. He felt her fingers in his hair, holding him in place as her body moved beneath him.
She made a series of soft, hungry sounds in her throat. Then her fingers left his hair and slid once a
gain to his waistband. She unzipped his fly and pushed on the wet denim. When it refused to slide over his hips, he reached down and yanked the jeans lower, kicking them unconcernedly onto the floor.
Even aroused, she could tease. “You half-Scots are so efficient.”
He ran a suggestive finger along the inside of her bikini briefs. “A little Irish impatience helps.” He sobered, then, his eyes taking in her flushed cheeks and wild hair. “Are you sure about this, Sam?”
For an answer she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled. “Positive,” she said. And using her bewitching mouth, proceeded to show him just how much.
NO STREAKS OF DAWN light graced the sky outside. Sam saw only darkness, heard only Bing’s dulcet tones and the thunder of her own heart as Aidan entered her. She pushed on his shoulders with the heels of her hands, not in an attempt to push him away, but in an effort to bring him deeper inside her. If it had been possible, she’d have crawled through his pores and under his skin.
Right now, that skin felt like hot silk over bone. The muscles beneath were stretched taut like piano wire. Sam glimpsed a blend of pain and pleasure on his face as his head fell back, then heard herself gasp as a sudden burst of heat and energy filled her. Her head moved from side to side; her hands gripped his shoulders. The sob that rose in her throat stemmed from desire. She wanted more, so very much more.
She savored the intoxicating male scent of him, something to do with cool Irish nights, hot Irish whiskey and his body rubbing insistently against hers.
Blood throbbed in her ears and at the base of her throat. His mouth skimmed over her cheeks and eyelids, her collar-bone and both of her breasts. She emitted something akin to a whimper but knew it was really a cry for him to continue, to hold back nothing physically, even if he couldn’t give his emotional all.
She sensed something in his touch, perhaps a hint of panic. Or did that come from her? Then the tempo increased, and her shaky logic dissolved. Nothing mattered except that she was here with Aidan, making love in his apartment. It felt like the early fifties even if it was the nineties—and she wanted this moment to go on forever.
