Deadly Desires

by Ann Christopher

  She’d be much less thrilled to see him in a minute. Maybe sooner, because when she leaned in for the usual hello kiss, he stiffened and drew back. It was one of the curses of a habitual straight shooter like himself, he supposed: if there was a way to hide the fact that he just wasn’t that into a woman, he hadn’t yet discovered it.

  “Got a minute?”

  “Yeah, but I have to get to the office in a few minutes.” She stepped aside to let him pass, her gray eyes darkening. He could almost feel her steeling herself for the worst. No one would ever accuse her of being a rocket scientist, but she was no dummy, either. “What’s up?”

  “Ah,” he began, trailing her down the hall to the immaculate vaulted living room, where they sat on the immaculate leather love seat next to the immaculately decorated coffee table. That was one of the things about real estate agents—they had good taste. And Belinda was a lovely woman despite the fact that she didn’t make his heart stop or even stutter. Resting his elbows on his knees, he rubbed his hands together, stalling for time while he wracked his brain for a diplomatic sentence or two. “The thing is—”

  “Oh, my God.” Her gaze riveted to his face with so much dawning horror that you’d think he’d grown fangs, a snout, and whiskers, and was halfway through his transformation to a werewolf. “You’re dumping me.”

  He could understand her consternation. For one thing, she had a body so smoking hot it was enough to make a man swallow his tongue, and she probably hadn’t been on the receiving end of much rejection in her life.

  For another thing, they’d been, well, for lack of a better word, dating for the last six months or so. The “dates” generally consisted of meeting up at his place or hers, often with carryout food and sometimes with a DVD, for several hours of no-holds-barred sex.

  There’d been no strings and no expectations, at least not until he heard the bewildered disappointment in her answering machine message a little while ago. Then it hit him: he didn’t expect anything, but Belinda was only pretending not to expect anything.

  Which wasn’t okay, especially now that—

  Now that what, Brady?

  That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it?

  He didn’t give his brain time to formulate an answer. Now wasn’t the time.

  “I’m not dumping you,” he said, a lie. “It’s just that you know I’m all about my career and I don’t have time for any kind of—”

  Belinda—sweet, sexy little Belinda, who’d brought him honest-to-God homemade chicken soup six weeks ago when he had a killer cold—turned nasty on him in the beat between one blink and the next. Her eyes narrowed down to flashing slits of gray fire and her lush lips flattened into a sneer.

  “Bullshit. You met someone else, didn’t you?”

  “No,” he said, wanting to mean it. Or maybe it was just that he wasn’t ready to put all the separate puzzle pieces of his feelings together and see what kind of picture they made. “I’m not seeing anyone else.”

  “But you want to.”

  Another lie was right on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn’t say it. Maybe because the question cut too close to the bone, and he couldn’t deny Kira even if it would be more convenient if he did. Maybe because the want was embedded so deep inside him, flowing so freely inside his veins, that there was no possibility of pretending it didn’t exist. Whatever. The bottom line was simple:

  He wanted. Where Kira Gregory was concerned? He wanted in parts of himself that had nothing to do with his body’s physical needs. That was scary enough. Admitting it, even in the privacy of his thoughts, was monster-in-the-closet terrifying.

  So he said nothing, and that was answer enough.

  “Oh, my God.” Belinda put a hand to the base of her throat, covering a pulse that was ticking furiously. There was more, but she seemed to have trouble forcing the words out of her hoarse throat. “Are you fucking her?”

  “Belinda—”

  If she heard the warning in his tone, it didn’t slow her down any.

  “Are you?”

  “That’s enough.”

  Belinda flinched.

  Regret was already hitting him by the time the first tear trickled down her cheek. Jesus. He hadn’t meant to roar at her like some overzealous drill sergeant, but he wasn’t going to submit to an emotional interrogation or any other bullshit, either. Working hard to control his temper—it wasn’t Belinda’s fault his growing infatuation with the drug lord’s widow had him in a stranglehold, and he didn’t mean to take it out on her—he spoke more gently.

  “Look.” He tried to take her hand, but she fisted it and snatched it away. “You’re a wonderful woman. I’ve enjoyed my time with you. I wish you all the best.”

  She didn’t—or couldn’t—speak for a long time, but the glaring reproach in her eyes said it all.

  “I’m sorry,” he told her, meaning it.

  She said nothing, which he took as permission to leave.

  “Good-bye.” Getting up, he walked down the hall with her on his heels, put his hand on the knob and was inches from a getaway that was, if not clean, at least not horrible.

  Inches.

  And then she lobbed the unanswerable question, the one he’d been asking himself with alarming regularity since the day—the first second—he laid eyes on Kira Gregory.

  “What’s she got that I haven’t got?” Belinda flung the words at him, each one a malice-filled dagger that sliced just a little bit out of him. “What is it about her?”

  What did Kira have?

  Like he knew.

  Was it mystery? Courage? Beauty? Strength? Humor? All of that? None of it? She was a mess right now; he knew that. Damaged, physically and emotionally, financially unstable, the poster child for the kind of yawning black hole of need who could suck a man dry faster than an undernourished vampire.

  And yet ...

  And yet.

  What did Kira have?

  He didn’t know. He just knew that he needed it.

  Shaken, he opened the door and left, striding away from both Belinda and troublesome questions that had no answers.

  “Kira? Wake up for me. Come on, now.”

  “No,” she murmured. Why would she bother waking up when the bed was so comfortable and she was so warm and drowsy? Curling in on herself, she tried to block out the annoying distraction and the nagging feeling that she’d escaped long enough and now needed to check back into the real world. “I’m sleeping.”

  “I know you’re sleeping.” What a nice voice. Smooth, deep, and dark, the verbal equivalent of a lake’s still waters at midnight. She’d happily listen to it forever if it wasn’t trying to pull her out of this wonderful nothingness. “But you’re starting to scare me, so you need to wake up. I don’t want you lapsing into a coma. I could do without the drama.”

  A coma. That sounded great, actually. “Shhh. Go away.”

  “Kira.” The voice changed, morphing from command to pleasurable caress. Even better, gentle fingers stroked across her cheek in a feather-light touch that made her toes curl. “What am I going to do with you?”

  Caught in that floating world between dreams and reality, where everything was acceptable and nothing could hurt her, she felt the smile ease across her lips. “Don’t stop ... don’t stop.”

  The hand hesitated. Lingered. Disappeared.

  The loss of that sweet warmth against her face had the effect of a dumped bucket of ice water. She woke up with a violent jerk.

  Oh, God. Brady loomed near the bed, watching her in the semidarkness, an indecipherable gleam in his eyes. Wait. Brady? She looked again.

  Yeah, Brady.

  Where was she—?

  She remembered with a sudden burst of embarrassment, scuttling to an upright position on her butt and thunking back against the headboard. Her aching head didn’t appreciate the abrupt change in altitude and throbbed accordingly.

  “Oh, man.” She rubbed her temples, praying for the sudden appearance of an ax man who could end th
e pain by beheading her. “Kill me now.”

  “Sleeping Beauty lives.” Brady’s voice now held a definite note of amusement. “Praise God.”

  Now was not the time for jokes. Glaring up at him, she worked on looking a little more formidable. “What time is it?”

  He checked his watch. “It’s about five hours after you headed down the hall to use the bathroom. The eggs are now cold, in case you were wondering.”

  She looked around, smoothing the soft khaki duvet and fluffy pillows on either side. “I’m not sure what happened. I think I needed a nap.”

  “Brilliant deductive reasoning. Good job.”

  That, finally, made her grin, which was something she hadn’t done enough of lately. “Don’t tell me you have a sense of humor, Brady. What did you do? Go out and buy one while I was asleep?”

  “Nah. I pull it out from time to time.”

  “Good to know.” She smoothed the pillows again. “You have a very comfortable bed. Thanks for sharing.”

  It took him several beats to answer. “No problem.”

  For no reason whatsoever, a hot flush crept up her neck. It was too dark for him to see it, but she still felt exposed and had to lower her gaze. “I should get going. Max and I have imposed on you long enough. Wait. Where is Max?”

  “He’s in the backyard, keeping us safe from squirrels and other vermin. And I need to talk to you for a minute.”

  “Oh.” The new concern in his eyes made her belly contract and twist into a knot the size of a watermelon. She tried to brace herself, but that was difficult when marriage to Kareem had trained her to live every moment in the Red Zone. “Okay.”

  “Okay,” he said, but then strode over to the window and back, taking so long to collect his thoughts that she began to wonder if the conversation in question would take place today. At last he sat on the corner of the bed, scrubbed a hand over the top of his head, and plunged in. “I’ve been to the office.”

  “Okay.”

  “The preliminary word from the fire investigators is that it was a gas leak.”

  “Oh.” Her mind floundered around for a reaction and came up empty. Gas leak, atom bomb, IED ... did it really matter? “I figured it was something like that.”

  “The lines were tampered with. It looks like arson. The ATF is getting involved.”

  Hold up. This was the big news flash? He woke her up for this? “Of course it was arson. Kareem did it. I’ve been telling you that.”

  “It wasn’t Kareem. It’s looking like it was either the Mexicans or the Russians—”

  “What?”

  “The Mexicans or the Russians.” He said it gently and with infinite patience, as though he was prepared to repeat everything he said, until it finally sank through her thick skull. “You didn’t think you and I were the only ones who wanted Kareem dead, did you?”

  “But why? Why now?”

  “Because we had him on major trafficking charges. They probably wanted to take him out before he started singing like a canary and pointing fingers at his suppliers so he could make himself a deal with the feds.”

  Made sense. Kira tried this on for size, trying to make it work: Kareem got out of jail on bond, came home to begin his house arrest, and was killed by his cronies before he could take them down with him. Kareem had lived by the sword and he’d died by the sword.

  Poetic justice. Karma. End of story.

  Except that her gut wouldn’t stop screaming its warning:

  This story is just beginning, sweetheart.

  She tuned back in to Brady, who was watching her, waiting for a reaction, and shook her head. “Kareem did this.”

  Something about her absolute conviction irritated him out of his patient routine. “Jesus. Stubborn much? I keep telling you—Kareem didn’t do this.”

  “You don’t know that—”

  “I do know that, Kira.”

  “Do you know how many times he swore he’d take a bulldozer and tear down that house—his beloved house, with his Egyptian furniture, and his high-def TVs, and his precious wine cellar—before he’d let the feds seize it? And now you think it’s just some huge coincidence that someone else destroyed the house? You’re not serious, are you?”

  “I am serious.” His chest heaved with a harsh sigh. “We also got the preliminary ID from the coroner. With the dental records. It’s a match.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “A match, Kira. A match.”

  The third time she heard it, the M word began to sink in.

  A ... match.

  The dental records matched the body.

  Kareem was ... dead.

  No, screamed her gut. Listen to me. Trust me.

  Staring into Brady’s face, she waited for the other shoe to drop. The big but. The punch line. Something. Anything. But all she saw was that freaking patient expression again, the one that said he would wait and wait and wait until that glorious day when she finally came up to speed with everyone else and accepted the obvious and inevitable:

  Kareem was dead.

  For the first time since the explosion, her absolute conviction wavered.

  This information mattered, didn’t it? The coroner’s identification counted for something, right? If the coroner said that that blackened, twisted, and unidentifiable body belonged to Kareem, then Kareem was dead.

  Wasn’t he?

  Mute with shocked disbelief, there was nothing she could say.

  Could she be this wrong about something she felt so strongly about?

  “Say something,” Brady told her. “You’re scaring me again.”

  “I don’t know what my life looks like without Kareem in it.” She hated to lay her twisted soul out there for Brady to see and judge, especially when he was such a Boy Scout with his right vs. wrong and rules vs. chaos view of life, but she couldn’t keep her sickness inside, either. It was eating her alive. “I’ve spent so much time trying to survive Kareem and escape Kareem that I can’t even understand what you’re saying. I don’t know what to do with myself now. I don’t know what my life looks like if it’s not a reaction to him.”

  Brady shrugged this dark confession away, as though she’d described nothing trickier than a bad case of poison ivy and he had complete faith in her self-healing abilities. “That’s what you need to figure out, isn’t it?”

  “Is it that easy?”

  “It won’t be easy. But you can do it.” He said it with unwavering conviction. “I know you can.”

  Wow. How had someone with judgment this misguided ever become a DEA agent? Had they relaxed their admission standards and let him slip through the cracks, or what? “Why do you have that kind of faith in me, Brady?” she wondered. “I barely have any in myself.”

  “If I can see the woman you’re becoming, so should you.”

  “The woman I’m becoming?” Why did he say it with that kind of quiet admiration, as though he thought she’d turn into Oprah if she continued on her current trajectory? “You’re sure about that, huh?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “How can you be?”

  That unblinking gaze of his caught her in an unshakable grip. When he watched her that way, with that bright and indecipherable gleam in his eyes, she found it a little bit harder to get air into her lungs, a little bit trickier to regulate her heartbeat.

  “How can I be so sure about you?” Another shrug. “No idea. I just am.”

  They stared at each other, the pregnant silence enveloping them in an unexpected web of intimacy. She meant to look away from his shadowed face, but her body was, suddenly, no longer accepting commands from her brain.

  Something happened to her then, a powerful zing of awareness that sizzled up and down her spine and reminded her that she was still a woman, no matter how damaged. And Brady was unmistakably a man, and this was his bedroom and she was sitting on his bed.

  A wave of panic chose that moment to hit, unsettling her even more. Not that she thought Brady would ever hurt her in any way—not emoti
onally and certainly not physically, not in a million lifetimes plus one—but there were many kinds of threats to a woman, including those to her equilibrium, and she was maxed out on those just now, thanks.

  So she sucked in a deep breath and focused on the immediate crisis, which was all she could handle.

  “What about Kareem’s lieutenants?”

  “They’re in custody. We’ve got plenty on them and it doesn’t matter whether Kareem is dead or alive.”

  This just got more and more incredible. “So his organization—?”

  “Is in tatters.”

  Kareem’s mighty drug empire in ruins. Unbelievable.

  “Oh,” she said, staring at a frayed seam on her jeans. “Oh.”

  Brady’s gentle voice snapped her out of her spinning thoughts. “What will you do now?”

  Do now? Like she knew. Running a hand through what was left of her hair, she forced a smile. “I think I’ll go back to the hotel with my dog and take a shower. Leave you in peace. That seems like a good place to start, don’t you think?”

  Brady didn’t whoop with cheer at this news that he’d soon be rid of his houseguests, but that was probably just his good manners kicking in.

  “Okay.” He cleared his voice, which sounded a little rough. “Yeah. Great.”

  She swung her legs off the side of the bed and started to get up, which prompted him to take a giant step out of her way, as though she’d threatened him with some invisible weapon that had a ten-foot radius.

  “I don’t bite, Brady,” she said irritably.

  It took him a couple of long beats to answer. “Good to know.”

  Feeling huffy now, she stuck her feet into her shoes and headed off toward the hall, but then a thought hit her. She paused, turning.

  “The coroner will release his body after the autopsy, right?”

  “Yeah. Probably by the end of the week. Why? Are you anxious to plan his funeral?”

  “No.” Bitterness made her voice sharp and her words clipped. “I want to see it with my own eyes when they put that bastard in the ground.”

  Chapter 12

  Assistant US attorney Jayne Morrison appeared at Dexter’s shoulder and spoke in an undertone that produced a white puff of steam in the frigid early afternoon air. “These drug dealers’ families sure know how to throw a funeral, don’t they? Someone should have put them in charge of the services when Princess Diana died. They could have shown the British how it’s done.”