Deadly Desires

by Ann Christopher

  A shudder of restrained need rippled through him, and his voice, when he spoke, was mellow. Husky. “Do you have any idea how good you feel to me right now?”

  “I’ve got some idea, yeah.”

  “I’m not going to let you go until you promise that I can see you tomorrow. You can’t disappear on me for another six months. Okay?”

  “You’re the genius who told me to take some time.”

  “I wouldn’t have said it if I’d known how I’d feel when you were gone.”

  “And how is that?”

  “Lost,” he said, lowering his head.

  It was a slow and thorough kiss, unbearably gentle, their lips fitting together and sliding against each other in every wondrous combination possible. He kissed her senseless, until her bones melted into the purest spun gold and her skin shivered with readiness, and then there was more.

  Freeing one of his hands and using the other to keep hers in that gentle hold behind her back, he angled her head and kissed her deeper, tasting little nips of her until she mewled like a helpless kitten and her hips began moving of their own accord, thrusting with embarrassing insistence against his.

  “Dexter,” she whispered, urgent now, desperate, but he let her go and gently set her aside, apparently having more faith in her ability to stand upright that she did. Hazy and bewildered with desire, she put a steadying hand on the hood of her car and hoped she didn’t look as wobbly as she felt. “But—”

  “Good night, baby. Send me a text to let me know you got home safe, okay?”

  “Oh.”

  She blinked up at him, thoroughly turned out and trying to hide it. Maybe it was the moonlight, or maybe it was her long sexual drought. Most likely it was the man. Whatever it was, she was ready to swear on a stack of Bibles that, if she’d ever been kissed before (and she couldn’t remember any previous kisses, so there was some question in her mind), she’d certainly never been kissed like that.

  “Good night,” she managed.

  “Good night.”

  Okay. Now walk, Kira. She headed off around the hood of her car to the driver’s side, taking one grudging step away from him, and then two. On the third step, she remembered something important she hadn’t told him and glanced over her shoulder to discover him watching her with absolute stillness.

  “I had a really good time tonight. In case you didn’t notice.”

  His eyes gleamed warm in the moonlight, intense with emotions she wouldn’t dare try to identify. “Oh, yeah?”

  There went that crazy flush again, creeping over her cheeks and culminating in a slow burn of a smile that made her feel like a seventh-grader with her first crush. “Oh, yeah.”

  “Well, that’s good. Because this thing we’re working on here—it’s about more than us hooking up for a little while. You get that, don’t you?”

  How could she not, when being with him was so easy and yet so thrilling, like falling off a cliff and landing safely in the place she was always meant to be?

  “Yeah.” The moment was so delicious she could barely look at him and had to force herself to hold his bright gaze. “I get that.”

  “And that’s okay?”

  She paused, giving herself time to consider the various caveats and wherefores she ought to be spewing right now. It was a little soon, after all, and having gone straight from her childhood home into marriage with Kareem, she probably should be taking a good long time to be alone and discover herself, or some such.

  Plus, she didn’t need to be rescued or protected, and maybe she needed to point that out, because Dexter definitely had a white charger thing going on. Oh, and what did she, an obstetrical nurse, have in common with a DEA agent? Anything? Really? And he was a fine man, strong and honorable, and he deserved a woman who was nothing less.

  She, of course, was less.

  But she was working on it with the focused ferocity of a woman trying to earn her PhD by the end of the year, and she was determined to get there. And deep inside her was the quiet certainty that, with a little patience and nurturing, this thing between them, whatever it was, could be spectacularly beautiful.

  “Yeah,” she murmured. “That’s okay.”

  She heard the relieved whoosh of his breath.

  “Thank God. Now go home. It’s late.”

  Oh, she had no intention of going anywhere. Not just yet.

  “How come you didn’t try to get me into the house with you just now?” she wondered. “It probably wouldn’t have been that hard. Did you earn a Boy Scout badge in gentlemanly behavior or something?”

  “Not at all. And I’m going to be wet-dreaming about you all night, so it’s not that I don’t want you enough, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  That little nagging doubt had been there, worming its way into the back of her mind. “Then why?”

  “I’ve waited this long for you,” he said simply, shrugging. “It won’t kill me to wait a little longer. The important thing is to get this right.”

  There it was: the exact reassurance she’d needed to hear. Now she could go home. Not to sleep; her body was far too tight and agitated for that. But she would rest easy, and maybe he would, too.

  “Good night, Dexter.”

  “Good night, baby.”

  Where was her phone?

  Sending Dexter a text to let him know she’d arrived home safe and sound (and how sweet was it that he wanted confirmation?) was going to be pretty tricky if she couldn’t find the darn phone, she thought, letting herself into her small foyer, punching in the code to silence the alarm, and locking the front door behind her. Guided by the lamp on the console, which she always kept lit when she was gone because she hated even the possibility of coming home to a dark house, she tossed her keys into the braided wicker basket and checked the charging valet right next to it.

  No phone.

  Hmm. That was weird, but something weirder was nagging at the edges of her consciousness.

  The house, which was a pretty little three-bedroom bungalow with dormer windows and those atmospheric slanted ceilings on the second floor, was way too quiet, with no welcoming barks, jingling collar tags, or clicking toenails to greet her. If Max was in the yard when she got home, his normal procedure was to run back inside because his super-duper canine senses of smell and hearing always announced her arrival way ahead of time, and usually before she could climb out of the car.

  All of which begged the question: where the hell was Max?

  Maybe he’d run off, taking the phone with him in case of emergency.

  Nonplussed, she walked through the living and dining rooms, checking all his usual napping spots on her way into the kitchen.

  “Maxie? Don’t hide from Mommy.”

  The place, which she’d painstakingly decorated and quite loved, was decorated in a style that could best be described as early international bazaar. Neutral sofa and leather chairs, yeah, but she had colorful scarves draped here and there, and an eclectic mix of Asian, African, and American pottery and sculptures. The dining room table was Shaker, but the bowls and candleholders atop it were Native American, in deep browns and reds, with splashes of blue here and there.

  Every single thing in the house was bought and paid for with money earned from the sweat of her hardworking brow. No drugs had been sold to buy this furniture, no children corrupted, jailed, or killed. Every single rug, curtain, and, hell, fork, knife, and spoon, was chosen because it caught her eye and she loved it. Some things were expensive, but some were from the sale end caps at Target, and all were equally precious to her.

  Sometimes, in unguarded moments, a flash of her past came back to haunt her. Kareem telling her he didn’t like the handwoven Peruvian blanket she’d found, for example, and she’d therefore have to return it because it didn’t match his vision for Casa Gregory, his shrine to all things Kareem. Ditto with the Oriental ginger-jar lamps, Turkish rugs, and coffee mugs made by local potters. He, meanwhile, had populated the house with whatever overpriced black leather
or lacquer monstrosities caught his eye, most of them Egyptian.

  There was nothing Egyptian in this house, nor would there ever be.

  There was also no Max.

  “Maxie? Come here, puppy.”

  A quick circuit through the kitchen turned up nothing, not even a few telltale short brown hairs on the counter near the bread box, which he liked to raid when her back was turned. She’d looped back around and was about to go upstairs to see if he’d climbed into the dirty clothes hamper in the closet and fallen asleep up there again, when she caught a flash of red out of the corner of her eye.

  Her phone. On the counter, next to the bowl of fruit.

  Again: weird.

  She was very meticulous about her things, probably just a couple of notches short of some variety of OCD. She didn’t like dust, clutter, or dog hair, and as a busy career woman now, she didn’t have time to spend hunting down her keys or her phone. Hence, the setup on the console in the hall. Things went in their place, period, and the place for her phone was either on the charger, in her pocket, or in her purse.

  Yet here it was, on the counter, and the explanation was obvious: she’d been so ridiculously wired and distracted about the possibility of seeing Dexter that she’d gotten sloppy. She supposed she was lucky that the poor phone wasn’t in the freezer, frozen into a block of ice by her negligent and thoughtless hands.

  Well, that was one mystery solved, but where was—Oh, God.

  The second her reaching fingers touched the phone, she felt the crawling prickle up her spine of a ghost walking over her grave. And it wasn’t a harmless ghost in passing like, say, Casper, not at all. It was the yawning and malevolent chill of ...

  Of what, Kira?

  Nothing, that’s what.

  She was being stupid, obviously, afraid of the boogeyman now in her own house. Idiot. Could she be any stupider?

  And yet she snatched her hand away from that phone because she didn’t want to touch it. Couldn’t make herself touch it.

  The silence closed in on her, ringing discordantly in her ears. Had she heard something? Was that it? Backing into the corner where the counter stretched out into the island, she faced the room, straining her ears for a sound that never came. She didn’t hear the rubberized squeak of a stealthy footstep, the protest of an elderly floorboard, or even the benign hiccup of the central air unit as it switched on.

  Which was all well and good—great, yeah, sure—but now she faced out into the dining room and living room beyond, and all she could see in every direction were shadowy spaces where someone—who, Kira?—could hide.

  Behind the silk drapes ... crouched on the other side of the ottoman ... next to the sofa.

  Hiding place. Hiding place. Hiding place.

  Her cozy little house was, suddenly, full of them, and terror had reached out to wrap its hard fingers around her neck. Was someone here? In her house? Watching her? The flesh of her bare arms rose up in bumps, as though she could feel the slow crawl of someone’s gaze over her body, and that kicked off a tremble in her knees that quickly turned into a shake.

  The shaking pissed her off.

  What the hell was she doing? Cowering in her own kitchen? For what? Because the phone was—what? Too red? Too shiny? What would she do next? Hide in the closet with her blanket over her head?

  They had talked about this, she and her therapist. They’d talked about the ways that Kareem still dominated her life, and how she’d surrendered too much of her power to him. Wasn’t this a shining example of that? Scared shitless for no reason, even though there were no strange sounds in her house and the alarm was on, as normal, when she came in. For months she’d thought she’d crept farther away from her old life, leaving the darkness behind her, where it belonged, but here, staring her in the face, was the truth in all its brutal glory:

  She was still the same scared and broken girl she’d been the night Kareem raped her. Still the same scared and broken girl she’d been when her father—

  No. She wouldn’t go there, and she wouldn’t give any man that kind of power over her (and she had to give it, didn’t she, because wasn’t Oprah always mentioning that Eleanor Roosevelt quote: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent”?) ever again.

  Starting now.

  Furious with herself—how many times would the past ambush her and try to drag her back, kicking and screaming?—she snatched the freaking phone, the cause of her mini-breakdown, off the counter and shoved it into her pocket, where it belonged.

  And guess what, dummy? It was just a phone. Not a vortex into impenetrable darkness or any other terrible thing. Duh.

  But Max was still missing, and she should probably give the house a thorough look-see before heading into the yard, because he did like that hamper and—

  From outside the kitchen door came the muffled but unmistakable sound of a bark. Max’s bark.

  “Oh, you silly dog.”

  Muttering to herself, her tortured knees now weak with relief rather than shaking with that formless fear, she unlocked the back door, which was one of those deals with curtained windowpanes at the top, and swung it open, flipping the switch for the floodlight as she went so she could see the furry little fool and get him into the house.

  To her consternation, the yard stayed dark.

  A re-flip of the switch did nothing.

  Max, meanwhile, barked again, from the general direction of an enormous pine in the far corner of the yard. The thing had low-hanging branches that stretched out from the tree in a ten-foot radius, and it wasn’t too hard to imagine Max getting his collar snared on one of them and being stuck.

  Still muttering, she swung back around, to the kitchen’s junk drawer, and found the mega lantern she kept there for power outages. No little flashlight for her, thank you; this baby had enough wattage to steer storm-tossed ships to shore if need be.

  Clicking it on, she shone it in the direction of the barks, and, sure enough, there was Max, his brown eyes reflecting eerily back at her from among the needlebrush branches of the tree, waiting to be rescued.

  Only he was on the other side of the split-rail fence, where the yard gave way to woods and then, on down the hill, to a creek that she knew was there but had never explored.

  The other side of the fence.

  How the hell did he get out?

  There were three gates, all of them, she saw at a quick glance, closed and secure. There were no signs of a freshly dug hole under the chicken wire filler, and Max had never been much of a digger, anyway.

  The fence was tall, coming up to her shoulder, and Max had the strong but short legs of a beagle. It was possible that he’d chased a squirrel and, in his excitement, vaulted the fence, much to his own surprise, but she’d never seen him do any such amazing feats.

  Unless someone had come and taken him out, he should be here, on the side of the fence where he belonged, sleeping like the dead in his doghouse the way he always did when she was gone for a few hours. But her nearest neighbors were elderly, with no interest in a dog other than to make sure he didn’t escape his leash and run through their flower beds, and the nearest kids on the street were five or six, way too young for any pranks like dog-napping.

  And yet, there he inexplicably was, and that fear was creeping up on her again, ready to paralyze.

  Shake it off, girl, she told herself. Shake it off.

  Propelled by her jangled nerves, she hustled down the steps to the gate nearest Max, opened it for him, and stooped to catch him when he scurried straight at her.

  “You crazy dog.” Her words muffled against his sleek little forehead as she smothered the undeserving canine with kisses, she kept him tight in the crook of her arm when she swung back around to go inside. “Thanks for scaring me half to death—”

  She pivoted to go back inside, and the lantern, moving with her but otherwise forgotten in her hand, swung its beam around to a cluster of mature trees at the property line on the side of her yard. From the corner of her eye,
just at the edge of both her vision and the lantern’s wedge of illumination, she thought she saw a large shadow detach itself from the base of a tree and slip deeper into the darkness.

  Chapter 18

  Like a snake’s tail glimpsed just as it slithers into the cover of a pile of decomposing fall leaves, the sight came and went so quickly she could almost convince herself that she’d imagined it. There was no warning of any kind, no telltale crash of, say, hooves through the undergrowth or the flash of a fat white tail to suggest a deer.

  Only the unnatural stillness of foliage that didn’t rustle and a dog that didn’t bark, and Max always barked at deer.

  Oh, God. Oh, God, please. What was that?

  Kira didn’t give the creeping horror the chance to glue her feet to the ground; she ran. Screw it. This was no time for brave acts like demanding to know who (or what) was there, or shining the light directly at the spot to see what she could see, or (how stupid would that be?) plunging into the woods to give chase like some tragically misguided horror movie teen who wasn’t long for the world.

  Oh, hell no.

  She wanted to live, and there was no room for anything else, including embarrassment. If that indistinguishable shape later turned out to be some taller-than-usual feral dog, then she’d deal with the sheepishness.

  Between now and then, though, she was outta there.

  Sprinting with the bursts of speed she’d shown as one of the stars on the high school track team, her heart pumping enough blood to fuel her for a marathon, she streaked across the yard, vaulted up the stairs, and banged back into the kitchen, kicking the door shut behind her and unceremoniously dropping Max and the lantern to free up her hands. When the door was locked, bolted, and triple-checked, she collapsed against it, a stitch searing up her side, and tried to master the monstrous fear, which still had her shaking even inside the relative safety of her house.

  Max settled at her feet, whining up into her face with avid concern, which didn’t particularly comfort her. What did it say about your mental health when even your dog thought you were crazy?