Deadly Desires

by Ann Christopher

  He snorted out a laugh. “Maybe—”

  “Probably.”

  “—But I’d be back.”

  Between them on the table, their fingers were twining and untwining, stroking and exploring easily, as though this, and nothing else, was what their hands had been created to do.

  “I could get used to being with you, Dexter.”

  “I hope you will.”

  Sudden and unhappy memories of her parents burst on the scene like a stampeding herd of Wyoming bison, and she couldn’t slam the gate fast enough to keep them out. She thought of their glorious twentieth anniversary shindig at the club, and then, later that same night, the drunken and screaming accusations behind closed doors.

  Then her mind shifted to her wedding day, when she was so sure she’d married the man who would take her away from ugliness forever, and the night when the DEA task force came crashing through their door, proving to her blind eyes that the man she thought she’d married didn’t exist.

  Then she looked to Dexter, so different from either her father or her husband, open and honest, with no hidden agendas or secret personalities, and she wondered if her life could, this once, be simple. Happy. Peaceful.

  “Is it supposed to be this easy?”

  Her fretful question didn’t seem to bother him at all, and there was no hesitation before his answer, only a wry half smile and shrug, as if he wasn’t primed for the worst, like she was, and didn’t suspect doom, or even significant problems, hiding around every corner, just waiting to ambush them.

  Was this the normal way between men and women, then?

  Smooth sailing ahead?

  “Yeah,” he assured her. “It’s supposed to be exactly this easy.”

  By the time he pulled the truck back into Kira’s driveway, his head was full to overflowing with thoughts struggling against each other, as though he’d shoveled five loads of jeans and oversized bath towels into the dryer and hit Start. First of all, when would he see her again? It was only midafternoon; what about tonight? What about tomorrow? They’d had a great time together so far, which didn’t surprise him one bit, but he didn’t want to press her too much and send her flying back into another six months of alone time. The thought practically gave him hives.

  So, yeah, he needed to cool it a little.

  And speaking of cooling it, when would his diarrhea of the mouth subside? What was with all his touchy-feely confessions about the way he felt about her, and when would he shut the hell up? Where had they even come from? With other women, the most demonstrative he’d been was an extra squeeze after sex and possibly the promise to call in a day or two. With Kira, the only things that had yet to come out of his mouth were I love you and marry me, but it was still early in the day. At the rate he was going, both would be shooting out of his mouth before sunset.

  Which scared him.

  And yet, didn’t scare him at all.

  The thing was, she made him laugh. Loosened him up. Brightened the sunshine and purified the air, crazy as that sounded, and maybe his ego was way out of whack, but in the last two days she’d looked and seemed happier than he’d ever known her.

  Certainly he’d never seen her smile like this when Kareem was alive.

  He put the truck in park and killed the engine, thoughts still spinning. There was paperwork waiting for him on his desk at home, but maybe they could—

  “What’s this?” Shooting him a delighted smile, she pointed out at a pink florist’s van pulling up to the curb in front of her house. “How did you know it’s my birthday tomorrow?”

  What? Birthday? Why didn’t she say anything before now?

  “I didn’t,” he told her.

  “Right.”

  With an I-don’t-believe-you narrowed-eye glance over her shoulder as she went, she bounded out of the truck and met the delivery guy at the back of the van, where the doors were open as he extracted the biggest, longest, and, from the looks of it, heaviest white box of flowers Dexter had ever seen. His limited experience ran to ordering Mom a bouquet for Mother’s Day, but even his untrained eye knew that a box like that, with the giant silk bow and all, didn’t carry a little ten-dollar bouquet of Have a Great Birthday! daisies from a work friend.

  He climbed out and slammed the door, his blood doing a slow and primitive burn that he didn’t much like but had a tough time reigning in.

  Kira, meanwhile, seemed to have lost some of her enthusiasm. She accepted the box from the guy with a muted, “Thanks,” headed over to the porch and propped one end of the box on the rail. Moving slower, almost reluctantly, she untied the ribbon and slid the lid clear with a shaking hand. With a stricken face she studied the contents.

  And suddenly whatever vague jealousy he’d been feeling toward a faceless competitor for her favors took a backseat to the stronger need to hunt down and, in all likelihood, kill whoever was responsible for making her hurt like that.

  Coming to stand at her shoulder, he looked down into the box.

  They were beautiful; even he could see that. Roses, of course, in fifty different shades of pink that he didn’t know the names for, and big, snowball ones—hydrangeas, right?—and smaller ones, like roses, that his mother loved so well. Ranunculus, wasn’t it? Yeah, that was it.

  A stunning bouquet. A fortune in a box. A knife to Kira’s heart.

  “What is it?” He kept his voice quiet, not wanting to startle her.

  Her skin chalky now, her lips tinged with a worrying shade of blue, she spared him one wide-eyed and wild glance before letting both the box and her purse crash to the ground.

  “Kira—”

  He watched with growing alarm as she dropped to her knees besides the mess of flowers and rummaged through them, searching with open desperation for something she couldn’t seem to find. She yelped, snatched her hand back, and sucked her bleeding thumb into her mouth—thorn, he thought—and then she reached in again to pull out a card and hold it up, looking triumphant.

  “Kira,” he tried again.

  She seemed beyond hearing. Ripping into the envelope, she extracted the card—it was typewritten, he saw—and read it aloud in a guttural voice he didn’t recognize as hers.

  “To my forever and a day wife, with love on her birthday, Kareem.”

  Chapter 21

  Whatever advanced analytical skills he’d developed during his years with the DEA deserted Dexter in that moment, chased away by the ghost walking over his grave and the dread crawling up his spine. So he could only imagine how Kira felt. He floundered, his brain working furiously on explanations—it’s a mistake, it’s a typo, something along those lines—but she was already way ahead of him, fishing her phone out of her pocket and dialing the number printed on the card.

  Call the florist, he thought, trying to come up to speed. Great idea.

  “Hi,” she said when someone answered. “This is Kira Gregory. I have a question about a delivery just now.” She listened. Waited. “Yes, my husband is—was—Kareem Gregory, and he died six months ago and I don’t understand how—”

  The voice on the line interrupted, chattering in one of those cheery voices, unnecessarily loud, that Dexter could hear but not quite make out.

  “Yes,” Kira responded, “but my address has changed—” She listened again. “Oh, that’s right. I forgot.”

  The conversation ended too soon, with Kira saying thanks and hanging up way before Dexter would have been satisfied that all stones had been overturned.

  Their gazes connected at the same instant that the synapses in his brain started firing again and putting two and two together.

  “It was a—”

  “Standing order,” he finished for her. “Same thing every year, right? Prepaid.”

  She nodded. “They didn’t know he’d died. And I used the same florist last month, when one of my colleagues had a baby. So they had my updated address.”

  Mystery solved, he reached for her because she was still way too pale and her eyes were distant now, cooler, as though
a sheet of glass, or maybe ice, had slipped between them when he wasn’t looking.

  But she backed up a step, hands up, and refused his comfort when he most needed to give it. Which hurt.

  Her words were hollow. Bewildered.

  “Do you think,” she wondered, “that I’ll ever stop freaking out whenever a reminder of him comes up?”

  “Absolutely.”

  She managed a hint of a smile as she stooped to pick up the flowers, thankfully not hearing the uncertainty in his voice.

  “You sure you’re okay?” Dexter asked for the onethousandth time, which was a thousand times too many and, in Kira’s opinion, enough to justify a violent act against him.

  They were in the kitchen, where he was completing his systematic check of every window, door, and potential hidey-hole in her house, including, yes, Max’s doghouse, and also driving her absolutely crazy.

  That scene from one of her favorite movies, The Fugitive, flashed through her mind again, and it wasn’t that much of a stretch to picture Dexter in the Tommy Lee Jones overzealous deputy marshal role as he tried to track down Dr. Richard Kimble.

  “What I want from each and every one of you is a hard target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, hen house, outhouse, and doghouse in that area... .”

  What the hell was Dexter looking for?

  What or who did he think he’d find? Elvis?

  Exasperation and affection went a couple rounds of a supremacy death match within her, and it didn’t take exasperation long to win in a spectacular KO, prompting her to put her hands on her hips and glare. “If you ask me that one more time, I am going to hurt you. Bad. So please knock it off, because I really don’t want to do time for assaulting a federal officer.”

  “I’m aquiver with fear,” he said darkly, not bothering to look at her or otherwise pause in his systematic inspection of the window over the kitchen sink. Was he this meticulous with everything he did? God help them all if he ever decided to, say, attempt the crossword in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. “If you didn’t still look green, I wouldn’t keep asking you.”

  Yeah. She still felt a little shaky—nothing like an unexpected reminder of Kareem to shake her up like a child’s snow globe—but that didn’t mean she’d admit it. “If I look green, it’s because of my near-death experience with rock climbing. Thanks to you, I might add.”

  “You were never near death.”

  Max, who was trotting back inside after a quick pee and romp around the yard to celebrate being liberated from his crate, where he’d spent the morning, hopped through the door flap. To Kira’s grudging admiration (wasn’t she the one who paid for the kibble around here, Furry Face?), he went straight to Dexter’s feet, where he collapsed and exposed his belly for the obligatory rub. Dexter obliged, squatting to administer a rough scratch that had the dog groaning in ecstasy.

  “You’re good with him,” Kira told him.

  Dexter’s intent gaze, unsmiling and deliciously wicked, flicked up to her as he stood and edged closer. “I’m good with you, too.”

  If the hot flush creeping over her cheeks didn’t give her away, then the unstoppable curl of her lips surely did. “Is that so?”

  “Come here. I’ll show you.”

  The murmured command acted on her like a drug, and she was moving before she knew it, already halfway into his outstretched arms before her synapses had finished firing the command to walk.

  Tipping her chin up, she parted her lips to—

  The doorbell rang, a long, insistent chime.

  Dexter frowned, his attention centered on her mouth and his hands settling on the curve of her hips. “Now that’s bad timing.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Do you have other plans? I didn’t mean to monopolize your day.”

  “You’re not. I have no idea who it could be.”

  “One way to find out.”

  Yeah. Like she cared who was at the freaking door when he had his hands on her. Right. Still, she did the expected thing and headed for the front door just as another of those jarring five-second rings came over the chimes.

  “I’m coming. There’s no need to carry on like there’s a fire—”

  A quick glance through the window seized up both her voice and her feet, and she froze with her hand on the knob and no earthly idea what to do now. Stricken, she turned to Dexter, who’d followed her, and helplessly said the only thing she could think of to say because she knew that a ton of shit was about to hit an industrialized fan when Dexter saw who was on her doorstep.

  “I didn’t invite him.”

  Dexter’s shrewd eyes narrowed, as though he was already up to speed and understood that a huge problem for them and their blossoming relationship stood on the other side of that door.

  “I didn’t invite him,” she said again, well aware that she sounded defensive even though she’d done nothing wrong. There were no lies between her and Dexter, and if she had her way, there never would be. She’d have told him about this if it ever came up.

  She just hadn’t planned to tell him now, like this.

  Out of patience and taking matters into his own hands, Dexter peered out the window and stiffened into marble when he saw who it was, his shoulders going as rigid and straight as a yardstick.

  “Fuck,” he said.

  Yeah. That about covered it.

  When he looked back at her, his expression had cooled down into the subzero range, and there was accusation there even if he wasn’t ready to unleash it just yet. With a sweeping hand gesture, he invited her to open the door.

  She did.

  Kerry, bleary-eyed and smelling yeasty, as if his overworked pores couldn’t stop the scent of liquor from bleeding out of him, stepped inside and started to say something.

  He saw Dexter, who was now leaning against the nearest wall, arms and legs crossed in a gesture of purest intransigence, and snapped his jaw shut before going utterly still.

  The men stared at each other, and Kira stared at their body language, no translations necessary for her female sensibilities.

  Kerry, wide-eyed and disbelieving: Ain’t this a bitch?

  Dexter, unmoving, unyielding, and unblinking: I’m not going anywhere, and all I need is for you to give me a reason, MF’er.

  Kerry came out of it first. Propelled by outrage, he swung back around and turned on Kira, so wounded and raw that his emotions reverberated through her like a sonic boom.

  “So it’s like that, huh?” he demanded.

  Dexter took one step forward, standing between her and Kerry’s fury, and answered for her in a voice that was low and unmistakably threatening, federal officer or no.

  “Yeah,” he told Kerry. “It’s like that.”

  One of the men made a low rumble in his throat—she thought it was Kerry, but she couldn’t be sure and, anyway, when you were trapped between two circling and snarling tigers, did it matter which one had the shorter temper? She decided that the best thing to do was separate them before anyone’s blood was shed. Dexter could wait in the living room while she spoke to Kerry in the foyer.

  Great. She had a plan. Crisis averted.

  “Dexter,” she began, stepping forward.

  Kerry didn’t seem to know, or maybe care, how close he was to having his throat ripped out, and turned his humiliated fury on Kira. “So this clown’s speaking for you now?”

  From the corner of her eye she saw Dexter make an aggressive movement, a chilling combination of puffing his chest and a measured step forward, and she held up a hand to forestall him. He paused, but she knew it was only temporary and felt like she was racing against the clock to save Kerry from his own suicidal stupidity. The only bright spot in the situation was that she didn’t think he was currently drunk, even if his thinking was seriously impaired.

  That was her fault, of course.

  So much of the ugliness in her life was.

  “I speak for myself, Kerry, and Dexter is no clown, so you need to—
”

  But Kerry couldn’t sprint fast enough toward his own doom, cutting right to the heart of the matter. “Are you fucking him?”

  Dexter exploded in a red-faced snarl of bared teeth, flared nostrils, and throbbing forehead veins. “You’d better step the fuck off before I haul your ass downtown—”

  “For what?” Kerry taunted. “Taking an unlawful aspirin?”

  “I’ll make something up, motherfucker, so unless you want to—”

  “Dexter.” Kira faced him, stepping into his personal space and demanding his undivided attention. Then, further risking life and limb, she put her hands on his taut arms and held tight, which was like hugging up to a power line vibrating with ten thousand volts. His furious gaze wavered between the two of them, finally settling on her. “I need a minute with Kerry, okay?”

  Dexter shook his head with open disbelief at this outrageous suggestion. “Like I’d leave you alone with this drunk-ass punk. I’m practically getting a contact high from the fumes.”

  Oh, no. That wouldn’t work on her, and if she and Dexter only understood one thing between them, it had to be this: she was forever done with allowing a man—any man—to make her decisions for her.

  “Kerry’s not drunk.” She kept her voice calm and uncompromising despite her spiking heart rate. “And if you don’t feel like leaving us alone, you can just leave. Your choice.”

  With a furious and unintelligible mutter, Dexter threw her hands off, wheeled around, and stalked off down the hall and into the kitchen, where he’d no doubt be able to hear every word of their conversation.

  Fighting sudden exhaustion, she turned to Kerry and strained hard for patience. “Please stop drinking. I’m begging you.”

  His face twisted with bitter derision. “What? You care about me now?”

  “Yes,” she said, knowing she was skirting that tricky line between being a friend and giving him mixed messages about their relationship potential. “I’m sorry I don’t care the way you want me to—”

  He produced a biting bark of laughter. “The way you care about him, you mean,” he said, jerking his head in Dexter’s direction.