Deadly Desires

by Ann Christopher

  She grinned to herself, that same simpering grin she’d been trying to smother for the last several hours, and passed it off as a particularly cheery hello to a young mother who went by with a curly-haired and chubby baby on her hip.

  The hot flush that she’d been sporting broke past the confines of her face and spread to every far corner of her tingling skin, and the tender area between her thighs renewed its sweet, throbbing ache, no doubt wondering, as she was, how soon she could feel the breathtaking thrust of Dexter Brady moving inside her body again.

  Dodging around an elderly couple, she edged through a glass door and into the nearest bakery, smiling at everyone and seeing nothing except Dexter ... his hands ... his mouth ... the perfect triangle as his wide shoulders narrowed to that flat belly, all of him sinewy and cut, strong and powerful ... and the sprinkling of hair between his nipples that trailed down and then flared out, guiding her to ...

  Wow. There went that hot flush again, prickling in her scalp now. The only surprise was that she didn’t smell the acrid singe of her own hair.

  Okay, so ... dessert. She studied the massive glass display case, mesmerized by the choices. Cheesecakes of every description, chocolaty or fruity, slices or whole. Cakes with so many layers of filling they were marvels of modern engineering. Pies and crumbles, cookies and brownies.

  What would Dexter like?

  Dexter.

  God. What had she ever done right in her life to deserve a man like him?

  After the rape, she’d spent hours ... days ... weeks worried that she’d spend the rest of her life dreading intimacy and cringing at a man’s touch. Hah. Dexter was so different from Kareem, so entirely other, that there’d been no need for fears and trepidation. No room for them between them.

  Nothing could have prepared her for last night, and she was no virgin. She and Kareem had screwed like athletic bunnies in the early days of their marriage, as though every room and flat surface had to be tried, at least once, and every conceivable position given a test run. With Kerry, there’d been stolen moments, poignant and desperate.

  Great sex, all of it.

  But never had a man worshipped her the way that Dexter had. Never had a man used her so thoroughly, wringing every last drop of pleasure out of every square inch of her body and taken such joy in doing so. Never had she reveled in giving everything she was—everything she had, everything she could offer—to a man, until last night.

  He had, in short, taken her apart and put her back together again, making her a more confident woman in the process. More than that, he’d proved his point beyond any doubt: nothing that’d happened to her before this counted; neither of her other relationships mattered now or would ever matter again.

  Right on cue, her cell phone vibrated in her pocket, and she pulled it out, checking the display. It was him, of course. Trying to step out of the way before she was trampled by a customer who was shouting at an employee behind the display case, carrying on about his urgent need for some schnecken, a rich German pastry that was pretty much a stick of butter with some sugar thrown in, she ducked into an alcove in the corner near the window.

  “Hi.”

  “Are you thinking about me?” he asked.

  Again—wow. They’d have to try the phone sex thing one of these days, because the low murmur of his voice in her ear was more than enough to make her breasts swell and her honey flow.

  “Of course I am.”

  He grinned; she could hear it in his tone. “What are you thinking?”

  “I would tell you, but I don’t want to melt the phone.”

  “Nice answer. But how am I supposed to go down to the office when I can’t get my pants zipped?”

  “It’s Saturday. Why are you going down there at all?”

  “I won’t be long. I just need to, ah, check on a couple things.”

  “Is there a story there? Should I be worried?”

  “Absolutely not. You let me worry.”

  That wasn’t quite the answer she’d hoped to hear. “Are you telling me there’s something to worry about?”

  “I’m telling you that if you ever feel threatened, for any reason, like, say, you see one of Kareem’s associates or something like that, I want you to go back to where we were last night and I’ll find you there, okay? Not that I think you will, but I just want us to have a plan. A plan will make us both feel better. Okay?”

  Now he was really scaring her. “Okay, but—”

  “More importantly, I want you to pick up some stuff for my dinner and be waiting for me in two hours. That’s as long as I can go without touching you. Got it?”

  Geez. He was right. Now they had a plan, in case they ever needed one, which they wouldn’t, and she could relax. When would she ever stop looking for disaster around every corner? Why couldn’t she embrace the sunshine and give herself permission to be happy? Hadn’t she earned it? She smiled, wrestling those nameless fears back into the dungeon, where they belonged.

  “Got it.”

  “You drive safe, okay? I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “No? Why’s that?” she wondered, blatantly fishing and hoping he’d say it again so she’d know he’d meant it last night.

  “Because I love you,” he said softly, and hung up.

  “Bye.” Happy tears welled in her throat and burned the insides of her eyes. Taking a deep breath, she blinked them back, forcing herself to focus on the matter at hand: dessert.

  When she opened her eyes, her gaze snagged on a man outside the window, standing under the awning of a cheese shop in the next block.

  He was staring in her direction, alert and still when everyone else—all the people walking up and down the sidewalks between them—were animated and purposeful.

  Ice water replaced her spinal fluid, creeping up her back inch by inch, spreading numb terror. He was ... watching her.

  He looked like ...

  No. She blocked the thought, refusing to let it form and intrude on her newfound happiness. She was stronger than that memory and would not be blindsided by random reminders.

  But her lungs had seized up, and clammy sweat was now trickling down her sides. Over the dull roar of the crowd inside the shop, she heard the relentless crackle of the brown paper bag she held in her shaking hand.

  The man was featureless. A shadow of black amid the bright hubbub, probably due to some trick of the distance between them and the sun’s rays as they fell on his awning. His race was a mystery, his clothing only an assumption. He might have been twenty-one or eightyfive, but it didn’t matter.

  The sight of him struck the kind of terror in her belly that she had never felt outside her husband’s presence.

  She stared, paralyzed down to the last drop of blood in her body.

  Without warning, a woman overloaded with bags and balancing a white cake box between her hands plowed into Kira, knocking her off balance and making her stumble.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” the woman began, bobbling the cake box. “I wasn’t looking where I was going, and I don’t know how I’m going to get this cake—”

  Kira heard none of it. The second she regained her footing, she put her palms on the glass and looked out, desperate to find the phantom again, to watch him move into the light so she could see with her own two overwrought eyes that he bore no resemblance to any nightmares from her past and she didn’t need to be so—

  He was gone.

  Chapter 29

  Dexter stared at the e-mail, the shit-eating grin he’d been sporting since he spoke to Kira a little while ago fading into frozen disbelief tinged with the beginnings of blind terror.

  What had started out as a quick and probably unnecessary trip to the office to make sure all possible loose ends had been snipped and tied had unexpectedly turned into a scenario with nightmare potential that he did not, even now, want to consider.

  All because of two lines from the coroner’s office:

  The dental assistant who provided us with the records in
question was killed in a car accident nearly six months ago. Will follow up with the dentist on Monday.

  This unacceptable answer was not what Dexter had prepared for. He’d thought that the coroner would say that the records had been double- and triple-checked, that they’d been certified beyond all human doubt and that Kareem Gregory was, therefore, the crispy SOB currently occupying the grave in Spring Grove, so Dexter could therefore go about living happily ever after with the beautiful widow.

  Instead, there was a glaring loophole in this whole scenario, a trail he could not follow.

  The person who’d provided the dental records that allowed for a positive identification of Kareem’s body was now dead and could not be questioned.

  But ... this could be nothing, right? The coroner would follow up on Monday, they’d discover that there were no discrepancies in the records or anything, and conclude that Kareem’s death and the assistant’s death had been nothing more than a ... coincidence.

  Too bad he didn’t believe in coincidence.

  He thought of Max’s disappearance and the prowler Kira’d thought she’d seen.

  He thought of her birthday flowers.

  He thought of the threat to Kerry, which, in fairness, could have been sent by any one of a million different thugs and/or enemies.

  He added all these things together and came up with one conclusion:

  Fuck.

  Resting his elbows on the desk and his forehead on his fisted hands, he tried to choke back the primal fear and use the brain God had given him. Think, Brady. Think.

  Okay. Let’s assume that Kareem somehow escaped the explosion.

  Ridiculous, but let’s assume it anyway.

  Let’s further assume that he managed a switcheroo in no time flat and substituted some poor chump in his place.

  Absurd, but let’s run with it.

  Who was the chump?

  How had Kareem wiggled out of the ankle monitor and gotten it onto the other guy?

  Where the fuck had Kareem been all this time, and why was he back now?

  What did he want?

  Stupid question there. If Kareem was alive, he wanted what he always wanted:

  Vengeance against his enemies. Power. Kira.

  Not necessarily in that order.

  Dexter stared, unseeing, at the e-mail. Dread, meanwhile, slithered up his spine like a chilled snake, and sweat collected across his forehead.

  And then his cell phone rang, flashing some unfamiliar number.

  Shit.

  “Yeah?” he barked.

  “Dexter? This is Amy from Pine Lake. You didn’t take your mother out, did you?”

  “My mother?” he asked stupidly, his brain struggling to shift gears.

  “She’s gone.”

  Kira left Findlay Market and went straight home. Simmering anxiety was hot on her heels, trailing her like an overzealous shadow, and her fingers were ten useless popsicles, despite the day’s heat. She did not buy any of the luscious desserts on display, nor did she pick up grilling steaks from the meat counter.

  It was all she could do to weave her way through the crowd to the parking lot and the relative safety of her car without erupting in shrieks of paranoid hysteria. It was a blessing from God that she arrived back home unscathed, because she drove with her gaze glued to the rearview mirror, making sure the ghost hadn’t followed her.

  That’s all it was. A ghost. It had to be. Because if the choices were between losing her mind and seeing ghosts, or being perfectly sane and seeing a man who should be dead but wasn’t, she’d take insanity any day.

  Insanity was her friend.

  She couldn’t stop shaking. Her blood ran cold with it; her hands vibrated with it; her teeth clacked with it. Six months and dozens of hours in therapy later, and she was as big a mess as she’d ever been. Maybe she should ask her shrink for a refund.

  She crept into her kitchen, trapped between numb paralysis and abject terror, afraid of the creak of her feet on the floorboards, the hidden places behind her furniture, and, most of all, of what might happen next.

  Maybe her hallucinations would extend to purple scorpions climbing her walls, and wouldn’t that be fun?

  Maybe she wasn’t hallucinating at all, and Kareem was in the house with her, right now, waiting for her.

  There was a yap and a scurry, and Max scrambled through his doggie flap from the backyard, eager to greet her even if she was coming unhinged. Grateful for the distraction, she stooped to scoop up his wriggling body, and that was when she saw it:

  The insistent red flash of the message light on her answering machine.

  She stared at it, Max’s head tucked under her chin, and tried to convince herself that her screaming intuition was wrong, and whatever she was about to hear was not the warning sound of danger headed straight her way.

  Creeping up on it, as though the machine was a fanged fire-breather who must not, at all costs, be disturbed, she pressed the button.

  The machine’s indifferent male voice announced the message:

  “You have one new message, sent yesterday at eleven P.M.”

  Had the message been there when she came home from Dexter’s this morning, then? Had she missed it in her afterglow euphoria?

  And then, from the other side of hell, came another voice. The faint, choked, and mangled voice of what was left of someone she’d once known.

  “Kira? Pick up the phone.” There was a muffled thump ... a pause ... an animalistic wail of despair that froze the marrow in her bones. “Kira! For God’s sake, pick up the phone! Kir-aaa!”

  “No.”

  Gripping Max tighter as her knees gave way, she slid down the wall and landed hard on her butt. Max whined and twisted free, trotting away and coming back to cock his head with concern when the silent sobs doubled her up.

  “No. No, no, no!”

  Hysterical now, she punctuated each No by slamming her palms on the hard tiled floor, until the sting of pain shot up her arms and through the top of her head. Where was she when this happened? Where was God?

  God didn’t deign to answer.

  The message, meanwhile, went on. There was an endless pause, during which she heard excruciating gasps and horrible gurgling breaths, as though someone had caught a fish and clipped a microphone on it while it tried to drag air rather than water over its gills.

  The suffering went on, both in the message and inside Kira, and she couldn’t sob hard enough, couldn’t cry enough tears for this kind of pain, and couldn’t get the sound out of her soul.

  After long seconds, Kerry’s breathing seemed to even out, and then to slow to a seething rattle.

  “Kira.” That voice was a whisper now, a dying man’s echo as he left the world. “He’s alive. He—”

  “End of messages,” interjected the machine’s mechanical male voice, and the machine clicked off.

  That was it.

  Kerry was dead; no one could survive what she’d just heard. Despite all her hopes and prayers, she hadn’t saved him from being slaughtered like an animal and dying alone and in terror.

  And Kareem—brilliant, malevolent, vindictive Kareem—was alive, and his so-called death had only been a trick to catch them all unawares. And why had he done that? It was so obvious now, so sickeningly, painfully obvious. He’d done it to avoid jail and, more important, so that, when he was ready, he could come back, terrify and torture them and then, finally, claim his pound of flesh.

  And somewhere, in the darkest corner of her soul, she’d known all along that Kareem would never be gracious enough to just die and leave her in peace.

  I have to get out of here, she thought, scrambling to her feet and choking back the rising hysteria that wanted to claim her. Now. She had to grab Max and her Glock, and then she’d meet Dexter at the boat—had he known Kareem was alive when he suggested that rendezvous point?; had he suspected?—and then she could tell him about Kerry and they’d figure out what to do next—

  Oh, God.

 
What was that?

  Sitting on the baker’s rack, just as pretty as you please, was a tiny robin’s-egg blue box with a white satin bow. From Tiffany, of course. Kareem’s favorite jeweler. Where else?

  How many times had he gifted her with boxes like this over the years? For Christmas and her birthday, their anniversary, and just because. Every time, she’d squealed with excitement and fallen all over him with delight.

  This time, she stared at it as though it was a roadside bomb with a hair trigger wire.

  And then, inexorably drawn, she crept toward it. Picked it up. Discovered the heavy linen envelope underneath.

  Kira, it said, in Kareem’s bold scrawl.

  Hands shaking, she opened it and pulled out the card.

  Did you forget, my wife? Forever and a day.

  The hysteria roared back, flooding her throat with sobs and laughter—Jesus, he was so predictable, it really was funny—and her eyes with tears.

  Her fumbling fingers refused to coordinate with each other, so it took her forever to untie the ribbon, work the box open, and peer inside and see what further delights Kareem had waiting for her on this nightmare day.

  It was the diamond engagement ring—the real one—that she’d tried and tried to find in the last days of her marriage. The one that Kareem had secretly replaced with a fake so she couldn’t sell it and have the money to leave him.

  Kira stared at it in utter disbelief.

  And then she screamed.

  Chapter 30

  “I don’t understand this!” Dexter finally lost his temper and, along with it, his determination to remain a shrewd and levelheaded law-enforcement officer during this crisis. Screw it. He’d lapsed into the darkest nightmares of his childhood, and he wanted his mommy back. Right now. “What kind of Keystone Kop operation are you people running here? And when are we going to be able to look at the security tapes?”

  After a search of his mother’s wing of the facility, during which he, the director, and about a dozen nurses, aides, and other employees had searched every room, bathroom, closet, nook, and cranny of this godforsaken place, they’d all converged back here under the awning outside the lobby to compare notes and wait for the arrival of a couple of units of the Cincinnati police.