by C. J. Miller
* * *
Susan’s heart was pounding when she awoke. It took her a moment to place where they were. A ski resort near Arapaho National Forest, in one of its guest rooms. How long had they been asleep?
As her pulse slowed, Susan took stock. She was on the run with her ex-boyfriend. They had formed some pseudo-friendship, bound by the circumstances. Then, she’d made love to him. More than having sex, it had been about showing Brady what he meant to her. Erasing some of his pain from his injury. If it had been about pure sex, those things wouldn’t have mattered.
Susan expected to feel sated and the sexual tension to be zero. But that wasn’t the case. She could almost feel him inside her, her body still oversensitized. New tides of arousal swept over her. She wanted him to say something, anything to her to prove his heart was open. To touch her again with the same poignant emotion and tenderness. To deliver another soul-shaking kiss.
Whatever she had believed about her emotional reaction prior to sleeping with Brady, she was clear now that she couldn’t have sex with him again without feeling something. Desire. Passion. Wanting. Those dangerous emotions that crossed the line between sex and love.
Susan rubbed her face against his chest and walked her fingers to his face. “Are you awake?”
“Barely,” he said. “What’s the matter? You have an oh-so-serious tone.”
“Did this feel different than before?” she asked. Did he also feel the newness of the act?
Brady shifted in the bed, facing the ceiling. “Just relax. Everything was great. You were great.” He leaned over and kissed the top of her head.
“I’m not questioning how great it was,” she said. Could she talk to him? Could they have a real, honest conversation?
“Tell me what’s on your mind,” Brady said.
“A lot,” she said. Her feelings for Brady were knotting around inside her, choking her.
“I hope by a lot you mean you’ve remembered something,” Brady said, sitting up in bed, pulling her against him.
Susan sat and tugged the sheet around her naked body. “Remembered something? About Justin?” Why did he want to talk about Justin now?
Brady watched her expectantly. “You mentioned you and Justin were having problems. Did you fight with him the night he died?”
Justin wasn’t her preferred topic, but if Brady wanted to talk about him, she was open. “We weren’t fighting that night exactly, but we had fought the night before.”
“About what?” Brady asked.
Susan hadn’t told anyone this. Not her lawyer or the police. She’d been afraid it would make her look guilty. Could she trust Brady? The answer was automatic. Yes. She could confide in him. It might be easier to tell someone, to release some of the guilt from her chest. “Something did happen between Justin and me the night before he was killed.” She took a deep breath and struggled to find the right words. “I told him I wanted to end our engagement and we argued. The next day, he begged me to come to the boat and have dinner so we could talk.”
Brady stared at her. Long moments passed before he spoke. “Why would you end the engagement?”
Because Justin wasn’t the right man for her. Because she wanted passion and excitement in her life, and what she had with Justin was lacking. “I told you we’d been having problems getting along.”
Brady narrowed his eyes. “Be more specific. Was he going out more and not coming home by a certain time? Was he taking phone calls in secret? Was he staying at work late to have dinner with colleagues?”
Justin’s schedule was predictable and he hadn’t received strange phone calls when she was around. A few times, they’d run into colleagues or clients and Justin hadn’t seemed any tenser than usual. When he’d had plans with business associates, he hadn’t stayed longer than anticipated or forgotten to call her.
“Not those kinds of problems. I can’t think of anything out of the ordinary. I can’t get my brain around what he could have done to cause this.” Frustration rose up inside her.
His hand stroked her arm. “Don’t get upset. I just wondered if you’d remembered anything else that could help us piece together that night.”
The pieces of that night haunted her. Justin’s face. The last time she had seen him. The yacht and the blood. So much blood. Her thoughts shuddered to a stop. Brady had picked a strange time to discuss this.
“Do you think I’ve known how he died all this time and kept it from you?” She turned, moving away from him and covered her body with the bedsheet.
Brady held up his hands. “Whoa, whoa. I do not think you’re keeping anything. I just know that you share more, are more relaxed and open after we’ve slept together. At least that was how it worked in the past.”
Humiliation and anger burned through her. “You slept with me to get information out of me?”
Guilt flickered on his face. It was all she needed to know. He was using sex to manipulate her. “That’s great, Brady. Sorry to disappoint, but I still don’t know anything more than I’ve told you.”
“Don’t get upset. It was an observation. I was hoping you’d remember something.”
“And did this observation occur before you slept with me or after?”
Brady forked his fingers in his hair. “Before. But that isn’t the reason I slept with you.”
She didn’t want to hear it. How could she have been so stupid? She had been trying to keep any and all emotion out of having sex with Brady. She preferred that to him using sex to manipulate her. Susan moved farther away. “Forget it. I should have expected something like this.” She struggled to see over him. The red digits on the side table clock read two o’clock. “We’ve been asleep for hours.”
“We needed it,” he said.
What she needed now was to put some distance, both physical and emotional, between her and Brady. How could she have slept with him and expected it to mean nothing to her? She now knew what it meant to him. She was half in love with him and he was working an angle. “I need to get dressed.” Focus on anything but Brady. She grabbed her robe and pulled it over her shoulders.
“Are you denying that you’re more open after sex?” Brady asked.
Why couldn’t he let it go? “It’s not sex that makes me open. It’s trusting someone. Feeling connected. Based on what happened here, we have neither of those things.” How had she believed he’d changed?
“I didn’t sleep with you as a manipulation tactic. I did it because I wanted to,” he said.
She wanted to believe him. Memories of her heartbreak stopped her. “Let’s not unleash this monster. Let’s focus on other things.”
“I haven’t been dishonest with you.” Brady turned on the light by the side table.
She’d seen it before with Brady. The lie of omission. Maybe he’d slept with her because he’d wanted to, but he hadn’t mentioned his other objective: to get her to open up about whatever secrets he believed she was keeping. “You didn’t outright lie. But you didn’t tell me the whole truth either.”
“If I had told you I thought you’d remember if we slept together, you’d have shut down. I wouldn’t have been helping. Besides, I figured we’d never sleep together so what was the point in mentioning it? Did you want me to stop in the middle to tell you?”
Valid points. Still, she wanted honesty from him before the fact, not after. “You could have told me.” Brady’s stony face left her disappointed. He had started to open up and now, on the heels of a confrontation, was shutting down. “I need to see if my clothes are dry.” She’d left them hanging in the bathroom.
“We might as well check the notebook, too,” Brady said, seemingly relieved by the change of subject. “I laid it in front of the fire. I’ll see if the pages are dry enough to read.”
Her drawing notebook? The answer dawned before she could ask it. Justin’s
notebook. The one they had found on the boat. “I’d thought we lost it.”
“Nope. It was soaked and unreadable, but I’m trying to fix that.”
Brady got out of bed. He didn’t bother dressing. “The cardboard of the front and back cover are damp, but the pages seem okay.”
He handed her the book. The pages could be turned without tearing. Ink had seeped between the pages, making some of it illegible.
Anxious for a distraction from Brady’s naked form and from the fact that she’d been a fool and made love to her ex-boyfriend, Susan looked at the notebook and willed something to jump out at her. The names, the columns of numbers, the dates. What did they mean? Were they connected to anything that had happened the night Justin had died? Another fifteen minutes and impatience got the best of her. “Nothing. There’s nothing here. It doesn’t make sense.” With Brady next to her, concentration eluded her.
“Would you like me to look at it?” he asked. He’d put the hotel robe back on.
His eyes moved to her mouth. He was thinking about kissing her. Or maybe thinking about getting into bed and passing the time in each other’s arms. Heat pooled in her stomach. She wouldn’t let the attraction and chemistry override her good sense. “If you think it will help.”
He paged through the notebook a few times. “I don’t know if these mean anything out of context. Let’s focus on our next steps. The person who ran us off the road knows we’re here or at least suspects we are. We need to find a safe place with a computer. I want to do more research and I need to know what’s developed with the case.”
Brady pulled a pair of jeans from the duffel. He slid them on and left them unbuttoned, hanging low on his hips. He dug through the bag again and pulled out another pair of pants. Digging in the pockets, he drew out a metal key ring with a canary-yellow key chain. “The keys from the safe!”
Susan rose to her feet. Like the notebook, she’d assumed they’d been lost.
Brady held them up. “I’d forgotten about these.”
Susan frowned and took the keys from Brady’s hand. Four metal keys. She flipped through each key, pausing at the smallest on the ring. “This one is strange. It doesn’t look like it belongs to a house or a car.”
She looked at the key and then looked closer. Along the key was a small inscription. “It says, ‘W.H., number eighteen.’ I wonder what that means.”
“W.H.,” Brady said. “Who or what is W.H.?”
Susan wracked her brain thinking about Justin’s life. How had he gotten involved with such dangerous people? He had been a good man. Fun. A good friend. He’d had a lot going for him. A great career with challenging work. Business trips. Corporate perks.
Inspiration dawned. “I got it. The Windsor Hotel. Justin had a conference there a few months ago.”
Brady straightened, his eyes sharpening. “That could be it. Most hotels use key cards, though. A metal key is rare.”
“The Windsor is a historic hotel. They might not have updated everything.”
She could see the wheels turning in Brady’s head. Maybe it was nothing, but it was a place to start.
“If the room keys are digitized, it could belong to a liquor locker, or a banquet room, or a maintenance closet. Employee locker room. A cabinet or file drawer. Those places could use a metal key,” Brady said. “We need to take it to that hotel and search. Maybe Justin hid something. Papers. Evidence. An insurance policy in case other documents were destroyed. Something to leave a clue about what he was involved with.”
It was a long shot. “How will we check? We can’t walk into the Windsor Hotel, hold up the key and ask if someone is missing it,” Susan said.
“We’ll fly by the seat of our pants,” Brady said. “I don’t have the answers, but I know we need to dig more into what Justin was doing and what he could have been hiding.” He buttoned his pants and she hated the mild disappointment that blanketed her. Brady had hidden something from her. She couldn’t ignore that or pretend her feelings for him were enough to make it work. She’d done that before and he’d broken her heart.
Susan ignored the twinge in her heart. Her priority was finding Justin’s killer and the key was a good place to start. She didn’t want to get her hopes up. So much had gone wrong for her and Brady. “This key could be nothing.”
Brady sent her a look that socked her hard in the gut. “Or if we find where it belongs, it could be the key to your freedom.”
Chapter 9
Brady picked up the toss-away cell phone from the hotel dresser. “We don’t have much battery left. I’ll make this fast. Since we’re leaving, we can make a couple of calls from our room if we need to.” Brady would call Harris first and he’d rather do it from the prepaid. He didn’t want to put his brother in the uncomfortable position of needing to lie if asked about Brady and Susan’s location.
Brady dialed his oldest brother and after a brief greeting, launched into his questions. “We’re planning to change locations. Do you have anything new?”
“I’m glad you called. A couple of things have come up. The cops got a hit on one of the men who attacked you in your cabin. His name was Finn Tremain. He was former Special Operations, combat control team, discharged from the air force ten years ago and working as a private contractor. They’re still trying to track the other guy.”
Private contractor was a nice way of saying Tremain was a mercenary. Plenty of guys with Special Forces went rogue, chasing money and excitement, selling their skills to the highest bidder. Unless Finn Tremain had known Justin personally, Brady pegged him as a hired gun. Brady had been right in guessing the men chasing them had exceptional skills. “I’ve never heard of the guy. Let me run the name by Susan.” After checking with Susan, she confirmed she hadn’t heard of him either.
“I looked into J.A.’s personal accounts. Nothing alarming and he didn’t have a criminal history. He wasn’t moving money through his personal accounts. The company he works for is resisting letting the police have a peek into its affairs.”
Not shocking. Most firms didn’t want the police auditing their accounts and bringing bad press to their work. “Anything else?” Brady asked.
“You won’t like this. Reilly is trying to get confirmation from a friend on the force peripherally involved with the case. We heard a rumor that the police connected large sums of money moving in and out of an account in Susan’s name.”
Brady appreciated that Harris called it “an account in Susan’s name” and not “Susan’s account.” Susan would never knowingly be party to money fraud. “If an account like that exists, then Justin or someone he was working with set it up.” Someone was framing Susan for Justin’s murder and as the pieces twisted into place, they were going to form a noose around Susan’s neck.
“I knew it wasn’t hers, but if the account exists, proving she wasn’t involved might be difficult. That’s all I got at the moment. Stay safe. Stay alert. They’re looking statewide and the mayor is turning up the heat. I need to get off the phone.” Harris disconnected. Harris was working undercover. How much risk was he putting himself at to help Brady and Susan? If Reilly was involved now, too, his brothers were both going out on a limb for Susan. Reilly had something at stake, as well, but it would have been the easier choice to stay uninvolved.
His brothers’ loyalty proved again the strength of their family bond.
Brady’s thoughts turned to what Harris had told him. A statewide manhunt. Brady had worked in dangerous, hostile territories on missions almost doomed to fail. He had nerves of steel in the field. But in this instance, he had Susan to take care of and that rattled him, increased the stakes. He was worried about her and his ability to protect her. Was he strong enough to be the man she needed him to be?
Susan was watching him expectantly. “What did Harris say?”
Which piece of bad news to give her firs
t? “The guy who broke into my cabin, Finn Tremain, was former Air Force Special Operations. Justin might have known him from his time in the air force.”
“Justin never mentioned him and I know a good number of his friends from the military.” Susan took a deep breath. “I guess anything is possible. I don’t know every person he knew. Did Harris have anything else?”
“Nothing’s turned up in Justin’s accounts. A rumor is floating that you have an account with large sums of money moving in and out of it.”
Susan’s mouth dropped open. “Like the large sums we saw in the notebook?”
“Could be,” Brady said, hating where this investigation was leading. The more evidence they found, the more it should point to the real killer, not Susan. Someone was doing a thorough job setting her up to take the fall for murder.
“I don’t have any accounts with large sums of money. I am not involved in payoffs or payouts or whatever you’re implying.”
On the heels of making love, she was touchy. “I’m not implying anything. I don’t believe for a minute you would commit financial fraud or theft. However, Justin has a history of dishonesty, but proving it could be impossible. His father did a thorough cover-up of the incident while he was in the air force, I’m sure.”
Susan scrubbed a hand across her forehead. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe we’re finding evidence to use against me instead of evidence to help me.”
Brady would work tirelessly to find the truth. “For now, we’re going to keep looking and be careful. Harris told me the manhunt for us has gone statewide. The mayor is making locating us a top priority.”
* * *
The yellow taxicab pulled up to the ski resort. Brady was grateful they had the extra money from the stash pack. They’d need it to pay for the trip to the Windsor Hotel.
Brady threw their duffel into the cab and climbed in. Susan followed him, keeping a ski hat she had purchased from the resort gift shop pulled low over her eyes.
“We need to get somewhere off the meter,” Brady said.
