And the Big Boss was running out of patience. In his line of work, it was never a good idea to tee off the boss.
If he missed her again tonight—and it looked like he might well be going to—there was going to be a problem.
He’d looked in the closets, under the beds, even in the damned refrigerator, on the off chance that she had somehow heard him come in and decided to hide. Nothing. Of course there was nothing.
She would never have heard him. She was not in the house.
He could almost smell the balmy breezes of Key West. That’s where he should be right now, sitting out on a starlit hotel balcony, a rum and Coke in his hand, enjoying his reward for a job well done.
Not kicked back in a leather armchair in his intended victim’s cave-dark den, playing Donkey Kong with the sound turned off on a Game Boy he’d found while searching the spare bedrooms, waiting with growing frustration for said victim to get home where she belonged.
This time, if she so much as stuck a toe in the door while he was still there, he was taking care of business regardless. It was getting to him, this waiting. Especially this waiting under the fulminating eye of the boss.
As it happened, he was so busy hammering the stupid little alligator things that were part of the game that he didn’t even hear her come in.
A burst of light as the enormous chandelier in the front hall was flipped on nearly gave him a heart attack. For a split second, from pure astonishment, he sat as if turned to stone, his thumbs frozen on the game controls, his gaze snapping to the open doorway, trapped in a flood of illumination. Then instinct kicked in and he dove over the side of the chair, placing its bulk between himself and the door, sheltering behind it as he peered cautiously over the arm like a kid playing hide-and-seek.
Luckily he managed to hang on to the Game Boy. If he had dropped it, the sound might have been enough to alert his prey.
Because it was her. Even as his heart resumed its normal steady beat, he was reaching out into the hall with every sense he possessed.
Several light footsteps, a sigh, the merest flicker of a shadow across the square of light that was all he could see of the hall—it was enough. Julie Carlson was home. He knew it as well as if he’d gotten a full, 360-degree view of her.
A quick glance at his watch brought a smile to his face. Tonight there would be plenty of time.
The ensuing wave of relief left him feeling buoyant in its wake. As his mother had always told him, all things come to he who waits.
The light went out in the hall as suddenly as it had come on. Basta listened to her footsteps moving lightly up the stairs. When she reached the top, he stopped concentrating on her to carefully unzip his bag and place the Game Boy inside. He couldn’t leave it. It had his fingerprints all over it, he’d had to take his gloves off to operate the tiny controls, and besides, he wasn’t finished with the game. He waited for a little while, ten minutes or so, to give her enough time to get really settled in and comfy. Then he pulled on his gloves, rolled the ski mask down over his face, and fished his Sig Sauer semiautomatic out of the bottom of the bag. Time for the fun to begin.
* * *
Go back.
Julie listened to the little voice in her head and made a face at herself in her bathroom mirror.
“I’d love to,” she answered it aloud. “But sleeping with him is a really dumb idea.”
It occurred to her that when people started talking back to the little voices that they heard, that’s when they knew they were really in trouble.
So she wasn’t going to listen to the little voice anymore, much less talk to it. Even if she really, really wanted to do what it suggested. Her inner self obviously had no idea of how complicated things could get if she gave in to its urging.
That thing with Mac tonight was the closest she had come to having an orgasm in months, Julie thought as she turned her attention back to her own reflection and anxiously examined what looked to be a wrinkle forming between her eyebrows. Actually, years, now that she came to think about it. Sid’s lovemaking had been perfunctory for some time before he’d finally given up the ghost altogether. Call her difficult, but she just wasn’t able to get off in the five minutes tops it usually took Sid from the first peck on her lips until he rolled over and went to sleep.
Yet one more reason to get rid of Sid: He was lousy in bed. At least, she thought he was. She didn’t really have much to compare him with—which brought her thoughts back full circle to Mac.
She would love a chance to compare Sid with Mac.
Julie glared at the tiny line between her brows as ferociously as if it were the source of her wayward thoughts, and scooped Mudd out of a jar, slapping some over the wrinkle before slathering it lavishly over the rest of her just-washed face.
Go back outside.
She was not going to let the fact that she was staring divorce in the face get her down, she told herself determinedly. She was not going to start hearing voices. She was not going to have a nervous breakdown. She was not going to sleep with Mac. She was not going to crack a baseball bat over Sid’s head. And she was definitely not going to gain a hundred pounds or so. Perish the thought.
Get thee behind me, chocolate, she thought, glancing over her shoulder in some regret as the last of the Hershey’s Kisses she kept in her lingerie chest for emergencies swirled down the toilet, where just minutes ago she’d gathered the willpower to dump them. Then, in a hasty mental aside just in case some listening spirit took that too seriously, she amended that to Get thee gone, chocolate. She certainly didn’t want the rejected calories ending up on her already substantial enough behind.
In any case, she was going to get her stress release in a less destructive way from now on.
And no, not from a Mac-induced Big O. Although she was really starting to regret not having gone for it while she had the chance, she comforted herself with the knowledge that she had done the right thing.
Aromatherapy might not be as much fun, but it came with a lot fewer drawbacks. The most important of which was, a man wasn’t involved. The smell of the chamomile bath salts was soothing, just as the printing on the packet had promised. Julie breathed deeply, filling her lungs with the aroma as steam filled the bathroom. As soon as the bath was ready, she would slide down into the hot water, immerse herself in the calming scent, and press the button that would activate the Jacuzzi.
Bliss. Or at least, as close to bliss as she could get under the circumstances.
Go outside now.
Take that, stress, she thought, pretending the little voice was not there as she inhaled again with grim determination. The steam was sweet smelling but—unsuccessful. So far, anyway. She resolutely refused even to think about checking out her lingerie chest just to make sure that no Hershey’s Kisses had been left behind. Instead, she returned her attention to the task at hand. She was not going to lose her looks over this, and not losing her looks involved taking care of her skin. The last of the Mudd she slathered down the middle of her nose like peanut butter on bread.
Rinsing her fingers, she looked at herself in the mirror again. With her hair swept up into a ponytail high on the top of her head and the mask covering every bit of her face now except for white circles around her mouth and eyes, she looked like Pebbles Flintstone doing The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
It took a lot of ugly to make a woman beautiful. Good thing all anyone ever saw was the end result.
Was it Cindy Crawford who’d said looking good was the best revenge?
No matter. It was now her mantra. Every time she even started to think of Sid and his extracurricular activities she was going to do something positive for herself.
Like treat her skin to a mask. Or scrub her teeth with super-whitening paste. Or wax her legs.
Or take a really hot, relaxing bath foaming with calming herbs, and go to bed. Where she was going to go right to sleep and not, not, not dream of men.
Not Sid the Jerk. Or Mac the Hunk. Or anyone remotely male.
Give her a society that was man-free, and what a happy world it would be.
Go now.
She hadn’t even heard that, she told herself with a final glance in the mirror. The mask was already starting to harden. It was crisping around the edges, and cracks were starting to appear in her cheeks. A few more minutes and she would rinse it off, slather on moisturizer, wax her legs, and get in the tub. After that, she would go to bed, and sleep.
She was not going to end up a withered, embittered old woman with wrinkles and bad teeth and hairy legs and a rear end the size of a schoolbus just because she’d had the bad judgment to marry a cheating no-good asshole.
So there.
Upon entering her bedroom some ten minutes before, she’d flipped on the light, stripped off her clothes, and grabbed a nightgown out of the lingerie chest. The nightgown was more husband-bait, a short, silky leopard-print thing with black lace trim and spaghetti straps, but there was no help for it, so, beyond deciding that a shopping spree for oversized T-shirts and cotton panties was definitely in order, she had resolved not to obsess about it. Sliding the newly despised garment over her head, she had flipped off the light and crossed to the window, pulling the curtains apart to see if she could see Mac’s car.
Too dark.
Just as well anyway, she told herself as memories of that steamy interlude at Sweetwater’s intruded, making her loins ache and tighten in reflexive response. Julie watched her eyelids droop and her lips part in her fuzzy reflection in the window glass, recognized the look for the sexual yearning it was, and sighed. Clearly she was destined to stay chronically hungry in more ways than one.
A moment or two later she had shut the curtain, turned her back on the window, and retreated to her bathroom, scooping up the Hershey’s Kisses on the way. Sex, as usual, remained tantalizingly out of reach. But tonight, chocolate was at hand.
Once inside the bathroom, with the help of her reflection in a three-way mirror, a critical look at her much-maligned butt, and a little hard-won self-control, she’d dredged up enough unexpected strength of character to flush the chocolate before it could add to the landmass that seemed to be following her around, and resolved there and then that even if her life went to hell, her looks weren’t going with it.
GO NOW.
Don’t shout, she almost answered aloud, but remembered that talking back to the voice was bad. A glance showed her that the tub was almost to the brim. In full Creature mode, Julie walked barefoot across the cool white tile, bent to turn off the taps, rescued the floating jar of leg wax that had been warming in the water, inhaled deeply of the aromatic steam that didn’t seem to be doing crap about her stress as far as she could tell, straightened and turned back toward the sink, jar in hand. She would rinse the mask off her face, wax her legs, and get in the tub, where the stress-reducing part of the chamomile would surely kick in.
She took a single step and stopped dead.
A man was staring at her through the bathroom mirror.
A man with his back pressed flat against the bedroom wall outside her bathroom door. A man with a black ski mask pulled down over his face so that she could see nothing of him except for the dark glint of his eyes through the round holes. A man who was at that very moment watching her watch him.
Every tiny hair on her body catapulted upright as Julie met his gaze in horror.
The little voice screamed. Julie was too dumbstruck to follow suit.
Then he stepped into the doorway, filling it, blocking all hope of escape.
Her breath escaped from her body in an audible hiss.
“Hello, Julie,” he said as she stood frozen to the spot. The caressing note in his voice and the gloating way he looked her over sent chills racing along her spine. In that split second she realized that she was facing every woman’s worst nightmare come true: a rapist, maybe even a killer. At the same time she registered with the tiny part of her mind that was not absolutely numb with terror that he was big, not so much tall but burly, and dressed all in black and carrying a gun which he held negligently in one surgical-gloved hand.
Oh, God, a gun to use on her.
He started to lift it, to point it at her. Her heart freed itself from its state of shock-induced suspended animation to give a great leap in her chest. She sucked in a huge gulp of air, found her voice, and screamed like a siren, all in a single instant. Then, acting purely on instinct, she hurled the jar of leg wax at his head.
It was a heavy jar, dark blue glass filled with warmed wax, and it hit him square in the middle of the forehead with a sound like a cork popping out of a champagne bottle.
“Son of a bitch!” he yelled, staggering backward and clapping a hand to his forehead as the jar spun away to crash against the wall and drop to the tile with a clatter. He disappeared through the doorway. For a split second after he was no longer in sight, Julie remained frozen in place. She knew he was still there, heard breathing and cursing and movements that told her he was just beyond the door.
Run.
No duh, was her inner response to the little voice as, with terror giving wings to her feet, she flew toward the door, knowing that this was, very possibly, her only chance to get away.
Exploding from the bathroom like a sprinter on speed, she saw in a single petrified glance that he was only a couple of feet away, a big dark shape with one hand still clapped to his forehead as he bent over to pick up the gun he had apparently dropped. She leaped past him even as he looked up.
“Son of a bitch!” Abandoning the gun, he lunged for her, trying to grab her with both arms.
“No!” Dodging, gasping for breath, her heart pounding so hard that she could hear nothing beyond the drumming of her own blood in her ears, she fled toward her bedroom door and the hall and the stairs and the outside door below, screaming her lungs out all the way.
Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God, he was chasing her, surprisingly nimble and fast on his feet considering his size. He was going to catch her. She knew he was; it was just a matter of minutes, seconds. . . .
Frantically she tried to recall some basics from the self-defense class she had taken once. Its mantra had been, if attacked, SING. S-I-N-G. The only problem was, now in her time of extremis she couldn’t remember what the S stood for.
The only S word she could call to mind that seemed at all appropriate was scream.
And she was already screaming like a steam whistle and it didn’t seem to be doing much good, unless deafening him as well as herself was part of the plan.
“Help! Help!”
He was right behind her as she reached the top of the stairs, lunging and grabbing and closing his fist over the flying banner of her hair.
Julie shrieked loud enough to shatter glass in Columbia as her head was jerked backward so hard she was surprised her neck didn’t snap. Then his arm wrapped around her waist, yanking her against him, and his gloved hand clamped down over her mouth and nose, silencing her, suffocating her. She was enveloped by the heat of his body and the smell of talc from the glove and sweat from the man.
“You shouldn’t’ve hit me,” he growled in her ear. She smelled onions on his breath.
Her stomach heaved. Lack of oxygen and terror made her head swim. Her heart pounded. Her skin crawled everywhere his rubberized fingers touched as if ants were running amok over her flesh. Still she fought as he dragged her back toward the bedroom, tearing at his gloved hand with her nails, kicking at his shins with her bare feet, twisting and writhing and struggling with every ounce of strength she possessed, with every atom of knowledge the streetwise little girl she had once been had had to learn to survive, knowing even as she fought that it was probably futile, that she was not going to be able to save herself, that, at maybe a hundred twenty pounds soaking wet, she was no match for a brute who was easily twice her weight.
He dragged her back over the threshold of her bedroom, back into the room with the tasteful white carpet and taupe walls and huge black-lacquered bed. Understated, all of it, right
down to the white summer linens on the bed. A room for quiet contemplation and restful sleep, not unspeakable acts and violence and death.
Oh, please don’t let him kill me.
The prayer shot skyward even as she managed to grab his mask and pull it off over his head, and he picked her up and threw her down on her back on the bed.
She landed with a bounce. He was on top of her before she could move, pinning her with his weight, forcing her deep into the mattress even as she tried and failed to knee him in the groin, tried and failed to roll free. Her nightgown was twisting toward her waist, she could feel the rough abrasion of his clothes against her tender skin, feel the heat and weight of him with a revulsion that was like nothing she had ever experienced in her life. She knew what he intended to do, knew it and screamed her terror into his face and thrashed and kicked and fought, all to no avail.
“Shut up, bitch.” One hand wrapped around her throat, cutting her scream off in midblast, brutal in its intent to cause pain, squeezing so that she gagged and choked and squealed like a small animal caught in a trap. Her gaze caught on her teddy bear sitting Buddha-like on the bedside table, and she realized with a sense of horrified disbelief that it might be the last thing she saw before she died. He was crushing her throat, cutting off her voice, her air. Her blood seemed to spike in her ears. All she could do was claw frantically at his hand and wheeze.
“Shut up,” he said again. She nodded jerkily, so grateful for the chance to live that she would do anything, and he loosened his grip enough so that she could once again breathe. He let go of her throat and grabbed her wrists, lifting them over her head as she lay unresisting, intent on drawing in blessed air. The weight of his body pinned her as he transferred both her captured wrists to one huge meaty hand. Then, with a ripping noise more terrifying than anything she had ever heard, he began to bind her wrists together with a roll of duct tape that had somehow appeared in his hand.
The tape wrapping her wrists felt sticky and tight and full of doom. She struggled weakly, trying to pull free of it. She couldn’t break it, couldn’t free her hands.
To Trust a Stranger Page 16
