by JoAnn Ross
“I appreciate that,” Will said, feeling more exhausted than he’d ever before felt in his life. “I’m going to need you to fill out a statement.”
“Yeah, I’m already on that.”
“No.” Will hated what he was about to say. But knew he had no choice. “Tell Desiree what you told me. Have her put it in an official report. If you want to lawyer up—”
“I don’t need a damn lawyer.”
Since they both belonged to a group of people who’d routinely been screwed over by attorneys who’d eagerly take their money, promising to help them gain access to the white government who’d screwed them in the first place, Will understood.
“I’ll instruct Desiree to hold off filing the report for another twenty-four hours.”
“That could get you in a world of hurt with the AG’s office and the DCI if things go south.”
Right now, Will didn’t give a flying fuck what the suits in the Department of Criminal Investigation might think. Sam was his deputy. Hazard was his town. And he damn well intended to handle things his way.
“We’ll jump off that bridge when we come to it,” he said. “Meanwhile, let’s get your statement on the record.”
Clouds had been rolling in from the west all day. A storm warning had been issued for western Wyoming, and after a flurry of shopping, residents seemed to have hunkered down for the duration.
As he drove through the dark and empty streets, listening to Drew Hayworth advising parents to monitor their children’s computer use to protect them from sexual predators, Will couldn’t help thinking of his own child.
He still knew, all the way to the marrow of his bones, that Josh had nothing to do with Erin Gallagher’s death. But how the hell was it going to look when the two individuals who were the last to see her, to be with her, were the sheriff’s son and the deputy who’d interrogated him?
41
The man raised by wolves was disappointed. He’d tried a new murder technique, but it hadn’t been the same. Oh, it had done the job, all right. Hadn’t he left his prey lying in a lovely pool of blood? The problem was, he’d had, by necessity, been too far away, which had left the killing feeling too remote.
Although he had no intention of ever getting caught, the man raised by wolves had begun to feel that something was missing. He wasn’t receiving the pleasure he usually did from taking a life.
Strangely, even slashing pretty Erin Gallagher’s throat hadn’t been nearly as exciting as he’d hoped. In fact, it had been the first time since he’d killed Snowball, the unlucky kitten, that he’d been able to wait until he returned home from the hunt to satisfy the throbbing erection that had always come with killing.
Of course, the stone-cold bitch of a mother didn’t count. That kill had been for utility, and a well-deserved punishment, after all. Not for enjoyment.
He had hopes for this new murder. But it hadn’t lifted his spirits. Hadn’t made his blood sing.
He was so… well, fucking bored.
What he needed was something to jump-start the pleasure again. Something big. Even outrageous. Something that would have people talking for months. Perhaps even years.
Something the good citizens of Hazard could be afraid of even while they were in the supposed safety of their own homes.
This need to escalate wasn’t surprising. He had been upping the ante for years. Which was why, in the early years, as he’d practiced his technique, he’d remained so far below the radar no one had ever noticed a serial killer was living among them.
And hadn’t Ted Bundy spoken eloquently to the problem of desensitization?
Bundy—who certainly belonged in the pantheon of killers—had stated that each time he’d killed someone, he’d suffered an enormous amount of guilt, horror, and pain. But then, that would wear off and the impulse to kill again would return. Even stronger than ever.
That’s obviously what was happening here. While his bloodthirst increased exponentially with each hunt, the joy he’d experience was diminishing in an equal percentage.
Perhaps there was some merit to that three- cornered-stone image. Perhaps he had a killing stone in his breast that had, after all these years, begun to wear smooth.
No. That was negative thinking, something he would not allow.
The problem, as he was beginning to see it, was that there was no point in being the world’s most deadly hunter of Man if no one ever knew about it. If you couldn’t enjoy the process. Bask in the terror of the victim.
Play with the kill. Like a clever cat playing with a plump mouse before ripping it to pieces, then devouring it.
The man who was once the boy raised by wolves smiled.
He knew just how to reclaim his bliss.
42
Faith vacillated after arriving at the Sheriff’s Department and being told by Trace Honeycutt that Will had gone home for a couple hours. If he was in bad enough shape to actually give in to pressure to take a break, he undoubtedly wouldn't be all that eager to have her showing up at the Bridger ranch.
On the other hand, his father and son were still out of town, and how many chances could they get in a town this small to actually talk in private? Besides, maybe if he was as tired as she suspected he must be—as she herself was—then perhaps he’d be less likely to go on the attack when she tried to explain her case.
She came to the Y at the edge of town. To the right was the road to her house. The left fork led to the ranch.
“In for a penny,” she decided as she turned left.
Had the SUV not been parked outside the house, Faith would have thought no one was home. There wasn’t a light on in any of the tall windows.
She pulled up beside the Cherokee, waded through the snow, and rang the bell.
Nothing.
She tried again, hearing it chime inside.
Still nothing.
She tried knocking, but her gloved hand made even less noise, so she pulled them off and tried her bare knuckles.
Still nothing.
Unwilling to give up now, she pressed down on the heavy-handled set latch. And pushed.
The door opened on a loud, horror-movie squeak. That the dead bolt hadn’t been fastened showed just how exhausted he must be, since she suspected he might be one of the few people, other than herself, in Hazard who locked their doors.
“Will?” Her voice echoed. But there was no answer. “Will?” She ran her hand along the wall by the inside of the door, found the light switch, and flicked it up.
Blinding-bright light flooded down from a chandelier that appeared to have been created from elk antlers.
“It’s Faith.”
Not wanting to drip melting snow all over what appeared to be antique Indian woven rugs, she unzipped her boots, left them by the door, crossed the long room, and headed down the hall she suspected led to the bedrooms.
The first room, with its clutter of teenage life lit by the glow of a computer monitor featuring a sunny-beach-scene screen saver, and posters of Destiny’s Child and Black Eyed Peas on the wall, was obviously Josh’s.
The one next door, which was as tidy and Spartan as a monk’s cell—save for the Stetson hanging on the wall beside a framed photograph of a beautiful young woman, dressed in a short white dress and veil—obviously belonged to Will’s father. The woman’s long black hair, parted in the middle, fell over her shoulders. Her dark eyes, the rich ebony color of her son’s, radiated love as her groom, wearing a dark, Western-cut suit and looking like a 1960s version of Will, slipped a gold band on her finger.
Faith heard Will as soon as she opened the third door, across the hall from the others. His breathing was deep and steady.
Outside, the clouds were starting to move down from Canada and Montana, but there was still enough moonlight slanting in the window for Faith to see him, sprawled on the bed, a towel wrapped around his waist.
Obviously he’d taken a shower, then crashed.
The sight of a near naked Will Bridger was vastly appealing.
Giv
en that she’d been awake for nearly two days, straight, the bed was even more so.
And she was suddenly so incredibly, bone-weary exhausted.
Of course, if sleep was all she wanted, there were two other unoccupied beds.
What she wanted was sleep.
Then Will.
In that order.
She pulled off her sweater and slacks and laid them over the arm of a wing-back chair covered in a black- and-brown-striped fabric that matched the comforter he’d managed to toss back before falling into bed.
Her bra and navy blue silk long johns were next to go. Then she slipped beneath the sheets. The minute her head hit the pillow, Faith fell asleep.
He was dreaming of her. As he had too many nights to attempt to count.
They were lying on some beach beside a turquoise lagoon. On Kauai, perhaps. Or Tahiti. It didn't matter which. All that mattered was that they were together. And alone.
He took a bottle of oil, poured it into his hands, and began rubbing it over smooth skin tanned to a golden brown by the benevolent tropical sun that was beaming down from an impossibly blue sky.
She was boneless, pliant beneath his caressing hands as he touched. Stroked. Aroused. Her flesh was hot and slick and warm. And his.
All his.
Drifting on the soft fantasy of the dream, he pressed a kiss against the fragrant hollow at the base of her throat and imagined he could taste her sudden increase in pulse beat.
Time slowed. Then stilled. There was no yesterday, and tomorrow was a lifetime away. There was only his exquisite, stolen moment in time.
Savoring every shimmering sigh, every humming moan, he planted kisses down her throat, over her shoulders, then lower. He cupped a hand beneath one smooth breast, stroked his tongue across the heated flesh.
When he took the tight, dusky nipple between his lips and tugged, her eyes flew open.
“You came.” Fully awake now, he stroked his hand down her side, from her breast to her hip.
“How could I not?” she asked.
Her eyes were a soft and gleaming gold. As he gazed down into them, the thought that had been playing around the edges of Will’s mind for so many months struck home.
Mine.
He tangled his free hand in her hair, dragging her head back. “Once we do this, there’s no going back. With so much in flux, I don’t know what's going to happen in the short term. But I do know that if you stay, you’ll belong to me.” His jaw tightened as he thought about her husband. “Only me.”
Her breath hitched. “And you to me.”
Something in his heart turned over. “Only you.” Those remarkable eyes he knew would still have the power to make him hard as a pike when he was ninety brightened with a bright, moist sheen.
With his eyes still on hers, Will slid into her, as smoothly as if they’d been created solely for each other.
Outside the ranch house, the moon continued its nightly ride across the midnight sky. Snow fell, faster now, sprawling over the ground, draping the dark green trees in thick coats of winter white.
Somewhere atop a hill, a coyote howled. Out on the lonely highway, racing toward the Dakotas with a load of caskets from Boise, a long-haul trucker tuned into Talking After Midnight, then cursed when he discovered the voice coming from his overhead speakers wasn’t sexy Faith Prescott’s at all, but that of some shrink who was yammering about communication in a marriage.
Back in Hazard, Deputy Trace Honeycutt drove through the dark and empty streets, on the lookout for bad guys, while upstairs, on the second floor of the century-old courthouse, Deputy Desiree Douchet took the statement of a man she’d come to respect.
Inside a sprawling log ranch house on the edge of town, caught up in the beauty of the night, and in each other, Faith Fletcher and Will Bridger slipped effortlessly, sumptuously into love.
43
“We moved a lot," Faith said, as she lay in Will’s arms in the wide bed he’d told her had been created from pine logs harvested on the ranch. “Every time social services got a whiff of what was going on, we’d take off in the night. I got really good at packing fast and traveling light.”
She’d thought, while driving out here, that telling Will about her less than pristine past would be the most difficult thing she’d ever done. But amazingly, he’d been even more accepting than Drew Hayworth had predicted. And certainly he’d behaved worlds differently from Sal. Of course he wasn’t hearing it in a public forum.
“I thought, after she died, that I'd be free. But the foster care system in this country is a joke. And it was like I had this invisible sign around my neck. One that read whore, that only guys could see, because three of the first four homes I was sent to, the men would decide I was their own state-supplied sex slave.”
“One more reason that case in Savannah would’ve been so hard for you to get involved in,” he murmured.
“I suppose. But by the time I’d landed in care, my mother had been whoring me for a year, and I’d gotten desensitized to sex. It was when one guy beat me up so badly he broke four ribs and my wrist—when I tried to fight back—that I just walked away.
“I didn’t know how to get phony papers back then, and no one wanted to hire a fifteen-year-old dropout, so I just started doing the only thing I knew how to do. But instead of having to turn all the money over to my mother, I got to keep it.” She sighed. “It sounds so ugly when you hear it out loud.”
“You were a kid,” he said, echoing what Sal had said in the bar of the lodge. “You were damn lucky you didn’t get killed.”
“I realize that.” She shrugged. “I knew it at the time.”
“But you didn’t care.”
She looked up at him. “How did you know?”
“I’m a cop. You think I haven’t seen this sort of thing before?” He drew her close. Pressed a kiss against her love-tousled hair.
“I should have told you about being married.” She trailed a finger down the arrowing of silky dark hair that she loved to feel against her breasts.
‘Yeah, you should’ve trusted me enough to protect you against anyone who’d want to hurt you, Faith.”
“I’d already gone the route of being with a man to protect me. And that didn’t turn out real well. I was planning on telling you about my past that last night in Savannah. Because I wanted you to know how different things were with you.” She looked up at him, wanting him to understand. “From that first time, I’d always separated sex from emotions. But from the minute I met you, they got all tangled up. At first it was terrifying to feel so out of control. Then it was wonderful.”
“Then it was horrible,” he said. His lips nuzzled her neck. “Which was my fault.”
“Maybe we both could have done things a bit differently,” she said, combing her fingers through his hair. “But it’s important for you to know that I’ve never felt the way I feel with you with any other man.”
“That’s right. I seem to remember, that first time, back in your bedroom in Georgia, when you warned me you’d never been able to come.”
“That was the truth.”
“Not that night.”
“You don’t have to sound so smug.”
“Sorry.” He rolled over, taking her with him, hooking his bare leg over her hip, essentially anchoring her to the bed. “It’s just that, correct me if I’m mistaken, but I remember losing count that night. And tonight, although I’ll admit to being distracted, I believe I counted three.”
“Four.” Humor replaced the shadows in her eyes. “Although, they could have been aberrations.”
"Could’ve been, I suppose.” He grinned and nuzzled her breasts. “Perhaps, in the interest of scientific experiment, we ought to try it again.”
“I suppose we could,” she allowed as, amazingly, her thoughts began to scatter and her body warmed from the inside out, as if he’d somehow lit a candle inside tier. “But since we’re being honest with each other, in the interest of full disclosure I should warn you that I’v
e never had a very strong libido.”
"Really?” He sounded fascinated. At least she thought perhaps that was the case. It was hard to read his tone when he had that wickedly clever mouth buried between her breasts.
“Really.” She struggled to concentrate on her breathing. “I think it has something to do with low hormone levels.”
“Well then.” His tongue had begun tracing wet circles around a nipple. “Maybe we should see if we can do something to spike them.”
When he took that hardened tip between his lips and sucked hard, Faith discovered there was a direct connection between her nipple and that still warm, still pulsating place between her legs.
“I think that may have done it,” she managed as he took her slowly, exquisitely, back into the mists.
“I don’t want to go back to work.”
“I don’t want you to go back to work,” Faith said. “But you have to. If for no other reason than to prove neither Josh nor Sam Charbonneaux had anything to do with Erin’s death,” He’d told her about his deputy’s situation earlier,
“Yeah. Christ, what a mess.”
“It’ll be okay.” She lifted her lips to his. “You’ll make it okay.”
“I used to believe I could,” he admitted. “Make everything okay.”
“Ah, the cop as superhero fantasy,” she murmured with a half smile. “How did that work for you?”
“Lousy.” He rubbed his chest in that gesture she’d seen before. “You know I got shot.”
“I’ve heard something about a bust that went bad.”
“Yeah. We were after this drug dealer, and, well, that’s pretty much it. It went bad. He ended up being shipped back to Mexico in a pine box and I ended up in the hospital. The day after surgery, Josh showed up.”
“He told me how his mother’s lawyer dumped him on you.”
“Dumped is, unfortunately, the word. Neither one of us had any idea the other existed, and I sure wasn’t in the best condition to leap into playing single dad.”
