Dangerous Kisses

by Trish Milburn

  Wanting to focus on life instead of death, she eyed the table and wished for some candles. But she didn’t bother to look for any. Jake Radley didn’t seem like the kind of man who’d even think about buying candles. If he didn’t have electricity, he’d just sit in the dark or leave.

  Without anything to occupy her mind, it wandered. She worried that Jake might be a target of the killer up on the deck, but she tamped down her overactive imagination. She couldn’t see anyone sneaking up on Jake. He was too alert, too poised to react at a moment’s notice.

  But what if the killer had a gun and took a shot at Jake from somewhere out on the lake? With daylight fading, a shooter might even get away. Or get to her before she figured out how to get the boat under way.

  Despite the chill, she climbed the steps and joined him by the grill, which thankfully gave off some warmth.

  "Miss me?" he asked.

  "My, my, you do think highly of yourself."

  "Honey, you’re the one who put those thoughts in my head. All that panting and moaning is good for a guy’s ego, among other things."

  She swatted him hard on the upper arm. "No wonder you don’t have a steady girlfriend. You turn into Egoman at the slightest provocation."

  "I wouldn’t say the provocation was slight."

  She huffed and moved to the edge of the boat, scanning the horizon. Nothing looked out of the ordinary, but then according to Jake she might walk by a killer on a daily basis without even knowing it.

  ****

  Jake watched Sydney as she searched the surface of the lake. They might tease and laugh, but there was no escaping the reason behind their self-imposed exile. A killer with black violence in his heart had targeted her and wouldn’t rest until he bent her to his will and finally broke her.

  His gut clenched at the thought, and his hands itched to squeeze the life from the killer as the nameless man had done to Maggie and Stephanie. In theory, everyone deserved a fair trial, but sometimes Jake had trouble with the concept when the accused was so obviously guilty of heinous crimes. He wouldn’t change the policy even if given the chance, but it sickened him all the same to see cold-blooded killers warm and well fed while their victims

  lay sealed up in graves before their lives really got started.

  Jake tried to shake the disturbing images by refocusing his attention on the food atop the grill. He flipped the steaks a final time and pushed the potatoes off to the side.

  When he looked back at Sydney, his heart tumbled over itself. Her long hair floated in the breeze, and the cool wind had pinkened her cheeks. He ached to touch her, tell her what his mind had screamed as they’d made love — that he’d fallen in love with her. It still amazed him, how it had all happened with blinding speed, catching him unaware. More than once, he’d almost blurted the words. Could he be selfish enough to tell her, perhaps having her return the feelings, only to rip her life apart?

  He stabbed at the meat, transferring it from the grill to a plate. When had he become so fatalistic? Before meeting Sydney, he’d rarely thought of being killed in the line of duty, had simply accepted it as a chance he took each day he put on his badge.

  "Is it ready?"

  "Uh, yeah."

  "Good. I’m starved."

  Eating on the deck would have been nice, even romantic, but the persistent breeze had begun to hint of the coming winter. Even below, they could hear it whistling around the edges of the boat.

  When something hit the side of the boat, they both started, showing just how jumpy they were. Jake went up to determine the source of the sound but only found a log floating beside the hull. "Probably washed off the island," he said when he told Sydney what he’d found.

  Despite his hunger, Jake spent almost as much time watching Sydney eat as enjoying his own food. When she finished her steak and potato and bit into the chocolate cupcake, he hardened beneath the table. Damn, he was hornier than a deer with a full rack.

  "You’re a decent cook," she said as she leaned back from the table.

  "It’s the grilling gene. Men are born with it."

  She smiled, nearly shattering his heart with the beauty of it. When she slid her hand across the table to clasp his, he turned his palm up and ran his thumb over the soft skin on the top of her hand.

  "Thank you," she said.

  "For what?"

  "For being so stubborn."

  "Gee, thanks."

  "No, really." She sighed before continuing. "I really needed to get away, but I would have never done it on my own. It’s like I’m addicted to work, like if I’m not there things will fall apart."

  "I can relate."

  She caught his gaze and held it with those hypnotic green eyes. "Maybe we both need to learn that the world will go on if we’re not at the office."

  "Maybe so." The idea of working less and spending more time with Sydney tempted him, but he pushed the seductive image aside. When they caught the man stalking her, things would go back to the way they were before, him working just as much and her pushing him at every turn with her demands for information. At least that’s what he told himself.

  "Why do you hate reporters so much?" she asked, as if she could read his mind.

  "Hate is a pretty strong word."

  "You don’t have to soften it for me. I know what I saw that day you found Maggie. If looks could kill, I’d have been as dead as her."

  He winced. "I didn’t know you then."

  "No, you were going on past experience, I’d say." She skimmed her fingers along the flesh of his palm. "What did a reporter do to you that made you hate us all?"

  He stood and made for the stairs, needing to get away from the images flooding his mind, twisting his gut in knots. He would have made it too if Sydney hadn’t risen just as abruptly and blocked his path.

  "No, Jake. Stop running. It won’t go away."

  "No, but I won’t have to drag up all the gory details."

  "Maybe that’s the only way you’ll get past it, whatever it is."

  "How do you know there’s anything more to this than annoyance?"

  "I’m a reporter. It’s my job to notice things. And what I saw in your eyes that day wasn’t annoyance. It was disgust and the desire to throw me out on my ass."

  Would it help to get it out in the open, to confess his festering guilt? He loved her, yes, but could he trust her? And would she look at him differently after he shared the truth?

  But she didn’t budge from her spot, and her probing gaze refused to waver. She was persistent in every task she undertook, but that persistence was now cloaked in something tender and healing. Was that love staring back at him?

  Could she love him, a hard, no-nonsense cop who’d given her little reason to feel any type of affection for him? Was she just as scared to tell him as he was to tell her? And how would he react if she did?

  One thing at a time, Radley.

  He retreated and sank onto the couch, let his head fall back as he closed his eyes. He allowed the images and memories to come, the ones he usually fought so hard to bury. The couch gave under her weight as she sat on the opposite end, not touching him. Her astute instincts at work, she’d evidently sensed he needed the disconnect if he was to head down the road toward his past.

  The first of it came out riding a deep, soul-ripping sigh. "I was a new cop when I met Jackie Gardner. She was a reporter for the Courier then. I guess you were probably still in college. I’d been on the force less than a year when we got a missing child case. We approached it like we normally do, constructing a timeline and interviewing the parents. So many times, it’s one of the parents involved. But these parents checked out, and we started interviewing neighbors.

  "Krissy Jacobs was five. She disappeared from her bedroom during a night in June. She was on the top floor, but someone had come in through the screened window and snatched her without a sound. Her parents were in the room directly across from hers and they didn’t hear a thing."

  Jake stopped a moment, swallowed hard
when he remembered Krissy’s parents, her mother sobbing uncontrollably and her father sitting stunned at the kitchen table. Both of them blaming themselves.

  "After several interviews, we began to suspect a neighbor. He lived alone and had a history of mental illness and petty crimes.

  "The press jumped all over the case. Krissy’s picture was splashed across the front page every day. Everyone was screaming for us to catch the kidnapper before he got to any more kids. It was summer, and people were afraid to let their kids go out and play in the yard.

  "Jackie and I had become friendly. I was a lot more naïve and less jaded back then. She was pretty, and I was young with raging hormones. We went out a couple of times, to dinner after work. She reeled me in like the brainless fish I was."

  "What happened?"

  "At first, we talked about stuff other than work. Now I know she was building up my trust." He snorted at how stupid he’d been. "She casually began talking about work, then asked me about mine, general stuff at first. But she gradually got more specific until she finally got what she’d been after the whole time — the name of the prime suspect.

  "I felt like I’d made a big mistake as soon as I revealed it, but there was no taking it back. I asked her to keep that part under wraps until we found the guy. He’d disappeared, and no one knew where he’d gone."

  "But she printed it."

  "Yeah. If you look on my back, I’m sure you can she where she stabbed me. It was quite the buzz how she’d gotten a piece of information no other media outlet had been able to squeeze out of the department. It didn’t take long for people to figure out where the leak had come from. I caught all kinds of hell, and deservedly so. I think the only reason I didn’t get the boot was

  because my father had been so well respected. I got the worst hours, worst pay and the disgusted stares of my fellow officers for at least two years after that. And I didn’t complain once. Nothing they could do could make me feel worse than I already did."

  He clenched his fists, the anger rushing through him like it had the morning he’d seen Jackie’s article on the top of the front page.

  "What happened to Krissy?" Sydney asked, a slight tremor in her soft voice.

  He looked over at her, touched by the compassion in her watery eyes. "He killed her. He saw his name in the paper and killed her. He raped her, then threw her off the top of Fall Creek Falls."

  His voice broke, and he swallowed and blinked away the urge to cry. "I hope you never have to see anything like that." He wiped an escaped tear from her cheek.

  She wiped at her other cheek. "What happened to the man who killed her?"

  Jake’s jaws clenched, and a cold chill scoured his spine. "The bastard killed himself. After he threw Krissy over the falls, he jumped. I think that was the worst part, that even in death he was lying right beside her."

  "Oh, Jake." She scooted toward him, then took him in her arms. "I’m so sorry."

  His eyes burned with unshed tears. She’d had nothing to do with it, and here she was apologizing. He hugged her close to him, rubbing his hand up and down her arm and planting gentle kisses atop her silky hair. By comforting her, he soothed himself. It was strange how relieved he felt to have the story out in the open, to not have that barrier standing between them. The anger was still there, but it wasn’t the black, devouring beast it’d been.

  "What became of Jackie?" she asked, her face pressed against his chest.

  His body stiffened again. "That’s the part I’ll never understand. She caused that girl’s death as surely as if she’d been the one to push her over the falls, and she got promoted. Krissy Jacobs dies at the age of five, and Jackie Gardner begins her climb up the media ladder. She eventually moved on to some bigger city. I don’t know where, and I couldn’t care less."

  "We shouldn’t be out here together. I don’t want you to get in trouble."

  "We’re okay. I’m more experienced now. They know I’m a good cop."

  "Has anyone said anything?"

  "No." He’d gotten a couple of hard stares, but he’d stared right back. He was older, wiser.

  Sydney didn’t speak again for several seconds. "I’m not like Jackie," she finally whispered, her words sounding desperate in their need to convince.

  He kissed her forehead. "I know that now."

  The gentle kiss led to more passionate ones. They clung to each other for support, as if they both needed to touch and be touched to prove there was life, beauty and pleasure in a world filled with people who could kill and defile without remorse.

  They gravitated toward the bed as if it were normal, natural. This time, they abandoned the frenzied pace they’d set before in favor of slow, seductive lovemaking. And he lost a bit more of his heart to the lovely creature who’d entered his life when he’d been sure he was immune to lovely creatures.

  She kissed and stroked and loved him as if she could erase the past, free him from the images that had plagued him for so long, ones he’d let fester instead of dealing with them.

  After they’d reached fulfillment, they lay entwined in each other’s arms.

  "It wasn’t your fault," she said. "It was Jackie’s, the killer’s, but not yours."

  His heart swelled at her kindness. When he started to protest, she rose up on one elbow and placed her delicate finger over his lips.

  "Don’t. Don’t walk around anymore with this misplaced guilt. You made a mistake, sure, but you have to let it go. You don’t know whether he would have killed her anyway. He probably would have."

  "But we might have been able to get to him before he did if I hadn’t opened my big mouth."

  "Perhaps, but you’ll never know. And you can’t live your life wondering about the what-ifs. We make mistakes, but if we learn from them it’s okay."

  He smiled at her. He couldn’t help it. "Are you sure you didn’t study philosophy or psychology in college?"

  "You’re a good man, Jake, a credit to your parents and the police department."

  He pulled her face down to his and kissed her with all the fullness threatening to burst from his heart.

  With her head resting on his shoulder, Jake drifted toward sleep, more content than he’d been in years. He was floating on that plane of semi-consciousness when she whispered in his ear.

  "I love you, Jake."

  ****

  He eased a few steps backwards into the trees as a boat passed. Once the vessel disappeared around a jut of shoreline, he raised the binoculars back to his eyes. He’d watched from different vantage points for several hours, beginning the previous afternoon, throughout the moonlit night that had allowed him a ghostly image of the cop’s boat, and now as the first rays of sunshine cast the bobbing craft in shades of orange and yellow.

  The vein in his temple throbbed. It’d been hours since the two of them had descended into the boat’s cabin, hours in which that filthy cop had touched her, tainted her body before he could take his own pleasure. Of course, she’d have to pay for her weakness, giving in to another of those supposedly attractive men. Why didn’t they learn? How many more would he have to discipline before they learned their lesson?

  He lowered the binoculars and stared across the open water. How dare that cop take her and flaunt it in his face. He’d get his own lesson.

  The increased flow of traffic across the dam told him it was time to leave. If he didn’t go to work, someone might start casting suspicion his direction. And he couldn’t be caught. He had too much left to do.

  His gaze slid back to the boat. A flash of anger smacked into him, so potent it almost knocked him down. His body hummed with need. He’d have to find an outlet or he’d be in danger of exposing himself, of losing his fine grip on control.

  Placing the binoculars into the empty tackle box and retrieving the unused fishing pole, he slipped back through the woods, looking to the casual observer like a fisherman going home after an early morning of angling. He smiled, confident that before another sun rose he’d feel much better.
>
  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Sydney woke with a start, not from fright but realization. In her dream, she’d confessed her love to Jake, only to have him pretend not to hear. She rolled over to find his half of the bed empty. When she slid her hand across the rumpled sheet, it was cool to the touch.

  She closed her eyes. It hadn’t been a dream.

  She turned onto her back and stared at the ceiling. What should she do, pretend it hadn’t happened or talk to him about it, tell him she didn’t expect anything in return? Yes, she wanted there to be more between them, but didn’t expect it. After all, she’d told him that she was an adult and could have sex without commitment. The words rose up to choke her. If there were to be a real relationship, he’d have to make the first move.

  She refused to be a clingy female, to go back on her word.

  Sydney slung her forearm across her closed eyes, trying to remember exactly what had happened. She vaguely remembered whispering that she loved him, but she’d been drifting close to sleep when she’d said it. Would he think she’d been babbling or perhaps dreaming? Had he even heard her? She couldn’t be sure unless she faced him.

  With her stomach somersaulting and her nerves buzzing, she slid from the bed and dressed in a clean sweatshirt and jeans. After tying her tennis shoes, she took a deep breath and climbed to the deck.

  The cold wind smacked her as soon as her head emerged from the stairway. She wrapped her arms around herself in an effort to fend off the early blast of winter. The air smelled like frost, cold and biting.

  Despite the temperature, Jake stood at the railing with a fishing pole in hand. He glanced her way as he cast the line. The distance in his eyes told her all she needed to know. She’d said it. He’d heard her. And now he was in full retreat.

  Determined not to show it bothered her, she said, "You must like fishing if you’re willing to brave this."

  "I didn’t want to wake you. Not much else to do up here."

  His words were polite, but they weren’t the gentle, warmth-laden words of a lover. Sydney swallowed against the growing lump in her throat.

  "Well, I’m awake now, so feel free to come in where it’s warm."