by Docter, K. L
Killing Secrets
by
K.L. Docter
A Thorne’s Thorns Romantic Suspense
Some secrets are better left dead.
Rachel James’ ex-husband is released from prison determined to reclaim her and her little girl—the child is his key to controlling the James’ fortune. Frightened, Rachel flees to Denver with the child who hasn’t uttered a word since her daddy went to prison.
Contractor Patrick Thorne wants nothing to do with another of his parents’ charity cases. He failed his own wife so abysmally she took her own life as well as his unborn son’s. After two years, it’s time to concentrate on the bid he’s won and the saboteur trying to destroy his construction firm.
There is no room for trust in either of their hearts. But trust is all that will untangle the secrets that dominate their lives, free a little girl of her silent prison, and save them all from a serial killer who stands too close.
Dedication
For Mom
I learned my love of suspense from you.
Thank you for setting me on the road.
&
For Jan
You were right.
I wish you were here to say, “I told you so.”
I love and miss you, my friend, my sister.
Prologue
Four Weeks….
Two Days….
Sixteen Hours….
…’Til death.
The first time he laid eyes on her, he stood on the threshold of a doorway he dare not cross. He fell into her fathomless dark gaze, unable, unwilling to shake his soul free and, in that one moment, he knew.
She was meant for him to love.
Untouched by the sordid life that flourished around her, she was sunlight in a gray existence. A smile in a dingy room. A joy such as he’d never known. She was a gift from a cold, unforgiving God. Forever innocent.
Why God would give him such a precious angel, he hadn’t a clue. But he suddenly knew what he was willing to die for. What he’d kill for.
In that instant of clarity the monster that lurked in the dark recesses of his mind was freed. A creature designed to kill. To live and die. Over and over again. Until his angel ascended once more to her place in Heaven at God’s feet where he couldn’t reach her.
’Til death parted them, she was his and his alone.
Certain she’d been lost to him, the shock of spotting her again in LoDo, a lower downtown section of Denver, nearly brought him to his knees. His brain tried to tell him he was mistaken. She had more curves than he remembered. Her hairstyle and clothes were different.
The others were different, too.
He shook his head against the monster’s treacherous whisper. He refused to listen. Couldn’t listen. His angel smiled at him. His soul recognized her. Somehow, some way, his fractious God had been appeased and given him yet another chance.
The past seven days were hell. Watching her. Wanting to take her. He couldn’t screw up and lose her again. Tonight, his preparations in place, she’d return to his side where she belonged.
Breathing slow and measured through the full-face ski mask he’d bought at a thrift store, he sucked in a lungful of musty stench. In this uncommon late-May heat wave, he was sweating bullets, but the wool soaked it up before it could sting his eyes. The itching would drive him insane, though, if she didn’t come home from work soon.
The LoDo sports bar where she waited tables closed almost an hour ago. She couldn’t have gone on a date at two o’clock on a Thursday morning, could she?
Three times he’d entered her ground floor apartment after she’d left for work, and he’d seen no sign she was involved with anyone. No jockey shorts mixed with her panties in the hamper. No extra razor. The food in the refrigerator wasn’t enough to feed a cat, let alone her and a boyfriend, and the only scent on her pillows was floral. The sole message from a male on her answering machine had identified himself as a special research librarian from the Denver Public Library reminding her to pick up the copy of “The Warwick Genealogy” she’d requested.
That doesn’t mean she isn’t still involved with him, the almighty scion of Thorne Enterprises. She’s probably crawling into his bed like a whore right this minute, letting him do things to her, making her scream….
Screams.
Blood.
Death.
“No! Stop!” he whispered. “That was a mistake!”
Was it? The insidious question lashed him from the dark place in his pounding skull.
He rejected the smirking voice, the vivid images. Think of something else. Anything else. Forgetforgetfor—
A car alarm screamed at an outlying parking lot and dragged him out of his fugue. His eyes cleared. The pain behind them eased to a level he’d learned to carry over the years.
Soon, he would kill the nightmares forever. Patrick Thorne would die and the secrets with him. But the contractor hadn’t been punished enough yet. Before he finished, he’d ruin Thorne’s reputation, his livelihood, destroy everything he loved most in the world.
Just as Thorne destroyed our lives. The man must die! Now!
Restless to escape its bonds the monster thrust knife-hot pain in his brain, but he wrestled it back into the shadows and locked it down. Retribution was almost at hand, but not tonight. This night was about her.
Where was she?
There! Her tennis shoes slapped the sidewalk as she approached. He caught a flash of uniform—shorts and sports shirt, both too tight for decency. Then she walked out of the weak light that pooled across the commons into the dark well that led to her door. Her building superintendent had replaced her broken porch light this morning, but he’d smashed it again. He smiled when she cursed someone named Ronnie.
With a jingle of keys, she passed the niche he’d carved for himself in the shrubs. A bunch of adrenaline surged through him, made him light-headed with anticipation. He shook the buzz from his head and crashed out of the bushes with more noise than he intended.
Her head snapped left. She shot a glance over her shoulder. Her eyes widened. She lunged for the safety of her door.
He chased after her, grabbed her by the throat. A squeeze of her windpipe cut off her scream. He didn’t want to damage her too much. He just needed to get her alone.
To atone. To give him another chance.
With her body crushed against him, he groaned with pleasure. It had been so long! For a moment he forgot his purpose, lost in the new scent of her, in the innocent softness of her curves. Her breasts were full beneath his forearm. The sweet curve of her ass cradled his stiff penis. With another groan, his grip relaxed.
She screamed. Struggling, she broke loose of his hold.
Shit! Reaching out, he snagged her long ponytail and yanked her back hard. With his other hand, he strangled her next scream into a whimper. “Do that again,” he grated, “I’ll use my knife.” The honed blade was secure in his pocket but she didn’t know that.
“I have money,” she croaked. “Three hundred. Tips. In my pocket. Please! Don’t—”
“Shh. Don’t fight me. Shh,” he crooned into her hair. He tugged a chloroform-laced rag from his pants pocket and fitted it over her face. “Just give me another chance, Angel, and everything will be fine.”
This time she’d make the right choice because, God only knew, he’d truly go insane if he had to kill her all over again.
Chapter One
Kolthern Ranch, outside Dallas, Texas.
“Til death us do part, darlin’. I keep what’s mine!”
Rachel James jolted awake in her apartment above the Kolthern carriage house, the harsh words scraping her nerves as if there weren’t six months and fifteen hundred miles standing between her and her ex-husband’s threats.
<
br /> For a long moment, their last night together flayed her mind with sickening memories. Punishing sex. The pain of his whip, blows that cracked one rib. Two. But it was the vicious threats that cut her to the heart, those scars never healed.
Eyes squeezed shut, she smothered the nightmare, sucked air into her lungs and ordered her body to unlock from its fetal position. Her pulse stampeded as she flipped on a table lamp and slid off the sturdy rough hewn daybed that doubled as her sofa. Shaking with fatigue, she reached for the suitcase she’d half-filled before dozing off.
“If you don’t finish packing and get your fanny out of Texas,” she muttered, “your worst nightmare’s going to walk right through your front door.” A too brief reprieve, divorce, name change, and concerted efforts to wrest some measure of control over her life meant nothing now that Greg had somehow manipulated his release from jail. Dallas suddenly didn’t feel quite far enough from San Francisco.
It took less than ten minutes to finish packing her little girl’s belongings. Rachel was topping off a second suitcase with her own clothes when she heard someone moving in the half-empty five-car garage beneath her. She froze. The line between her nightmare world and the real one blurred. Blood thundered in her ears.
Why hadn’t she left yesterday?
She cocked her head to listen for another sound that might reveal the intruder’s exact location. She only needed forty-two seconds to run the length of the apartment, wake Amanda, and climb down the emergency ladder fixed outside the bedroom window. She’d timed it. Had she missed the squeak on the first two steps? Greg wasn’t scheduled to be released for several more hours and it would take him time to locate her, but for all she knew, he could already be standing outside her flimsy door preparing to kick it in.
Squeak.
Thump.
Squeak.
Thump.
Her knees almost buckled when she identified the familiar sounds. Cane thumping the wooden risers in counterpoint to her footsteps, Katherine Kolthern, Rachel’s landlady, boss, and friend began her slow climb up the interior stairs. Rachel leaned her forehead on the doorjamb and listened to the maddeningly independent woman make her way to the small landing on the other side of the door.
Rachel gritted her teeth against an impulse to rush out to help her. Finally, she unlocked the door with a smile. “I’m sorry, Katy.” She invited her into the apartment with a small wave. “Did my lights wake you?”
“I don’t sleep much. I looked out my bedroom window and saw you were already up and about.” Her sharp gaze fell on Rachel’s mussed bed, her open suitcase. Making a rude noise, she thunked her cane on the wood plank floor. “I have a good mind to march myself down to little Danny Johnson’s office to tell him he has no call to upset you like this.”
A genuine smile tugged at Rachel’s lips at the thought of Katy waiting in her nightgown, robe and snakeskin boots on the D.A.’s doorstep when he arrived for work later that morning. With her long, gray hair floating in wild disarray around her shoulders the woman looked fierce. Or she would if one discounted her five-foot three-inch frame. It might be worth sticking around Dallas to see Katy shake a chastising finger at the six-foot-six descendent of a reputed gunslinger.
“Daniel did me a favor warning me about Greg’s release,” she said. “I’m grateful he kept in touch with his friend at the FBI.” No one in San Francisco bothered to warn her the evidence in Greg’s case—evidence she’d supplied the FBI—had disappeared, forcing them to withdraw their felony fraud and theft charges before they could go to trial next month.
With one look at the digital clock on the side table, Rachel’s heart sank to the handwoven rag rug beneath her bare feet. She’d planned to be long gone by now. Arranging for Katy and the nurseries to be looked after once she’d gone had taken most of the last thirty-six hours. If she didn’t leave soon, she might as well throw herself at her ex-husband’s feet when he showed up and beg for mercy.
Not if she had anything to say about it!
“Confronting the Devil is hard, child,” Katy said, “but I wish you wouldn’t run away. You said it yourself. He won’t expect to find you here.”
Rachel was startled to have her own words thrown back at her. When she ran home to Dallas after Greg was hauled off to jail, she’d had to convince Katy to let her take care of her. The sixty-year-old woman was too fragile from her heart attack and she was the closest thing Rachel had to a mother since she was a child. She’d been without a parent altogether after her father walked out of her life ten years ago. Katy was family. She loved her.
She also owed her. It was Rachel’s fault Greg got close enough to the older woman to decimate her livelihood, along with the others he’d conned across two states. The authorities had only found a small portion of the money he’d scammed, so her friend might yet be forced to sell off a chunk of her family’s homestead. She’d lost so much already.
It broke Rachel’s heart that she couldn’t stay to fix everything. “I have to go, Katy. I’m sorry.”
Katy thunked her cane on the floor again. “Has it occurred to you that maybe you’re being paranoid and he’s not coming at all?”
Her frustration palpable—they’d argued her decision to leave since the D.A.’s call—she reminded herself that Katy wasn’t in San Francisco in those days before Greg’s arrest. She hadn’t seen the obsessive rage in his eyes when he’d beaten Rachel before trying to escape prosecution. Her friend was in an ICU ward fighting for her life after a heart attack provoked by Greg’s con. Another charge to throw at his feet.
Rachel’s laugh came out rusty. “He’s coming. Take my word for it.” Hurrying across the room to the battered sideboard that served as her dresser, she grabbed her mama’s silver mirror, comb and brush set. She carefully rolled the precious items in a wad of white cotton panties in one corner of the suitcase.
Katy pushed the bag out of reach and perched on the side of the daybed. She patted the cleared space beside her. “Sit, child. I get that you’re spooked. But you can’t let it gnaw at your soul like snails on a lettuce patch. You’re not alone any more. Let me help.”
Too antsy to sit, she paced the long, narrow room instead. Twelve steps to the front door in the kitchenette. Twelve in the opposite direction to the hallway. “I’m supposed to take care of you, Katy, not the other way around.”
“Bah! You’ve spent the past six months nursing me back to health. You’ve worked yourself to the bone from dawn to dusk to single-handedly save Kolthern Nurseries. Stop beating yourself up for what that no good, no account polecat did to me. We were both fooled, girl. None of this is your fault.” She grabbed Rachel’s hand as she passed, stopped her in her tracks. “Rachel, you’re the daughter Henry and I could never have. Please let me do something. I’ll never forgive myself if you and Amanda gets hurt again.”
As she hugged the other woman, tears threatened to slide down Rachel’s cheeks. She’d not heard such a declaration of love from anyone since she was ten years old and her mama died. Except from Amanda. But her daughter, tucked in the single bedroom down the hall, didn’t tell Rachel she loved her anymore. She didn’t speak at all. Not since the horrible night her daddy almost killed her mama.
Rachel walked to the open window where the cool breeze fluttered the muslin curtains she’d made late one night in a fit of sleeplessness. She craned to hear the Kolthern cattle lowing in the field a quarter of a mile away. Rain-washed essences drifted from the family herb garden situated by the back porch near the big house. She inhaled the aroma-rich air, redolent with blossoming honeysuckle and freshly turned garden soil, hoping to gather enough memories to give her strength to do what she knew was necessary.
She’d gotten a lot of practice leaving her life behind thanks to her nomadic father but this was different. This had become her home! “We were supposed to be set free the day Greg went to jail,” she whispered.
Katy heard her. “He should rot for an eternity for what he did to the two of you, honey.”
<
br /> There was no arguing that point. Katy was the only one in Dallas who knew Greg as more than a consummate con artist. Her friend had seen the scars he’d whipped into Rachel’s belly and back. That one fit of rage would haunt her forever. However, the last thing she wanted to think about was the brutal end of her sham marriage. Her daughter needed her mama to be strong.
With the trial, she’d hoped to remove Amanda from her father’s sphere of influence before he could hurt her, too. They hadn’t escaped soon enough. Amanda didn’t carry her mother’s physical scars. She’d buried her wounds inside a prison of silence. The physical pain Rachel carried out of her bedroom six months ago was nothing to the agonizing grief she’d experienced when she discovered her four-year-old daughter in the hall curled into a ball around her new baby doll.
Guilt tore at her conscience. Her poor daughter must have heard everything through those closed doors. She suspected Greg said something to the child before he left them alone in the house, too. Amanda wasn’t saying. PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, according to the specialist Rachel found upon their arrival in Dallas. The label didn’t matter. Her little girl was hurting and she required more than a handful of sessions with the therapist to break through her trauma.
They’d run out of time.
She placed a protective hand over her stomach. The noose Greg held around Rachel’s neck for so long had loosened these past months of freedom, but he still had the power to yank her back. All he had to do was get his hands on Amanda again.
“What I don’t understand, Rachel,” Katy said, dragging her away from her dark thoughts, “is why you’re suddenly tearing up the roots you’ve planted here. You have friends who can help you stand up to Greg. Your great-aunt’s estate will be finalized in a few months, no matter what your mother’s family tries to do to break the will. You’ll have all the money you need to surround yourself and Amanda with the best security money can buy. What aren’t you telling me?”
