by Kaylea Cross
The cold seeped through her coat and made her shiver. She turned away from him and walked toward the house.
He followed. “I really do think Blackwell came back. Might be coming back all the time. I know I heard him last night.”
“Did you see him?”
Silence.
“Did you see anything?”
He didn’t respond.
A short bark of a laugh escaped her throat. “Teenagers hang out back by the creek sometimes. I told you they drive their snowmobiles all over the place. I found cigarette butts before. And empty beer bottles.”
“It’s him.” He caught up with her and grabbed her by the arm to stop her. Turned her around. His gaze cut hard and cold. “Listen to me. This is serious. I think you know him. I think he might be watching you. What if he didn’t just come here because of the grave? What if he buried me on your land for a reason?”
For a second, fear stabbed through her, but she pushed it away. That was the old Ashley. She refused to live the rest of her life in fear. She watched his face, his gaze intent on hers. He believed, with everything he was, what he was saying. She didn’t.
Regret washed over her. “I understand that you can’t let go of Blackwell. I have my own issues in the letting-go department. But please leave me out of this.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
His cerulean eyes looked nearly black in the twilight. His gaze held hers. “Because I care.”
The quiet admission sent her for a spin.
Especially since, deep down, she cared about him too. She wished things were different, for both of them. She swallowed the lump in her throat. “How did this happen? How did we get here from anger and hate?”
His eyes gentled. “I never hated you. I was angry at you because you were supposed to be my straight line to Blackwell, but it was becoming obvious pretty fast you weren’t. And I hated myself because I was attracted to you even back when I did think that you were in league with the bastard.”
She stared at him. “I don’t know what to say to that.”
“Say that you’ll keep yourself safe until this is over.”
“Safe from what? From imaginary trouble? You know how long I’ve been doing that? You know how hard I’ve been fighting the anxiety. I’m making progress. I’m moving forward. I’m trying not to hide from my own fears. I can’t start now to hide from yours. Don’t ask me that.”
One moment they were glaring at each other, and the next the heat was back, his gaze dipping to her lips. And, yes, part of her wanted him to kiss her again. Part of her wanted more than a kiss. Even as desire tingled across her skin, an ache grew inside her chest. Because she knew what little good it ever did to wish for impossible things.
He’d never want anyone half as much as he wanted Blackwell. So why did he have to mess with her? Why did he have to kiss her in the middle of her damn kitchen where she would now think of that kiss every time she walked in there? Why did he-
She froze.
The cold wind slammed into her, but the ice that spread in her stomach was colder. Oh God.
Humiliation and a sense of betrayal washed over her. She scampered back. “Are you playing some kind of sick game? Did you kiss me in front of the window last night, with all the lights on, because you thought Blackwell was watching?” Her stomach turned. She was going to be sick.
He stared at her, his face darkening. But he didn’t deny her words.
Her eyes burned. He opened his mouth to say something, but she lifted a hand to stop him. The darkness he carried, the paranoia, was too much. She was already fighting her own demons. She couldn’t take on his. “I don’t want any of this, Jack.”
“You might not have a choice. If he has an interest in you, like I think—”
“You need help.” She turned on her heels and hurried away from him.
He called after her. “Have you canceled the party?”
She glanced back over her shoulder.
His hands shoved into his pockets, tension bracketed his mouth as he watched her.
Brady Blackwell’s shadow had destroyed his entire life. But it wasn’t going to destroy hers. “I’m sorry about your sister,” she said. “I’m sorry what it did to you. But this is my life. And I’m going to live it.” Then she ran up the steps.
She went inside and locked the door behind her, had no intention of letting him in if he came up and rang the bell. He didn’t.
The ache in her chest deepened. She refused to cry as she took off her coat and kicked off her boots. For the first time in forever, here was the guy she could have been interested in, someone she actually had chemistry with.
He had strength, despite his deep, dangerous flaw. She was attracted to that strength—maybe because of her myriad weaknesses—but Jack’s strength wasn’t what she needed. She needed to find her own strength. She needed to stand on her own two feet. She needed to fight for what she wanted.
She moved to get the mop to deal with the mud she’d brought in, but the cell phone ringing on the coffee table stopped her. Her father’s number flashed on the display.
“It’s me,” Maddie chirped on the other end.
“Hey, birthday girl. What’s new in the big city?”
“Bertha took me shopping for a birthday dress. She said it’s so pretty it would make princesses weep.” Excitement poured through the line.
“I can’t wait to see it.”
“Am I getting a lot of presents?”
“You’ll have to wait and see.”
“Moooom!” A moment passed in disgruntled silence, then, “Grandpa would like to talk to you.”
Her father picked up the line then, and they talked about what he should bring. Bertha had apparently baked up a storm already.
“About the birthday party tomorrow…” she began, thinking of Jack.
Her father waited.
“This weekend…” She couldn’t say it. The phone conversation when she’d canceled her trip to the city still lived vividly in her mind.
“If you’re having problems—” he said, his tone resigned.
Did he expect her to beg off again?
“No problem,” she rushed to say. “I just wanted to let you know they’re calling for snow. The kids will have nice, clean snow to build snowmen with. And I’ll drag the old sleds out of the garage.”
Jack Sullivan and his all-consuming obsession would not be allowed to ruin her relationship with her daughter. She was reclaiming her life. And she was starting it by driving into the best bakery in town and picking up the biggest cake they had.
* * *
“Did you kiss me in front of the window last night, with all the lights on, because you thought Blackwell was watching?”
Had he?
The question haunted Jack as he drove to his next meeting.
Had he kissed her to tick off Blackwell? Not consciously. But on some level…
Maybe, partially, yes. Get Blackwell angry. Get him to make a rushed move on Jack. Get him to make a mistake.
Had that been there, in the back of his mind?
He hated himself for the possibility as much as Ashley hated him for it. She had every right.
He was crossing too many lines. But he didn’t know how to stop now, he thought as he drove to the Adamo residence to officially interview Bobby.
While it was a generally acknowledged fact that teachers were underpaid, some school administrators fared pretty well, he thought as he pulled up in front of the largest house on the street, a stone-covered colonial with giant banks of windows, three-bay garage, and professional landscaping.
The principal himself opened the door when Jack rang the bell. He looked even more unhappy now than at the school early that morning, his tone clipped as he said, “Detective Sullivan. Come in.”
He guided Jack to the library that didn’t quite rival William Price’s but was nevertheless impressive, with a conference table in the middle. Bobby sat there, looking a lot less cocky now
, next to his pale-faced mother who was wringing her hands, and another man Jack assumed to be their lawyer.
He sat as the introductions were made, then turned to Bobby, the reason for his being here. He wanted to be done, to be able to close this case that Bing had assigned to him only as a distraction in the first place. “So have you remembered anything since we talked this morning?”
The lawyer responded instead of the teenager. “Bobby is willing to acknowledge that the Internet account in question is his, but he had no idea the items listed were stolen.”
“And where did he get these items he claims he doesn’t know were stolen?”
Bobby swallowed, looking at his father with resentment, but both his father and the lawyer nodded, prodding him to go ahead.
And Bobby did, naming his friends one by one.
“Do you have any stolen items in your possession?”
“No,” he immediately protested.
“You realize that since you confessed, I can get a warrant for this house? You came clean about the listings. How about we do this all the way?”
The principal glared; the lawyer said nothing. But Mrs. Adamo’s quiet words, “Bobby, honey?” did the trick.
“Tyler gave me some stuff.” The kid shifted on his seat, quickly adding, “I thought they were his. I don’t know anything about any burglaries.”
Jack nodded, even if he didn’t believe a word. The kids were caught; the burglaries would stop. Bobby would get special consideration for turning on his friends. Life wasn’t perfect, but progress had been made in the case. Bing would be happy.
“How about I take what you have in evidence right now and avoid the whole search-warrant thing?”
“Absolutely,” the principal answered for his son, then snapped at him, “Bobby?”
The boy got up. “It’s um… The stuff is in the basement.”
They all followed him down to a fully furnished space that looked like a college-dorm rec room, complete with flat-screen TV, pool table, video games, even a full-size refrigerator for snacks. The space was as cluttered as a teenage boy’s hangout would be, sports paraphernalia everywhere.
Bobby picked through the mess and handed over a laptop, a couple of phones, a Skilsaw, a dozen top-brand golf clubs, and a ratty old fan. “That’s all I have here.” He glanced at his father. “I swear.”
Jack catalogued the items and gave the lawyer a receipt. “I want a full, written confession.”
“I’ll bring it to the station first thing in the morning,” the lawyer promised.
“Why the fan?” Jack asked on the way up the stairs. “It can’t be worth two bucks.”
Bobby gave a sheepish shrug. “We plug it in when we hang down here, so nobody upstairs hears us talking.”
While the kid’s father chewed the boy out, Jack could only shake his head.
He couldn’t believe Blackwell was out there while he was wasting his time on two-bit stuff like this. At least he was almost done with the case. Go back to the office, have the other kids and their parents called in, make the arrests. Maybe that would put him back into Bing’s good graces again.
That would be nice, since he was about to redouble his efforts to find Blackwell. He’d already lost Ashley. Not that he ever really had her. Maybe under different circumstances, he could have. But he’d now lost even that remote chance. He sure had nothing else to lose.
This was it, the endgame. He was on a collision course with Blackwell, and he had no intention of stopping until one of them was dead.
Chapter Twelve
He stood in the middle of his life’s work, an installation that filled the entire top floor of one of the nicest buildings in Broslin. His soundproofed workshop was down in the basement. The downstairs he left as it had been when he’d bought the abandoned building. If anyone somehow peeked in through a boarded-up window, let them see nothing.
But the top floor, here he spent money. The space could have been part of a wing in the Louvre. Not that he ever wanted his art to be moved there. This was his hometown. His museum should be here, maybe with the town named after him eventually. Let the French come here if they wanted to see his work. He was proud to be an American.
The canvases that hung on the walls had been painted in living blood. They’d been his first true creations, the very thing that eventually led him onto the right path.
He’d been in North Carolina to pick up a car he’d bought online. He met a young woman at the hotel bar. She came back to his room with him.
And then she changed her mind, right when things were starting to get interesting.
He hadn’t meant to kill her.
She shoved him first. He shoved her back, not that hard, really. But she’d had too much to drink, and she hit her head on the edge of the desk. There was blood, but his open suitcase on the floor caught most of it.
He didn’t panic. He wrapped her head in a towel, pulled a plastic bag over that, got her out of his room in the middle of the night, drove her to the beach, near the rocks, removed the towel and bag, and dumped her in.
When they’d found her, her death had been ruled an accident. There’d been alcohol in her system. The police had said she’d slipped on the rocks, and the rising tide dragged in her body.
He didn’t realize what he had until he came home and unpacked a white shirt that had blood all over it, the pattern amazing in its complexity, the color more real than anything he’d ever seen in a gallery.
And then he realized what he’d been doing wrong all these years he’d been trying to create art. He’d been missing the human element. So he went back to being an artist, this time using the most valuable media.
The women he took he honored with his choice. His art made them immortal.
He had a good selection of paintings now, even collages, but the centerpiece of his legacy was his three-dimensional works. He liked to walk up here, in his very own exhibit, literally walk through his art that represented death and life and resurrection.
He created it all, and he would protect it.
He didn’t like having to worry about his secret treasure. It interfered with his creative process. But he was ready to end the distraction at last.
Before the day was over, Jack Sullivan would be dead.
* * *
The birthday party was in full swing, Ashley’s head spinning. But it was worth anything to see her daughter silly-giggles happy.
Maddie and Jenny, one of her little friends, were going around the house with a bouquet of two dozen balloons in every color of the rainbow, letting them go one by one to float up to the ceiling for decoration. Heather, Jenny’s mom, the first mom to arrive, provided assistance.
“You have some pretty good works up there.” William Price came down the stairs from the loft, noiseless in his Italian-leather loafers.
“Thanks.” Ashley smiled at her father, relaxing a little. She put out the sandwiches, all shaped like crowns or ponies or butterflies—with the help of Christmas cookie cutters. She had plenty of butterflies in her stomach too. She wanted everything to be perfect.
His gold watch glinted from under his shirtsleeve as he reached out to adjust a tray. “You think you have enough material for a show?”
“Almost.” She was doing well with time. Whether or not she could go all the way to New York for an opening was still a question. But she was working on it. This morning, she had driven to the town bakery to pick up the cake. She’d even done her grocery shopping during the daytime.
“I know I’ve been hard on you,” her father said as she set out utensils and napkins that had colorful balloons on them, then added paper cups with the same pattern.
“After your mother’s death…” He linked his hands together behind his back. “I just wanted everything to be normal. The rumors about the unfortunate affair with DaRosa—” His lips flattened for a second. “When a family has the kind of standing in society that ours does, there’s a lot of pressure. One is tempted to keep up a façade even
at a personal cost.”
She busied herself with refolding the napkins, but she couldn’t stop the memories from coming back. Her mother in that mental institution, the scandal of the high-society gatherings, all the guessing, all the digging for gruesome detail, then her death.
Then, less than a year after Abigail Hastings Price’s celebrity funeral, her teenage daughter falling pregnant and accusing a pillar of society, a man two decades her senior, of seducing her. DaRosa denied it. And her father kept her quiet, squelching the rumors as fast as they’d begun. He’d been in negotiations on a hundred-million-dollar business deal with DaRosa at the time.
“I don’t suppose you read the business pages much?” he asked now.
She shook her head, then felt a little guilty. Whatever her father’s faults were, he’d always taken an interest in her work, always supported it, always asked, kept track, sent friends and clients to her shows. But she’d shown very little interest in his company over the years. “How is business?”
“We’ve had some issues with DaRosa’s branch. Some accounting discrepancies were discovered. He’s been discredited to a great degree, I’m afraid. Well, ruined, according to the business analysts.”
She stared at him. “Will that drag the whole company down?”
“Since he was ousted by the board of directors almost immediately and forced to sell his shares back at a discount, I think we retained credibility. Stock price took a dip, but for the past few days, it’s been inching back steadily. Our stockholders seem convinced that we’ve made meaningful changes.”
Something in his voice made her wonder if he’d somehow engineered DaRosa’s bad luck personally, and there was more to the story than he was telling.
Then he said, “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you back then.”
She blinked. “Why believe me now?”
“Maddie looks like him,” he said simply. “And I know now that you don’t have any of your mother’s flair for drama. Even in the face of insurmountable difficulties, you do whatever you have to and manage.”
