“We’ve got time.”
“It’s not a big deal. It happens to plenty of women. It was two years ago, and I shouldn’t—”
“Don’t give me that. I know you, Dana.” He rubbed her back in slow circles, urging her to lean on him. “I’ve read your books. I knew what you were like even before I met you. Your emotions run deep.”
She shuddered.
He held her, simply held her. He expected her to pull away, but instead she sighed and pressed her face into his shoulder.
He brushed his lips over her hair. “Want to talk about it?”
She breathed deeply a few times. “It was a boy. I carried him for five months. I had already felt him move before—” She cleared her throat. “He was too small to survive. My marriage didn’t survive, either. Hank left me.”
He remembered the other things she had said, how she had assumed he hadn’t cared and had turned his back. She must have been talking about her husband. What kind of jerk had the man been, to desert her when she needed him most?
But when it came to a man’s character, Remy realized he wasn’t in a position to judge anyone. “You would make a great mother,” he said. “I can see it in your work. Maybe someday…” He paused, unwilling to complete the thought. He didn’t want to picture Dana remarrying and having more children. He didn’t want to consider her being touched by another man. “I’m sorry, Dana,” he said.
“And I’m sorry for saying those things about you. I…wasn’t thinking.”
“Don’t worry about it.” He gave her a gentle squeeze. “You okay now?”
She rubbed her forehead against his coat. “I’m okay. I don’t dwell on it, really I don’t. Just sometimes out of the blue it hits me.”
“I understand. It’s that way for me with Chantal, too. Some times are worse than others.”
“I’ve seen that.” She tipped back her head to look at him. “Like at the park.”
It was the wrong thing for her to say, he thought. Instantly the memory of their kiss in the twilight flooded his mind. This embrace was supposed to be for comfort, but she felt too good in his arms. It wouldn’t take much for it to change. The way she was looking up at him, with the trace of tears brightening her eyes and sympathy softening her lips, could make him forget the reason they were here.
He focused on her mouth. Another mistake. All he could think of was how she had tasted, how she had responded. He hadn’t been acting. Had she?
Headlights slid across the blinds. He glanced at the window and tensed. “Dana,” he began.
“Oh, God,” she murmured. She pushed away. “Someone’s coming.”
He waited, straining to hear. “Sounds like it was just someone turning the corner.” He bent down to gather the papers that had spilled out of the file folder when he’d dropped it. “But we shouldn’t push our luck.”
She crossed her arms. “I’m sorry, Remy. This is just awful.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“No, I mean I shouldn’t be thinking of myself. This was a horrible way for you to find out about your baby. Sylvia should have told you she was pregnant.”
“I’m not surprised that she didn’t.”
“Why not?”
He braced his fingertips on the floor and looked up at her. “Because she knew she wasn’t carrying my child.”
“What?”
“We hadn’t slept together for almost a year.”
Her eyes widened as she realized the implication of what he had said.
“I had suspected she had a lover,” he continued as he stretched to reach a paper that had slid under the shelf. “I told the police about it right from the start, but there wasn’t any proof. My insistence made me come across as paranoid and jealous, and it ended up helping their case against me.”
“Oh, Remy. I’m sorry.”
“You’re right, though. Sylvia should have told me about the baby. It wouldn’t have been easy, but we could have tried to work it out.”
“If she hadn’t miscarried, you would have found out eventually. She couldn’t have hidden her pregnancy forever.”
He glanced at the last page of the doctor’s notes, intending to slip it into the folder. He inhaled sharply as a word caught his eye.
“What is it?” Dana asked.
He pushed himself to his feet and grabbed his flashlight off the shelf to shine it directly on the handwriting. When he realized what it was that he was seeing, his hand shook.
How could he have been so wrong about the woman he’d married? Considering the state of their relationship, he could understand why she would be tempted to break her vows by having an affair. But this?
“Remy?”
“Sylvia knew I’d never find out.” He closed the folder and tucked it under his arm. “She didn’t have a miscarriage.”
“But—”
“She had an abortion.”
Chapter 11
The fire crackled behind the spark guard, flames licking along the fresh wood—there had been more than enough kindling to build the blaze. Heat pushed outward like a firm hand, forcing Dana to slide farther back on the rug. Still, she drew her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs as if to warm herself. Lately she had been getting a lot of chills that couldn’t be dispelled by a fire.
Sylvia Haines Leverette was gone. Whatever her faults, she was beyond blame. It was pointless to detest a dead woman.
Yet that’s what Dana did, because even dead, Sylvia had hurt Remy.
How could any woman be unfaithful to a man like Remy? With six-foot-three of hard-muscled male in her bed each night, how could she want to look elsewhere? The proof of her unfaithfulness was in her pregnancy. Dana believed Remy completely when he had said the child couldn’t have been his. The pain in his gaze had left no room for doubt.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Dana would have felt sympathy for Sylvia if she had lost the baby in a miscarriage, no matter how the baby had happened to be conceived. Yet now that she knew Remy’s wife had deliberately terminated her pregnancy…
Dana pressed her eyes to her knees, swallowing hard. It wasn’t fair. She would give anything to be able to bear a child of her own. Just one. Sylvia had been about to have her second, and she hadn’t wanted it. Seeing that lab report had brought everything back with a vengeance. Two years had passed, but Dana vividly remembered the joy of carrying a life within her. And she would never forget the grief that had followed.
As she had told Remy, miscarriages happened all the time. Many women went through that heartache and got on with their lives, but when Dana had lost her baby, she had also lost her husband and the dreams she had held for their future. The loss that had been the worst, though, was her loss of faith in her own judgment.
A weight settled at her feet. She lifted her head to watch Morty shape himself into a loaf on her toes. Grateful for his warmth, she dropped her hand to his fur.
He did a rumbling purr, his way of letting her know that he might tolerate her attention for a while.
Remy sat down beside her. Morty looked at him expectantly, and Remy obliged him by ruffling the fur behind his ears. The cat closed his eyes to slits and purred again smugly.
“He adores you, you know,” Dana said.
“He’s pretty easy to please, for a celebrity.” Remy stroked his palm along the cat’s back until his hand met Dana’s. He squeezed her fingers. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine, but I should be asking you that.”
“Why?”
She rested her cheek on her knee so she could look at him. Remy had been subdued since they had returned from the clinic, and it was little wonder. After what he had already been through, how much more pain could he take? “It had to have been a shock for you, what we found out tonight.”
He withdrew his hand and gazed at the fire. “It confirmed what I already suspected about Sylvia having a lover, so that part of it wasn’t surprising.” He paused. “But I’m disappointed that she felt s
he had to rid herself of the child.”
She could see by the drawn expression on his face that he was more than disappointed. The fact that his wife had had an abortion—in secret—had hit him hard. It was obvious to Dana that he loved the child he already had. How would he have dealt with this one?
He would have loved it like his own, she thought immediately. It didn’t matter what he said about his background or his juvenile record. The man who had held her so patiently while she had told him about the baby she had lost wouldn’t have rejected an innocent child. He wouldn’t have blamed the baby for the sins of the mother. If Sylvia had wanted to mend their relationship, he would have found a way to accept her child into their family.
She smiled wryly when she realized what she was doing. She had just reminded herself of her lack of faith in her judgment, so when had she started putting her faith in Remy? He had lied to her; he was a convicted felon; he was everything any mother would warn her daughter about; yet he was the first man she had opened up to in years.
Once more she wondered how any woman could have betrayed a man like Remy. “Do you have any idea who…”
“Who her lover was?” he finished for her.
She nodded.
“No. I was too busy with my business that last year to keep a close eye on Sylvia. Any spare time I had I spent with Chantal. Sylvia had plenty of opportunity to see whoever she wanted, but I never noticed any one man paying more attention to her than usual.” His lips thinned. “She was good at keeping secrets.”
“I guess she was.”
“I’ve been through everything in her medical file, and there’s nothing that gives any hints about the child’s father in there, either.”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
He swung his gaze back to hers. “Of course, I want to know. I need to know.”
“I mean, Sylvia’s dead, so—”
“Because her lover killed her.”
“How… What makes you so sure? You told me you didn’t know who did it.”
“I don’t know who he is, but I know what he is. He had to be her lover. Everything points to it.”
“How?”
“The same reasoning that threw suspicion on me also implicates him. There hadn’t been any sign of forced entry, and nothing had been missing, so it wouldn’t have been an attempted robbery. There hadn’t been any signs of a struggle, either, so Sylvia must have known her killer.”
Dana hugged her legs more tightly, feeling another chill. “Go on.”
“It wouldn’t have been a casual acquaintance, because she was in the bedroom when I found her.”
“Okay. What else?”
“According to the coroner’s report, the first wound was the fatal one, but there were seven more.”
Dana made a noise in her throat.
Remy paused. “I’m sorry. This is upsetting you.”
“No, I just—” She pressed her lips together briefly. “I have a vivid imagination.”
“Sorry.”
She waved her hand. “Go on.”
“The brutality and the location of the attack point to a crime of passion,” he said. His voice was level, mechanical, as if he were describing the puzzle in a mystery story. “The killer had to be someone who was passionate about Sylvia. I believe it was her lover, but there’s no way to prove my theory. The prosecution decided her husband was a likelier suspect.”
“The medical records could help you, after all,” Dana said. “They could prove that Sylvia did have a lover.”
He shook his head. “From what I read in the file, there was no paternity test done on the fetus, so I still have no way of proving she was unfaithful. The fact that she wanted an abortion would only demonstrate how bad our marriage was. Unless I can prove the identity of her lover, this information about her pregnancy would hurt my case instead of helping it.”
She tried to think objectively about what he had described, but it was difficult. Remy had had almost a year of practice at distancing himself from what had happened. She couldn’t. This was no mystery-story puzzle, this was his life. “Remy, can I ask you something?”
“Sure. What?”
“Why did you marry Sylvia?”
He laughed. It wasn’t from humor. “Along with the other question, who killed her, I’ve been asking myself that every day.”
“From what you’ve told me about her, you two didn’t have much in common.”
“No, we didn’t. If train tracks ran through Hainesborough, I would have been from the wrong side of them.”
“Then how did you two meet?”
He slanted her a look. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”
“Yes.”
“I met Sylvia when I was working on an addition to the country club. I liked the way she looked in her tennis whites, and she got hot seeing me sweat.”
Dana could easily picture what Remy would look like in jeans and a work shirt, with his muscles flexing and damp from exertion. Oh, yes, he could raise any woman’s temperature, even a tennis-playing member of a country club.
“We had an affair,” he said bluntly. “She wanted to keep it secret because she knew her family wouldn’t approve, and because she got an added thrill out of it that way. I didn’t care where we met as long as it was private enough to do what I wanted. When she told me she was pregnant, I stopped playing along. I insisted that she marry me.”
It was foolish to feel a pang at the idea of Remy being intimate with another woman, especially now that the woman was dead. It didn’t surprise her that he would insist on marriage, though. Considering his own unstable childhood, he would have wanted to provide a secure home for his child. “She must have been very beautiful.”
He paused. “Yes, she was that.”
“What was she like?”
“Like a poor man’s dream,” he said. “Porcelain skin, a mouth that looked sexy when she pouted and a cloud of auburn hair. It took me too long to realize that the beauty was only on the surface.”
“Did you love her?”
“I thought I did. She was the mother of my child, and I hoped we could build a decent life together, despite the differences in our backgrounds. For a while, I thought we had a chance.”
“What happened?”
He lifted his shoulders. “The infatuation wore off. Sylvia realized she was stuck with a man who wore his hair too long and had calluses on his hands, and she wanted her old life back. I tried to give it to her. I went to her father for loans to expand my business, I built her a fancy house, I worked twelve-hour days to give her what she asked for. It wasn’t enough. It just got worse.”
“But you tried.”
“I didn’t love her anymore, Dana. She wasn’t stupid, she realized I was just going through the motions. We became like two strangers living in the same house. The only bond left between us was Chantal.”
She thought about that for a while. “It’s ironic,” she said. “I had been convinced that a child would save my marriage.”
His gaze softened with sympathy. “Was it in trouble before your miscarriage?”
“Yes,” she answered honestly. “Hank wanted a big family. So did I. That’s why I’d married him, for the home and family and all that. There was this…emptiness inside me. I had put all my hopes on having his baby.”
“Having a child with him might not have helped.” He reached out to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, his knuckles gently grazing her cheek. “I was wrong to get married only for the sake of a child. Any relationship should be based on more than that.”
She tipped her head, unconsciously seeking more of his touch. “What do you think a relationship should be based on?”
“Depends what kind you’re talking about.”
“Give me an example.”
He rubbed his thumb along the line of her jaw. “Between a man and a woman?”
“Well, yes.”
“Before I met Sylvia, I would have said sex.”
“Oh. And now?�
�
“I think there has to be more.”
“Like what?”
“Common interests. Respect.” He paused. “Trust.”
“Yes, there would have to be trust.”
“And honesty.”
“I would have thought they sort of go together.”
“That’s right.” He reached for the cat, carefully lifting Morty from her feet and setting him down on the rug closer to the hearth. Morty glared at him briefly before he averted his head with feline disdain and went back to sleep. Remy watched the fire for a while, then turned to face Dana and took her hand. “It’s my turn to ask you something.”
“Go ahead.”
“Do you think I’m a murderer?”
The question took her off guard. Her hand jerked. She started to pull away, but he hung on, curling her hand into his chest.
“I need to know,” he said. “You’ve said it doesn’t make any difference, and I’ve told myself it shouldn’t, but it does. It makes a hell of a difference.”
“Remy…”
“Please, Dana. Tell me the truth. Do you believe I killed my wife?”
It was hard for her to hold his gaze. She had danced around the question for days. She should have known she couldn’t keep ducking the issue indefinitely.
Do you believe I killed my wife?
She searched for the doubts that had served her before, but they were no longer there. Somehow, when she hadn’t been looking, they had crumbled and fallen away.
She had thought this would be harder, she had agonized about this for more than a week, but the answer was easy, because it had been there all along. She had just been too afraid to admit it. Although she might never be ready to trust her judgment, that didn’t change the fact that the judgment had been made.
Of course she didn’t believe Remy had killed his wife. She never had. Otherwise she wouldn’t have lifted a finger to help him, no matter what he had threatened her with.
She’d used her suspicions the same way she had used her anger. It was a way to distance herself from him, to keep her heart safe.
It hadn’t worked, had it?
“Dana?”
She blinked. In the firelight his eyes were shadowed. The planes of his face looked harsh and his expression closed. He should have looked dangerous. Instead, for all of his size and strength, in this moment he looked more vulnerable than when he’d been helpless and half-frozen on her doorstep.
Fugitive Hearts Page 16
