by Marata Eros
“No,” I say, stroking her head, my fingertips catching in all those curls. “It's our mutual pasts and chemistry. But I love you—the woman.”
My hand moves down, down.
I squeeze her ass once then drive a finger deep where my cock's just been. Her head falls back, a thready breath squeezing out of her. My lips move to her throat, pecking a trail of heat along every part I can reach.
“Tell me,” I say, pumping my finger inside her slick wetness. A second finger joins the first, and she groans.
“Yes,” she whispers.
I move her backward, eyeing the towel she dumped in the middle of my cavernous bathroom.
“Yes what?” I ask, still pumping as I glide her backward.
“Yes, I love you.”
“This? You love this?”
I lay her on the towel, and her legs spread before me. I keep driving my fingers in and out, my gaze locked on her heavy eyelids.
“Yes,” she breathes, her fingers going to her clit.
“And what else?” I ask quietly because I have to know.
“I love you.”
I push her fingers away and my mouth finds her moist center.
“The man,” she finishes in a whisper.
I stay between her thighs for an hour.
TWELVE
K.
This has to be the strangest thing in the history of my life. I am visiting Chloe in the hospital.
We move through the corridor until we find the room she has been assigned.
I glance up and see the correct numbers attached to the door.
“409,” I say, and Chet pushes the door wide.
Chloe's lying on the bed, hooked up to IVs. She's naturally fair, something that’s made me self-conscious from the first moment I saw her. But when someone is naturally fair, there's a ruddiness to their complexion. Hers is gone. She’s a ghostly white—unhealthy.
“Chet,” she says, “you came.”
He walks to her bedside, saying nothing. Her eyes flick to mine then away.
“I don't deserve it,” she says.
“Chet,” I admonish. I thought I hated Chloe, and a part of me still does. But whatever this is, I feel more pity for her than hate. I have no doubt that there's something far more going on than my hurt feelings and speculations. I just wish I'd followed my instincts from the beginning.
I wish I'd believed in my self-worth a little more.
Unnatural color fills her face, and shame lifts color in my own. God, what a fucking mess.
“There's no baby,” she whispers.
Relief sweeps me, followed by more shame. Heap it on me.
Then I realize—what the hell do I have to feel guilty about? Clarice and Chloe planned some kind of blackmail scheme against Chet.
I guess it's the whole Chet fucking and doing the all-you-can-eat buffet at Kiki's Drive-In.
Yeah.
While Chloe's all messed up in the head. Yup, that's got me all twisted up. I feel guilty because I was getting the supreme treatment while medics were working a block away on Miss Conniving.
“Was there ever a baby?” Chet asks, folding his arms.
That's my question.
She nods.
“Why are you here?”
Chet's not soft with Chloe.
Maybe it's because I'm a chick, but I flinch to hear the tone he takes with her. She might deserve it, but damn he's cold.
I remind myself that he's had to be.
“After we... saw you…” Her eyes roll up to meet his, then she quickly looks away. “We went back to the Sinclair estate, and I shared a drink with Clarice. Not long after, I began to have cramps and... well, you know the rest.”
A doctor walks in, sees us, and asks us to leave.
“You're not family, and I have some blood test results to share with my patient.”
Chet sighs. Before he leaves, he turns to Chloe. “I'm sorry.”
Chloe gives him a sharp look. “For what?”
He shrugs his muscular shoulders, his eyes holding many emotions. “Everything.”
Chet walks out and I follow, feeling like a voyeur.
*
C.
Kandace's eyes are bulging with fear.
Over my driving.
I take every corner too fast, motivated by one thing: confronting Clarice.
“Chet!” Kandace squeals. “You're taking everything like a banshee. We're going to crash!”
I grip the steering wheel, easing my foot off the accelerator. I see the needle dip under ninety. “Satisfied?”
“Stop. Being. A. Cockbite!”
I bust out laughing. “I am a bit of one.”
“Not just a bit,” Kandace says, giving me a sidelong glance. “Grande.”
We ride in silence for a few seconds. “Why challenge Clarice now, Chet?”
The steering wheel protests under my death grip. “It's been a long time coming. She came to you with a lie.”
It's partially the truth, and I should come clean. “There’s a loophole in my mother's will that states that if I don't marry within a group of a specific five families, I won’t receive my rightful inheritance.”
“Whoa,” Kandace says.
“Whoa is right.”
She shrugs as if it doesn't matter, but her face tightens. “So? Just don't get married.”
“I didn't want to get married. It was never a plan for me.”
Kandace bites her lip. “Problem solved.”
“No,” I bite out, “it's not solved. Clarice is the person responsible for the addendum to my mother's bequeath.”
Kandace's face whips toward mine, her brown eyes appearing to float in her open face. “I'd love to peruse that will.”
I smile and reach for her fingers. I lift them to my mouth and bite the softest part of her hand, relishing the feel of her flesh between my teeth. She moans and I smile around her skin. “I bet you would,” I say against the thickest part of her palm.
I set her hand on her thigh and glance at the indents from my teeth. I haven’t broken the skin.
“Eyes on the road, Sin,” she says.
I reluctantly keep my gaze trained ahead.
A text buzzes in.
“See who that is, please.”
I watch Kandace pick up my cell in my peripheral vision. “Some dude with the initials D.L.”
Dean.
“Not important.” Anymore. I've found Kandace and will confront Clarice. That's all that matters in the “live by the moment” universe I've erected.
A second chime comes in after the first. I see her face and take my eyes off the road. We're almost to my father's estate.
“Chloe,” she says with some distaste. “It says ʻ911.ʼ”
I scowl. “Later. I know what I need to know with her.”
“Maybe we should see what she has to say, Chet.”
I shake my head. “Nothing good ever comes out of that mouth.”
Kandace smirks. “Nice.”
I give a grim smile, making a right turn onto the unmarked paved road that leads to the Sinclair estate.
When I reach the gate, I punch in the security code. It's odd that Lawrence isn't at his station here. My eyes sweep the grounds. Everything appears as it should.
“Wow... I hate being the girl with her nose pressed to the glass but this place is amazing.”
I move through the gate, the pang of bitter hindsight is sharp as a knife as it cuts me. I should have known what Kandace was to me far sooner. She shouldn't be blown away by my father's estate because she should have been coming to mine. Involved with me properly. Playing it off as my lack of intimacy doesn't quite cover my gaff. All I can do is make it right in the now.
After I close the loop of Clarice, I will make it right between Kandace and me. As right as someone as damaged as myself can manage.
Chloe's not pregnant, and that's a relief, though something strikes me as off. She came to my house, presumably to tell me something before disaster st
ruck.
Yet at the hospital, she didn't confess anything.
Maybe she couldn't.
“It's not that impressive,” I say because that's how I feel.
I attempt to see the mansion of my youth through her eyes. The house, a hundred years old and beautifully forged of stone, sits on a knoll. It was built back in a time when each piece was laid and strung together with care and precision. Ornate chimneys intersect and stack, eight in all, in perfect spacing one from the other. Supposedly to warm the home.
The mansion had always felt cold when I lived there. Except for those brief times with my mother, the house is a sterile fortress from my perspective.
Perfectly manicured grounds, currently barren, lend symmetry as they sweep from the entrance and carve pathways and sheered borders for the low evergreen hedges that hug the circular drive where I park.
Kandace doesn't look at me. Instead, her eyes consume the surroundings and I smile. It's one of the things I love about her. Kandace is vital, engaged in the world around her.
I lean forward and she wraps her slim fingers around my forearm.
I lick my lips, thinking about tasting her just an hour ago.
“It's beautiful.”
Looking at my father's estate makes me feel beaten. “This is where every terrible thing in my life occurred.”
Kandace stares at me, her eyes filling with the tears. “Then we won't come here again.”
My borrowed grief runs down her face.
“Agreed,” I say through a thick throat.
I sweep my door open. I move to her side of the car and hold out my hand. I don't watch to see if she'll take it.
When her warm hand slides into mine, something tight inside my chest eases, and we walk to the front door.
I can do this. With Kandace, anything is possible.
Then Clarice opens the grand front doors. A small gun is naked in her hand.
Her cruel lips curl, not a hair out of place.
“Mind the body, Chet.”
The question of where Lawrence is has been answered.
His corpse is still fresh, blood staining the antique marble veining crimson.
THIRTEEN
C.
I feel Kandace's fear as a palpable thing beside me.
“Don't think about opening your mouth, Miss King. I won't hesitate to make a second hole.”
Kandace tenses, gulping down a scream. The hand that I don't hold covers her mouth, her eyes taking in the dead man at Clarice's feet.
I drag Kandace behind me.
“Don't bother, Chet. Miss King is dead. I am the victim here.”
Nothing Clarice says or does makes sense. Except one thing: the insanity that fills her eyes. That can't be faked.
“Chet,” Kandace whispers.
I squeeze her hand as Clarice motions with the gun.
“Step inside and don't come too close,” Clarice says. “I'm very aware of what you are capable of, Sin.”
*
K.
Psycho fucking bitch time. I bite my lip to keep a hysterical laugh at bay. “What the fuck is this?” I whisper from behind Chet.
“This is your demise, you worthless girl,” Clarice says.
She just flat-out offends me. “That would hold so much more water if you weren't some kind of murderer and rapist.”
Clarice swings the gun toward us. The single black cylinder is the scariest shape of my life. And I survive shit. My heart climbs into my throat like a pulsing lump of fear.
“Don't, Clarice,” Chet says, holding up a palm, his body a shield in front of me.
My eyes move to the dead guy on the floor. Heat climbs from my feet to my head, and I grip Chet’s back to keep standing. I've seen plenty of dead bodies in my time.
I just never thought I might join the ranks.
“You could have made all this easier if you'd just married Chloe,” Clarice says. “She was my patsy. We could have had it all. You and I could have been as before, Chloe would spit out a few brats, and I would have more money than I could burn.”
Jesus, she's crazy as a loon.
“Where's Father?” Chet asks, and my stomach drops.
There's a fucking rearrangement of my organs going on. I want to puke. I put my head against Chet's back, hanging on for dear life.
“We don't need him, Chet,” she purrs.
Oh God.
“What have you done?”
I feel his heartbeat against my cheek. It pounds and my clenched hands ache with tension.
Her blonde hair shines from the winter light slanting through the door. The faceted rays fracture as they make a jacquard pattern against her face, gruesomely splitting her austere beauty.
Her blue eyes narrow, and she answers Chet's question. “What I needed to.” Her eyes flick to me, and they're dead eyes. Dead soul. “Step inside, and shut the door.”
Chet's body stiffens against me. “Let us leave.”
“No. I knew when you wouldn't leave the stripper cunt that I would have to implement my contingency plan. I'll miss you, Chet, but when they find the Sinclair men plus one slum girl dead, it'll be you they blame. I'll be the sole heir. If I must miss what only you can give, I should be rich in my loneliness.”
Her powerful words and the sincerity in them makes me step around Chet.
“Back off, bitch,” I growl.
“Kandace!” Chet roars.
But I don't hear him over the rapport of the gun going off.
No one ever says how noisy a gun is, how much it fills the air with that Fourth of July smell.
But the smell that rises above even that is metallic.
Copper.
I look up, and Chet is moving away from me. My vantage point is perfect from the floor. He appears to move in slow motion. The gun in Clarice's hand follows his motion, and his hand comes out like a blur, slapping the gun away.
It spins and clatters on the floor.
It moves in a slow circle, coming to point again at me.
My eyes flutter. That black circle is the only thing that fills my vision, my ears ringing. A body drops. Long blond hair spills like pale blood around a smashed face that no longer breathes.
A foot kicks the gun out of sight.
Chet is there.
But I am not. I float, and arms lift me. A panicked voice I've never heard from Chet shouts into a cell.
Chet shifts me, jogging through the house. He sets me on something soft. I reach up, my hand waving around without a home, and he grabs it in the air, bringing it against his face.
“I love you, Chet,” I say and notice his beautiful dove-gray button-down shirt is red.
I feel my pulse beating. It's like a thread of my life is being pulled through my stomach, and I sigh.
My gorgeous man is suspended above me. “Hang on,” he says in a hoarse bark.
My hand grows heavy, and I let it fall.
Chet clutches it. His eyes are captured icy sunlight. “Don't you fucking leave me, Kandace!”
I smile. Of course I won't leave you.
Salty tears fall like tropical rain on my face.
They're Chet's.
My vision tunnels, growing more black with each slowing heartbeat.
I don't know why he's sad. Clarice has bit the big one, and we're finally together. She's gone.
And then so am I.
FOURTEEN
Chet
“No—no—no!” I shout, cradling Kandace. Her blood is everywhere. I can't smell her for the bite of copper in my nose.
“Sir, we can take it from here.” The medic looks at me. “If you'd stand over there and give her information to the police officer.”
I lay Kandace down, carefully slipping my arms from underneath her. My throat feels like closing and my bowels clench, my face wet with tears. Kandace lays on a large couch, bleeding from where that bitch shot her.
The medics swoop in, and I step back farther.
I've never wanted anything in my life more than
I want Kandace to live.
Cops fill the lower floor.
I glance at Clarice. Death gives her skin a wash of ivory. I wipe a shaking hand over my face.
I killed Clarice. I've wished for her death more times than I could count.
There's nothing good about killing. Killing a woman seems a million times worse.
But Clarice wanted to kill us—she'd shot Kandace. It was a choice between our deaths and hers.
If only Kandace hadn't stepped in front of me as she pulled the trigger.
My eyes drink her in.
Kandace's chest moves with the medic’s rhythmic compressions. I don't hear the cops when they move in.
I don't feel them haul me away.
My eyes are glued on Kandace. I can still taste her, feel myself inside her.
I close my eyes against the sensory of it all. Denying it.
They're dragging me away.
I hear words about finding other bodies.
I watch the woman that I breathe for slip away, and I bellow.
I scream and rail.
The cops drop from my fists. More come.
Later I find out it took eight police officers to subdue me.
But they didn’t know I'd already been subdued.
By her love.
*
“Okay, it's just you and me, pal. Tell me what the fuck went down with my sister and I might not go medieval on your ass.”
I gaze up at Thorn from my seated and cuffed position. I'm sure the police view me as a threat.
Thorn does. His big body belies his anger, seated casually against the corner of the interrogation table.
“How's Kandace?”
Thorn shrugs. “They're trying to stabilize her from the hit she took for you.”
My face tightens. “That was not my intention.” I add in a voice gone low with anger, “As you're aware.”
“I'm not aware of anything, rich-boy. What I do know is there're a lot of people dropping like flies around you. Let me count the ways.” Thorn's lip lifts sarcastically as he ticks them off. “There's the ho who claims she fucked up your contraceptive method because stepmommy put her up to it. She's not dead but she ain't doinʼ so hot either.”
