Alix sniffled loudly. “Tell me you haven't gone to Seattle to root around in old skeletons, honey! Let the past go. You're such a bright girl, so much potential! Tell me you're moving ahead, looking forward!”
“I'm moving ahead and looking forward,” Raine said dutifully.
“Don't you dare get smart with me, young lady”
“Sorry,” she muttered.
It took several careful minutes to soothe her mother's anxiety and get off the phone. When she finally hung up, she clutched her abdomen and abandoned the idea of making a sandwich. As usual, lying made her stomach clench into a tight, aching ball, but there was no alternative. She was engaging in the ultimate transgression. She was going to dig up all the skeletons she could, if she had to rent a backhoe to do it.
She shrugged off her coat and hung it up, pondering her mother's words. The days following her father's death were a grief-stricken blur in her memory, and by the time she started paying attention to her surroundings again, she had been hi a new country with a new name. But one thing was certain— she did not remember getting that news in Positano. Surely that was a moment that should have been etched hi her mind like engraved stone, every detail vivid and immutable.
She had never seen her father's real grave. Maybe seeing that it was different from the dream image would take the menace out of the dream.
Then again, what if the reality were identical?
Her stomach flip-flopped at the implications, and she shoved the creepy thought aside. This was no time to whip herself into a frenzy. She had too little nerve as it was. She had to concentrate on the positive. The encounter with Seth Mackey and Victor had finally set things in motion. This was good. This was progress. She had to decide what to wear tomorrow.
More to the point, she had to decide what to do tomorrow.
The excitement that surged inside her was so strong that she jumped up, laughing out loud. She went into the bedroom and stared searchingly into the mirror on the armoire, trying to imagine what Seth Mackey saw when he looked at her. Something he wanted, evidently, but she had a hard time imagining what it was. All she saw was plain old Raine, looking pale and spooked.
It was stupid and ill-timed to fall into lust right now, poised as she was on the edge of disaster, but hey, rotten timing and poor judgment had characterized her love life ever since it began. Look at Frederick Howe, and Juan Carlos. Those years of traveling had not been conducive to forming friendships or developing social skills. Eventually, Alix met and married Hugh Cameron, a stolid Scottish businessman. She and Raine settled in London with him, but by then the damage was done; Raine was painfully shy. The boys in her schools would have nothing to do with the tongue-tied, bespectacled girl with the tottering armful of novels.
The situation did not improve even when she went back to the States for college, and her unclaimed virginity began to weigh heavily upon her. Shortly after she turned twenty-four, she ran into Frederick Howe in Paris. He was a business associate of her stepfather's, a burly Englishman in his early thirties, pleasant and polite. He took her out to dinner, where he talked nonstop about himself. Still, he'd seemed nice, certainly safe and nonthreatening. After dinner, she had taken a deep breath and let him escort her back to her tiny little rented room.
It had proved to be a huge mistake. He had been clumsy and rough, crushingly heavy on top of her, his breath sour with garlic and wine. It finished almost before it began, which under the circumstances was a blessing, since it hurt, a lot. And while she was in the bathroom washing up, he left the flat without saying good-bye.
It had taken her eighteen months after that humiliation to work up the nerve to try again. She had met Juan Carlos during a summer studying Spanish in Barcelona. Heft been playing Bach on his cello in the park; slender and beautiful,
with melting brown eyes and curly Byronic locks, dressed to kill in Gucci and Prada, She was smitten with his elegance, his air of sensitivity. So different from the stolid Frederick, just the thing to soothe her braised romantic sensibilities.
But the moment to consummate their passion was never quite right for Juan Carlos. She'd been patient with his reluctance, coaxing and reassuring him, bolstering his ego. Finally he confessed to her that he suspected he was gay.
That summer she forged a deep and lasting friendship with him. He credited her for giving him the courage to confront the truth about his sexuality, which was all very well and good; she loved him tenderly and wished him happiness with all her heart. But it left her exactly where she'd been before. Restless and confused. Climbing the walls.
Shortly after that summer, the tombstone dream began to intensify. Her pent-up sexual energy was promptly relegated to second place on her list of problems, and then forgotten altogether.
Until now. It had made a spectacular comeback, at the worst possible time. It was maddening. All her life she had been buffeted about by external events that were hopelessly beyond her control. Now she was buffeted by internal forces that were even more frightening. Her fears, her dreams, her pulse-pounding reaction to Seth Mackey.
She took off her jacket and hung it up. Fear could be faced and overcome, she told herself bracingly, as she unhooked the skirt. She was doing her best to deal with the dreams. And as far as Seth Mackey was concerned, well, that was beyond fear. He belonged to the realm of unicorns and centaurs, demons and dragons. Where even she might find herself magically transformed.
She unbuttoned her blouse and threw it onto the chair, staring into the mirror as she pulled the pins out of her hair. She really should try not to lose more weight. She was starting to look puny. Tomorrow she would put more cover-up on her undereye circles, and deepen the blusher. She shook her hair out of the braid, began to yank off the stretch lace chemise—and stopped. She tugged it back down into place, and thought about Seth Mackey's eyes. Heat rushed up into her face. There was going to be no need for blusher tomorrow.
She smiled a sultry, inviting smile into the mirror. She leaned over and tousled her hair, teasing volume into it with her fingers, and flung it back over her shoulders, letting a few locks tumble across her face. The untamed “queen of the jungle” look. A little lipstick would help, maybe. Something glossy and moist She pouted her lips out as she pulled up the chemise, wriggling sensuously as she tugged it off. She held it out, let it dangle from her fingertips and drop to the carpet.
Now the pantyhose. They were all wrong. She needed thigh-high gartered hose, so she could sit on the edge of a chair, unclasp her stockings and slide them slowly down over her thighs while the pirate watched, his eyes tracing lines of sweet fire across her skin.
As it was, she had to bend over and peel them off, trying not to trip as she tugged them off her ankles. Probably a more experienced woman could make that look sexy, but not her. And her lingerie was tragically dull. Her generous breasts had always made her self-conscious, so she used minimizing underwear bras that made her feel more contained and less conspicuous. For the first time, she wanted something deep-cut and frilly, with lots of cleavage popping out.
Oh, well. She was new at this femme fatale business. Like any other skill, it was bound to take some time to perfect.
She cupped her breasts in the mirror, imagining Seth behind her, his hands sliding over her belly, then cradling her breasts, feeling their softness and heft. She imagined the heat of his bream against her throat, the rasp of his beard stubble as he kissed and tongued her neck and shoulder. Then poof, he was in front of her, bending over her chest, his tongue plunging between her breasts, licking the deep, shadowy cleft. She unhooked her bra, imagining herself bared to his sight.
It was so vivid. The scene unrolled behind her closed eyes with an almost lurid brilliance. She could actually hear his growl of appreciative pleasure, she could feel the heat and suckling wetness of his mouth as he kissed and licked her, his tongue swirling and tasting. His mouth fastened over her nipple, no longer pale pink, but flushed to deep raspberry, and hard. She wondered what kind of lover Seth w
as. Slow and languorous, or passionate and urgent. She wondered if he would do to her any of those things she had only read about in romance novels and erotica.
She pushed off her panties, letting them fall to her ankles. Her hand slid between her thighs as the fantasy swirled on, unstoppable; him sinking to his knees in front of her, nuzzling her navel, pressing his face against her mound. Breathing in her scent. Hot and sweet, like a flower in the sun, he had said. The words echoed in her mind, making her sigh with longing.
She touched herself, following her dream lover's movements. His hands teasing, insinuating themselves into the humid folds of slick, hot female flesh. Circling his tongue around the stiff, engorged bud of her clitoris. Her eyes popped open with a startled gasp. Usually her fantasies were rose-tinted and tenderly indistinct, but this one was urgent and hungry and explicitly detailed. It had a will of its own, and she followed it helplessly, staring at herself with wide, frightened eyes. Her face was bright pink, her lips red and parted, eyes shadowy and dilated. She looked wanton, with her panties around her ankles, one hand caressing her breasts, the other cupping her sex.
She looked like a woman half-desperate with desire.
She kicked off her panties and walked carefully on rubbery legs to the bed. She was almost frightened by the restless ache between her thighs, the wild, whimpering frustration. Need pulsed in her body, heavy and hot. She fell back against the pillows and writhed against the velvety flannel sheets, rubbing her sensitized skin eagerly against the caressing nap of the soft fabric.
Her legs fell open, and her fingers slid eagerly into the moisture between her legs. She imagined a barrage of sensual images, all the possibilities, all the positions. Maybe he would open her legs wide and press his face against her sex, sucking her clitoris with slow, tender skill. Maybe his tongue would slide up and down the soft folds of her labia, and then thrust deep into the hot, quivering core of her.
She saw him mounting her, felt the heat, the weight of his hard, graceful body pinning her down. She imagined him entering her with one swift lunge, and then the glorious friction as he slid slowly in and out of her. She would clutch his shoulders and cling to him as he thrust deeper and harder, his steely arms holding her tightly, his eyes gazing into hers, seeing her soul unveiled, incandescent, utterly his.
That pushed her over the top. She arched on the bed with a sharp cry, and came; an endless, shivering cascade of sensation, more intense than any orgasm she had ever experienced. She tugged the sheet across her limp, trembling body and slid into an exhausted sleep.
That night she dreamed once again that she was swimming naked in the glass aquarium. Her hair swirled around her, bright and luminous. But the dream changed before her eyes. The walls of the aquarium dissolved, colored pebbles became glittering sand, fake coral sprigs became huge, towering structures that glowed in the underwater gloom. The plastic castle was gone, but the sunken galleon was real, encrusted with algae and barnacles.
Whatever protection those glass walls had afforded her was gone. She'd wanted to swim with the big fish, and her wish had been granted. The feeling of limitless freedom that swelled up inside of her almost made up for the looming sense of danger as she swam deeper into the fathomless depths of the ocean like a tiny, flickering beam of light.
Chapter 4
It was pure dumb luck that Seth was all alone when he watched the sex show. If any of the McCloud brothers had happened to see it, he would have had to kill them.
She'd been asleep for almost an hour, but still he stared at the screen, his eyes still wide and burning, his cock as hard as granite. If he hadn't personally installed all the equipment, if he hadn't had reason to be almost certain that his surveillance was undetected, he would've concluded that the whole scene had been staged deliberately for him. Why else would she perform in front of the camera in a way precisely calibrated to drive him out of his fucking mind?
Except for the fact that he would bet body parts that Raine Cameron didn't know how to fake. That orgasm had been all too real.
Dear God, it had been way too long. Even before Jesse's death, his sex life had been somewhat problematic. His sexual appetites were prodigious, and he was very good in bed; he could say that with total assurance, and without vanity. What he wasn't good at was saying all the things that women wanted a guy to say, before, during and after. One ex-lover had informed him, immediately prior to dumping him, that he lacked basic social skills. He hadn't bothered to deny it. He blew it every time by telling it exactly like it was, which frequently caused women to storm off in a huff, drastically reducing or completely ceasing further sexual availability.
It was a pain in the ass, but it hadn't bothered him as much as it probably should have. He had more pressing things to occupy his mind. He was wealthy, relatively good-looking, and could be charming when he put his mind to it If a woman stormed off, no big deal. There were plenty of others waiting to step into the vacancy.
Then Lazar and Novak had murdered his brother, and he had very suddenly forgotten that sex existed. He'd been sort of relieved by the frozen, floating feeling. Like being a disembodied brain. Not exactly peace, but close enough. It was good that his body had been cooperating in directing all of his energy into his investigation. Then Raine showed up, and all of a sudden his libido was making up for lost time.
The cell phone rang, and he jerked in his chair as if he'd received an electric shock. He checked the number on the display, disgusted to note that his hand was trembling.
Connor McCloud. Great. Just the guy to cheer him up. He enabled the digital speech spectrum inversion, punched in the code that decrypted Connor's transmission and hit “talk” with a grunt of resignation. “Yeah.”
“I just got word that the gun from the Corazon murder went missing yesterday” Connor said, without preamble.
Seth waited for more explanatory info, but none was form-coming. “Corazon?” he prompted.
Connor made an impatient sound. “You ever watch the news?”
“Uh...”
“Never mind,” Connor snapped. “Gorgeous supermodel got wasted in her waterfront penthouse last August. Does that ring a bell?”
“Oh. Her. Yeah.” Vaguely. He'd seen her beautiful face
splashed across every magazine in the supermarket checkout lines. Belinda Corazon, 1980-2002. Christ, she was young. Only a zombie could have missed the Corazon murder. He almost qualified, but not quite. “What does a dead supermodel have to do with us?”
“Pay attention, for God's sake. Remember when I told you that Jesse and I were following up on rumors that Lazar was brokering stolen murder weapons from famous trials?”
Seth grimaced. “I can't believe people really buy stuff like that.”
“Believe it. The world is full of sick bastards who have way too much money. The point is, I think there's a good chance that our boy commissioned that theft. And I can guess who he got it for, too.”
“Who?” Seth demanded, impatient.
But Connor was being coy and mysterious. “Where's Lazar?”
“Stone Island,” Seth responded without hesitation. He had personally planted a powerful, remote-controlled microwave transponder in every vehicle in Victor's fleet. Lazar's silver Mercedes had arrived at the marina at 6:59; the Colbit at the dock verified that he'd boarded the boat, and the transponder he had planted on the boat indicated that it had arrived at the island at 8:19.
“You kept track of him all day?”
“Yeah,” Seth replied. “In the office till 2:45, two-hour power lunch at the Hunt Club with the Laurent Group, a meeting with Embry and Crowe from 5:30 to 6:35, then straight to the marina.”
“Anybody else go to the island tonight?”
“I don't know,” Seth said.
“What do you mean, you don't know? You planted cameras there, didn't you? Oh, hold on, now I get it. You were checking out Barbie's dream house instead, huh?”
“Fuck you,” Seth said, through gritted teeth.
“C
hrist, Mackey. You sex-crazed bonehead. Are you with me on this or not?”
“I can't watch the island in real time,” Seth snarled “It’s eighty-five miles away. I don't have portable power sources that can transmit that distance for more than a couple of days at a time, and security out there is too tight to sucker-up off the local power. If I want to know who came to the fucking island I have to go out there in person, gather the data, bring it back and process it”
Connor clucked his tongue. “My, my, aren't we defensive.”
“Like I said before, McCloud—”
“Yeah, yeah. Fuck me. I heard you the first time. Get your ass out there and get that data. We need to know if Lazar had a visitor between nine and ten. That would square with what my source told me.”
“What else did your source tell you?” Seth demanded.
“Curious, curious,” Connor taunted.
“Don't be an asshole,” Seth snapped.
Connor made a snorting sound that could have been a laugh. “OK. Get this. Novak had a thing for her.”
“For Corazon?” Seth was incredulous. “No way. She was too famous for a sewer rat like him. He would never have risked it”
“He risked it, evidently. Very hush-hush, of course. He sent her the crown jewels of fallen empires, solid gold death masks of famous pharaohs, the Shroud of fucking Turin, you name it. He had it bad.”
“And Lazar was the guy who procured that shit for him?”
“Bingo,” Connor said in approving tones. “You're a smart boy, when you're not zoning out in Barbie-land.”
Seth was too intrigued to respond to the jibe. “So why weren't you guys using her as bait?”
“It was a secret affair. We didn't know, and now she's dead, so get off my case, OK?”
“I'm not on your case.” Seth drummed his fingers against the table, fascinated “So Novak was the one who really wasted her?”
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