by Barker, Kira
“Of course?” I echoed, my voice taking on a slightly shrill pitch. So much for remaining calm.
A glimmer of reproach appeared in his eyes that made me snap right back to a less frantic state of mind.
“You chose a good place. The floor here is much easier to clean than the carpet outside. That we would likely have had to cut out, which would have seemed suspicious. Burning the entire cabin would have done the trick, but that’s a drastic step that would alert the authorities too quickly.” He paused, giving me a moment to catch up before he went on. “We’re going to strip her and wash the body, to make sure to remove the DNA evidence. Yours, that is. I’ll be suspect number one either way, so we might as well leave them some sperm to analyze. Then again, fucking my girlfriend isn’t exactly a crime nor very unusual. And seeing as I wasn’t the one who killed her, I have nothing to be afraid of.”
That I felt like protesting, but I shut up when he gave me a sharper look. His reasoning was sound, I hated to admit. Not that it had held him back in the past.
“After she’s clean, what then?”
He shrugged. “Depends on how you want to dispose of her. I’ve chosen the location for many reasons to make things easier. We are in the middle of nowhere and there’s a snow storm raging outside. It will be hours, maybe even days before the body will be found—with luck, after it was savaged by wild animals no less. So I’d say we dress her again, throw her over the back of one of the snowmobiles conveniently waiting at the back of the cabin, and deposit her a mile or two into the woods. Close enough that she could have ventured there herself, but far enough away that by the time anyone finds her, the tracks will have been snowed over once more.” A pause. “Any objections?”
A world of them, really, but not a single one made it over my lips. I idly wondered that if I spoke up now, would there be two bodies to be found rather than one? But there was no tension in his shoulders, no gleam in his eye. In fact, he looked the most pleasant he’d been to me in a long, long time—possibly since before we’d traversed the line between escort and client to lovers.
“I should probably wear gloves,” was what I replied when my mind didn’t come up with any form of protest. What that said about me, I didn’t want to dwell on.
“You should,” he agreed. “Don’t worry too much about getting anything on your clothes. We’ll take care of them later.”
I waited for further instructions to come, but all he did was extend his hand to me to pull me up. I hesitated, conscious that I was about to step over a very special demarcation line if I accepted it. Right now, I could still backpedal. I could defend myself, explain that it had been an accident. Sure, things didn’t look good—many people had witnessed our open animosity, and there was that part about being here in the first place.
And slamming her head into the floor until her skull cracked.
Shit.
Exhaling slowly, I wrapped my fingers around his and let him pull me to my feet. His skin was as warm as I remembered, his grip sure, and Darren used the momentum to let my body collide with his. He didn’t grind himself against me, or embrace me, but our faces were close enough to kiss—and for a moment, I wished that he would. I could have lost myself in that, ignore what had happened, what still needed to happen, and just be. But that moment passed and I let go, and rather than sweep me off my feet, he handed me a pair of thick latex gloves from the inside pocket of his parka.
So much for anything about this not being premeditated.
While I was busy shrugging my own parka off and donning the gloves, he did the same. Only that he didn’t stop there, but continued to strip down. When I gave him a weird look, I got a grin in return, but it made sense—there was only a shower in this bathroom, not a bathtub, and getting into the stall himself was the easiest way to get the body cleaned up. I only hesitated for a moment to grab Daliah’s feet when he hoisted her up with his arms underneath hers. Immediately, his torso got smeared with blood and other liquids, but he didn’t seem to mind as he stepped backward into the stall.
The sight of him standing there, naked except for the gloves, the lifeless body pressed against his was too much for me, and I forcefully closed the door and turned around. There was the floor to clean, and fresh clothes to get, so that’s what I did. To mop up the worst, I used her dress that he lobbed over the shower partition. The rest the provided towels had to do for. I wasn’t even surprised when Darren directed me to get cleaning supplies out of one of his suitcases.
He took about as much time cleaning her as I did with the floor. The towel I handed him to dry himself—and her, too, I guessed—remained free of blood as he handed it back to me, but I still threw it onto the heap in the corner. He set her down in the middle of the room, then exited to get dressed, in passing commending me on my choice of clothes that I’d selected for her. Rather than the dress she’d worn, I’d grabbed a thick sweater and some jeans, at least trying to lend the scenario of her getting lost on a walk some credence.
I just couldn’t bring myself to touch her, so she was still naked, looking deathly white with a bluish tint to her lips from all the blood loss, by the time Darren returned. He shot me a long look, but didn’t comment as he knelt down next to her and dressed her with careful, slow motions. The nasty voice at the back of my head—now shrill rather than taunting—informed me that he must have gathered quite the experience with the dolls. The soiled clothes and towels went into a suitcase that Darren locked immediately, and out into the cold we went.
It was hard to tell with the storm, but dusk must have fallen by now, turning the already dark world darker still. Darren was quick to secure the body across the back seat of one of the snow mobiles, then nodded at me to take the other. I followed him down the trek through the trees, until he came to a halt. Rather than drag her into the woods, he just dumped the body right next to the trek, then drove on.
I followed, not looking back at the crumpled heap that was already starting to be covered with falling snow.
I figured that I would do a lot of the same—following, that was—in the near future. Unless, of course, he’d decided to get rid of me next.
We completed the circuit that brought us back to the cabin via a different way. Darren grabbed the suitcase but left everything else behind. Rather than aim for one of the other cars, he went straight to my Jaguar and waited for me to open the trunk. I followed suit, still numb, and not just from the cold.
One look at me, and he shooed me over to the passenger side after divesting me of the keys. He only waited to type in an address into the nav system before he took off, going just fast enough that it should have scared me, but appropriately slow to remain cautious of the bad weather conditions.
I didn’t really take in much on the drive back to the city. We didn’t talk. My thoughts were racing, but at the same time my mind remained blank, just filled with static and white noise.
That was until the car rolled to a stop in front of a gate that I knew all too well.
My pulse slammed up as he pivoted my car into the garage below his house, but I refrained from grabbing for the door and throwing myself out of the moving vehicle to escape. Any drive to fight that I’d still had in me seemed to have died the moment I realized that I’d killed Daliah. If he really wanted to do away with me next, he could have me.
Morbid as my thoughts were, I couldn’t help but shudder when my gaze fell on the unassuming maintenance door at the back of the huge car port. The car dipped underneath me as he got out, but I remained rooted to the spot, unable to look away. Darren got the suitcase from the trunk before he got my door, waiting for me to exit.
“Is this the end of it?” I asked. “Are you going to lock me away again?”
It took him hunkering down next to me and grabbing my hand—the right one, my damaged one—in his to let me focus on his face again. Oh, there was humor lurking in his gaze, but not that dark kind of intensity that I’d come to associate with him, particularly in this place.
&nbs
p; “Why would I want to do this? You’re my wife, Penelope. What decent man would lock away his wife?”
“You’re the farthest thing from decent that I can think of,” I replied, but squeezed back when his fingers tightened around mine.
“That’s true,” he admitted, flashing me a grin. “But so are you.”
I let him pull me out of the car and didn’t protest as he led me to the stairs—the stairs up into the main house. Everything was dark around us, quiet enough to make it obvious that the house was empty except for us.
“Are they still there? Your dolls, I mean.” I didn’t want to ask, but I had to.
His mouth quirked up at the corner, likely at my designation for his former not-quite-wives.
“No. I burned them all.”
“To get rid of the evidence?” I asked, a little surprised. He had, after all, put a lot of work in his gruesome collection.
“There’s that,” he agreed. “I couldn’t expect you not to run straight to the FBI and sic them on me. I was pleasantly surprised to find my property completely untouched upon my return from the hospital, and not a whisper out there about my habits.”
“Was it hard?” Another question I didn’t want an answer to, but had to have one.
Darren surprised me by shaking his head. “No. I didn’t need them anymore. You proved, without a doubt, that you’re the perfect woman for me. Why hold on to a past that is no longer valid?”
That answer stunned me enough that he had to tug on my hand to make me follow him into the upper floor and down the hallway to the master bedroom. He dumped the contents of the suitcase in the middle of the bathroom, right into a plastic container that was already waiting there.
“Strip,” he ordered. “Boots and all. There’s no sense to being sloppy now.”
I silently did as he bid me, feeling just a little surreal as I handed him my clothes and he threw them onto the bloody towels. His own clothes followed. I watched him as he got a container full of bleach out from under the sink, mixing it with just enough hot water that the entirety of the fabric was covered.
“I will burn them once the bleach has had time enough to disintegrate any organic traces left,” he explained as he turned to me, still naked.
I stared at him, unable to look away. He’d changed less than I had thought that day we met again. I had never found out exactly how long the injury I had inflicted had sent him onto his almost-death bed, but he obviously had had time aplenty to recover. His body was still as lean and strong as I remembered, discipline and hard training lending him a chiseled physique. His face was a little gaunter, and his abs somewhat more defined, but everything was still as I remembered. Down to his cock that was stirring now that he was gazing at me with the same kind of intensity, drinking in every inch of my body.
My eyes finally found his, and whatever he must have seen in them made him cross the distance between us, until he stopped, close enough to touch. He reached up slowly until he could graze my cheek with the back of his hand, his skin soft except for the slight calluses over his knuckles.
“We should take a shower,” he murmured, barely loud enough for me to hear, even in the silence of the house. “To wash away what little evidence might have transferred to us.”
“Bleach?” I ventured a guess.
“Soap and hot water will do,” he replied. “After all, I have a perfectly good reason why her DNA could be on my skin. And you only met her last night. Who says that you didn’t accidentally pick up the stray hair then?”
I just nodded, incapable of coming up with any form of protest. He slid his hand down my arm and steered me toward the shower, stepping in after me.
My mind still empty, I took a moment to reach for the shampoo, but he made a clucking sound with his tongue and pulled it out of my limp grasp. He was thorough, but also gentle, surprisingly so. He hadn’t touched me with such… reverence the last few times we had interacted physically, and certainly not in the endless days before that. Maybe that should have left me conflicted, but it didn’t. I simply responded, raising my arms, lifting my hair away, turning around at his directions.
The warm, fluffy towel felt slightly abrasive against my skin when he dried me off, but I attributed that to the sudden, rising anxiety that started to claw its way out of the stupor and into the forefront of my mind.
What I had done—
What he had made me do—
—Where did that leave us?
Turning to him, I was just about to ask him that—demanding an answer, more like it—when he grabbed my head and kissed me, his lips hot against my own mouth, his tongue begging entrance. My hands came up to cover his, ready to sink my nails into his skin and pull them away—but instead I slid them down his arms to his shoulders until my wrists were crossed behind his neck. Mashing my naked body against his, I felt his hard cock press against my stomach, and I instinctively rolled my hips against it.
The next moment, my back hit the soft covers on his bed, with him perched above me. I gazed up at him, wondering what we were about to do, when in the next he flipped us over so that I was straddling him. His hands roamed down to my hips, then up my back, stroking, needing to reacquaint themselves with every curve and pane and angle. I moaned when his palms brushed over my hard nipples, but the sound was wrong, somehow. Almost sacrilegious.
I didn’t hesitate another second to wrap my fingers around his cock and guide him into me, biting down on my lips to keep silent as I sank down on him. I wasn’t exactly filled with lust but his attention in the shower had taken care of that. But what I needed was to feel him inside of me now—and to forget.
To forget what I had done.
To forget what he had done.
None of that mattered right now.
And as I kept looking into his eyes, I saw that very same hunger in him, screaming to be quenched.
Our lips collided as I leaned down to kiss him, his hands returning to my hips to guide me just as I started grinding myself against him. My motions were jerky, harsh almost, the sudden need too strong to be satisfiable that easily. He thrust up to meet every roll of my hips, going deeper and deeper with each turn. His hands wound up in my hair again, locking my lips with his, but pulling away was the farthest thing from my mind.
I needed him like the very air to breathe.
And now I had him—undisputed, forever.
It was that thought more than the physical euphoria racing through me that sent me over the edge, and he came at the exactly same time, making the moment perfect.
Chapter 17
My post-coital bliss—and the resulting white-out in my mind—only held for about a minute, which was just long enough to make me sag onto the bed next to Darren, my breath still coming in heavy pants. Reality slammed into me like a sledge hammer, making my slowing pulse skyrocket again.
What had I done?
And, more importantly: What was I still doing?
“I think we need to talk,” Darren said, plucking my racing thoughts right out of my head. His tone was wry, and when I glanced over at him, I saw that the hint of a smirk had taken residence on his face. Only he could be amused by the situation we—or rather I—found ourselves in.
“What’s going to happen now?” There was no sense to beating around the bush. I might not have exactly committed premeditated murder, but I had played perfectly into his hands, and he clearly had a plan.
He gave a slight shrug. “Do you mean between us? Or in general?”
“Both.”
“Regarding you, I expect that you will drive home now and spend the remainder of the night tossing and turning, as you usually do. By tomorrow morning, you will have rallied your thoughts and go on with life as usual. Sooner or later, you will have to check in with your utterly incapable entourage, and I expect that the fine detectives of the Chicago police department will drop by to ask you a few questions.” My blood ran cold at hearing that and I couldn’t suppress a shudder, but Darren talked right over any question I might
have posed. “I honestly don’t expect them to think of you as a suspect. But you are an established key player in my life, and seeing as I will be the main suspect, they will want to verify certain things with you.”
“Like what?”
“Like what will likely be my alibi,” he proposed. “Also the fact that we’ve continued our crash-and-burn affair since you returned to the city. Your connection with Alison, and the fact that you and Daliah never saw eye to eye. They might even try to use you as a character witness regarding me, but that’s the point where I would advise you to shut up and say nothing without your lawyer present.”
“I don’t have a lawyer,” I pointed out. It was a minor matter that could easily be rectified, but Darren, of course, had an answer to that also.
“You will have, the moment you need one,” he assured me. “And the best-suited there is for said needs. As you know, this is not my first rodeo. And I do have contingency plans in motion.”
“Like what?”
He gave a dismal grunt as if explaining was beneath him.
“Let’s say that, worst case scenario happens and they do manage to pin the murder on you. You will be taken into custody, but because there is no prior offense noted on your rap sheet, and you will have a doberman of a lawyer gunning for them, your hearing will be within the first twenty-four hours after they take you in. Bail will be exorbitantly high, but it will be posted. A car will take your directly from the court house to a private jet that will fly us to a country without any extradition treaties with the US. It might be inconvenient to a certain point, but I can think of a worse way to spend the rest of my days than laze around at the beach, enjoying balmy weather year-round.” He paused, the look on his face souring, but his voice remained soft as he went on. “Should you choose that you don’t want to enjoy my company, we will part ways. You will be set up to live in style and have complete access to your own secure funds, plus a monthly stipend to support you should that not be enough. But I do hope that the recent events have proven that you do intend to stay with me.”
