A Kiss In The Dark

“She’s alive?”

“Found the body…or so she says.” Zito glanced at a small notebook in his hands and shook his head. “Story’s got more holes than the ozone layer.”

Dylan swore softly. For the past forty minutes, images of Bethany hurt and bleeding, dead, had tortured him. Now…

Lance.

Jagged emotion cut in from all directions, but Dylan didn’t miss Zito’s insinuation.

“You think she did it?”

“It’s her house, her fire poker, her ex. The blood was on her hands.” Zito shrugged, shook his head. “I count my blessings when Pam was done with me, she was content to sign a few damn papers. Don’t know why people have to complicate a good divorce with murder.”

Blood on her hands.

The image formed before he could block it, turning everything inside him stone cold. Disbelief surged. Too well, he knew how misleading Bethany’s porcelain-figurine exterior could be. Intimately, he knew there was nothing she couldn’t accomplish, if she put her mind to it. Hell, she’d cut him out of her life with the ruthless precision of a heart surgeon. But murder?

“Where is she?” He needed to see her, to—

To nothing.

Zito flipped his notebook shut. “Out back, by the pool.”

“Is she…hurt?”

“A nasty blow on the side of her head, but no concussion.”

Dark spots clouded Dylan’s vision. “Someone hit her?”

“Maybe. Or maybe she hit herself.”

Revulsion knocked up against disbelief. He’d heard worse, a young woman slashing her throat with a steak knife to cover the fact she’d killed her lover, but Bethany…

“I want to talk to her.”

“This is a crime scene. I can’t have you contaminating—”

“Her, damn it! I want her.”

Zito cocked an eyebrow.

“You’ve already taken her statement,” Dylan reminded, fighting a pounding urgency he didn’t understand. “What do you think I’m going to do? Tell her how to change her story?”

Zito’s dry smile said just that. “Stranger things have happened.”

“Ten minutes, Zito. You can listen to every word. Just let me see her.” He had to. God, he had to. He didn’t know why, just knew that he needed to look into those languid blue eyes and see if he saw a murderer looking back at him.

Zito sighed, motioning for Dylan to follow him around the wide porch. “Five minutes.”

The side of the house boasted a wall of windows, giving Dylan a distorted view into Bethany’s world. The thick, beveled glass denied detail, but not impression. Everywhere he looked, shades of white glared back at him—flooring, furniture, art.

Near the back of the house, French doors hung open, revealing another room, where a sheet lay draped over a form near the fireplace. Three uniformed cops stood around talking, while two technicians examined the fire poker. A photographer busily recorded the scene.

“No matter how hard it is, boys, we go on. From now on, I’ll be more like a father, than a grandfather. And you’ll be more like brothers than cousins.”

“But you’re not my father!” eleven-year-old Dylan raged. “And he’s not my brother! We don’t even like each other.”

“Then you’ll just have to pretend, won’t you?”

“It’s the St. Croix way,” thirteen-year-old Lance added, earning his grandfather’s approving smile. “It’s not so bad once you get used to it.”

But there was no pretending now. Lance, the complicated cousin who’d never become a brother despite how hard Dylan tried, really did lie dead on the living room floor. And apparently Bethany had blood on her hands.

Remorse clogged Dylan’s throat, the hopes and dreams of two very different little boys who’d grown up to fall in love with the same woman. Somehow, he kept walking.

“She’s just around the corner,” Zito said.

Dylan stopped before turning, taking in the elaborate cabana and pool area. In the distance, the fading light of early evening cast the Cascades a giant, misshapen shadow against a horizon streaked with shades of crimson.

Even the sky seemed to be bleeding.

And then, for only the second time since that cold night on the mountain, when a snowstorm had shattered the preternatural indifference he’d lived with for six years, he saw her.

“She’s all yours,” Zito indicated with a sweep of his hand.

A hard sound of denial broke from Dylan’s throat. Zito couldn’t be more wrong. Bethany Rae Kincaid had never been all his. Never all anyone’s.

But still, his heart kicked, hard. And the years between them crumbled, just like they had on the mountain.

The ice princess, they’d called her in high school. She held herself apart from the world, refusing to fully give, fully surrender herself to anyone, least of all Dylan. Except when they’d been in bed. Then, she’d literally come apart in his arms. But after, after she’d always sewn herself up a little tighter.

Some things never changed.

The sight of her sitting in a chaise lounge, holding a black-and-white cat and staring toward the mountains, stirred something he’d thought finally dead. Her long chestnut hair was tangled, her creamy skin alarmingly pale. Blood stained her slinky ivory robe. Her feet were bare.

“Pink or red?”

She looked at him, laughing. “What?”

“Your toenails,” he said, running his hand along her high arch. “I want to paint them. Pink or red?”

The memory cut in from somewhere long forgotten, prompting Dylan to swear softly. In the end, she’d chosen red. At her wedding, she’d worn pink.

That damning, defining night in the cabin, there’d been no color at all.

Dylan clenched his hands into tight fists. Damn her. Damn her for turning him into a gnarled mess, while his cousin lay dead inside and she sat there perfectly calm. Untouched.

Untouchable.

He wanted to tear across the patio and take her shoulders in his hands, put his mouth to hers, breathe some life into her. He wanted answers. He wanted to understand. He wanted—

He wanted to stop wanting.

A cool breeze drifted across the flagstone, bringing with it the scent of jasmine that was quintessential Bethany. Or maybe that was only his imagination. Slowly, he stepped into the shadows of twilight and started toward her. Birdseed crunched beneath his loafers, drawing the cat’s attention, but not Bethany’s. Big and scruffy and missing most of one ear, the black-and-white narrowed yellow eyes and watched Dylan approach.

His heart hammered cruelly. Look at me, he raged silently. He wanted her to turn to him, acknowledge him. He wanted to see those startling blue eyes rimmed by the darkest, thickest lashes he’d ever known, see what truths lurked in those deep, deep depths. What lies.

But classic Bethany, she didn’t grant his wish. She just sat there, seemingly oblivious to the world around her, staring beyond the pool that looked more like a lagoon. The evening breeze sent ripples across the turquoise surface, while a stunning waterfall at the far corner babbled peacefully. The wall of rocks seemed to weep. Birds sang.

And deep inside Dylan, something twisted.

It was a damn peaceful scene for a murder.

Beth St. Croix stared blindly across the cabana. Nearly sunset, she knew shadows would be stretching across the pool, but she could bring nothing into focus. The world beyond was hazy, cold. Frozen.

Or maybe that was her.

Till death do us part rang with a finality she’d never expected on that cold day she and Lance had quit pretending theirs was a real marriage. Legal documents couldn’t make up for the distance that had settled between them. She could still see the suitcases sitting against the white marble of the foyer, the empty shelf in the entertainment center where CDs and DVDs had once been stacked. She hadn’t asked him to stay.

Hadn’t wanted him to.

Ma’am, where’s the body?

Horror surged, clogged. Bile backed up in her throat. Once, in a fit of rage, her mother had thrown an iron candlestick at a sliding door. The thick glass had cracked into thousands of misshapen pieces, but by some miracle remained intact. Fascinated by the sun streaming through the prism of color, a six-year-old Beth had put her hand to the surface, only to have the shards crumble, slicing her palm to the bone as they fell to the cold tile floor.

Now, with absolute certainty, Beth knew if she so much as moved, she’d shatter just like that door.

Wake up, she commanded herself fiercely. Wake up! It was time to leave this terrible dream behind, to claw her way out of the frozen cocoon where each breath stabbed like daggers. She had to make her legs work, so she could go back inside and make Lance wake up. Tell the police there’d been a terrible mistake.

Without warning, a low hum broke through the stillness, a sharp wind rushing through a narrow ravine.

“Bethany.”

Her heart staggered, but in some faraway corner of her mind, she wondered what had taken him so long. He always invaded the shadowy realm of her dreams sooner or later, tall and strong, eyes burning, touch searing.

“I came as soon as I heard.”

The hoarse voice settled around her like a steadying hand, a lifeline back from that frozen place she’d slipped into upon finding Lance. She wanted to turn to him, feel his arms close around her like they had one cold, desperate night. Instead, she held herself very still, acutely aware that if she so much as blinked, if she let go of that tight grip she held on herself, she risked losing hold of all those nasty sharp pieces she’d gathered up and shoved deep before the police arrived.

“Bethany,” he said a little stronger, a lot harder. “Look at me.”

No, she thought wildly. No. But slowly, she turned to face him. She’d never been able to deny him anything, at least not in her dreams. In real life the cost had been shattering, but she’d learned the importance of denying him everything. Fire burned. She knew that, couldn’t afford to forget.

He towered over her, his big body blocking out the last fragile rays of the sun. Familiarity faded as well. In her dreams, her memories, he always, always touched her.

Now he just stared, his eyes hot and condemning. And she knew. God help her, she knew. Dylan was here. Here! Which meant she wasn’t dreaming. She was awake. Horribly, vividly awake.

The past two hours came crashing back, breaking through the blanket of shock like a hideous rockslide. “Lance…”

Dylan swore softly. “I thought it was you.”

The strangled words shattered the jagged pieces she’d been trying desperately to hold together. Everything fell away, the haze and the blur and the vertigo, leaving the cold hard truth.

And it destroyed.

For six years this man had stayed away. He hadn’t touched her, spoken to her, even acknowledged her, except that one shattering night on the mountain, when loose ends had played them both like puppets. At a charity auction just two nights later, he’d walked right by her with a gorgeous woman hanging on his arm, looking through Bethany as though she didn’t even exist.

But now, now that he thought she lay dead on the living room floor, he was first in line to view the body.

“Sorry to disappoint you,” she managed through the broken glass in her throat.

The hard planes of his face were expressionless, but a pinprick of light glimmered in his eyes. “Rest assured,” he said softly. “Of the many ways I’ve imagined you over the years, hurt, bleeding, or dead isn’t even close. Not when I watched you marry my cousin, not when I woke up alone.”

The pain was swift and immediate, forcing her to blink rapidly to hide it from him. She looked at him standing close enough to touch, but saw only a man bursting in through a closed door, running across the darkened room, shouting her name.

“What happened, Bethany? What the hell happened?”

The slow burn started deep inside, pushing aside the shock and giving her strength. She released Zorro and stood, welcoming the bite of cool flagstone beneath her bare feet.

Dylan St. Croix was not a man to take sitting down.

He loomed a good six inches over her five-foot-eight, bringing her first in contact with the wrinkled cotton of his gray button-down. He wore it open at the throat, revealing the dark curly hair she’d once loved to twirl on her finger.

Shaken, Beth looked up abruptly, only to have her breath catch all over again. It was bad enough facing him after the night on the mountain, but to do it here, now, like this, seemed crueler than cruel.

Time and maturity had served him well, hardening the lanky, reckless boy into a devastating man. Tall and broad-shouldered, he wore his thick dark hair neatly clipped, obliterating the curls he’d always hated. His green eyes were narrow and deep-set, his cheekbones shockingly high. There was a cleft in his chin. His jaw always needed a razor.

He looked like a million tainted bucks, her friend Janine had once said. The description fit.

“You don’t belong here,” she said, but the words cracked on the remembered smell of sandalwood and clove. “Please. Just go.”

“So you can slip back into your pretend world where roses don’t have thorns, we weren’t lovers, and Lance isn’t dead on the living room floor?” He paused, stepped closer. “Sorry, no can do.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, instinctively stepping back.

His gaze hardened. “Zito says you found him.”

The memory speared in before she could stop it, Lance lying near the fireplace. So still. So cold. She’d lain there for a few minutes before opening her eyes, dizzy, disoriented. The sun cutting through the windows had blinded her at first, but after several moistening blinks, she’d brought him into focus.

Odd place for a nap, she remembered thinking. Odd time.

Then she’d become aware of the stain on the carpet. And the fire poker in her hand.

“What else did the good detective tell you?” Lance had been a prosecutor with the D.A.’s office; she knew how weak her story sounded. Murder was rarely random or anonymous. Spouses almost always topped the list of suspects.

“Did he tell you they don’t believe me when I say I have no idea what happened? That they don’t believe the gash on my head isn’t self-inflicted? Did they tell you that?”

Dylan frowned. “Not in so many words.”

But she didn’t need words. Everything Dylan St. Croix believed, felt, wanted, burned in that dark primeval gaze. He was a man driven by the kind of searing passion that incinerated everything in its path. Her included. Her especially. That he stood there now, so ominously still, so silent and expressionless, chilled in ways she didn’t understand.

“I can see it in their eyes,” she whispered, “just like I see it in yours.”

“It’s a logical assumption.”

In another lifetime, she might have laughed. Logic and Dylan went together as well as fire and ice.

Needing to breathe without drawing in sandalwood, she turned and walked to the edge of the pool, where an empty blue raft floated near the waterfall.

“I came home and walked inside,” she said, looking out over the pool. In the distance, jagged mountain peaks blended into sky, only the faint stars indicating where one world ended and another began.

“Someone grabbed me. I screamed, but…everything went dark.” She lifted a hand to the back of her head, where a nasty knot throbbed. “When I came to, I was in the living room next to Lance. He was…” A sob lodged in her throat. “The blood…There was nothing I could do.”

She stiffened when she felt a warm hand join hers at the base of her scalp. She hadn’t even heard him approach. He circled the injury, making her acutely aware of his fingers in her tangled hair, gently exploring the wound the detectives wondered if she’d given herself.

“Does it hurt?”

“Not anymore.” Liar.

Somewhere along the line, the birds had stopped singing. There was only the sound of cascading water and the hum of activity inside the house. The sound of their breathing. The crazy desire to lean back, to feel the solid strength of a hard male body.

“When did you change into your negligee, before or after?”

Cool evening air swirled around her bare legs, reminding her that beneath her robe, she wore only a white silk chemise. One she hated. One she’d never worn, though Lance had bought it for her over a year before.

“I—I didn’t put it on,” she said, stepping from Dylan and tightening her sash. “I was wearing a suit. It’s hanging in the closet now.”

“What was Lance doing here? I didn’t think you two were even speaking. Had something changed?”

“No.” No way. Their marriage had ended long before he had walked out the door, long before she took a drive one deceptively beautiful afternoon. Long before she learned truths that violated everything she’d ever believed.

“Then why was he here?”

“He called and said he had a few things to pick up, wanted to know when I’d be home. He sounded…strange.”

“Strange how?”

“Just…strange. Upset.” Very unLancelike.

“And?”

“And nothing.”

Dylan swore softly. “Don’t hold back from me,” he said, turning her to face him. Inches separated their bodies, their faces, years their hearts. “I’m a private investigator, for God’s sakes. I make a living finding what people don’t want me to know. And I see secrets in your eyes. What, damn it? What are you hiding? Are you afraid? Is that it?”

Deep inside, she started to shake. He was too close. Much, much too close. The mere sight of him ripped her up in ways she hadn’t known were possible, resurrected feelings and desires and dangers she’d tried to bury.

She didn’t want to see him now.

She didn’t want to see him ever, ever again.

“I came home to find Lance dead and the police think I did it. I had blood on my hands. How do you expect me to feel?”

Dylan frowned. “I learned a long time ago not to have expectations when it comes to your feelings. Still waters run too deep for me. Too cold.”

She angled her chin. “Only because you can’t muddy them.”

“This isn’t about me!” he practically roared. He took her shoulders and pulled her closer, forcing her to tilt her head to see his eyes. “This isn’t about us or what happened on the mountain. It’s about what went down in this house a few hours ago. It’s about you. It’s about a whole hell of a lot of questions, and too few answers.”

A hard, broken sound tore from her throat. “You think I don’t know that?” she tried not to cry. The wind whipped up, sending tangled strands of hair into her face. Agitated, she lifted a hand to push them back, but Dylan did the same. Their fingers met against her cheekbone, hers cold, his thick and hot. She closed her eyes briefly, but the sound of a vicious curse shattered the moment. Heart pounding, she looked up just in time to see hot fury erupt in Dylan’s eyes.

It was the only warning she got.

Chapter 2

Something inside Dylan snapped.

He stared at Bethany’s wrists, at the smears of blue and black circling pale flesh like violent bracelets. She said she’d been hit on the head and the gash there bore testimony to her claim, but clearly she’d been grabbed by the wrists, as well. Grabbed hard. Crushed with more than casual force.

The picture formed before he could stop it, heinous, damning. Bethany as a cold-blooded murderer he couldn’t see. But crimes of passion required neither forethought, nor intent. They simply exploded, destroying everything in their path.

Dylan knew that well.

“Did he do this to you?” he demanded, taking her cold hands and turning them palm up. Deep, crescent-shaped gouges in the fleshy part of her palm told him just how tight she was holding on. The discolored thumbprints on the inside of her wrists turned his blood to ice. “Did he hurt you?”

She gazed up at him, her eyes cloudy and confused, her mouth slightly open. She looked lost and alone standing there in nothing but the pale silk robe, like she’d just rolled from bed and found that while she slept, the whole world had slipped away.

“W-what?”

The thought of anyone getting rough with her, hurting her, chased everything else to the background.

“Lance. Did Lance put these bruises around your wrists?”

Slowly, she looked down, as though just now noticing the discoloration. But she said nothing.

His mind worked fast, reenacting the crime with a brutal precision learned from years as a private investigator. He could almost hear Lance and Bethany arguing, the elevated voices, the desperation. Hear her telling him to leave. See his cousin grabbing her wrists and squeezing. Hurting.

“Bethany.” His voice broke on her name. “Did Lance do this to you?” Tell me no, he thought savagely. Tell me no!

She blinked at him. “Would you care if he did?”

Once, he would have killed. “Answer me, damn it!”

“Let go.” The words were soft, but carried unmistakable strength. Strength the girl she’d been had not possessed. Strength that would have threatened the St. Croix prince.

“Maybe the two of you were arguing,” he theorized ruthlessly. He needed to crack through her control, and a toothpick wouldn’t cut it. “Things got out of hand and Lance lost his cool, got rough. Maybe he even found out about—”

“No!” She jerked her hands from his and backed away. “That’s not how it happened.” The wind whipped long locks of hair against her mouth, but this time neither of them moved to slide the silky strands back. “I told you—someone knocked me out when I walked in the door.”

Dylan studied her standing there against the darkness, that skimpy robe falling open at the chest and revealing too much cleavage. He didn’t need to be a seasoned detective to see the secrets in her eyes. The fear. He didn’t need to be a man practiced in seeing through pretenses to notice how badly she trembled.

But he did need Herculean strength to keep his hands off her.

Too damn well, too intimately, he knew how passion could blind and distort, make even the most rational person snap like a sapling in a gale force wind.

He’d just never thought passion played a role in Bethany and Lance’s relationship. The thought, the reality that it might have, made him a little crazy.

“If it was self-defense, you need to tell me.” He tried to speak casually now, to match calm with calm, but the horror was like a rusty stake driven through his core. “If he grabbed you, tossed you around—”

“No—”

“You wanted him to leave,” he pushed on, needing to hear her denial as badly as he’d ever needed anything. Even her. “He wouldn’t. Maybe he grabbed you. You only picked up the fire poker to protect yourself. You never meant to hurt—”

“Stop!” she shouted, lifting a hand as though to physically destroy his nasty scenario.

He caught her wrist, just barely resisting the crazy desire to pull her into his arms. He knew better than putting a snub-nose to his temple.

“I wish I could stop,” he said as levelly as he could. “But I can’t. Don’t you understand what’s going on here? Lance is dead and his blood is on your hands.”

The change came over her visibly, the glacierlike wall she used to separate herself from the world slipping into place with eerie precision. “I don’t owe you any explanations.”

Come back, he wanted to shout, but for the first time Dylan could remember, he envied her the ability to isolate herself from what she felt. He wanted to do that now, to shut himself off from the horror and the rage and the fractured grief that splattered through him like vivid splashes of color all mixed together until nothing was discernable except for dark, jagged smudges.

But lack of feeling was her specialty, not his.

“You may not owe me anything,” he said, “but the cops are a different story.” He glanced toward the door, where Zito stood watching. “And their questions are going to be a hell of a lot harder.”

She lifted her chin in a masterful gesture of cool defiance that was pure Bethany. “If you’re trying to reenact the crime, it’s not going to work. The fire poker is inside.”