The Hot Ladies Murder Club

Prologue

Corpus Christi, Texas

The wages of sin must always be paid. That’s what his headmaster used to say right before he tied him up and locked him in that awful cupboard. It came as a pleasant surprise that the familiar phrase, as well as thinking about her punishment, could give him such a thrill.

Yesterday the handsome, debonair Sir Dominic Phillips had lunched at his club in London. Today he was sweating like a pig in a nondescript rental car in a shadowy parking garage in south Texas contemplating his wife’s murder.

Please…Please, sir, let it be her.

He used to say please, pretty please to the headmaster. It had been part of their ritual.

This wasn’t the first time Georgina had tempted him to murder. The trouble with murder was the risk that it would catch her unawares. That wouldn’t do.

He wanted Georgina to feel the blow coming, to dread it with a morbid, soul-destroying anticipation. That was part of the game. He wanted to overwhelm her in death as he had in marriage. He wanted her last dying thought to be that her precious, darling Georgia, whom she’d unwisely favored over him, was now his to do with as he pleased. And Georgina knew his tastes when it came to little girls.

His heart beat in a frenzy. Maybe it was the late-summer, south Texas heat that had him so feverish and crazy. Even in the dark garage the sun seemed to scream out of a too-bright, almost-hostile blue haze. Two minutes ago he’d turned off the air conditioner. Two minutes, and already his Savile Row suit that was a blend of silk and wool was dripping wet, and his fine silk shirt was sticking to his armpits. It wouldn’t be long before he stank, too.

Even though he’d rolled the windows of his car down, he was suffocating. He wiped his damp brow with his soaked handkerchief.

Had he found her?

According to Morrison’s report, she was to be deposed at three o’clock by an unscrupulous, hotshot local attorney, Joe Campbell. Apparently, Campbell had been run out of Houston for his shady legal dealings with a CEO by the name of Rod Brown. Together they’d looted Brown’s company and run off with the funds. Brown was living it up in a mansion in the British Virgins while Campbell was exiled to this backwater hellhole doing personal injury law. The creep was representing former clients of Georgina’s, who were suing her for not disclosing mold growth in a property she’d sold them.

Georgina, or rather Lady Phillips, a Realtor—here? How appalling!

As always Morrison had been painstakingly thorough. So thorough, Dominic nearly laughed out loud as he thumbed through the detective’s report.

And she’d thought she could hide. If the plain-looking woman in Morrison’s grainy photos really was his dazzling, wild Georgina, he now knew everything about her new life, her address, little Georgia’s school—everything.

When he heard her ancient Mercedes rumble up the ramp of the parking garage, he felt as devilishly excited as a child playing hide-and-seek. As he was about to crouch behind the wheel, a woman laughed close by. She was short with red hair. Walking toward her car, she fumbled in her purse for her keys.

Bugger. This could ruin everything.

A man in the truck that she climbed into started the engine and drove toward the exit. Dom held his breath until he heard Georgina’s Mercedes, closer now.

With her fear of dark, enclosed places, he hadn’t expected her to dare the garage even in broad daylight. Nevertheless, just in case, he’d parked in a reserved spot two floors beneath Campbell’s plush offices, so there’d be no danger of her parking anywhere near him.

You should’ve killed me when you had the chance, darling.

That last hideous night in their ultramodern flat on the Thames, she’d enraged him by begging for a divorce. He’d grabbed her, and when his hands had closed around her throat she’d hit him with a paperweight. Just the memory was enough to contort his aristocratic face into a mask of rage.

He’d plummeted to the floor and landed with a resounding thud. He remembered staring up at her in a weird, semiconscious state as she knelt over him in fear and alarm.

“You’ll be all right,” she’d whispered in that throaty voice of hers.

“Help me,” he’d mouthed, the way he’d once begged the headmaster for mercy.

“I’ll get help, but I can’t stay. This whole thing, us, is getting worse and worse. Please try to understand.”

Understand? He’d tried to talk, to say he was sorry, but because of the coke he’d been on, his words had slurred. He’d struggled to move, but it was as if his limbs had been made of lead and he was paralyzed from tongue to toe, helpless to do a thing to stop her as she’d gotten to her feet and packed and taken Georgia. Finally, he’d regained sensation in his limbs and had been able to crawl to the couch and then to stand.

Slut. That night she’d taught him she was like all the others, who’d made him love them and then used and abandoned him. Unlike the others, she was his wife, and she still consumed him. Constantly he imagined her with other men.

A diesel engine purred up the ramp. He knew he shouldn’t risk her seeing him, but when her Mercedes inched past him, belching plumes of black diesel, he couldn’t resist a glance just to make sure.

One look had his heart trilling with excitement and he got hard.

Yes!

Huge sunglasses hid most of her pale, slim face. Sure enough, just like in Morrison’s pictures, she’d dyed her hair and swept it untidily into a cheap plastic clip. Neither the color nor the style flattered her. Still, how clever of her to mute her dazzling beauty, to dye her honey-gold hair and discard her beautiful clothes and glamorous sense of style, to hide here, of all the dull places—Corpus Christi, Texas—which was so far away from who and what she really was. So far away from him and their glittering life together.

You shouldn’t have told me about your grandmother in San Antonio. Nor about that year when you were nineteen and lived with her when you got your Realtor’s license.

He scowled. He was the clever one. He was the one who planned while she just drifted, hoping for the best. Her disguise wasn’t that good. As soon as his detective had shown him the pictures, he’d put two and two together and had boarded a plane.

She was his wife. His. She belonged to him forever. She had no right to run away, no right to take little Georgia. No right to leave him all alone. No right to have another man. He’d show her.

When he’d stumbled to the bathroom that awful night to inspect himself in the mirror…to see…When there hadn’t been anyone in the mirror, he’d begun to quake and then to claw the mirror in an attempt to make his reflection reappear. When it hadn’t, he’d begun to weep and pound the mirror with bare fists.

The same thing had happened when he was a little boy. He’d been very, very bad—so bad, mirrors had been empty when he’d tried to see himself. After his father’s death, his mother had been so frightened, she’d sent him away to boarding school. For a long time he’d felt powerless, as if he’d simply ceased to exist.

The night Georgina had left him, he’d broken the mirror with his bare hands. Then he’d scrawled Georgina’s name on the white bathroom tile floor with his own blood. The last thing he’d heard before he’d collapsed was a siren.

She must have called the ambulance as soon as she’d known she was safe because when he’d awakened, he’d been in a trauma unit and they’d been praising his famous, beautiful wife to the skies.

Where was she, the famous Georgina, they’d wanted to know? Why wasn’t she with him? Their unspoken question had been, if she wasn’t with him, who was she with?

He’d known what he had to do.

Find her. Teach her. Retrain her…as he had in the beginning when she’d been a young bride. The wages of sin…

Like a cat, he’d toy with her awhile. He’d tie her up with bloodred satin ribbons like before. He’d…

He got hard just thinking about how her husky voice would sound when she begged him to kill her.

“Say, ‘Please,”’ he’d whisper. “Say, ‘Please, Sir.’ Kiss me down there and say you love me.

He touched himself, gently, very gently, just like he’d taught her to.

Just the thought of her lips there had him hard as a rock. Then he came, wetting all over his suit.

See what you made me do?

She would pay for that, too.

BOOK ONE

When we look into the mirror we see the mask. What is hidden behind the mask?