A Kiss In The Dark

“Crying doesn’t help, Dylan. Crying doesn’t change a damn thing.” She squeezed her eyes shut, not wanting Dylan to see truths she couldn’t hide. Not even from herself.

She realized her mistake too late. A woman should never close her eyes on Dylan St. Croix. Never turn her back to him. Never give him an advantage to press. Because he would.

Dylan St. Croix never turned down the killing blow.

Out of the darkness his mouth came down on hers, and just like that explosive, snowbound night in the cabin, the bottom fell out from her world.

Chapter 3

She could retreat from the world, build ice palaces where no one could touch her, hurt her, but by God, Dylan refused to let her slip away from him. Not again. Pretenses made him crazy. Lies destroyed.

Sex, Dylan. It was just sex. Nothing more, nothing less.

The words tore in from the past, dark. Tortured. After all this time, he still didn’t know if she’d spoken the truth when she’d told him she loved him, or when she’d told him she didn’t.

And he knew if Bethany had her way, he never would.

He felt her stiffen beneath his hands, his mouth, heard the sharp intake of breath. But she didn’t lift a hand to his face like she’d done that night in the mountains, didn’t sigh, didn’t open for him.

Frustration twisted with something darker, something he’d tried to destroy, but that had lain dormant instead. He’d hoped to slice through the remote facade she wore like a tight-fitting bodysuit, to see if he could still reach her or if after that night she’d traveled so far away, sewn herself up so tightly, that she was beyond even his touch.

He might as well have lifted a goblet of arsenic to his own mouth and drunk greedily.

Bethany wrenched away from his kiss and stared at him through huge, bruised eyes. The breath tore in and out of her.

“Does that change anything?” he asked darkly, buying time to bring himself under control.

She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. “I’m not a naive, passion-drunk little girl anymore,” she whispered, “I’m not my mother. It takes more than a kiss in the dark to break me.”

Like he’d done before. She didn’t say the words, but they reverberated through him. He looked at her sitting inches from him, her hair loose around her face, the mutinous line of the mouth that could set his body to fire. She no longer wore that slinky robe, and for that, he found himself grateful. But somehow, even in the severe black pantsuit, she still managed to look shockingly vulnerable, wary, but beautiful all the same.

“Who said I was trying to break you?” Maybe he’d been trying to break himself.

A hard sound broke from her throat. He refused to label it pain.

“You forget,” she said. “I know you, Dylan. I know how you operate. But it’s not going to work. You can’t rattle a confession out of me—you lost that ability long ago.”

The words sounded tough, but he’d felt the tremor race through that lithe body of hers. Who was she trying to convince? he wondered. Him? Or herself.

“Careful, Bethany. Some men might mistake that as a challenge.”

She pulled his hand away from her face. “Let me go.”

He should, he knew. A smart man would unlock the door and let her vanish into the night all over again. But he couldn’t do that. Lance was dead, and Bethany had bruises around her wrists. He didn’t want to think about what other, less visible, wounds she hid. But did.

“You always thought you’d break if you showed emotion. But the truth is you’ll break if you don’t. There’s honesty in feeling things deeply. Not shame.”

Through the glow of the dashboard, her eyes darkened. At the house, he’d seen the wall of ice slide into place, but this time her expression remained naked and raw, like she was bleeding from the inside out and couldn’t make it stop.

“Maybe I don’t feel anything.” The words were soft, brittle, surprisingly candid. “Maybe everything inside me is cold. Frozen.”

And maybe he was a fool. He never should have come to the police station, never should have left his grandfather’s house. He’d gone there to tell the judge about Lance, but afterward, the silence had been suffocating. The older man had retreated, not showing a flicker of the grief Dylan knew he felt.

“It’s called shock,” he said and knew, “but someone who doesn’t know you could mistake lack of emotion for lack of feeling.”

“And you, Dylan? Is that what you think?”

“I know you’re capable of feeling. At least you used to be.” Earlier, the years between them had fallen away; now they stacked right back up. “But I don’t know you anymore, and I don’t have a damn clue how you felt about Lance.”

He never had, either. Part of him wanted to hear her express pure, undying love for his cousin. No matter how badly that would sting, at least it would help assure him Zito’s suspicions were as crazy as Dylan wanted them to be. Without that sentiment, he was left standing on the razor fine edge of doubt, and it was slicing him to the bone.

“Did you love him?” he asked point-blank.

She didn’t look away like he expected her to, like she once would have. Through the darkness, she just stared at him.

“Well?” he asked. “It’s not that tough of a question.”

Bethany looked down at the hands clasped severely in her lap, where the gaudy two-carat, emerald-cut solitaire Lance had given her no longer overwhelmed her slender finger.

“Lance and I had a…complicated relationship.”

“I thought it looked pretty simple.” Though he’d tried not to look at all. Not to know. “He went his way, and you went yours.”

She looked up abruptly. “Not every relationship has to be fire and brimstone. Sometimes they can be quiet and simple, undemanding. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”

“Relationship? It looked more like a photo-op to me.”

Pain flickered in her eyes, and yet she lifted her chin like a queen. “You have no right to pass judgment on me, Dylan. Not you, of all people. You and Lance were hardly the devoted cousins your grandfather wanted everyone to think you were.”

“How could we be?” Sebastian St. Croix had done his best to raise Dylan and Lance as brothers, but they’d been as different as fire and ice. Lance had thrived in the posh world of the Portland elite, old money and timeless hypocrisy.

Dylan had felt like he’d been sent to prison.

“The only thing we had in common was something two men should never share.” And now Lance was dead, leaving Dylan to pick up the pieces, like his cousin had done for him so long ago.

“I’m not doing this,” Bethany said, reaching for the door.

But he didn’t release the locks, wasn’t ready to let her go. “I’m just calling a spade a spade, sweetheart.”

She turned back toward him. “But that doesn’t change anything, does it? Lance is still dead. And no matter what went down between the two of you, the two of us for that matter, he didn’t deserve to die.”

She’d yet to say she loved him. He wondered if she realized that. Worse, he wondered why he cared.

“No,” he agreed, “he didn’t.” But too well, Dylan knew people didn’t always get what they deserved. Or wanted.

Once, a long time ago, Dylan’s grandmother had given him a bag of marbles. He’d loved playing with the small, colorful glass balls, had spent hours organizing and sorting them. Then Prince Lance had come over, yanked the bag from Dylan’s hands, and dumped them on the sloping driveway. The marbles had scattered everywhere, and no matter how quickly Dylan tried to scoop them up, they just kept rolling away from him. With sickening clarity, he remembered the sound of Lance’s laughter.

But when his grandfather had caught them fighting, it had been Dylan who got the belt.