A Kiss In The Dark

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.