A Kiss In The Dark

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.”

The words were soft, but they landed like crashing boulders. He looked down at his big hand manacling her slender wrist, the nasty bruises completely hidden. It was a miracle whoever roughed her up hadn’t snapped the small bone in two. It wouldn’t have taken much extra effort. Just a little pressure—

He let go abruptly and stepped back.

Slowly, Bethany lifted her eyes to his. “Do you really think I’m capable of murder?”

The night fell quiet, so silent he would have sworn he heard the pounding of his heart, the rasp of his breathing. Or maybe that was hers. Theirs.

Everything else faded to the background, Zito waiting in the wings, the ugliness inside. There was no horror or blind rage, no stabbing grief, no crime to be solved, no betrayal to be forgotten. There was only a man and woman, a silent communion he neither understood nor wanted.

He drank in the sight of her standing there, finally allowing himself to look into eyes he’d relegated to the darkest, coldest hours of the night. They were deep and heavy-lidded, fathomless, liquid sapphire framed by full dark lashes. A man could lose himself in those eyes, swirling and serene, but somehow, always, always, lost.

But they were dull now, huge and unfocused, her pupils dilated. Long, tangled brown hair concealed a portion of her face, but not the smear of blood on her left cheekbone. Nor the fact that no tear tracks marred her features.

Because he didn’t want her to see how badly they’d started to shake, Dylan shoved his hands into his pockets. He tore his gaze from hers and let it slide lower, to the silk garment gaping to reveal the swell of her breasts, the indentation of her waist, the curve of her hips. He couldn’t help but wonder about the negligee beneath, whether it would be pristine, as well, or if at least in the bedroom, she’d displayed a little warmth and creativity.

Like she had with him.