Chapter Nineteen

 

 

Her mother had emerged from the bedroom fifteen minutes later, draped in yet another pantsuit, this one emerald with a flowing train behind it. She’d artfully arranged herself on the sofa, the orange material a perfect backdrop to the emerald silk. Della had refused to leave, sitting on the opposite end of the couch basking in Ariana’s reflected glory.

Simone had refilled the coffeepot three times, visited the bathroom twice, and turned on the swamp cooler. It didn’t help.

“Simone, you’ll really shouldn’t wear yellow. It makes your skin sallow.”

She almost jumped up to exchange the yellow tee for pale peach. But Jackie gave her a look. Don’t you dare.

“Simone, you have lipstick on your teeth. I can see we’re going to have to take you for another makeup application lesson at Guittard’s when we get home.”

She ran her tongue across her front teeth until it hurt.

“She’s such a pretty girl, isn’t she, Della? Of course, if she’d had Jacqueline’s looks and my talent, she could have been a star. But Simone’s got her own special charms.” Ariana beamed as if she’d said something wonderful.

What charms? According to her mother, she was fat, she needed a facial badly to reduce blotchiness, and her hair had turned to straw in the dry desert air. She wasn’t sure how much more of her mother’s exalted presence she could take without going stark raving mad. Or melting into a puddle of gooey tears.

She almost welcomed the telltale crunch on her gravel drive and the sharp slam of a car door.

She knew without seeing that it was him. Brax. Her hero. Come to her rescue. Standing at the door, she took in his brisk stride up her front walk, her chest swelling with emotion. Oh my, oh my, he was so...

Pissed.

He grabbed her by the arm even as she opened the screen door.

“We have to talk.” He stopped, suddenly noticing the four pairs of eyes focused on him. “About that bag I brought over last night.”

“The bag?”

“Yeah. The paper bag.” He widened his eyes with meaning.

“Oh. The bag.” Her hand fluttered, then she managed to point to the back of the house. “I put it away. In the guest room.”

“Let’s get it.” His teeth clamped sharply.

Carl’s fantasy. What could he possibly want with the fantasy now? They’d been through all that last night. He’d gotten over his initial anger. Hadn’t he?

Obviously not, if the pinch of his fingers on her upper arm meant anything. He didn’t hurt her, but neither was he letting her go anywhere without him.

She let him lead her down the hall, past her office to the guest room. The silence in the living room beat at her nerve endings. Brax pulled her in and closed the door.

Thank goodness she’d made the bed.

“Where is it?”

“In the closet.”

He followed at her heels, then breathed down her neck as she pulled the bag from its hiding place. He took it from her numb fingers, then dumped the contents.

Her panties landed smack-dab in the middle of the bed.

They both stared for two long, slow heartbeats, long enough for Simone’s face to reach conflagration stage. “I hid them in there last night. I guess I forgot.”

He spoke after the longest time. “I didn’t forget. Not a thing. Sorry I barged in like that.”

“My mother already thinks you’re unforgivably rude.”

He laughed, a short bark. “No extra harm done then.” Taking her hand in his, he pulled it to his lips for the briefest brush of his lips. “We have to go through the story again. I saw the rock, right where Carl must have fallen. It’s real. And I’m wondering how many other landmarks in there are real.”

Real? “What rock?”

He pulled her close, chest-to-chest. “The rock. Where you wrote that she—”

“Oh my God, that rock.” The blow-job rock. She would never, ever write another fantasy in her life. Well, not for anyone she knew. She did have to make a living, after all.

“I want to go back up there. I want to see what’s at the end of that trail.”

“It’s a big cave.” Carl had her end it there, before the couple went inside. “Do you think it’s real, too?”

“Highly likely. I want to know why he was so specific. You said he gave you the physical details to use.”

“Yes. What does it mean, Brax?”

“Hell if I know. That’s why I’m going up there. Someone killed him on the trail he told you to write about. It could be simple coincidence, but that story is like a map, and I want to follow it to its conclusion.”

“I shouldn’t have deleted all his emails. We could have used those. It would have been easier.”

He unrolled several scrolls and arranged them by number, stopping to glance down at the script. “It would have been easier on me.” He looked at her, his gaze deep blue. “Reading this the first time damn near killed me.”

What exactly did that mean? She wasn’t stupid. She knew all about lust and anticipation and that the way to a man’s heart wasn’t through his stomach. But still... “Do you think I look insipid in yellow?”

“What?” A line furrowed between his eyebrows.

“Nothing. I...” I am totally stupid and moronic asking a question like that at a time like this. Her cheeks heated with the silly schoolgirl insecurities that question revealed.

“It makes you look...” He struggled for the right thing to say. “You take my breath away whatever you’re wearing.”

That was still about sex. She wanted, needed more, but was afraid to ask for anything. She pointed to the neatly scripted scrolls. “Do you want to follow it like a treasure map?”

Simone flattened the first page even as it struggled to snap itself into a tight roll again.

A map. That’s exactly what her fantasy was. Brax pointed. “See that view you’ve described?”

The rise of the hills off to the left, the muted sound of highway traffic, and the courthouse clock tower.

“I saw it when I was coming back down. This is the same trail.” Brax looked at her. “Did he tell you to write it that way?”

“I told you last night. He gave me all the details to use. Except the...”

Except the sex parts.

 

* * * * *

 

The sex parts. Yeah, Simone got to make up those for herself. Yes, Brax knew. How the hell could he forget? Those were the parts he’d damn near memorized despite himself.

Page three. He found himself smoothing it out almost reverently. His favorite page. Damn. The effect was worse with her citrus scent swirling around him and the warmth of her arm pressed to his as they knelt together at the side of the bed. He leaned over to read.

The huge cylindrical stone jutted out from the mountainside like a phallic symbol of the gods, casting its shadow over the gorge below. Long, wide, with a rounded cap at its peak, it resembled an erect cock, beckoning them to worship at its base. She pushed him back against the rock, her hand flat against his chest, sliding down through the buttons she’d opened. Her fingers trailed his abdomen to the snap of his jeans.

He knew what was coming. His body knew it, too. The Simone effect. His jeans were suddenly a tad too tight and heat rose to his face.

“Uh, that’s the rock,” he said, his voice a little hoarse. Yeah, the rock. Think about that. Not what her characters were doing on the rock.

Taking him in her mouth, she circled the tip with her tongue.

Shit. Think about the meaning of the rock, he told himself. “Picture the jut of it out over the path.”

“Yes. Carl called it a phallic symbol.”

Damn. It was that all right. With Simone next to him and her words on the page tempting him, the symbol was overpowering, and her words like the call of a seductive siren.

“And the vista view from that rock.” The view, yeah, that’s what he’d noticed right off. “It’s the same.”

“The same as what?”

He hesitated too long.

“That’s where Carl fell,” she said for him. He nodded, and she closed her eyes. “Are you sure it had to be...”

In Cottonmouth, murder had never become routine. But it hadn’t been a shock since his first year in the department when he’d found Dick Monahan’s body at the bottom of Lucas Tinsin’s bonfire. Property-line dispute.

“It was the same spot,” he said.

Carl’s keys had not slipped out of his pocket, and the wind hadn’t miraculously swept clean the very quadrant of plateau from which he’d made his tumble.

The hazel of Simone’s eyes deepened to stark green magnified by the shimmer of tears. “They’re all my friends, Brax.”

You never wanted to find that the smile and good humor of someone you knew could harbor the soul of a killer. You’d bait a trap, thinking you had total control over the outcome. You’d avoid facing it until suddenly other lives hung in the balance.

Even then, a man didn’t always learn his lesson. His lesson had started with murder in Cottonmouth. He was learning it all over again in Goldstone. Anyone was capable of anything if the circumstances were right and the anger burned hot enough.

Anger such as Maggie’s.

“Don’t.” Simone stared at him with wide, frightened eyes.

His mouth dried up. “What?”

“I know what you’re thinking.”

She couldn’t know the depths to which his mind could sink. Especially the depraved notions he had about his own sister.

“Maggie didn’t do this,” she said. Emphatically. With a hint of terror.

He struggled to breathe. How could she read his mind so easily? He took her shoulders in his hands, holding her still. “I don’t blame her if she did. Bad things were going on in her marriage. I ignored them.”

“You can’t blame yourself for Carl’s death.”

He turned the statement around on her. “Didn’t you blame yourself because of a fantasy and an email?”

“You showed me I was wrong. I still feel bad, but then I think of what you told me.”

Christ. There was such an overwhelming wealth of trust in her statement. Trust he wasn’t worthy of. “It’s not the first time I’ve minimized a situation.”

“Hindsight’s twenty-twenty. It only works in hindsight.”

Another time, he might have laughed. How could he explain that a cop couldn’t afford hindsight? “I didn’t come to Goldstone for a vacation.” One could actually say he’d been running away. Like Simone. Like everyone else in Goldstone.

“Why are you here then?”

He steeled himself, then gave her a confession he’d given to no one else. “I let a friend get murdered.”

“Did you kill him?”

He rubbed her arms almost absently. “You know that’s not what I meant. He was killed. It was preventable if I’d been paying attention the way a cop is supposed to.”

She put a hand to his cheek. “I think you did everything in your power. I know you did.”

If only things were that simple. In Simone’s world, maybe they were. “The truth is that I didn’t.”

“If you didn’t kill him, and you didn’t know he was going to be killed, then it isn’t your fault.”

“Simone—”

She stopped him with a soft kiss. “You can’t save everyone from the bad things that will happen to them, Brax. I wish I hadn’t written that fantasy. But I’m not sure Carl would be alive even if I hadn’t. And I’m not sure your friend would be alive if you’d done anything different. You can’t be sure either.”

Just as Teesdale couldn’t save an eight-year-old girl. But he could save his own child. And he’d done it by coming to Goldstone and giving her a safer life.

“You can only do your best, and I know without a doubt that’s exactly what you did. But you can’t do your job if you blame yourself for things you can’t control.”

He knew that. It was damn near the same thing he’d been telling himself.

“I know you know that,” she said, though he hadn’t said anything. “But you don’t believe it.”

“Are you some sort of mind reader?”

She put her face to his chest and shook her head. “No. But you tend to think like me. So I’m telling you the same stuff I always tell myself.”

They were alike? Sweet, innocent Simone? And him? “It was my job, Simone, and I failed.” Christ, how did she get him to admit these things aloud? “Your guilt over that fantasy and what I did are two completely different things.”

She looked at him, then whispered, “Are they?”

He opened his mouth to shoot off a quick retort. She gently covered his lips with her palm. “Think before you say it. Is the guilt, not the circumstance, really that different?”

Asked that way, he suddenly wasn’t so sure.

She must have seen that uncertainty in his eyes. Or read his mind again. “Don’t answer now,” she said. “Just think. Very carefully.”

He tipped her chin up and lightly kissed her nose. “I’ll think.” He would. Later. When he knew what had happened to Carl. For now, the revelation eased something deep inside him. Her simple acceptance of his biggest mistake was more than he’d believed possible.

Simone smiled, flipping his heart with her dazzle. “Let’s talk about Maggie and the ridiculous notion that she pushed Carl.”

“I don’t—”

She ignored him. “You know, if Maggie was angry, she’d have shot Carl right then and there, not followed him up a mountain trail looking for a perfect place to push him off.”

Jesus, the way her mind worked. Icy logic confirming exactly what he wanted to hear.

“And she wouldn’t have risked that Carl might not be dead when he hit the bottom.”

Brax stared at her.

“If you’re really, really angry, you just want them dead and you don’t care about making it look like it was an accident.”

He blinked.

“That’s why the death penalty doesn’t work. Because people don’t think first, they just act. At least most of the time.”

“You scare me, Miss Chandler.” She made him hot, actually, the way she smelled, the way her mind worked. Her defense of Maggie. Her belief in him. She could turn any man’s thinking around, and so help him God, he needed that. Now.

“Someday, I’ll write a murder mystery,” she told him.

Putting a hand to her face, he smoothed his thumb across her cheek. “I think you write a mean fantasy. I wouldn’t give up your strong suit.”

“There can be sex in mysteries.”

“Hot sex?”

“Oh yeah. All that threat of danger and lives at risk. Very fast, very hot, and very sexy. Against-the-wall kind of sex where they don’t even have time to get their clothes off.”

He put a finger to her lips to shush her. “You better stop right there or we’ll never finish this mission.”

She pulled his finger away. “You wouldn’t dare. My mother’s out there.”

“I don’t care.” He waited, his gaze roaming her face.

“But you’d be embarrassed when we walked out afterward. Humiliated even. She’d look at you like you were—” She stopped, her eyes wide and bright with glimmering emotion.

“Look at you like you were what?”

She didn’t even seem to notice that he’d used the same pronoun, turning the statement back on her.

“Like you were life’s greatest disappointment,” she whispered.

Her scent screwed with his common sense. He let it. He pulled her hand down to the hard bulge in his jeans. “Does this feel like I’m looking at life’s biggest disappointment?”

She stared at him through wide, disbelieving eyes. More than anything, he needed her to believe. In herself. In her power over him. Last night, her skin had glowed with mortification after she’d lost herself in his touch, in his arms. This morning he wanted to reward her with that same loss of control, but this time he’d teach her its glory, see her revel in it. At this moment, bad as the timing was, it was a gift he had to give her. She’d given him something equally precious, her acceptance and her trust. He wanted to drown out the sound of her mother’s disapproving voice. She needed him. He needed her.

He pressed her hand, rubbed himself with her palm. “This feels like anticipation, like I don’t give a flying rat’s ass who’s out there or who hears or how they look at us afterward. This feels like I’ll go crazy if you don’t do exactly what that story says.”

She worried the inside of her cheek.

“Please. Put me out of my misery,” he murmured, a hairsbreadth away from taking her lips with his. “I’m begging you.”

She looked at him as if no man in her life had ever begged for her touch. “Stand up.”

He did as she commanded, rising, giving her, on her knees, all the power over him.

She undid his belt, slowly pulling the leather free of the buckle, her palms resting on him as she gazed up. Taking even longer to unzip him, she stretched out the thin wire of his tension.

She tugged at his waistband. He helped her push the jeans over his hips until she’d exposed him completely. A groan escaped him as she closed her fingers around him, a long heartfelt sound of desire and need. He gave up the last of his control to her ministrations as she put her mouth on him.

Her cherry-red lips caressed his length until they met her fingers fisted at his base. Then she looked at him with a gaze drunk on her own power over him. He almost came, hanging on only with the knowledge that it was too fast, that he’d rob her of something she badly needed. Her tongue swirling back up, she sucked the tip.

He pushed his fingers through her silky hair, begging her without words. This time she moaned and clutched his hips, taking him deeper, holding nothing back. The soft delicious sounds in her throat vibrated against his nerve endings.

“You’re so beautiful.” The sight of him sliding inside her warmth, then his flesh reappearing, wet with her, the tip of her tongue as she drank from him. He lost himself in sight, sound, and sensation, gave voice to it low in his throat. “Take me to heaven, Simone. Please.” She’d cried out her joy for him last night. He would do no less for her now.

His muscles bunched beneath her touch, a fire built in his belly, then shot low and wide. His hips thrust, filling her. He closed his eyes, grit his teeth until he exploded in light and sound.

He called out her name, cried out to God, and gave her his essence. She took everything he had, everything he was, keeping him inside until his spirit floated back and reentered his body.

He’d wrapped her hair around his hands. She’d left marks on his body where she’d clutched him. He cupped her face, and she nuzzled into his palm.

Pulling her up, he pressed her against him, whispering in her hair. “Thank you.”

“You shouted.” She burrowed into his chest.

“Hell, yes.” He’d do it again, shout out in pleasure and exultation. “Nothing you could ever do to me, and nothing I could ever do to you is shameful or embarrassing. Nothing.”

She burrowed deeper and shuddered. Pushing her back a fraction, he tilted her face until she was forced to look at him. “Don’t take that away from yourself. Or from me.”

He was ready to battle the red stain on her cheeks. Instead, she glowed, her eyes, her moist lips still with lipstick amazingly intact. “That was the most incredible thing a man ever let me do.”

“Let you?” He smoothed back the hair he’d disheveled. ”I begged you.”

She rose on tiptoe to throw her arms around his neck. “I’m special.”

He squeezed her tight. “You don’t even know the half of it.”

 

* * * * *

 

I’m special.

Simone looked down at Brax’s head as he gathered the scrolls of her story, tossing the ribbons aside, ordering them, then rolling them all backwards to force them flat.

What they had just done was much more than sex, more than taking him in her mouth. Brax wanted them all to hear. Not some triumphant thing, as if he’d laid the homecoming queen in his backseat. He’d wanted her. He’d needed her. He’d come for her.

“It’s all about me,” she whispered to herself.

He turned, flopped on the bed, his belt buckle flapping, then gave her a shit-eating grin. “Yeah. It’s all about you.”

She had the feeling there wasn’t an exhibitionist bone in his body. Yet he’d cried out for her. He didn’t care that anyone heard.

He fluttered the pages at her. “I’ll take these with me to go over them more fully. You gonna be all right with Mommie—your mother?”

She snorted. In spite of Ariana. Maybe because of Ariana. “I’m going with you.”

“Not.”

She braced her hands on his shoulders and climbed onto his lap. “For sure.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“You think Carl’s killer is skulking around the scene of the crime?”

“They always come back.”

She rubbed noses with him. “You’re afraid my fantasy will be your undoing, and you’ll have to have me six times on the way up there.”

“You’re already my undoing. I let you blow me while your mother was sitting out in the living room. And I’ve got a feeling trailer doors are very thin.”

They were. Little better than wallpaper. She nibbled his lip. “Yeah. You begged me to blow you.”

It was crass. It was crude. It was exhilarating. What she’d done. Sex play. Love talk. She’d never been comfortable with any of it. Except on paper. Always inadequate. Always wondering about the performance. But not with Brax.

“And you were so easy,” she added.

“You were too damn good. I couldn’t help myself. Think your mother will understand?”

She should have been horrified at what they’d done. At least a little embarrassed.

Instead, she still tasted him, still felt the throb of him in her mouth, the bite of his fingers against her scalp at the moment he filled her, his wholly animal cry that lifted her above herself.

Her mother would understand all right. Brax had staked a claim. He’d drawn a line in the sand, shouted his emotions to the world with an “Ah, God” and an “Oh Jesus” as if he were really saying, Your daughter is the most beautiful perfect creature I’ve ever touched or wanted and I’m damn well going to let you know. Take that, Ariana Chandler.

“Let me go with you, Brax.” She wasn’t silly enough to think that what he’d done for her was love. But it was equally as important, and she wouldn’t willingly let Brax leave her side until the day his vacation ended.

How many days were left?

He bunched her hair in his hand and pulled her head back. “Sweetheart, I—”

She put her hand over his mouth. “I’m going with you. We’re going to figure out who killed Carl. We’re going to save Maggie.” She put her lips to his, a hairsbreadth away, as he’d done to her. “You don’t have to do it all alone.”

He searched her face, then seemed to find his answer. “All right. But you’ll need better shoes than that.” He pointed to her sandals. “And we sure can’t leave this room with your lipstick still in place. It’ll look like I made up all that noise for nothing.” He took her mouth, stroked her lips, then dived deep. She tasted him all over again, his heat, his tang. Then he sucked her lower lip into his mouth and devoured her remaining cherry lipstick.

 

* * * * *

 

Brax opened the door, guided Simone before him, then stepped out, buckling his belt as he turned in the hallway. Like the proverbial pin drop in a silent cathedral, the unmistakable clank of metal filled the trailer from one end to the other.

He wondered at the wisdom of his blatant display. He could have done up his belt while Simone changed her shoes. Ariana would find the belt exhibition distasteful. Simone would know it meant he wasn’t ashamed, not of being with her, not for being loud and crude about how damn good she made him feel. What was between them was far beyond the physical. Simone needed a statement and making a statement required drama.

It also required further cementing action. He tucked his fingers beneath Simone’s hair, kneading her nape. “From now on, you can only wear yellow. It makes you glow,” he said, once again loud enough to fill the entire trailer. Then he turned her head with a gentle brush of his fingers along her jaw and kissed her, reveling in the warmth of her mouth, the zest of their lovemaking, and the pulse beating wildly at her throat.

He was damn sure Ariana Chandler had never before been at a loss for words.

Simone had struggled to build her own foundation, and he wouldn’t let anyone—especially not her own mother—tear it from beneath her.

Judge Della Montrose blinked, slowly, like an owl.

Simone fanned herself with the sheaf of papers. “We’re going out for a while.”

“Simone! You cannot leave me alone.” Crumpled silk filled her mother’s fisted hand.

“I’ll be back, MOTHER.” Simone’s teeth snapped on the title.

“But—”

“We’re going for a hike, Mrs. Chandler. A long hike. In the hills. We’ve got things to discuss.” Brax paused long enough to suggest to Ariana that talking wasn’t all they’d be doing.

Academy Award-winning Ariana Chandler blinked as owlishly as Della.

Simone slapped Brax’s arm with twenty pages of pure fantasy. “Stop that,” she hissed, then spoiled the effect by giggling.

Just as quickly, her smile faded. He knew the moment she remembered why they were going up there. Because Carl was dead. Murdered. You wanted to forget, you tried to forget, but as soon as you did forget, guilt slammed home like a battering ram.

It was like the first time he’d laughed after his dad died. When he realized he was laughing with his old man only days in the grave.

Simone turned soberly to her mother. “Kingston and Jackie will entertain you.”

“They’re gone. Kingston looked nearly apoplectic and begged Jackie to accompany him. He practically dragged her out of here by her hair. I’m sure he wanted to save her from corruption.”

Right. Brax had a feeling Kingston Hightower dragged the pretty Jackie out by the hair for a very different reason. There was something between those two. Furtive looks, sideways glances. A smile just between the two. He’d been in their presence perhaps all of ten minutes, but their byplay had set off his radar.

Ariana wouldn’t have let them go if she’d had even an inkling.

“I would have rushed out with them, but”—she glanced at Della—“we have a guest.” Her how-could-you look stabbed Simone.

He wondered if Ariana’s sanctimonious, holier-than-thou attitude was a calculated method of belittling Simone.

He suspected the answer was yes.

Della jumped to her feet, tripped on a buckled bit of shag, then scuttled sideways, like a crab, to the front door. “Thanks for the coffee. Think about what I said. We’ll talk later. Bye.” The screen door slammed behind her.

“If you leave with him, Simone—”

Ariana’s unfinished threat hung in the air. Brax prayed Simone would take up the gauntlet and tell her mother to shove it in no uncertain terms. Yet at the same time, he feared it. Neither woman would win, both of them would lose, and nothing would ever be the same.

Simone wasn’t ready for that confrontation.

He also realized he wanted to be there for her when she was, whenever and wherever the time came. For now, though, she at least ignored Ariana Chandler and left with him.