It didn’t feel very warm now.
“Turn around and look at your husband, honey.”
His voice was sharper now, the endearment dripping with contempt. So different from Mitch. So different. She forced herself to turn, to look at him, vaguely aware of the distant sound of a phone ringing in the house.
He was a big man, several inches over six feet, and powerfully built. He had played football in college, and kept in shape since by lifting weights. She knew how strong he was. Average in appearance other than his size, he had fair hair and deceptively mild blue eyes, and a wide white smile that tended to dazzle people. It had dazzled her.
The smile wasn’t in evidence now. His thin lips were a grim slash in his beard-stubbled face, and red-rimmed eyes looked hot and mean. The gun held negligently in his hand was outsized and threatening, just as he was. It was a big silver weapon, and some distant whisper of knowledge told her that one shot could probably cut a person in half.
“You look so surprised, honey,” he said in the gentle tone that had always preceded brutality. “Weren’t you expecting me? I always knew you’d end up here in your lover’s house. It was just a matter of time, so of course I waited.”
Kelly swallowed the huge lump of terror in her throat, but her voice was still choked when it emerged. “Leave me alone. Why can’t you leave me alone?”
“You shouldn’t have left me, honey. I told you I keep what belongs to me. You’re my wife.”
“I divorced you,” she whispered.
His eyes narrowed. “You think a piece of paper means anything? You’re mine. I made you mine, remember?” He laughed suddenly, harshly. “Oh, don’t shrink back like some timid virgin, honey. You put on a good act with me and turned up your nose like sex was something only the animals did, but I’ve watched you with him. Rubbing up against him like a cat in heat. You can’t keep your hands off him.”
In her reeling mind was a single sickening realization. “You watched?”
Brad didn’t seem to hear. “With me you were so cold I could hear the ice crack when you moved. And flannel nightgowns from neck to ankle, nothing like that black silk thing you wore for him. He should have rotted away like a vegetable in that hospital, but you kept him alive, didn’t you? His ghost in my bed, and you wouldn’t let go of him, wouldn’t let the bastard die. I would have beat him out of you, but you ran before I could finish the job.”
“Stop.” There was something else inside her now, twisting and churning, something stronger than fear.
He laughed again. “I’ve just been biding my time, honey. I knew he’d come back from the dead. It was amusing to watch you run like a scared rabbit, and it was just a matter of time before he woke up and came looking for you. I knew he would. And I knew you’d welcome him into your bed. I wanted to see the two of you together before I sent you both to hell. Wasn’t that nice of me? I’ve let you finally have your ghost, and right where you wanted him too—between your legs.”
“Stop.”
His face hardened. “You shouldn’t have threatened me, Kelly. Nobody threatens me. I let you get away with it in Texas because that big-mouth lawyer you hired meant to make a circus out of our private affairs. He wanted to pin an assault rap on me and wail about how I beat up my poor little wife. But I got rid of the pictures in his dinky safe; your evidence is ashes, honey. And I’ve got witnesses to say I’m at home right now. The perfect crime. I’ll blow my cheating wife and her lover to hell, and nobody’ll ever know it was me.”
The threat of death, curiously, was something she hardly paid attention to. She heard herself speak as if from a great distance, that churning thing inside her growing larger. “You watched us. In the conservatory.”
“Quite a show you put on,” he said, but despite the light words his face twitched in sheer rage. “I always knew you were a whore at heart—the frigid ones never fool me. Well, he’s had you, but he won’t keep you. I’ll see you in hell, honey.”
She wasn’t even looking at the gun. She was staring at his face, and now she knew what the violent emotion inside her was. Fury. A soul-deep, burning, cleansing fury. He had almost destroyed her, had shattered her self-respect, humiliated and degraded and hurt her. He had forced her to run, to hide, to look over her shoulder in terror. He had turned her into a cowering animal.
No more. The sickening knowledge that he had watched them, leering in the shadows as his twisted presence intruded on an interlude of stark intimacy between her and Mitch, so enraged her that she could think of nothing else. He’d defiled so much of her, and she refused to let him cast his diseased shadow over the joy she had found with Mitch.
“You bastard,” she said softly. “Sick, twisted—” She heard the rattle of savagery from his throat, but it had lost all power to frighten her. “If I wasn’t sure you’d be roasting in hell someday, I’d burn you alive myself—”
Her unexpected defiance momentarily stunned Brad and, she realized later, gave Mitch the precious seconds he needed. As quick and silent as a cat, he crossed the upper terrace and vaulted over the balustrade, launching himself at Brad. The force of the impact sent the big silver gun spinning away and carried both men to the ground hard.
It happened so fast that Kelly couldn’t move a muscle. In a crazily detached suspension, she saw them go down, the jarring collision knocking them apart so that they could both roll and scramble up. Mitch was first on his feet, still catlike in his swift, graceful precision; she had never thought of him as deadly, but that was in him now and visible, cold menace coming off him like arctic wind off a glacier. But Brad was enraged and almost as quick; he was inches taller than Mitch and forty pounds heavier, and there was an animal brutality in him that was totally alien to Mitch.
That brutish cunning was very much in evidence, because the first move Brad made was to try to blindside his enemy, to come at him on the left side. Only the fact that Mitch was still very conscious of his lost eye enabled him to anticipate the tactic and guard against it.
Her moment of detachment—actually very brief—allowed Kelly to see the first few moves of the battle as something almost as beautiful as it was deadly. Men had fought throughout their existence, and there was a curious primitive exhilaration in both these men that was almost palpable. Too many emotions had seethed in them both for too long; the physical struggle was something both wanted.
But Kelly’s immobility lasted only a few seconds. She didn’t doubt Mitch’s ability to hold his own despite the seemingly unequal contest, but she had no intention of standing by idly while the battle raged. Brad had no comprehension of fair play, and she knew he’d pull something underhanded if he got the chance.
She looked around wildly for the gun, and realized immediately that it had been knocked into a riotous clump of ivy; she’d never be able to find it there. She hesitated for an instant, but the sickening thuds of flesh on flesh made her whirl for the steps leading up to the terrace and race into the house.
The gun was just where she’d put it, in the drawer of her nightstand. It was a .38, fully loaded and well kept; she’d taken lessons almost three years earlier in handling firearms, and had practiced her marksmanship at various pistol ranges. It had been a matter of necessity, something she had hated doing. But for the first time she felt no revulsion at the dull black gleam of the revolver and its heavy weight in her hand. Gripping the pistol firmly, she ran back downstairs and to the garden.
It seemed to her that an eternity had passed, but only minutes had gone by. Reaching the terrace, she ignored the steps, scrambled over the balustrade and into the lower garden, her eyes fixed on the two men. The marks of battle were showing on both men. Brad had a split lip and one eye looked swollen; he was also protecting his left side with his arm in a way that indicated either a bad bruise or a cracked or broken rib. Mitch’s mouth was also bleeding, and there was a reddening mark high on his right cheekbone that would be a bruise later.
No fan of any kind of fighting, Kelly had never before seen two a
dult men trying to kill each other with bare hands—and she never wanted to see it again. She couldn’t help thinking that her very few glimpses of stylized boxing and wrestling were shockingly tame compared to the deadly speed and brute force of what she was seeing now.
They weren’t going to stop. She realized that on some level of her mind. Even Mitch, whose initial motive had been to protect her, was now totally caught up in a primitive male struggle for supremacy. They were moving so quickly that she didn’t dare risk a shot; eyes blind and chests heaving, utterly silent except for grunts of pain and effort, they were fighting to the death.
Brad must have realized he was going to lose. His greater height and weight should have given him the advantage, but it didn’t. He had the bulky muscles that come from bench presses and chin-ups; Mitch had the raw strength of a body honed with painful effort to superb peak condition. The blows delivered by the more slender man had behind them the force of a pile driver, while his lightning-quick reflexes enabled him to deflect or completely avoid Brad’s increasingly wild swings.
Brad couldn’t stand losing. With the survival instinct of an animal, he took advantage of the uneven terrain of the garden, sacrificing pain for gain. He stopped trying to protect his cracked rib and charged toward the other man with furious swings. He felt the rib go completely under a well-placed blow, but Mitch had to give ground or be quite literally run over.
The low place was half hidden by vines of ivy, but Mitch wouldn’t have seen it anyway. He stumbled and, his balance unable to compensate, went over backward.
Rather than press his advantage, Brad leapt back away from his fallen enemy and bent to claw at his ankle. An instant’s grace, that’s all he’d wanted. Just time enough. He straightened with a wicked knife in his hand. Mitch was already back on his feet, but he went still as a flat voice cut through the air.
“Brad.”
For a heartbeat Mitch was surprised to see her there. The first hammer-like punch from the larger man had done something to him that he was only now aware of. His attack had been driven only by the need to protect Kelly, but when the first blow had staggered him, he had realized with a queer shock that this man had already hurt her. That he had used his great size and force against her delicate softness without mercy, teaching her a terror no woman should ever have to know. At that instant of realization a red haze had crept over his mind, and he had seen or heard nothing except the bastard he wanted to kill.
But she stood there now, her slight body still and her face pale, eyes that were now almost black fixed on West. She was closer to him, only a few feet away, and the gun in her steady two-handed grip was aimed at the center of his chest.
For an instant West looked almost ludicrously surprised. The knife in his hand was held with the expertise of a street fighter, loosely and in front of his body with the blade pointing up rather than down. He stared at his ex-wife as if he couldn’t believe she would aim a gun at him.
“What the hell are you doing?” he barked, obviously having no idea how ridiculous the demand sounded.
“Drop the knife,” she said flatly.
“You’ve never fired a gun in your life—”
She cocked the pistol. “The safety’s off. There are no empty chambers. And I have a marksman’s medal.”
Bradford West stared at the scared rabbit he had hurt and taunted and pursued for years, and he must have seen what Mitch saw in her stony gaze. She wasn’t afraid. She had defeated him simply by overcoming her fear of him. He must have seen that.
And he hated to lose.
With a roar of blind rage, he lunged at her, the knife curving toward her slender body. Two shots cracked through the air, almost deafening and so close together they sounded like one. Brad staggered back, a look of surprise on his face as scarlet blossomed on his chest and shoulder, and fell heavily.
Kelly didn’t see him fall. She looked back over her shoulder at the two men on the terrace. One was burly and casually dressed, while the other wore the reassuring uniform of a policeman; it was the cop’s gun that had fired along with hers. She looked at her own gun and carefully thumbed on the safety, then dropped it to the ground and hurried to Mitch.
He met her halfway.
—
“Ouch.”
Holding the antiseptic-soaked pad of gauze firmly to the corner of his mouth, she said, “You’re going to have a lovely bruise on your cheek too. Are you sure the ribs are okay?”
“Just another lovely bruise, I promise you.”
The house was quiet and they were alone—finally. The police and the coroner’s wagon had departed, as well as the detective Mitch had hired. Evan Boyd had sincerely apologized to her for not having the sense to double-check his own assumptions.
He had assumed that Brad was safely in Texas because of references to his presence in a couple of newspaper articles. It had occurred to him only when he was killing time before boarding his flight that charity organizations generally gave the newspapers lists of those who had contributed to their functions—implying rather than stating actual presence.
Worried by that realization, he had called the investigator in Texas who had been helping him and suggested he go openly to Brad’s office and find out for certain if he was there. In the meantime, Boyd decided that Brad would neither have brought a weapon registered to him from Texas, nor purchased one here in Oregon in his own name. So he called his policeman friend in Portland and they began checking the likely places.
Gun laws were strict, but to a man like Brad West, who was used to buying what he wanted, difficulties could be overcome. He had bought the big Magnum from a pawnshop the day before.
And once Boyd knew that a man matching Brad’s description—right down to the charming smile—had bought a gun, he wasted no time in persuading his friend to accompany him back to the house. Increasingly worried, he had called Mitch from the car when they were still minutes from the house.
They’d made it just in time. Since a policeman had witnessed the fact that Bradford West had attempted to kill his ex-wife, no charges would be filed, even if an autopsy proved that it had been her bullet that had killed him.
Kelly didn’t really care. She knew Mitch was concerned about her emotional state, but she hadn’t had a chance to reassure him that she was fine. Taking the opportunity now, she said, “I won’t have nightmares, you know.”
“He didn’t give you a choice,” Mitch said quietly.
She wondered if that was why she felt nothing at all about Brad’s death. “When I first started taking lessons at a pistol range, I thought I’d never be able to point that gun at a person. Even him. But today…well, I didn’t feel hate or even a need for revenge. I just knew I wouldn’t let him win.”
Mitch tossed the gauze pad onto the coffee table and drew her into his arms. “He can never hurt you again.”
“Or you. He meant to kill us both. I finally realized, while he was talking out there, that he literally couldn’t live with the knowledge that another man had bested him. That’s the way he saw it. No matter what he did, I…couldn’t let go of you. It frustrated him that his—his rival was a ghost, but it was a hundred times worse when you were a flesh-and-blood reality. He watched us,” she added softly. “In the conservatory.”
His arms tightening around her, Mitch said, “I know. I heard part of what he said to you out there.”
“It made me sick, that he’d done that. He made so many things dirty, even words. I couldn’t bear it that he’d tried to make us dirty too.”
Mitch released her and rose from the couch, then took her hand and drew her up as well. He led her from the room. When she realized where he was taking her, her hand trembled in his.
“Mitch—”
He took her into the conservatory and eased her gently down on the chaise. “We’re alone, sweetheart, I promise you. Nobody’s watching us. There’s no threat.”
The late afternoon sunlight was shining through the glass all around them, making the plants g
low emerald. The French doors were standing open so that a cool, moist breeze rustled through the leaves, and the ocean was a distant whisper.
“Mitch, I don’t know if I can—”
“Shhh.” He kissed her, apparently untroubled by any pain in his swollen, cut lip. He kissed her slowly and deeply, teasing her mouth until she relaxed and began to respond. Guiding her to lie back on the cushions, he slipped one hand underneath her blouse and stroked her side, still kissing her.
Kelly lost all awareness of everything except him and the heat rising inside her. She murmured a protest when his mouth left hers, then eagerly helped him get rid of her blouse and the camisole. She didn’t know which of them had removed his shirt, but his smooth, hard skin was under her seeking hands, and she could feel his muscles moving with the sinuous power she loved. His mouth was on her breasts, and the heavy jeans slid free of her with the wisp of panties, and there was another muffled noise that might have been his pants being cast aside. Waves of pleasure rippled through her, each hotter than the last, and throaty sounds welled up and escaped her.
She felt his mouth moving lower, making her stomach quiver in tiny surges of electric delight. He was murmuring soft, rough things against her flesh, blunt sex words and tender love words, and the combination was so starkly intimate that it made her excitement spiral out of control. Then his heated caresses moved lower still, and she cried out when he found the aching fullness of her. Her body was out of her control again, and she was helpless to do anything except endure the burning wash of feelings. She was submerged in them, then lifting, trembling like a wild thing on the crest of a final huge wave…
He rose above her and she cradled him frantically, her need pulsing through her with a primitive demand. She felt the slow, hot push inside her, and moaned as her body accepted him like a part of itself. He kissed her as his weight settled fully on her, roughly now and with fierce hunger, tangling his fingers in her hair, and she was kissing him with the same uncontrolled desire as she writhed beneath him.