She leaned back into his chest and Max kissed her hair while he ran his hands over her breasts, fingering her nipples and smiling at her moan of response. “How many more minutes until that’s ready?”
“A few.” She lifted her head and looked outside. “Look. The boat’s gone.”
“The buyers must have come.”
“That was fast,” she said. “I thought the broker said later this week.” She turned to him with a sly smile. “Feel like a game of favors tonight?”
He grinned. “The game where no one loses. Let’s go upstairs.”
“My favorite deck is down in the cabana. Can you go get them? I want to try something new on you.”
He let out a soft groan. “Evil woman. Okay, come on, let’s go. I’m armed.”
She plucked the metal tea holder out of her cup and dropped it in the sink. “You’re always armed, Max. Your hands are weapons of destruction.”
She held the cup to her mouth just as he squeezed her backside. “And this is the target.”
She laughed, the tea missing her mouth. “Damn you, Roper,” she said, wiping her chin. “You’re gonna pay for that.”
Outside, even at this hour, the heat pressed. The moon waned, but the security lights made rounding the pool and heading toward the stone path that led to the dock easy. As they took the three stairs to the lower lawn, Max tucked her under his arm.
“So why did you lose your balance that first night?” he asked, bringing her first sip to a halt.
“Excuse me?”
“When I found you, right here.” He motioned to where she’d been standing the night he arrived. “I saw you trip when Breezy mentioned my name.”
She gazed at him over the rim of her cup, the rising steam causing droplets of water to form on her upper lip. He wanted to taste them. “You need to ask?”
“I need to hear.” He lowered his face to hers.
They stared at each other over the mug, the connection as powerful as ever.
“Max.”
There it was, that sweet note in her voice that always preceeded I love you.
“What?”
“Let’s go get the cards.”
For a moment, he didn’t move.
“Listen, kid.” He touched that upper lip just because he couldn’t help himself. “I have to tell you something. It’s something…I never told you before.”
“Then instead of favors, we’ll play for secrets. You can tell”—she grinned—“when you lose.”
“Okay.” He guided her to the dock, thinking of how to tell her. She wasn’t going to like this secret.
“Who put a light on in the cabana?” she asked. “Did you?”
“No.” Instinctively he pulled her behind him and reached for his weapon. “Stay here.”
A wave lapped against a dock piling, and a fish jumped about thirty feet away. He made no sound as he approached the cabana, his Ruger drawn. The boarded front window cast an eerie shadow over the empty sofas and the end table, where a coffee cup rested, along with some CD jewel cases and a picture, turned facedown.
He tested the door, and it slid open. No one would leave it unlocked. Not after his instructions—
He froze at the sight of a woman’s body lying on her side, and cursed as he recognized the thick, black curls and body.
“Marta.” He reached her in two steps and crouched down, lifting the hair from her neck as he felt for her pulse. He couldn’t find it. Around her lay books and maps and a baseball cap with the words “Peyton’s Place” embroidered on it. Tucked under her side was the statuette of a palm tree.
His gaze darted around the room. What had happened here? His attention fell on the mug on the table. Grabbing it, he sniffed, the pungent lemony smell wickedly familiar. He leapt up just as Cori came to the sliding door, her cup tipped toward her lips.
“What is it—”
He lunged forward and whacked the mug out of her hand, sending ceramic exploding against the wall and tile floor.
“Did you drink it?” he asked.
She shook her head, too stunned to speak.
He turned toward the body as he whipped out his cell phone and handed it to her. “Call 911. I think Marta’s been poisoned.”
“The stupid maid wouldn’t leave me alone, Giff. Honest. I couldn’t do it.”
“Stop whining.” Giff seized his drink and followed her to the patio. “It makes my teeth itch when your voice hits that pitch.”
She mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like “fuck you” but he didn’t respond. Instead, he stared at the misty midnight rain and downed a solid slug of Scotch.
Getting Breezy to plant evidence had been a stupid idea, anyway. How would they know what to plant? He had no idea what the hell killed William. “There has to be a better way,” he mused.
“You could come clean,” she said over the cigarette she was lighting. “Cori would undoubtedly forgive you.”
“Like we could cough up ten million dollars to pay her back for what we did.”
Breezy choked on her first drag. “What did you say? I didn’t do anything. You stole the money, Giff. You’re the one with the soft heart, promising the sun and moon to your kid on his deathbed.”
His fingers tensed around the glass, fighting the urge to fling it in her face and chip her twenty-three-fucking-thousand-dollar porcelain veneers.
“If you ever had a child,” he said around a clenched jaw, “you would realize that no value can be put on their lives.”
She sighed. “She isn’t your child, Giff.”
“She’s Galen’s flesh and blood, Breezy. She’s his twin sister and—”
“You didn’t even know she existed when you and Orca adopted her!”
He slammed the glass on a table, and the first burst of pain shot through his temples. Damn it! “Don’t call her that, Breezy. She has a thyroid problem.”
“She has a lot of problems, Giff. But none of them is as big as the one I’ve got right now.” Breezy threw her cigarette on the wet fieldstone and let the rain douse it. God, he hated when she treated this house that way. “You basically screwed my best friend out of ten million dollars to pay for medical costs that haven’t even been incurred yet.”
“She’ll get it, Breezy. They have very similar DNA and if it killed Galen, it could kill her.” He froze as he realized the outer edges of his vision were already growing dark as Breezy approached him. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered.
“Precisely. Your son was adopted, Giff. A-dop-ted.” She poked his chest with each syllable. “I realize that you loved him. But the long-lost biological sister he scraped up from an Internet search is not your child, Gifford Jones, and not your responsibility. Whatever obscure-disease gene they were born with killed Galen, and that is a damn shame. But his sister is not your problem.”
He swallowed, placing his fingertips on his temple. “I made it my problem.”
“And now you’re making it mine!” She took a deep breath and raised two hands. “Listen, Giff. You cannot get out of this with some convoluted scheme to make it look like Cori killed her husband, and I don’t give a damn what that drug addict Billy told you. We can’t let it come to a murder investigation.” Her voice cracked with the strain of trying to modulate it. “We can’t. It will ruin Peyton.” She waited a beat, just as he would have if he’d been in front of a jury. “It will ruin us.”
He blinked, hating the onset of darkness and the drill-like pain shooting in his head. Breezy put her hand on his cheek, instantly cooling his skin. “Listen, baby. It’s time to come clean. She called me this afternoon, they were getting on a plane to come home from Sonoma. She should be back in Miami by now. Let me get her over here, and we can talk about it.”
He closed his eyes and covered her hand with his. That was his Breezy. Always looking for a solution. But this time, there was only one solution.
It was going to hurt, but this was what she deserved.
For the first time in months, he felt the early stirrings of a hard-o
n. Great—he was about to end a life, and that finally made him horny.
“Breezy,” he whispered, closing his fingers over hers tightly. After all, it would be the last time he held her. “I have to tell you something. And you’re not going to like it.”
“Whatever it is, I can fix it.”
“No, you can’t,” he told her. Closing his eyes, he pulled her against him as his dick stiffened slightly with the first hard pump of blood and arousal.
Finally. He could have her now, one last time. Before he had to say good-bye. “Come upstairs with me, Breezy.”
Chapter
Twenty-one
“I ’m going with her.” Cori tried to push Max aside as the paramedics slid Marta’s stretcher into the back of the ambulance.
Max didn’t move and glared at her. “No, you’re not. She’s unconscious. She won’t know you’re there until they pump her stomach and then she’ll just sleep. I want you safe in the house with me.”
“Safe? In the house?” She plucked at the tea stain on her shirt. “I don’t think I’m safe here.”
“I’ll go,” Dan said. “I’ll follow them to the hospital and if—when—she wakes up, I’ll find out what happened. In the meantime,” he looked at Cori, “stay here and don’t eat or drink anything in the house.”
“You think that tea was meant for me,” Cori said, blinking into the red and blue flashing lights.
“I think we have to consider every possibility,” Max said.
“Such as?”
“Maybe she tried to kill herself,” Dan suggested. “But why?”
Max watched as the ambulance doors closed. “Maybe because the man she loved died. Maybe because she killed him. Maybe because she knows who did.”
Cori just closed her eyes. “She wasn’t in love with William, Max.”
“No? Then why did she follow him across the country?” Max asked. “And why did she surround herself with his belongings?”
“That stuff might still have been in the cabana. She was cleaning,” Cori insisted. “She drank my tea.”
“You know,” Dan said, “maybe she was going for a murder-suicide the night she killed your husband, and failed. Now the guilt or loneliness got her. The loss of his boat, the place where they—”
“Stop it!” Cori shouted. “I’ve lived in the same house with them for years. Don’t you think I’d know if my husband was sleeping with the housekeeper and all this drama was going on under my nose?”
The look of pity that Max gave her sent a wild fury through her. “Do you think I’m that stupid?”
Dan put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Not stupid, Cori. It’s easy to ignore clues you don’t want to see.”
Cori looked down at her hand, still clutching the palm tree she’d seized from the cabana. Who had given it to whom? Marta to William, or William to Marta?
“Go, Dan,” she said, looking up and swallowing the lump in her throat. “Go to the hospital and find out what you can. I’m going to call Breezy.”
Max clasped her arm. “No, you’re not.”
She jerked out of his grip. “Yes, I am. You don’t get it, do you?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “You are so cavalier about my husband and whether or not he cheated on me. He was my rock, Max.” She pounded a fist into her chest. “He was my grounded, stable, dependable, supportive partner. So stop painting him in this black, awful light. I refuse to believe it.”
“Take your blinders off, Cori. I understand that you loved him. And that you trust Giff and Breezy and Marta and even Billy, for God’s sake. Not everyone is what they seem.”
She stared at him. “No, I guess they’re not.” She started back up the driveway and Dan left for his car.
“I didn’t mean to be so harsh,” Max said, walking next to her without touching. “You were raised by a drifter, and security and stability are important. Your friends are—”
She stopped in place and just shook her head. “No. It’s much simpler than that. I love Breezy; I loved William. I love Marta, regardless of what you think she did to me. I loved my father and I loved you. I don’t want to lose what I love anymore—” Her voice cracked. “Some things are irreplaceable. Like my father. And my husband’s reputation. And my friendships.”
When he didn’t say anything, she blew out an exasperated breath. “Okay, you can probably blame that on my whacko mom who can’t hold a job, husband, or hairstyle for twenty minutes, but frankly, I don’t want to blame anyone. I’m a big girl and I’ll take the responsibility for how I turned out.”
She marched toward the house. As she reached the door and opened it, he put his hand on her shoulder.
“How about a compromise? Wait until tomorrow to call her, until we have a plan for interrogating Gifford and Marta wakes up and tells us what happened.”
“No.” She pulled the door open and continued toward the stairs. Behind her, she heard the dead bolt and locks. She’d reached the fourth step by the time he grabbed her arm.
“Stop, Cori.”
She tried to wrench out of his powerful grip, but he didn’t let her go. “I need my friend,” she said through clenched teeth. “I need to talk to my friend.”
“I am your friend. Talk to me.”
He was a step below her, so they were eye level when she turned to him. “I can’t trust you, Max. You are so quick to put the screws to my husband, my housekeeper, my attorney—”
“He’s the one who created fake contractors and deposited ten million dollars to accounts he owned.” He loosened his grip. “And you’re the one who’s suspected your husband’s death from the moment it happened. Or did you forget that box of condoms? And that.” He pointed to the gold sculpture in her hands.
“I didn’t forget. Circumstantial evidence, both of them.”
“I’d bet not.”
She flipped the statuette from one hand to the other and looked at Max. “You’d bet not? You want to know what our problem is, Max?”
He looked at her. “Our problem?”
“Our whole relationship was built on betting and games and the need to win.”
His brow crinkled with disbelief. “What are you talking about?”
“We met at a poker table. We played for a year. It was all about who had the better hand, who called the shots, who won, who bluffed, who called.”
He leaned forward. “I wasn’t bluffing when we made love. I wasn’t bluffing when I asked you to spend the rest of your life with me. And I’m not bluffing now when I tell you that someone—someone on that list of people you love—might have killed your husband. You know it and I know it.”
“And what about my father, Max?”
He jerked back. “What about him?”
“Were you bluffing to win the night we told him we wanted to get married and he went ballistic?”
Color drained from his face, telling her she’d hit a nerve. She powered on anyway, sick of holding it all in. “When he slammed his bedroom door shut and you punched a hole in the wall, I heard what you said, Max. I heard you.”
“What?”
“He said he’d do whatever was necessary to stop us. Including have you shipped away to some remote assignment.” She paused. “And you said, ‘He won’t win this. Nothing can stop us.’ ”
“Cori.” His face contorted as he shook his head. “That was just an expression. There was a lot of emotion that night. Things were said by all of us. You were the one who stomped your foot and said you’d follow me to the ends of the earth. Or were you bluffing?”
“And then you took matters into your own hands.”
The look on his face was even more pained than the night in Chicago when she had first made the accusation.
He lowered himself one more step, putting more distance between them and actually forcing her to look down on him. The position made him seem vulnerable, as did the look in his eyes.
“I did not take matters into my own hands, Cori.” He spoke so softly, she leaned forward to hear him. “Your father did.
”
“Pardon me?”
“I know what you think happened. But believe me, I didn’t have a chance to take matters into my own hands.” His throat moved as he swallowed. “Coop did that for me.”
Disbelief squeezed her heart. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that…I lied.”
Cori reached for the wrought-iron banister. “What did you lie about, Max?”
“I lied about the O’Hare drug bust. I lied to you, and the DEA.” He closed his eyes. “And I’ve paid for it ever since.”
Oh, Lord. “What really happened that morning, Max?” she asked quietly.
“I didn’t freeze and let Coop take that bullet.” He swallowed again. “He dove and took it for me.”
Her eyes widened. Just like your father. “On purpose? He did that on purpose?”
“He saved my life…for you.” He put his hand on top of hers on the banister. “Before he died, he told me to watch out for you, to take care of you. He gave us his blessing.”
“Oh.” It was more of a sound than a word. “And I blamed you. And ran away.”
“And I didn’t watch out for you or take care of you. Until now.”
“That’s why you took this assignment, isn’t it? Not to nail me for murder. Not to get back at me. Not to rekindle anything. It was to keep a five-year-old promise.”
“I really loved your dad.” His voice cracked at the same moment her heart did. “And he really loved you.”
“Well, that was some stupid way to show me,” she whispered, tears in her eyes. Her father had given his life for her, and they’d blown it. Both of them.
He took a step up, bringing them closer again. “He just wanted you to be happy.”
She closed her eyes. “And he thought I’d be happier with you than him.”
He nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Max?”
“I wanted to, but not when the pain was so raw. I thought…” His eyes were dangerously moist. “When some time passed. When I came back to Chicago…”
“And when you came back, I was already married to William.”
“I lost that bet.”
“Oh, Max.” She put her hand on her chest, trying to quell the pain. “I blamed you. I blamed us. I never thought he’d…” She closed her eyes.