A Killing Kind of Love: A Dark, Standalone Romantic Suspense (32 page)

“It’s mother’s take on a bordello waiting room. Like it?” Gina asked, her mouth, tightening, told him she didn’t.

“Creative,” he said, looking at her, then lifting the wine bottle. “Glasses? A corkscrew maybe?”

“Over there.” She gestured toward an enameled bar in the corner of the garish room. “When you’re done. We’ll be in there.” Another gesture toward a door a few feet away. Delores’s parlor, he presumed.

“How many glasses?” he asked.

Gina eyed him, then looked at Camryn. Defensively, Dan thought. “Four. Adam will be down in a few minutes.” She upped the wattage in her sharp eyes. “And he’s the one you’re
just dying
to meet, right?” She smiled then, as if what she’d said was in jest. The woman was a definite nut job.

“Four it is.” He crossed the room, opened the wine—a decent one thanks to Camryn—then joined the two women in what could only be described as a dark, furniture-packed pigsty of a room that faced the lake.

“Could use some light,” he said.

“Mother likes it this way. Sorry.”

He shrugged, set four glasses—none too clean from what he could see—on the coffee table next to a couple of heaping ashtrays. He poured the wine for the three of them.

Camryn, who’d been standing by the window when he came into the room, walked toward the settee. She shoved some magazines aside so she could sit down, but before she could sit—

“No!” Gina said. “Don’t sit there.” Holding her drink in one hand, she pointed toward two chairs, and, as if she were directing a stage play, said to Dan, “You sit there,” nodding to one, “and you there, Camryn,” gesturing toward another chair, directly across from the settee and in the opposite corner from Dan. The room was long and somewhat narrow, so it seemed their hostess wanted them as far apart as she could get them.
Damned strange,
thought Dan.

Gina went on. “While you settle in, I’ll go up and see if I can hurry up Adam. Oh, and I’ve got some cheese and crackers. I’ll get them, too.” She set her wineglass precariously on a stack of books that sat beside the ugliest sofa he’d ever seen. “God,” she babbled on, her voice a pitch higher. “We have so much to talk about. It’s been ages. Absolute ages.” She shot a look toward him. “You won’t mind listening to some girly catch-up talk, will you, Dan?”

“Not at all.” From here on in—at least until Dunn showed up—he’d happily let Camryn carry the ball.

When Gina was gone, Camryn, aghast at her friend’s odd behavior, turned to Dan, “God, I didn’t know it’d got this bad. Something’s not right with her. I felt it the minute we walked in the door.” She tugged nervously on her earlobe. “And where’s Delores?”

She was asking herself, not Dan, but he shook his head. “Can’t say I’m sorry to have missed her, after meeting the daughter. That woman’s more out of it than Erin Grantman on her worst day—and not from drugs.” Dan wandered the room, tried a couple of the lamps, but none of them worked. They were left with the light from a gooseneck reading lamp near a chair in the far corner, enough to cast shadows but little else.

“Damn it.” Camryn said, letting out a frustrated sigh. “I should have stayed in closer contact these past months, but she kept resisting any effort I made. Kept saying she needed time alone for a while. When I’d press, saying I’d come here, she’d put me off.” Camryn got up, sipped her wine, and started to pace. “She always blamed Delores and, knowing Delores, I believed her. Damn it,” she said again. “I shouldn’t have taken no for an answer.” The truth was she hated coming here; the unending mess and Delores’s withering tongue did not make for a fun time. So she’d decided to give Gina what she wanted. Time alone to work out whatever needed to be worked out. She’d never dreamed it had anything to do with Adam.

“So now you’re making this loony bin”—he waved a careless hand—“and its flaky inhabitants your fault?”

“No, but I could have been more sensitive. Maybe helped in some way.”

“I seriously doubt that.” He jerked his head toward the door, then looked at her, “What’s the story here, anyway?” He looked around. “This place is a mess.”

She followed his gaze, welcomed the change of subject, used it to ease her gnawing worry about her friend. “The house has been on a downhill run since Delores bought it twenty-five years ago. Back then everyone attributed it to Delores’s”—she rolled her eyes—“decorating taste. But according to Gina, the real problem started after Delores’s third husband walked out on her with most of her bank account—maybe fifteen years ago; I can’t remember exactly. Gina called it the GDD, the Great Delores Depression, and said she was never the same after that. She fired the cleaning staff, rarely went out herself, and started ignoring the deteriorating condition of the house, wouldn’t allow anyone—even Gina—to touch it with so much as a feather duster.” Camryn scanned the room and sighed. She remembered once hearing Delores describe her decorating style as whimsical. Grotesque was more apt. The dimly lit parlor, with its overladen ashtrays, stained carpet, and ratty furniture, made you want to don an antiviral suit and a gas mask. The smell of stale tobacco and dust was so strong it was like thorns in your nose.

She thought of Gina, losing a baby, coming to this awful place, depressed and alone, and her heart ached for her.

Gina, obsessively neat and organized, had always loathed this house, and to say the mother-daughter relationship was strained was a gross understatement. Gina had once said, dramatically, that if she didn’t get out of “Misery Manor” and free herself from the talons of “Mother Dracula,” she’d go mad.

Perhaps she had.

Dan clicked his fingers, tilted his head. “Dan to Camryn. Anyone there?”

“Sorry.” Camryn pulled herself from her memories. “Anyway, to make a long story short, Gina left for college, then settled in Seattle to practice law. After that, she came to the lake maybe once a year. Her ‘guilt visit,’ she called it. Even then it was mostly to see Sebastian. He lived here, in a perpetual state of war with Delores, until maybe three years ago.”

“What the hell does he do anyway?”

“He’s a day trader. A successful one, I’m told,” she said absently.

They both heard the sound of a man’s voice, then a door slam somewhere in the house. Then absolute silence. No, not quite. Music, barely audible, floated into the room. The same chords repeating and repeating . . .

Unaccountably, Camryn’s heart pounded, and she had the insane desire to run. Her every instinct sensing trouble and pain.

She looked at Dan, who’d taken a pile of paper and magazines off a chair in the farthest corner of the room and settled into it with his glass of wine. He’d leaned forward at the sound of a door slamming from somewhere in the house, listened intently for a moment, then leaned back, his expression calm, his body relaxed.

“Looks to me as if we’ll be here a while,” he said, not a trace of impatience in his voice. “You might as well sit down and enjoy your wine.”

She nodded. He might be right about their having to wait for a time, but instead of drinking her wine, she set it beside the bottle on the cluttered coffee table and went back to the seat Gina assigned her, across the room from Dan. She stared into the blackness outside the window.

And thought of bullets . . .

“Shush, they’ll hear you,” Gina said, closing her bedroom door too quickly and much too hard. At least he’d waited where she’d asked him to. A miracle, considering he’d become less and less obliging lately.

“Yeah, well, I don’t give a good goddamn. You’re crazy if you think I’m going down there. That guy hates my guts.”

“You have to come. Dan Lambert being here changes everything. I didn’t factor him in. I need you, Adam.” Gina’s voice was calm, but her insides rolled and banged like dropped drums. “There’s no risk. None. If we do this right.”

“You said you’d do it, Gina. This whole goddamn thing was your idea.” He glared at her, his eyes jumping with frustration, refusing to settle on her. He sounded like a petulant teenager.

“I will, my darling. All I want you to do is provide a distraction. Buy me a little time to get the second shot off.” She went to stand in front of him, ran her fingers along the soft cotton of his shirt front. She felt high, excited, frustrated, panicked. Wild. More alive than she’d been in months. The only thing that came close was an orgasm a la Adam. At that thought, she moistened her dry lips, rubbed her palms over his nipples, tried to kiss his chin. . . .

He pulled away. “Jesus, Gina, will you stop rubbing yourself against me like a bitch in heat. Can’t you keep your hands off me for five minutes? Give me time enough to actually think!” He ran a hand through his lustrous hair. She loved his hair. He turned his back, took a few steps away, leaving his hand to rest on the nape of his neck, head bowed.

Even from where she stood, a few steps away, she could hear his heavy breathing.

“Whatever you want, Adam,” she said, knowing she’d have her hands all over him forever when this night was done. In a way it was perfect—two birds with one stone. It wasn’t that Dan Lambert was a threat exactly, but he was a nuisance, determined as he was to keep Adam’s daughter. There was always the chance he’d cause trouble, delay Adam’s money. Their money. “All I want is for you to come into the room—noisily—about five minutes after I go back down to the parlor—”

“The parlor? You’re in Delores’s parlor?” He turned enough to look at her, seeming puzzled.

“Yes.” She skidded over his questioning interruption. “It’s simple enough, Adam. All I need is a moment’s diversion, and I’ll take it from there. Camryn first. Lambert second. I told you I’d do it, and I will. Then we’ll have everything we ever wanted. We’ll have this house. Money. We can live here forever—happily ever after.” She smiled. “Think of it. Your Lando problem solved, and us with the freedom to do whatever we want, whenever we want.”

He shook his head. “With two bodies buried in the basement.” He sneered. “Nice. Real nice. And who the hell said I wanted anything to do with this shit-house?” He made a full turn, put his hands on his hips, and glared at her. “And where the hell is Delores?”

It was as if her lungs collapsed. “Delores?” she repeated, suddenly feeling slow and stupid. Her mother. Where was her mother?
Oh, yes . . .
She took a breath. She should have expected this.

Adam and Delores. Delores and Adam.

“Delores, Gina. Where is she?”

“She, uh, went out. She said something about seeing Paul Grantman. You must have heard the car.”

His direct gaze wavered, but only for a second. “No, I didn’t hear a car. Where is she, Gina?” he repeated, his words slow, his eyes narrowed and suspicious.

Gina wanted to turn her back on him, but she couldn’t, couldn’t look away from his cold eyes. Adam.
Her
Adam. Asking about Delores. She couldn’t bear it. “Why do you care where she is?” She kept her voice soft and pushed back at the rage tearing into her chest. She could feel its claws, the heat of it, see its sharp, fatal brilliance before her eyes. “Why do you want to know?”

He hesitated, and she could see his hands shift and tighten on his slim waist. “Because she offered me a better deal—a bloodless deal—and I’ve decided to take it. I don’t want anyone dead, Gina. I especially don’t want Camryn dead. You got that?”

The brilliance in her mind, grayed, and shattered, letting fear and rage in on a roar, deafening her to her own thoughts. “You love her, don’t you? That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? You still want her. You’ve always wanted her.”

He shook his head. “There’s a leap. I don’t want to kill someone, and you think it’s because I want to take her to bed.”

“You fucked my mother, Adam. And if you’d crawl between her sheets, you sure as hell won’t say no to Camryn.” He studied her as if she were a dropped egg, a horrible mess that he didn’t want to clean up. “I shouldn’t have come to you. Shit. I always knew you were different from Holly and Camryn, but I didn’t know you were jackass crazy.”

Why did he have to speak their names, bring them into the room, like smug, sneering ghosts? There should be only her and Adam. Not Camryn, not Holly, not Delores—not a thousand nameless women Gina hadn’t met, would never meet.

Weariness sucked at her, engulfed her, sapped her energy. She’d tried so hard . . . Now, she was finished.

Color followed, the red of surging violence, the gray of disgust for what she was. Despair enveloped her, even as her mind skirted reason.

Adam didn’t love her—would never love her.

Through dark eyes she saw him, his excess of gifts, masculine beauty, grace, leanly muscled body, midnight smile . . . the latent consuming power of his sex. His lying words.

I hate him. I hate them all.
All who’ve been given life’s unfathomable gifts—to love and be loved. Children.

Small, loving souls. Mine only tissue and blood.

Her brain blanked with the abruptness of a power failure, and the light of her mind, already diffused and dim, went out.

Hatred, bloody and sharp, dried her mouth.

Desolation coated her heart.

I can’t
—
won’t—take it anymore.

She stuffed her hands in her sweater pocket, wrapped her fingers around the comfort of death. “I’m different from anyone you’ve ever met, Adam.” She took the gun from her pocket.

Adam’s eyes fell to the gun, widened. “Jesus, Gina—”

“Don’t worry,” she said, calm flowering inside her, lightening her tone. “You’re going where you belong . . . to Mother, to Holly.” She lowered the gun to his groin. “And you might want to wait up, because Camryn will be along shortly.”

As will I. We’ll see you in hell, Adam. All of us.

She fired.

Dan shot to his feet. “What the hell!”

Camryn’s head snapped up. They both looked upward to the ceiling. To whatever was beyond it.

The harsh report of the gun coming from the far reaches of the big house had barely registered before the room filled with music: a clash of cymbals, a crescendo of violins . . . what sounded like the onslaught of a hundred-piece orchestra; its rush of sharps and flats, as if herded by the volume at which they were played, tripping over themselves, tumbling down the stairs and into the miserable parlor.