IN ROOM 33 (33 page)

"Every last nickel of it. Your mother's financial wellbeing might be your concern. It sure as hell isn't mine. I don't care if she—" He stopped. Enough said.

"I think the normal finish to that sentence is 'rots in hell?'"

He said nothing, and she fixed those wide, truth-seeking eyes on him—and honed in on a dark spot he'd hoped never to visit again.

"Which leads us to your story," she said. "Tell me. What did she mean when she said you must be 'better in bed than you used to be?'"

"Maybe you should ask her." He was stalling and knew it.

"Do you really want me to do that?"

"No." He didn't, but neither could he make his damn mouth work.

Silence filled the room, heavy and bleak—accusatory.

Finally, Joy closed her eyes against it, against him. Her words came out on a chilled whisper. "You did sleep with her, didn't you?" She licked her lips as if they were dry, and her gaze met his—not with the anger he'd have been comfortable with, but a bone-deep, terrible misery.

"I did not sleep with her." That much was true. He couldn't describe what they'd done, but he knew one thing—it had nothing to do with sleeping.

Chapter 16

Joy's blood coursed through her veins, a river of ice.

Wade was lying and she knew it. He looked angry, guilty, and frustrated. No doubt he was all of them. Just as she was sickened, disappointed, and strangely panicked. She had the insane—or smart—urge to grab her clothes and run. But before she could be sure that her brain still controlled her legs, Wade stepped up to her.

"Sit down," he said. "I might as well get this over with." His expression was forbidding, his mouth a thin seam.

He exerted light pressure on her shoulders to make her sit on the edge of the bed. With the anger and pain in her head blocking a sane decision process, she sat. He stood over her. They both took some deep breaths.

"I was seventeen when your mother married my dad." He stopped. "This isn't going to be pretty, and I'm not going to watch my words. Can you handle that?"

"Oh, I can handle it, all right. The truth is, I'm fascinated. It's not every day a girl sleeps with the same man who's slept with her mother."

"It wasn't—" He stopped again, looked at the ceiling as if it would offer him the excuses he needed. "I did not sleep with your mother. At least, not in the sense you're thinking of it."

"I'm thinking of it in the sense of fucking." She managed to lace her tone in sugar and add a smile. It felt like a tear across her lower face. "How are you thinking of it... fondly?"

He glared at her. "If you'll shut up, I'll tell you."

She put a hand behind her ear, ignored the building pressure in her lungs. "Go for it."

"I was seventeen—"

"—you said that." When his glare hardened, she didn't care. Anger, cold and vicious, had staked its claim. She turned away from his eyes, afraid of what truth she'd see there.

"It happened the same day you and I met at the Phil. I'd met Dad there that afternoon to go home with him for his birthday dinner the same night. I hadn't wanted to go, but my mother insisted... That woman didn't have a mean bone in her body." He paused as if to gather his thoughts. "Before dinner, I hit Stephen's liquor supply, figured I needed liquid courage. I was okay until Lana came in and sat in my mother's chair. Cool as... hell, cool as it's possible to be."

"I get the picture."

"I doubt it. Anyway, that cool—and the Jack Daniel's—made me a little nuts, I guess. I mouthed off, said something rude—and probably crude—to your mother. I can't remember, but whatever it was started a fight with my father." He glanced down at her. "You remember that? You were asked to leave the room and you weren't happy about it."

She gave a slight nod. "You broke a glass against the wall."

"Yeah." He pulled his earlobe. "After that, I got out of there and went to bed." He started to pace, then just as suddenly stopped. "I fell asleep pretty much right away. I guess 'passed out' would be more accurate. It was maybe three o'clock when I woke up." He took a breath. "I thought I was having a wet dream, and maybe I was, at first. But then I felt hands... working me. I woke up hard as stone with your mother straddling me, trying to—hell. You can guess."

Silence bloated the room, as if there'd been a sudden, shocking death. Even the air thinned.

Wade looked as if he'd been beaten by ghosts—no visible scars but haggard, weak, and exhausted from the battle.

Joy put her head, suddenly too heavy to hold upright, in her two hands. She did not want to know this. Didn't know what to do with the information.

"There's more," Wade said.

She lifted her face to his, her mind blanked by overload.

"When my brain kicked in, I shoved her off me, cursed her with all the colorful vocabulary at my seventeen-year-old disposal—you got a taste of it earlier that night at dinner—and that brought my father to the scene." His expression altered subtly, at once pained and hard, and he ran a hand through his hair. "And what a view he got. A naked kid with a hard-on, railing at his beautiful wife, who was flat out on the floor." His mouth flattened. "She told him I'd come on to her. That she'd come into my room to check on me, and I'd been all over her."

Nauseous, Joy had to ask, "And Stephen? What did he do?"

"He believed Lana and tossed me out of the house." He dragged a chair to face her and sat, trapping her knees between his. He reached for her hands, and she didn't have the strength to pull them away. "My guess is he went to his grave believing I was some kind of pervert." Pain clouded his gaze. She saw him straighten to refuse it entry, work to contain the bitter memory, shove it into the ugly past where it belonged.

"And you blame my mother." Her words sounded dumb, ill-placed, and stupidly accusatory, but she didn't know what else to say, didn't know how she felt, and couldn't hold onto an emotion long enough to identify it.

"I don't know how else to say this—except to say it. My take on it is that all your mother cared about was money, and she married my father to get it. When I think about it now—which is as little as possible—I see that little show in my bedroom as her way of getting rid of me. I'm not going to lie. I more than blamed her, I hated her—maybe I still do." He lifted her chin, forced her to look at him. "The one thing I did
not
do was sleep with her. You have to believe that, or you and I don't stand a chance."

She pulled her face away, got up, and crossed the room to the closet. She started to dress. If she didn't get out of here, the chaos in her brain would close her lungs completely. She needed fresh air, and more than that—she needed to get away from Wade... the image of him and Lana.

"Joy, don't do this." He started across the room.

She held up a hand to stop him. "Don't touch me." She put on her robe, gathered up her bag and the dress she'd worn to dinner. A dinner that now seemed like days ago. "And don't say another word."

She finished gathering up her things. At the door she looked back. "And there's something you should know. I have two million dollars in the bank—the result of a brief but highly profitable marriage. So you could say preying on men and their fortunes is a specialty of the Cole women."

Not waiting for his reaction, she stepped into the dark corridor and ran across it to her own room.

Room 33 enclosed her with the harsh, dark purpose of a prison cell, its only light the gray illumination from streetlamps nearly a half-block away down the alley outside her window.

Her blood pounded and stumbled along her veins, and her heart thumped until she couldn't hear over its thrumming beat. She wanted to run, run and never stop, but even in its overtaxed state, her mind registered it was the middle of the night and a dangerous neighborhood. And she wasn't wearing any shoes. Her shoes were at Wade's, as were most of her clothes, her computer, and her naive heart.

"Joy." There was a determined pounding on the door.

She ignored
it.

"I don't want you in that room," he said.

"I don't care what you want." She looked at the door, Wade had installed new hinges and locks after Sinnie's attack. He could pound all he wanted and he'd stay on the other side unless she wanted it otherwise.

"If you won't stay with me, I'll drive you back to the Marriot. You can't stay here." He thumped the door again.

Joy unlocked it and flung it open. "If anyone's going to leave this hotel, it's going to be you. For the last time, this is my hotel, not yours, not my mother's. Mine. And I'll do what I damn well please." She came perilously close to poking him in the chest, but the thought of it was too ludicrous. "Have I made myself clear?"

"Perfectly."

"Fine," She started to close the door and he put his foot in it.

"We haven't finished."

"We are about as finished as finished gets."

"I wasn't talking about us. I was talking about the Phil, about finding out what's going on around here." He kept his foot wedged in the door opening.

"I can do that on my own."

"You probably can." His look was cold. "But somebody hurt Sinnie, and I don't plan on leaving here until I find out who. We can either work together or alone. Your choice."

"You do whatever you like. Alone works for me." Alone, always alone—she was used to it, yet the word slid across her tongue like the bitterest of medicine.

"I did not have sex with your mother, Joy. If you don't hear anything else I say, hear that." He pulled his foot from the door and crossed the hall. "If you're going to sleep in that room, check all the windows and lock your door. I'll leave mine open. If you need me, call." He disappeared into his room.

When she closed the door behind her, she followed his instructions, took off her robe, and crawled under the covers. The bed was cold and too firm, but her resolve was colder—and harder. She lay awake, stared at the shadowed ceiling, and for the rest of the night fought a winning battle against tears.

Lana, for all her selfish ways and flagrant indiscretions, was her mother. She couldn't change that. Nor could she shape her into the milk-and-cookies mama she'd dreamed about as a child. But, mysteriously, as if she carried a gene imbued with the immutability of it, she couldn't stop loving her—and hating her at the same time. Lana had taken her from a father she loved, never let her say good-bye—and now she'd taken Wade.

Wade...

In the small hours the anger ebbed, and a wretched, deeply resented, fear replaced it. Joy didn't know if she could ever look at Wade again without replaying that scene in his bedroom.

And she never wanted to see that scene again.

* * *

Lana slipped out from under the covers, too warm to sleep, too indecisive to make plans. She looked back at the man in the bed. A man who, a few hours before, she'd agreed to marry. David was everything she wanted and didn't want.

They were too much alike, she and David. And he'd lied to her, she was sure of it. His deceit left her uncertain, vaguely uneasy.

Lana knew what she was—selfish, cautious, and controlled. She didn't believe in emotional unraveling—except in bed. She took what good sex had to offer—release in a confined period of time—because risking your body, your physical responses, was such a small thing. Lana adored seeing desire in a man's eyes, the want of her. Only her. She'd seen lust in David's eyes the day they'd met, and she'd responded to it, as she'd done many times before.

She'd considered herself fortunate to find him when Stephen's interest in the bedroom started to wane—most likely when his health problems began. She'd thought she and David would last a month or two and she'd move on.

That was a year ago, perhaps more. And tonight she'd agreed to marry him... because she was afraid to lose him. That fear was disconcerting. It should be David who was afraid, not Lana Cole. Never Lana Cole.

"What are you doing out of bed?" David's deep voice came out of the dark.

She walked back to the bed and put one knee on it, looked down at him. "Actually, I was thinking about your marriage proposal."

"Regrets already?" He stroked her bare knee, ran his hand along the back of her thigh.