Just Evil (19 page)

“No, you aren’t late, and yes, we’re babysitting. Baylee had
something she needed to do tonight and as it turns out it was at the last
minute. I wasn’t really sure if you’d make it. The crisis must not have been
that critical.”

He had no intentions of telling her that he’d verbally kicked
Chuck’s ass for waiting to the last minute to make corrections to a contract
that should have been finished two weeks ago. Then, to the surprise of everyone
within shouting distance of his office, he’d delegated the rewording of the
contract to Dylan and left him to deal with the Eastman contract. It had been a
first, but he hadn’t wanted to risk getting bogged down in the minute details
and consequently be late for dinner.

He followed them from the tiled entryway through the long,
open rectangular living room into the small but homey kitchen. He watched Kit
put Sarah in the swing without a fuss and hand the baby a bright yellow plastic
teething ring to play with before turning back to the counter to start work on
a marinade. Noticing the wine he was holding, Kit asked, “Does that wine need
to breathe or chill or something? Despite helping you polish off three bottles
last night I’m not a wine connoisseur.”

He chuckled as he shrugged out of his suit jacket, draped it
over a kitchen chair. “A beer sounds good.”

She dug into a drawer for the corkscrew before reaching into
the fridge for a beer.

“And this is an Australian Shiraz 2004 that goes well with
just about anything, and since I wasn’t sure what was on the menu, I thought it
was a safe bet.” 

In one motion, she twisted off the cap to the beer and
handed him the bottle. “It’s such a nice evening, why don’t we throw some
steaks on the grill, eat outside, and enjoy the view from the deck?”

She took down two wine glasses from the cabinet and carried
them outside to the table already set for two. When she got back inside, she
found him watching the baby as if Sarah were an alien with several heads.

When he caught her looking at him, he turned his attention
to the view beyond the open French doors, enjoying the picture-perfect sight of
shimmering water merging with a crystal blue spring sky.

For a few moments he stared out at the ocean until his eyes
drifted back to where the baby sat prettily in the swing. Curious, he leaned
down in front of the swing and asked Kit, “How old is Sarah?”

At the mention of her name, Sarah chortled and cooed and
tried hard to throw the teething ring in Jake’s direction. The thing landed at
his feet. Jake reached down, picked it up off the floor, and handed it back.

As Kit poured the marinade over the steaks, she acknowledged
proudly, “She’ll be five months Sunday. And she got her first tooth this
morning.” Turning from the counter, she caught their exchange. “Oh look, she’s
trying to give you the toy. You obviously have a way with babies. Go ahead,
reach out your hands. See if she’ll come to you.”

“Come to me?” He’d played with a niece or two at this age.
The idea that she might actually want him to pick her up intrigued him so much
he held both hands out to the baby.

In response, Sarah went to kicking out her little legs and
cooing again. Willing to oblige, he reached out, scooped her up with his big
hands, and brought her up to his shoulder like an old pro. Patting her gingerly
on the back, he issued a couple of soothing words until Sarah gurgled and waved
her little arms in the air.

Kit stood there amazed. She had no idea he’d actually pick
her up. Well, who knew? Weren’t most men scared to death to handle a baby? The
man obviously had a way with children. Kit watched as Jake headed outside to
the deck, bouncing the baby in his arms while carrying on an animated
conversation, talking to her about the ocean, the sky, and the setting sun.

After about fifteen minutes of sightseeing though, he
brought Sarah back inside just as she started to fuss. “I think she’s getting
tired. She’s starting to—make noise.” 

Kit wiped her hands on a dish towel before turning to take
the baby from him. “Well, aren’t you just the best-kept secret since daycare?”

“I’m an uncle several times over. I have nieces. My oldest
sister Sophia has two girls, six and five. Hannah has a little two-year-old
girl and she’s expecting another.” As if that explained everything, he grinned.

Testing his good mood, Kit asked, “In that case, with all
that experience under your belt, maybe you’d like to change her diaper, give
her a bath, or get her ready for bed? Pick one.”

The man visibly paled. “I’ve never changed a diaper in my
life. I have, however, taken the garden hose and wet down a couple of sticky
little girls before letting them set foot in the house. But something tells me
that isn’t what you had in mind.”

She stalled in mid-step and turned to look at him. “Well,
no. A garden hose?”

He grinned and grabbed his beer. “It seemed like the most
practical way to get rid of several layers of caked on dirt since they were
making mud pies all afternoon.”

“Somehow I can’t picture you caring for two little girls.”

“Piece of cake as long as there are no diapers to change.”

When Sarah began to cry for real, Kit reached into the
depths of a gigantic diaper bag until she found a pair of lavender pajamas and
a fresh diaper. For good measure, she searched again, finally pulled out a
little red rubber duck she could use for Sarah’s sponge bath. “Be right back,”
she yelled as she turned the corner and disappeared. 

When he heard water running, he took his beer and stepped
back outside to stand at the rail.

He stared at the waves, watched the people strolling on the
beach and the sinking sun. Pepper ambled up to him, and he reached down to pet
the dog and let this purely domestic scene envelope him like a warm, fuzzy
glove.

He stood there listening to the waves and let the day’s
events just melt away. The encounter with Collin forgotten, as well as the
problems with the Eastman contract and dealing with Chuck, peace settled over
him and the day’s tensions fled.

He began to relax. Instincts told him this was the something
he’d been missing. Kit. It occurred to him that even with her difficult
childhood, her innate sweetness would make her one hell of a mother someday.

Were kids and marital bliss really in his future? he
wondered.

Thinking like that had a nasty tasting fear inching its way
up his throat. He’d wanted kids once. And look how that had turned out. But Kit
wasn’t Claire, he reminded himself. The two women were polar opposites in every
way.

That settled him down.

When he heard Kit come back into the kitchen, he went inside
to get another beer and met her at the fridge. Kit grabbed the baby’s bottle of
milk, he a beer. Their eyes met and held.

Suddenly, Kit offered Sarah out to him and asked, “Will you
hold her a minute while I heat up the bottle in the microwave?”

Once again, he held Sarah in his arms, breathing in her
powder-and-lotion, her baby smell, while he watched Kit punch in the time on
the microwave. While the bottle heated, she dug into the deep interior of the
diaper bag and came up with the baby monitor.

When a tired Sarah began to wriggle in Jake’s arms and fuss
in earnest, Kit took the milk from the microwave, tested the temperature, and
handed off the bottle to Jake, who promptly stuck it into Sarah’s eager mouth.

While she nursed, making little sucking noises, Kit motioned
for Jake to follow her into a minuscule bedroom immediately off the living
area. “I have to hook this thing up and get it working before I put her down so
we can hear her while we’re outside.”

When Kit had trouble getting the monitor hooked up, the geek
in him couldn’t stand watching her struggle with it and finally volunteered,
“Let me do it.”

Grateful for the offer, they switched duties. Kit took the
baby and began to rock her gently in her arms. With each back-and-forth
movement, the baby’s eyelids fluttered with sleep and soon closed.

While Jake worked on the monitor, the room fell silent.
Instead of feeling awkward, it settled into a comfortable atmosphere where the
two of them were engrossed in nothing more than getting the baby down. Soon
Jake had the monitor up and running and Sarah was fast asleep.

As they walked back to the kitchen, Jake admitted, “That was
fairly painless.”

“She’s a good baby.”

“I take it Baylee’s on her own.”

Kit nodded as she tossed the salad. “I wasn’t kidding
earlier. Baylee’s clammed up. She disappeared about the same time you did last
year and showed up Christmas Eve with Sarah. I don’t even know who Sarah’s
father is.”

“That doesn’t sound like Baylee. No idea what happened?”

“Not a clue.”

Changing the subject, he offered, “What can I do to help?”

She handed him the platter with the steaks and said, “You
can get these started.”

As he went outside to put the steaks on the grill, something
kept rolling around in his mind. Baylee had to know Kit’s past. And knowing
that, some relief tore through him that at least she’d had someone to confide
in, someone to turn to. But then just as quickly, that relief vanished when he
decided that turning to another kid wouldn’t have been much help in Kit’s
situation. What she’d needed was for her father to step in and get her out of
there.

But he hadn’t done that.

Kit joined him at the railing just in time to see the
remnants of the sun drop into the water. “Ever thought of having one of your
own? A baby, I mean.”

In spite of his earlier thoughts, her direct question caught
him off guard. Kit merely shrugged. “Hey, last night I bared my soul. Tonight’s
your turn. I’ve never asked you about Claire; never wanted to go there.”

Much like she’d felt the night before, he didn’t want to
dwell on his past, didn’t want to talk about it. But if they were headed toward
a relationship, and he thought they were, it was better to get things out in
the open.

He took a pull on his beer. Kit watched as he swallowed the
liquid, gathering his thoughts. He finally set the bottle down on the table. “I
knew from the start I’d made a huge mistake. When you marry someone based on a
lie, there’s no other direction to go but down when the truth comes out.”

That was the last thing she expected him to say. A tug of
sympathy formed in her heart. “Why’d you marry her then?”

With the tips of his fingers he rubbed both eyes before
drawing out a sigh. “She told me she was pregnant. But two weeks after the
wedding I walked into the bathroom, caught her taking a birth control pill out
of her pill pack. She tried to make me believe that she’d miscarried, but I
wasn’t quite that stupid. She’d lied and got caught, simple as that. There were
plenty of red flags before we were married that spoke volumes about what kind
of person she was, but like an idiot, I ignored them all. I thought once we
were married, she’d change.”

He shook his head. “People don’t suddenly change their
behavior because you stick a ring on their finger. But knowing she’d lied about
being pregnant, I was done. I knew she couldn’t be trusted.”

Suddenly Kit understood the infamous Claire had tricked the
founder of a multimillion-dollar software company into marriage for his money.
As she listened intently, she walked to the grill and turned the steaks,
intrigued that the confident, arrogant man she’d known could have been fooled
so easily into believing a lie like that.

But he must have loved her.

“We were married twenty months, just a little more than a
year and a half. It was the worst time of my life. I was miserable. I spent
more and more time away from the house and buried myself in work. It wasn’t
that hard to do, I had a pretty full plate at the time trying to keep sales up,
keep the software current, and meet strategic marketing deadlines on three
continents. I had to travel a lot back then, so I was gone most of the time.
Our marriage became more like a roommate situation. We shared the same house,
but lived in separate bedrooms. If I suspected there were other men, the truth
is, at that point, I just didn’t care. I was too busy with work to pay much
attention to what Claire was doing, how she lived. As long as she left me
alone, I didn’t care.”

“Why didn’t you get a divorce?”

“And admit to everyone they’d been right about her. A part
of me was humiliated that I’d been so stupid. Then… That day—I’d been out of
town for almost two weeks. I landed at LAX at seven-fifteen in the morning from
Germany, went directly to the office, put in a sixteen hour work day, I didn’t
get home until well after midnight. When I walked upstairs the first thing I
noticed was the blood on the carpet in the hallway. Then I walked into the
room—I’ll never forget that as long as I live. There was blood everywhere, on
the bed, the walls, the floor. There’d obviously been some kind of a fight…”
His voice trailed off.

How horribly sad, Kit thought. But she had to stop him from
going any further. She didn’t need those kinds of details. She reached out and
took his hand in hers, pressed it to her face. “Jake, you don’t have to do
this. It isn’t necessary. I get the picture.”

He squeezed out a forced laugh. “The thing is I wasn’t
entirely sure about the men, the affairs; I mean, I had no confirmation of that
until after she died. It was St. John who asked me real nice like to come down
to the station for a little interrogation, a little one-on-one, and then he hit
me over the head with that information right between the eyes. Of course, I
wasn’t all that surprised, but hearing a police detective tell you that your
wife is screwing anything in pants is a pretty low point in your life. And just
when you think things can’t get any worse, you learn that the police plan to
use her infidelity, her affairs, as your motive for killing her. Honest to God,
that was perhaps the lowest point in my life. When I found out I was a murder
suspect, I hit rock bottom. I’d embarrassed my parents, my sisters, my friends,
my employees, myself.