Killing Secrets (7 page)

His grip tightened further and she knew his bruising fingerprints would ring her wrist by morning like some kind of slave bracelet, a reminder of what she’d been forced to pay over and again for that miracle.

“You’ve obviously forgotten how good it was between us, darlin’.” He rubbed his erection on her hip. “I’ve been thinking about it for six long months, about all the ways I want to refresh your memory. Do you have any idea what it felt like sitting in that jail cell wanting you, knowing you stabbed me in the back only to make me pay for messing with your home-wrecking friend?”

Swallowing back the urge to retch, she winced when she thought of Katy. Her friend hadn’t been the only reason she’d done something to escape the untenable situation she’d lived for four years. Katy had simply given Rachel hope. That she could leave Greg. That she could escape without losing Amanda. The older woman had offered her old job back, reminded her of the peaceful joy of landscaping, a settled place for her heart and dreams that didn’t include a man who controlled her every waking moment.

Righteous anger stiffened her spine. She suddenly tore free of Greg’s grasp, staggered away and sucked clean air into her lungs. “You’re lucky they only arrested you for theft and fraud. If Katy had died from the heart attack you caused, you’d have been charged with murder too.”

On a roll, she said more than she’d ever dared before. “As for how good it was between us,
darlin’
, my memory’s a lot different than yours. I stayed to protect Amanda, and you know it. Do you think I’ve forgotten what you did to me?”

Her laughter overflowed with bitterness six years of marriage had left seared on her battered soul. “You’re deluded if you think I’ll ever let you touch me again. I never wanted you after I knew you for the snake you are!”

She regretted her final words the moment she uttered them because snakes strike when provoked. Greg’s handsome face mottled with familiar fury. She didn’t see his hand move, but she felt it pass through her blessedly short hair where he used to grab the waist-length strands, heard his growl of frustration when he didn’t snag anything. Before he could try again, she jerked away. Her legs tangled up beneath her and she sprawled flat, her head snapping backward to hit the ground with a sickening thud.

Dizziness swirling through her mind, the taste of blood on her tongue, she stared at the metal weed bucket she’d forgotten at her feet. She shook her head, then looked up at Greg, debating the wisdom of rising.

“Get up,” he ordered.

Staying put sounded like a better idea. “You can’t tell me what to do anymore. We’re divorced.”

He laughed. “You think a piece of paper means a fucking thing to me? To us? You’re mine ’til the day you die, darlin’.”

Maybe it was the blow to her head messing with her good sense, but she couldn’t stop baiting him. “If you want to kill me,” she said, “you’re going to have to come down here and get your hands dirty. I’m not moving.”

“Killing you isn’t in the plan.” His expression twisted. “But don’t force my hand.”

Trepidation centered in her midsection beneath her scars. “How did you find us?”

“I know a tracker.”

“You’ve had me watched? Followed?” She’d thought it was her imagination, sheer paranoia, the few times she’d felt unseen eyes upon her these past couple of days. “How long?”

“Since the day I discovered you turned me over to the FBI. My plan was foolproof,” his smile held no humor, “except for the knife my darlin’ wife thrust in my back.”

Six months? He’d been keeping tabs on her the entire time he was in jail? Dear God, hadn’t she paid enough when he beat her that night? Her answer was burning through his ice-blue eyes.
Killing you isn’t in the plan.

No. She hadn’t paid nearly enough.

Why did you allow Katy and Evelyn to convince you to stop running? It’s harder to shoot at a moving target.
Had she learned nothing at her own daddy’s knee?

She moaned as a series of sharp stabbing pains began to creep around the back of her head like a filigree iron band. Exploring the area behind her left ear with one hand, she discovered a large goose egg. One light graze of her fingertips over the tender knob sent more streaks of pain radiating in all directions. When she yanked her hand away and looked down, her fingertips were smeared with blood. She’d knocked her head harder than she’d thought!

The reality of her situation hit her full force. How could she be so stupid thinking she could handle Greg alone? And Amanda! Greg knew where she was now. What was she going to do?

“Get up and go inside,” he ordered. “You’ve got ten minutes to pack. Then we’ll get your precious brat and hit the road.” He glared at her bare legs and feet below her favorite cutoffs. “And put on a dress and heels. No woman of mine is going to embarrass me looking like filthy white trash.”

She bit her tongue so she couldn’t blurt out what she’d done with the walk-in closet full of designer clothes he’d forced her to wear. The FBI had frozen all of their assets with the exception of her personal clothing. She’d asked Simon to get rid of it all. Greg would not appreciate learning he’d clothed a dozen women housed in an inner city domestic violence shelter. What Rachel had kept could be wadded into one suitcase in five minutes less than the ten he’d given her to pack.

In the mood he was in, he just might decide to kill her here and now.

Rachel would go inside to do as he’d ordered, the moment she figured out a way to climb out the bedroom window without this man on her heels. She’d only gain a five-minute head start and a climb down Evelyn Thorne’s rose trellis would be precarious, with or without a head injury, but the risks were worth it if she could somehow get her emotionally fragile daughter to another safe place out of her father’s reach.

Was there such a place? Assuming she successfully gathered up Amanda from next door and made it to the rental car still gassed up behind Evelyn’s greenhouse, where could she go? It was an exercise in futility if Greg hadn’t called off his watchdog once he’d arrived in Denver.

Panic won’t help you.
Chances were good Greg sent her shadow on his way.
The man’s arrogant enough to think he can handle you alone.
The challenge is to keep him from following her upstairs.
One step at a time.
“I’ll go with you. But I must make arrangements—”

His lifted hand cut off her words. “Don’t give me any more crap unless you want one of these. I didn’t come all this way to go away empty-handed.”

Hope fled with the realization he’d never leave her out of his sight long enough for her to escape. No one could save her.

Except, possibly, the large man jumping over the dwarf cranberry hedge that delineated the property line between the two Thorne households.

Rachel’s heart began to pound as she looked across the yard into Patrick Thorne’s furious brown eyes.

Chapter Five

Patrick stalked across his parents’ lawn past the woman he’d promised to watch over, lying on the ground like a negligent child’s broken toy. He didn’t stop moving until he’d slammed Rachel’s attacker back into the painted wood siding of the house. “Hit her again,
pal,” he gritted out, pressing his forearm down on the man’s windpipe, “and you won’t have any hands at all!”

The man clawed ineffectually at Patrick’s arm, his lips moved. All that came out was a gurgling noise.

“Wait! Stop!” Rachel said from behind them. “I-I fell!”

Patrick froze. That wasn’t the impression he got running out of his house on the heels of Suze’s interruption of his planning meeting with overwrought pleas to “save ’Manda’s mommy from the bad man”. All he saw was Rachel sprawled on the ground, a strange man looming over her with a raised fist. In Patrick’s experience a man didn’t raise a hand unless he were a hair’s breath away from using it or already had, but he slowly backed off and released the stranger.

The man scuttled quickly around him to the middle of the yard, his hand rubbing his neck as he gasped for air. Blond, handsome in that cookie-cutter, preppy way many women couldn’t seem to resist, at first glance he didn’t look like a bad man. But Patrick had to give Suze credit for her ability to spot the mean look in his eyes. Pretty boy or not, this man was capable of violence.

“Preppy” stiffened. “How dare you come between me and my wife?”

As far as he knew his parents’ houseguest was, in fact, a divorcee. Yet Patrick would have ignored the querulous question anyway. He walked over and reached out a hand to assist Rachel to her feet…and nearly dropped her again.

When her fingers slid across his calloused palm, a ragged edge of awareness zipped through his bloodstream, awakening something inside him he’d buried long ago. Craving. White hot and mind-numbing desire. He couldn’t release Rachel fast enough. She swayed unsteadily, and her slender frame tumbled into his arms. The top of her head came to just below his chin and, damn it all to hell, she smelled like his mother’s Persian lilacs after a spring rain. Lush. Potent.

He gave himself a mental shake. He had no business wrapping his starved libido in the scent and feel of this woman! Lifting a pale honey curl away from her cheekbone, he worked to reestablish his distance. “You okay?” he asked, the words like gravel in his throat. His gut knotted as she simply gazed back at him with those liquid brown eyes so like the mute, blond cutie that had traipsed through his house and office on Suze’s heels these past few days.

“Let go of my wife.”

“Screw you.” It wasn’t often he threw his bulk in another man’s face, but for reasons he didn’t want to acknowledge, he was spoiling for a fight. No matter what he’d told himself earlier about Rachel being on her own, he couldn’t allow any woman to be threatened under his nose. He didn’t think she “fell” all by her lonesome either. All of his protective instincts primed, he tucked her under his left arm.

The ages-old display of masculine possession wasn’t lost on the stranger. His face turned the color of Mrs. Steinbecker’s new dining room walls, a sickening shade of puce. “Who do you think you are?”

Rachel’s Southern-laced voice punched through Patrick’s senses like a double shot of raw whiskey, but it was the words she uttered that robbed his speech. “Patrick’s my boyfriend, Greg.”

“Preppy” laughed, although he didn’t look the least bit amused. “You’re joking.”

Patrick didn’t question how she knew who he was, much less contradict her. Her declaration did the weirdest thing to his objectivity though. Rather than immediately discounting her claim as the blatant lie it was, he felt a Neanderthal urge to puff up his chest and carry his prize off to his cave. He hadn’t felt this possessive about a woman since…well, never.

Like they were the only things holding her up Rachel’s fingers fisted in the folds of his work shirt at the base of his spine, a trembling reminder the woman was terrified and likely to grasp at anything to throw between her and the ex. Even a fake boyfriend would do.

Rachel’s declaration gave him tacit permission to act as one. “You didn’t expect Rachel to remain alone for long, did you?” he challenged.

“Is that what she told you her name is? Rachel? You must be rolling in dough.” Her ex-husband curled a lip in a first class sneer. “I have to tell you,
pal
, Felicia’s quite the con artist. She may look like some kind of ingénue, but she’ll have you laid out to dry the second she gets her hands on your fat bank account.”

For all he knew, the woman
was
a con artist. Her fabrication about their imaginary relationship had tripped off her tongue easily. She’d certainly insinuated herself and her daughter into his parents’ good graces fast enough. However, he didn’t like the way “Preppy” looked at her so he stifled his reservations. For now. “Rachel can shave her head, call herself the Dali Lama, and spend every penny I have,” he said. “I have no problem sharing what I have with her and Amanda.”

The man didn’t say anything for several moments. Then, like he’d drawn four aces in a game of five-card stud, he smiled. “You may have somehow wormed your way into my frigid wife’s bed, but that’s about to end. You can’t have my daughter. She’s mine.” His gaze shifted to Patrick’s left. “And you’re a package deal, aren’t you, Felicia darlin’?”

Felicia darlin’, Rachel, whatever her name truly was separated from Patrick’s side. “Greg, please. Don’t do this.”

He said nothing.

Words, it seemed, were unnecessary. By the slope of her shoulders, the resignation that shadowed her expression when she glanced at Patrick, it was easy to see her emotional reserves were tapped. He didn’t like the odd hold “Preppy” seemed to have over her. He wanted him gone.

“Rachel and Amanda aren’t yours anymore,” he informed him. “This is private property and it’s mine, too. You’ve got ten seconds to clear out before I call the cops.”

“Preppy’s” blue eyes narrowed. “You have no right to—”

“
Nine,
” he said with implacable resolve.

“This isn’t over!”

“Yes, it is. Unless Rachel wants to press criminal charges.” Patrick glanced at her and gave her one last chance to reveal the real reason she “fell”, but she shook her head. He frowned before turning back to the man. “Lucky you.
Eight.
”

“Felicia! You’re going to regret—”

“
Seven
. Better run before she changes her mind. Before I do.” Patrick took two purposeful strides forward and almost grinned with satisfaction at the flicker of unease that crossed the man’s expression. “
Six.
”