Madness (2 page)

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There was no bellboy, so armed with a key card, Olivia took the elevator to the sixth floor and followed the signs to Room 317. She was shaking with reaction and refusing to think, simply wanting to put as much distance between herself and Cameron as she could. The pseudo key nearly defeated her as they always did but eventually she got the door open and humped her cases inside. She possessed a master’s degree in business yet had difficulty opening a door with the latest technology. It humbled a person. The room was decorated in varying shades of mauve and more mauve with a dark green carpet in a Greek key pattern. However, the king-size bed was comfortable to sit on and would probably serve up a good night’s sleep. She needed one. The past months had been from hell.

Olivia padded into the bathroom and started a tub, retreating to find her favorite lavender bath salts in the depths of her suitcase.

While the bath filled, she shook out and hung up a couple of outfits for the next day, suitable for the Texas fall weather, and took out her laptop to place it on the small desk at the window. She had avoided thinking about Andrew’s death and the subsequent tidying of his affairs during the long drive to Aspen Grove from Austin and hoped
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she could push it away for a longer period of time, because she really needed to sleep tonight.
Don’t think about Cameron, don’t.

The warm bath enveloped her like silk, and Olivia sighed at the feeling. Her hair was clipped on top of her head as she didn’t want to take the time to dry it, but then she succumbed to the need to sink deep into the water and have it wash up and cover her ears. The world just went away when she did that, and then there was only the sound of the sea reverberating in her head, and the sense of floating. She stayed that way until the water cooled before struggling out to dry herself off, her saturated hair escaping its confinement to deluge her before she wrapped it in a towel. Dispassionately, she viewed herself in the mirror, the shroud of steam softening the outline of her thirty-two-year-old body, smudging the lines around her eyes and mouth.

Her breasts were hers, and while not centerfold material, they still sat fairly high and round on her ribcage, the dark-red nipples dominating them. Her waist was still firm and thin, although her hips flared beneath it and her thighs were rounded, not lean and muscled like the current fashion. Her ass remained the bane of her existence, full, high, heart shaped, an ass that apparently spoke to men, the kind of men she kept her distance from.

There was no help for it, the thoughts were flooding in. Olivia donned a light nightgown and after squeezing as much of the moisture as possible from her hair with another towel, she slipped beneath the bed covers and turned off the light. Then she allowed twelve-year-old memories to overtake her.

Twenty-year-old Olivia Drader ran lightly up the stairs of the
beach house, smiling in anticipation of finding Cameron. He was
probably making drinks or searching for snack food, having
disappeared from the revelry on the beach. The party was the final
one of the summer, with most of the group heading back to college or
away to work. It was a loose-knit group of men and women from age
eighteen to maybe twenty-five, most having grown up in or around
Aspen Grove. There were a variety of social classes encompassed in

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the group, but no one really cared who had money or who was just
managing to get by, for there was a divide in Aspen Grove insofar as
people went. For some reason there was a huge number of teenagers
and an overabundance of people over fifty. Olivia’s group was vastly
outnumbered and hung around together as a form of support and
social survival.

There had been a few loose pairings but nothing serious, and
Olivia believed that she had hidden her obsession with Cameron
Fraser, dark, handsome, and serious Cameron. He was five years
older than her and seemed to have lived a lifetime already. She was
leaving for another year of college in a few days and wanted a few
minutes alone with him, hoping to find out if he harbored any similar
feelings for her. She didn’t feel she could leave without at least
asking. She had felt his eyes on her during the summer, when he
thought she didn’t know he was looking, and he kindled feelings in
her she had only read about in romance novels, erotic and otherwise.

He seemed different than the other guys, somehow, and it wasn’t just
the fact that he was oldest of them. Olivia sensed something deeper,
darker, and didn’t want to leave without knowing what it was between
them, if anything. It seemed that they talked about mostly everything
else. They learned about one another, and Olivia told him things
about herself she had never told another soul and thought he had
been as open with her. Except there was that dark something…but
more importantly, they liked each other. That indefinable something
wasn’t discussed, and she had a sense that, if they didn’t address it,
she would be missing out on something very important and special.

She had experimented with sex infrequently. No one had made her
body as aware of its potential as Cameron did, just by turning those
azure eyes of his on her.

The volleyball game had deteriorated into dunkings in the lake,
and someone was struggling to get a bonfire going with wet wood. It
would soon be dark, and everyone would be huddled together around
the fire, telling tales and horror stories and planning for the next
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summer. Everyone would swear that they’d be back to connect, and so
it had gone, at least in the two years she had been part of the group.

The number ebbed and flowed as people moved on in their lives and a
few teenagers hit the age of majority and were included as
replacements. Olivia had never heard of anyone being turfed from the
group or declined entrance, and there were no tales of heartbreak or
even of any group activities really getting out of hand, despite the
usual pranks. It felt comfortable, like family.

Olivia caught the door before it slammed as it always did and
allowed it to close silently behind her. She felt a bit anxious, like she
was changing the rules somehow, then shrugged and began to search
for Cameron. There was no sign of him in the kitchen or great room,
and the bathroom door stood open. She was about to head back to the
beach when she heard it, a whimper coming from the far bedroom.

The bedrooms were off-limits, everyone knew that, unless someone
was ill or needed privacy to change. Mr. Donovan was happy to loan
them the beach house but didn’t want any funny stuff, as he labeled it,
going on there. He was a devout Christian, a family man, a respected
businessman in the town who owned the golf course and adjoining
properties. He appreciated the fact that Aspen Grove didn’t provide
much in the way of activities for their age group aside from the local
bar and supplied his summer getaway for their summer parties. It was
tradition and never abused.

She hoped no one was ill. Olivia hadn’t noticed if anyone had left
the game before her, other than some taking the usual brief bathroom
breaks. If she hadn’t been watching Cameron so closely these past
weeks, she might not have noticed him leave either. She swallowed
and then quietly walked down the hallway, prepared to offer
assistance if necessary, especially as the whimpers were escalating in
volume and were now accompanied by a strange cadence of sound
she couldn’t identify. Somehow Olivia knew it was a woman’s voice
and she was in trouble, so Olivia hastened to the door, already
raising her hand to knock. She stumbled to a halt, the slightly open

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door giving her a line of sight into the bedroom, reflected by the huge
mirror on the dresser. She could hardly take in what she saw. Jennifer
Barnes was kneeling on the bed, nude, her hands tied to the
headboard, chest on the mattress, legs apart, ass high in the air. Her
face was turned away from the door but clearly reflected, her eyes
shut tightly and her mouth open, those whimpers coming louder now.

Cameron was behind her, clad only in his jeans, his tanned, muscular
chest gleaming with sweat as he thrashed Jennifer’s thighs and
buttocks with his belt, saying filthy, sexy things to her in a low,
dominant tone as he did so. A massive erection tented the front of his
jeans.

Olivia didn’t know if she made a sound or not, but suddenly
Cameron’s eyes met hers in the mirror. He ceased his movements as
their gazes locked. Olivia felt like her soul was being sucked out of
her body. She couldn’t take a deep breath. She was vaguely aware of
a flush of arousal flooding her, then Jennifer whined a complaint and
it broke the spell. Olivia whirled and ran out of the house and kept
running, ignoring the calls from her friends, running until she found
her car down the road. She left her towel and other sundry items
behind and never did go back for them. Olivia packed and left that
night, cobbling together a hasty explanation that satisfied her parents
and presumably the other members of the group, because their
subsequent e-mails and infrequent phone calls made no mention of
her abrupt departure other than to tease her. Everyone accepted that
she had forgotten the dorm rules of being in residence three days
before the first day of college or forfeiting your spot. Everyone
accepted that Olivia Drader, planner supreme and possessed of a
steel-trap memory, had forgotten those rules.

It was unfortunate that her memory replayed the scene in the
bedroom during her dreams and her waking hours for a long time to
come. This then was Cameron’s darkness, a need to dominate and
inflict erotic pain on his partners, availing himself of the beach house
and hoodwinking Mr. Donovan, risking discovery to further spice
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things up. Olivia now knew this about Cameron without him ever
having to explain things to her. She didn’t question how she knew, she
simply did. She wished she hadn’t looked for him that night. She
wished she hadn’t seen what she had seen. But most of all, she wished
it had been her on that bed instead of Jennifer, and that was the
biggest betrayal. Olivia hadn’t been mistaken about the attraction she
felt for Cameron. But he had chosen someone else, and she hated him
for it.

Olivia abruptly sat up in the hotel bed and impatiently pushed her damp hair back. She struggled out of the cocoon of blankets and went to the bathroom to find her brush. She was upset with herself and not a little dismayed. She had hoped that memories of Andrew would flood her consciousness as they had done over the past months, not the ones of what she referred to whenever she even thought about it as

“the event that changed my life.” She had finished her degree and never looked back. Visits home were infrequent, and when her parents moved to Europe, there was no need to ever go back. She was extremely careful during her visits to avoid Cameron, getting in and out of town like a thief in the night, staying home with her parents rather than seeking out friends or checking out the Grove. Over the years Olivia lost touch with everyone and subsequently even the offhand remarks about Cameron that were included in e-mails or shared when she occasionally saw someone from the group, ceased.

She effectively compartmentalized all thoughts of him after the first few months of emotional upheaval and moved on, sequestering her own unborn, dark sexual longings in the process and shutting that part of her life down. Olivia knew enough about psychology to understand that she was denying herself, using some sort of defense mechanism, but simply didn’t have the wherewithal to address it. She knew Cameron had affected her heart and couldn’t allow herself to go there.

And now here he was again, front and center, probably because she had come back to where it had all begun. The irony was not lost on her. She had even purchased the house where her betrayal had taken

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place. The thing was, she had been caught up in a life of her own making, one that held no sex, no children, but certainly a life full of love and caring, a life that had broadened her knowledge and interests, and one she believed she would never regret. Until Andrew died.

Olivia clambered back into bed and quite suddenly fell asleep.

When she awoke in the morning, it was well past the time she usually rose, and for a moment she was tempted to try for another couple of hours. The rattle of a chambermaid’s cart outside her door dispelled that thought, and she hopped out of bed and made her way to the bathroom, her feet sensing the trek of hundreds of others in the plush carpeting. Today would be about the house, and if she had time, she would stop by the golf course.