Quinn (The Waite Family) (20 page)

“You only call me Drew when we have sex.
I guess I can live with that.”
He ran his hand down her belly and spread his fingers wide over it.
“How do you feel?”

She felt wonderful, relaxed and sated. But she was reasonably sure that wasn’t what he meant.
She pulled away this time and he let her.
She was naked from her waist down and his pants were open and his cock wet with her juices.
As she looked at him it shifted and stirred.
She looked up at him when he laughed.

“My parents are probably wondering what we’re doing. If you want me to take you again on the desk I will have to call them and let them know we’ve been…detained.
Shall I?”

She flushed.
“You most certainly will not. They probably have a very low opinion of me anyway.”

His smile looked so sad for a second she was sure she’d imagined it.
“You’d be surprised.
But we really need to go.
You have dinner with me and
,
if you still want to go home, I’ll take you later, all right?”

She was so embarrassed that she nodded. Something had happened here tonight and she wasn’t sure what.
But she did know that it changed things. And not for the better.

Robert got a ticket.
He was still fuming about it when he got back to the pigsty and was in no mood to talk nice with his mother.
She was sitting in the living room when he entered.
It took him a few seconds to remember that he’d caused the mess in there and they hadn’t been robbed.

“What have you to say for yourself, Robert?
This mess has to be cleaned up and I’m not doing it.
And you’ll replace everything you’ve broken. Do you understand me?”
She didn’t move off the couch as she spoke.
“I don’t know what pissed you off this badly, but this will not happen again.”

“Fuck off.
You want it cleaned then you do it.
I’ve got better things to do than be a house maid for you.
Besides, none of this would have happened if you had paid the fucking cable bill and not got your hair done up. Which, by the way, looks like shit.”
He knew he’d scored a direct hit when she put her hand to her hair.
“If you can’t manage the money any better than that then perhaps I should take over the finances.”

“Go ahead,” she snapped. “I don’t care. There isn’t any more anyway.
And at the end of next month there is less than nothing if Alyssa has her way.”
She got up, went over to the desk in the corner, and pulled open one of the drawers he’d missed.
“Here are the bills that need to be paid and here is the income.”

In one hand, there was a stack of bills at least three inches thick. In the other, there was nothing. Not even a checkbook.
He looked up at her.

“The money for this month is gone. Between my hair, your dates, and your uncle’s gambling, there isn’t anything to pay bills with.
So in less than ten days the power is going to be shut off, and sooner than that the phones will be off.”

“That’s not possible. It’s only the...” He looked at his new watch he’d gotten the day before.
“It’s only the tenth. How the fuck can we be broke?”

“We only get ten grand a month each to live off of.
And thirty thousand doesn’t go as far as we’re accustomed too. Of course we’ve never been on a budget before so I guess it’s only natural that we haven’t a clue how to live on one.” Her laughter startled him.
“And then we’re going to be in real trouble starting the end of October.”

He sort of remembered something about the twenty-eighth, but couldn’t remember what.
Robert thought it had something to do with Alyssa, but wasn’t really sure what. At the time he’d been wondering how to get out of the fucking meeting, not paying attention to what was being said. Besides, he figured his mother and uncle were there, why did he have to pay attention?

“When Alyssa kicked us out of the house last year she had us sign that agreement stating that she would only give us an allowance for a year.
That year, my dear son, is nearly over.
She will cut us off as if we’re nothing more than yesterday’s old news.”

“She can’t do that. The will says that she is to provide us with our part of the estate. I remember that. It’s like five million each.
She can’t just steal that from us too. She has to pay us our share.”
Robert sat down now, suddenly dizzy.
“Doesn’t she?”

His mother sat down too. “According to her attorney we spent all that and more when she was hiding out.
My five million was spent within the first three years.
Thankfully she was ‘kind’ enough to not count the credit card debt I’d incurred.
You had gone through yours in less than a year. You’ve been, according to her attorney, living off her generously for over ten years.
Your uncle wasn’t given as much money so he blew through his in less time than you.”

He couldn’t breathe.
Broke, they were broke? It wasn’t possible.
Nathan Howard was like this millionaire.
And he’d left them well cared for.
All of them.

“What about Nathan?
Where’s his money?
He’s been in that fucking sanitizer for over a year now. He has to have some money left.”
Robert would use that to make a fresh start. “Or is she keeping that money for herself too?”

His mother went through the bills in her hand and handed him one. It was from The Clinic.
Robert knew it wasn’t a sanitarium, but a place for drunks and drug addicts to dry out. He just called it that to piss his mother off.
He opened the envelope.

Pas
t
due, it said.
Forty thousand eight hundred dollars pas
t
due, as a matter of fact.
Robert crumpled it up and tossed it on the floor.

“His money went to all those places he went to before Alyssa came back, she said, and she paid this one for one year. That’s a bill for the next year of treatment, which I’m assuming she’s not paying.”

Robert got up and paced the cluttered room. Broke. They were all broke and soon to be homeless.
He turned to his mother. “I suppose she’s been paying the phone and other bills all along too.”
She nodded. “What else? What else has she been paying but won’t now?”

“Your car will be repossessed next month along with any jewelry you’ve purchased since she’s been footing the bill.
Yes, that means your watch too.”

He wrapped his hand around it. He glared at her. “You’ve known this all along. You’ve not paid the bills because you were trying to stick her with them.
You fucking bitch.”

She smiled and shrugged. “So what if I did?
She’ll have to pay them and I won’t. Everything is in her name anyway.”

His fist struck at her quick.
Robert heard the crunch of bone, but didn’t care. His temper was hot, red hot, and he didn’t care to bring it down.
As she fell off the chair he followed her to the floor.
Over and over he pounded into her face and her ribs.
He could see what he was doing
;
blood splattered over him and her too, but still he couldn’t seem to stop, didn’t want to stop.
It wasn’t until he was exhausted that he fell off her.
His body spent, he la
y
back against the chair and closed his eyes.

This was Alyssa’s fault too. She’d taken everything from them and made him lose his temper.
He looked over at his mother and shuddered. She was in bad shape. Her face looked misshapen and broken.
When he reached over and kicked her with the toe of his boot she didn’t move, didn’t make a sound.

“Mother, get up. You need to see a doctor. And you’re bleeding on the floor. If you think I’m cleaning that up too, you can just forget it.”
He kicked her harder.
“Get up.” He was still sitting there when his uncle came home smelling of liquor and smoke.
“She made me do it. She pissed me off about her daughter and I lost my temper.”

Samuel leaned over and put his finger to her throat.
Then he sat back on his heels and looked at him.
Robert didn’t like that look. It was the one he used when he was pissed about something someone had done and he’d have to figure out a way to get it cleaned up.

“What have you done, boy?
What the hell have you done?” Samuel asked with a shake of his head.
“She’s dead.
Your mother is dead.”

Robert looked at her and then at his uncle.
They both smiled.
Not a friendly smile, Robert thought, but a smile that he’d scared people with.

“I think I just figured out a way to buy us more time in this house and maybe a bit more money.
Grieving son and all,” Robert said with a smirk. “Hot damn, but this might work out to our advantage, huh?”

His uncle smiled again. “You have got to be my son and not that other pansy-assed one she birth
ed
and said was mine.
Fuck, now we have to come up with a good story.”
Samuel looked around the room before he spoke again.
“I’m thinking robbery, how about you?”

They worked on their story for nearly two hours. Then Robert cleaned up and they both left the house.
Time to put plan “fuck the sister” into action.

~~~

Captain Cait Grant looked around the mess. There just wasn’t any other way to describe it. The room had been destroyed and a woman murdered here.
Her blood soaked the couch where she lay next to it and the carpet beneath her was sticky with the dark substance.
Whoever had done this had been in a rage.

Cait looked over into the hallway at the two men standing there. They claimed they’d found the body. Something wasn’t quite right about their story, but she couldn’t put her finger on it just yet.
She’d wanted to call her sister-in-law Dane to come and see what she could get from the scene and the men, but she and Jamie were on their second…or their third honeymoon.

The crime scene crew was waiting on the owner of the house. Alyssa Waite owned this house, as she did the ones on either side of it.
Cait hated to do this to her, but the men were no help in knowing if anything had been stolen.
Cait turned when she heard shouting in the hallway near the front door.

The Howard children, now adults, had been fighting since Cait had been just an officer on the force here in Columbus.
Things hadn’t changed much over the years as far as she could tell.
The oldest boy, Nathan Howard the fourth, had been in and out of rehabilitation since he’d been a preteen.
And as far as Cait knew that was where he was now.
The younger boy, Robert Phillip Howard, was just trouble. She’d heard rumors that he had at least four bastard children and more aborted ones than she’d ever been able to get a count on.
He had also been brought in on domestic violence a couple of times, but the girl usually decided not to press charges.
Cait wondered if Mom had anything to do with that.