See How She Dies (3 page)

“Happy birthday, darling,” Katherine Danvers whispered into her husband's ear as they danced across the polished floor of the ballroom. From the alcove near the corner, a small dance band played “As Time Goes By” and the melody whispered through the crowd. “Surprised?” she asked, nuzzling him, her satin heels moving in perfect time to the music.

“Nothing you do surprises me.” He chuckled low in his throat. Of course he'd known that she'd reserved the ballroom of his hotel under the fictitious name of some sorority. He hadn't spent sixty years learning to be the shrewdest businessman in Portland without picking up a few tricks along the way. He gave his wife a playful squeeze and felt her breasts, beneath her black silk dress, press closer to him. A few years before, he would have become aroused just by the scent of her perfume and the knowledge that beneath the gown she wore absolutely nothing—just the dress and a pair of stiletto heels.

She pouted prettily as the pianist played a solo. Her black hair gleamed under the muted lights from chandeliers suspended from the cove-shaped ceiling, and her eyes, a deep blue, glanced coyly at him through the sweep of thick, dark lashes.

There had been a time when he would have given away his fortune just for one night in her bed. She was sensual and smart and knew exactly how to please a man. He'd never asked her how she knew so much about the pleasures of love when he'd met her. He'd just been grateful that she'd taken him as her lover, bringing back the lust that he'd thought he'd lost somewhere near middle age.

A kitten who liked to be cuddled, Kat metamorphosed into a wildcat in bed and for a few years her raw sexual energy had been enough to satisfy him. He'd married her and remained faithful and managed to bed her every other day in the early years. But his desire had been short-lived, as it always was, and now he couldn't remember when he'd last made love to her. A hot fire crept up the back of his neck at the thought of his impotence. Even now, when her thighs were pressed intimately to his and her tongue touched a sensitive spot near the back of his ear, he felt nothing, no hint of wildfire in his blood, no welcome stiffness between his legs. Even a little harsh foreplay didn't bring him to an erection anymore. It was a miracle that they'd managed to conceive a child.

Suddenly angry, he swirled her roughly away from him, then jerked her back into his arms. She laughed, that throaty little laugh that bordered on nasty. He liked her laugh. He liked everything about her. He only wished that he could throw her on the dance floor and take her the way she wanted to be taken—like an animal, with four hundred horrified eyes watching as he proved that he was still a man and could satisfy his wife.

She'd tried all her tricks. Flimsy negligees. Peekaboo bras that outlined her nipples and long black garters that flicked at her shapely thighs. She'd coaxed him with her tongue and dirty words, slapped playfully at his butt and balls, but nothing she did aroused him anymore, and the thought that he couldn't manage an erection, might never have sex for the rest of his life, cut a hole in him that burned like dry ice and scared the living hell out of him.

The song ended and he pressed forward, bending her spine in a low dip, so that she had to cling to him, her eyes staring up into his, her black hair sweeping the floor that had been littered with pink rose petals. Her breasts, heaving with exertion, threatened to spill out of the deep cleavage of her dress.

In full view of the audience, he pressed a kiss to that glorious hollow between her breasts, as if he were so randy he couldn't stand it, then yanked her to her feet. Laughter and applause erupted around them.

“You old dog, you!” one man shouted, and Kat blushed as if she were an innocent virgin.

“Take her upstairs. What're you waiting for?” another middle-aged boy yelled. “Isn't it about time you two had a son?”

“Later.” Witt winked at the crowd, content that they didn't know his secret and secure that Kat would never breath a word of his shame. A son. If this crowd of friends, relatives, and business acquaintances only knew.

There would be no more children. He'd sired three sons and a headstrong daughter from his first marriage to Eunice. With Katherine there would only be London, his four-year-old daughter and favorite child. He made no apologies for caring more about his little girl than he did all of his other children put together. The other kids—some of them adults now—had caused him so much heartache, and their mother…Christ, what had he ever seen in Eunice Prescott—a skinny woman with a sharp tongue who'd thought sex with him had been her duty—nothing more than a chore? He'd decided she was frigid, until…Hell, he didn't want to think about Eunice cheating on him behind his back—laughing at him.

Angered at the turn of his thoughts, Witt escorted his wife to the center of the room where, beneath the glimmering lights of the chandelier, an ice sculpture in the shape of a running horse was beginning to melt. Nearby a tiered fountain of champagne gurgled and splashed.

The band started playing “In the Mood,” and a few brave couples strayed onto the dance floor. Witt snagged a glass from a silver tray and drained the champagne in one long swallow.

“Daddy!” He glanced up and found London, her black curls dancing around her face, her chubby arms outstretched. Dressed in a navy-blue dress with white lace collar and cuffs, she ran up to him and threw herself into his waiting arms.

He hugged her tightly, the velvet of her dress crushed against him, her legs, encased in white tights, clamped around his waist. “How do you like the party, princess?”

Her crystal-blue eyes were round and wide, her cheeks flushed with the excitement of the festivities. “It's loud.”

He laughed. “That it is.”

“And there's too much smoke!”

“Don't tell your mother. She planned this as a special surprise and we wouldn't want her to feel bad,” Witt said, grinning as he winked at his daughter.

She winked back, then snuggled her pert little nose into his neck and he got a whiff of baby shampoo. She tugged at his bow tie and he laughed again. Nothing could make him as happy as this dynamic whirl of precociousness.

“Hey, that's
my
job,” Kat said as she smiled and gently nudged London's fingers from Witt's neck. Kissing her daughter's crown, she said, “Leave Daddy's tie alone.”

“How about a dance?” Witt asked his young daughter, and those little lines between Kat's eyebrows, the ones that suggested silently that she disapproved, appeared. Witt didn't care. He drained another glass of champagne and twirled a laughing London onto the dance floor. The child, his princess, squealed in delight.

 

“Sickening, isn't it?” Trisha observed from her position near the band. She leaned against the glossy top of the concert grand and petulantly sipped from a fluted glass. She was allowed, having just turned twenty-one.

Zachary lifted a shoulder. He was used to his old man's theatrics and he really didn't care what Witt did anymore. He and his father had never gotten along, and things had only become worse when Witt had divorced his first wife and eventually married a woman only seven years older than his oldest son, Jason, Zachary's brother. Truth be known, Zach didn't really want to be here, had only come because he was forced. He couldn't wait to escape the smoky, loud ballroom filled with boring old people—suck-ups, every last one of them.

“Dad can't keep his hands off Kat,” Trisha said, her voice slurring a little. “It's obscene.” She took another swallow. “The lecherous old fart.”

“Careful, Trisha,” Jason said as he joined his brother and sister. “Dad probably had this place bugged.”

“Very funny,” Trisha said, tossing her long auburn hair over one shoulder. But she didn't laugh. Her blue eyes were flat and bored and she continually scanned the crowd as if she were looking for something or someone.

Jason's eyes narrowed. “You know half the people here would like to see the old man fall.”

“They're his friends,” Trisha argued.

“And enemies.” Jason rested a hip against the piano as the band took a break. He watched his father, still holding London, playing the crowd, moving from one knot of bejeweled guests to the other, never once setting London on her feet.

“Who gives a shit?” Zachary asked.

“Always the rebel.” Jason smiled beneath his mustache, that know-it-all smile that bugged the hell out of Zach. Jason acted as if he knew everything. At twenty-three, Jason was already in law school and six years older than Zach, a point he never let his rebellious younger brother forget.

Zach tugged at the tight collar of his tuxedo shirt. He couldn't stomach Jason any more than he could his sister, Trisha. They both cared too much about the old man and his bank accounts.

Leaving Jason and Trisha to worry and fret over Witt's affection for London, Zach walked to the edge of the crowd.

He managed to grab a champagne glass from an unattended table, then sauntered over to the bank of tall, arched windows that overlooked the city and turned his back on the party. He felt a bit of satisfaction as he stared through the glass to the hot July night and swallowed champagne. Traffic flowed in a steady stream along the street. Taillights winked and blurred as cars and trucks labored through the city and over the yawning Willamette River, a sluggish black waterway that separated the west side of the city from the east. Steam rose from the city streets and the humidity level was high.

In the distance, beyond the expanse of city lights, a ridge of mountains, the Cascades, guarded the horizon. Thunderheads that had been gathering all day blocked out any view of the stars, and the quick, sizzling forks of lightning added unwanted tension to the brackish night. Zach finished his champagne and, hoping no one would notice, half buried his empty glass in the soil surrounding a potted tree.

He felt out of place, as he always had with his family. This black-tie affair thrown by Kat made him all the more aware that he was different from his brothers and sister. He didn't even look like the rest of the Danvers clan, all of whom were fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and were favored with varying hues of blond to dark brown hair.

He resembled his half-sister, London, more than anyone else in the family. Which didn't win him any points with Jason, Trisha, and Nelson, his younger brother, all of whom on one occasion or another professed to hate their half-sister.

With a snort, he considered London. He didn't care much about the kid one way or the other. Sure, she bothered him. Any four-year-old was a pain in the ass, but she wasn't as bad as the others made out. In fact, Zach found it amusing that she was already showing some of the traits Kat had perfected over the years. It wasn't London's fault the old man treated her like some kind of priceless jewel.

As if she'd read his mind, London pushed through the crowd and grabbed hold of his leg. He turned to tell her to get lost, but by that time she'd discovered his glass pushed deep into the potting soil.

“Leave that alone!” he whispered in a harsh voice. She glanced up sharply, a naughty twinkle in her eyes. God, if he could just step out on the balcony and grab a smoke—another vice of which his father and stepmother disapproved, though Kat was never without her gold cigarette case and Witt enjoyed his share of cigars smuggled in from Havana.

She dropped the glass back into the dirt. “Hide me from Mommy!” With a wicked little giggle, she ducked behind his legs.

“Hey, don't get me involved in your stupid games.”

“Shh. She's coming!” London hissed.

Great. Just what he needed.

“London?” Katherine's husky voice drifted over the slow strains of a ballad.

Behind him, London tried to smother a giggle.

“London, where are you? Come on now…it's time for bed. Oh, there you are!” Katherine sidestepped a group of men, her practiced smile well in place. Waving her fingers as she passed, she tracked down her wayward daughter with the precision of a bloodhound.

“No!” London cried as her mother approached.

“Come on, sweetheart, it's nearly ten.”

“Don't care!”

“You'd better do what she says,” Zachary offered, his gaze flicking slightly to his stepmother's. He knew what the old man saw in his young wife. Katherine Danvers was probably the sexiest woman Zachary had ever met. At seventeen he understood about unbridled sexual desire. Hot and thundering, it could roar through a man's body and turn his brain to mush.

“Come on.” Katherine leaned down to pick up her daughter. The silk stretched across her shapely rump and her breasts seemed to bulge a bit, as if they might fall out of her plunging neckline.

“I'll get her into bed,” another woman, London's nanny, Ginny Something-Or-Other, offered. She was a small, plain woman in sensible shoes and a drab olive-green suit. Next to Katherine she looked frumpy and old, a dowdy matron, though she was probably just over thirty, not much older than Kat.

“I don't want to go to bed,” London insisted.

“She's being a brat.” Katherine looked up and noticed one of the waiters motioning toward her. With a sigh, she turned back to her daughter. “Listen, honey, it's almost time to bring out the birthday cake. You can stay up and watch Daddy blow out his candles, then you have to go upstairs.”