Vengeance to the Max (16 page)

“Her uncle.”

Max stiffened, bile caustic in her throat. She hated uncles, hated her own more than anything else in the world. Except perhaps as much as she despised herself for sitting and listening to Izzie Monroe lacerate her life with Cameron.

Izzie shrugged. “Well, he was only her uncle by marriage. Aunt Evelyn’s husband.”

Max let her head fall forward onto the table, rested with her eyes closed, and assimilated the data.

“No one’s heard from them since?” Witt asked.

Air currents flowed. She was sure Izzie nodded her head.

No one had heard from Cordelia or Evelyn’s husband, BJ, in almost thirty years.

“I hate you I hate you I hate you,” Max chanted without a breath between.

“You sound like a child,” Cameron whispered in her head.

She wanted to throw things like a child.

Witt was in the next room. He moved about, a door closing with more than necessary force, a noisy cough, as if he wanted her to know he could hear her as easily as she heard him.

It didn’t make her lower her voice. “You goddamn bastard.”

“Why does this hurt so much?”

How could Cameron not know? How could he not understand that it was like he’d been with another woman?

“They were letters, she was an old friend, I thought she’d be able to tell me if she ever heard from Cordelia. They were friends.”

“How do you know what you thought? You’re not supposed to remember a damn thing.”

“I remember it all now Izzie’s out in the open with you.”

“That’s so much bullshit. And so damn convenient.”

“I don’t know how this memory thing works any more than you do.”

“You say that so you can change the rules to suit yourself.”

Unable to stand still, she paced the small room. Witt’s TV went on, blaring. She didn’t care if that, too, was another message. “Why didn’t you tell me about her?” She couldn’t bare to say the woman’s name. “Why did you need to keep her a secret?”

“Why did
you
keep secrets from me?”

“I kept those things from myself, too. You weren’t special in that, Cameron.” Childhood things, bad things, like the nights her uncle came to her room, like the murder she’d committed when she was thirteen. She’d hidden them away in the deepest part of her mind. She hadn’t let herself remember while Cameron was alive. It had taken his death, taken the visions, the murders of her soul sisters Wendy, Tiffany, and Bethany, and her friendship with Angela to drag her head out of the sand.

She wished now she could have stayed there like an ostrich.

Pacing wasn’t enough. She grabbed the album she’d thrown on the orange bedspread, yanked a drawer open, intending to hide it. The drawer was full of clothes and nonsense. She slammed it shut. The volume of Witt’s TV went up another notch.

God, it was so like Cameron to turn the tables on her, so like her to let him do it. She sucked in a breath, held it. “Why didn’t I ever see a letter from
Izzie
?” She almost spat the name at him.

He was quiet a long moment. She died a little inside, like the night she’d watched him lying amongst the Cheetos, the night she thought he’d left her for good. “I gave her the office address.”

She turned from the glowing red of his eyes in the corner of the darkened room, turned her back on him, threw the album on the bed, next to the damn yearbook she’d left there earlier, and stalked to the bathroom. She didn’t ask him why, but the question crackled like electricity in the air around her.

“We’d been writing since long before I met you. She had the work address, I saw no reason to change it.”

She flipped on the overhead light in the bathroom, squinted. “You’re making excuses,” she whispered.

“It was never because I didn’t love you.”

She stared at her pale face in the mirror, her light makeup long since worn off. It was because he couldn’t share everything with her, because in a way he’d had to share
about
her. “Did you tell her stuff about us, about our relationship?”

Again, that painful ominous silence. She grabbed a washcloth, ran the water until it scalded her hands, then put the cloth to her face. God, the warmth felt good, leaching the strength from her even as it soothed.

“Sometimes I wrote about you. I told her how wonderful and smart you were, that I admired you as well as loved you.”

Her heart contracted. She lowered the washcloth, stared at her now reddened face. “What did you tell her about the other times?”

“I didn’t complain about you, if that’s what you mean. I ...”

Unwrapping a piece of soap, she wet it, then rubbed it into foam against the rough material. “You what?”

He didn’t answer right away. She scrubbed her face, kept on scrubbing, waiting, scrubbing until she’d scraped her skin raw.

Then he spoke. “Sometimes I asked her what she thought. She was a woman.”

Max rinsed the cloth, laid it on the bathroom counter. Her hands shook. There was more. She didn’t want to hear. She covered her ears as she walked into the bedroom, stopped by the bed for the album, looking for a place to put it so she didn’t have to see it ...

“I thought Izzie would understand another woman and be able to tell me—”

Her skin burned. She couldn’t breathe, was capable only of sucking in enough air to say, “You bastard. Leave me alone.”

“Max ...”

She yanked open the sidetable drawer, a drawer big enough to fit the damn album and the frigging yearbook, big enough to fill with all the tears she’d never shed. With shaking hands, she emptied the contents, then shoved in the two books, one on top of the other.

“Max,” he tried again.

“Get out.” She shrieked the words, then threw the thing in her hands against the connecting door. The Gideon’s Bible fell facedown, open, its spine twisted.

“I love you. I’ll be back.” A promise in a swirl of peppermint that vanished abruptly.

For the first time in two years, she wished he wouldn’t keep that promise.

A soft knock sounded on the door she’d just given a pounding.

“Go away.” She didn’t have the energy to sound convincing.

“Open up.”

Witt. Of course it was Witt. His room was next door. He’d turned his TV off. Witt, who wanted her.

She scrambled to the doorway, fumbled with the lock, threw open the door. His brow creased in worry, his eyes wandered over her face as he raised a hand to cup her chin, cool fingers against her chafed and stinging flesh.

“You okay?”

She nodded, a hint of movement. She liked his touch and loved the color of his eyes when they were full of emotion, a dark and heavy blue she could lose herself in. He’d brushed his teeth, the scent of cinnamon all around them. Thank God it wasn’t peppermint. His skin smelled of the hotel soap he’d washed his hands with, the same as the one she’d used on her face.

Cameron had pushed her at Witt, lauded him, perhaps hoped he could turn the task of protecting Max over to him. She was like a captured wild animal that could be passed from one keeper to another. Yet Cameron was the one who said Witt would have nothing less than true love from her, that
having sex
could never be good enough. He doubted she’d ever be ready. He went on and on about her inadequacies. Maybe the truth was that Cameron didn’t really want to see her with another man.

Without a thought for the consequences, she wrapped her arms round Witt’s neck, buried her face in the crook between shoulder and ear. Uncaring of the roughness of his shirt against her raw skin, she breathed deep of him. “Make love to me.”

His body hardened in her arms and not in the right place. “It’s not time.”

She rubbed her body against him, smiled when she felt him begin to rise to the occasion. “I’ll let you be on top.”

“You’re doing this because you’re pissed at your husband.”

“He’s a ghost,” she mumbled against Witt’s shirt. “I’m putting him to rest.”

“You’re getting back at him.” His hands rose to her arms around him, pulled them away until he could look down into her face. “You gotta want
me
, Max, not vengeance.”

Her nose tingled. Tears she wouldn’t cry pricked at her eyelids. “Did you ever lie to your wife?”

“I didn’t tell her things I knew she wouldn’t like.”

“But you did those things anyway.”

“Sometimes you have to.”

“Did you have sex with another woman?”

“No.” He searched face, touched a finger to her reddened cheeks. “And that’s not what your husband did.”

“No.” She took a deep breath, then added, as if it were the same thing, “He talked about me with another woman.”

“Would it have bothered you if it was another man he told?”

She didn’t say anything.

“It would have bothered you, but you’d understand that sometimes people have to talk their marriage out with someone else to find perspective.” Damn, that was a long speech for him.

“It’s different.” She said the horrible name. “Izzie was his old girlfriend.”

Witt’s hands slid down her arms, cupped her elbows. “Izzie was two thousand miles away.”

She wanted to rest her forehead against his chest. Okay, so it was a little like the times, after a fight with Cameron, that she’d run to her best friend, Sutter Cahill. Except that Sutter wasn’t the opposite sex like Izzie. And she hadn’t run to Sutter in two years.

But Izzie
had
been two thousand miles away.

Witt bent at the knees, tried to look into her downcast eyes. “You’re a lot prettier than her, too.”

“Don’t try to make me feel better,” she muttered, hiding her face in his shirt. He’d managed to take the edge off her jealousy, blunt the anger, and make her feel ashamed and over-reactive. “You think I’m skinny.” So did Cameron. “Izzie’s buxom.”

He slid his hands down, trailed his thumbs beneath her smallish breasts, spanned her waist, then rested his fingers on her hips. “I like the way
you
feel.”

“She has long, beautiful hair. Men like long hair.”

He reached up to ruffle her short, dark curls. “Yours smells better than hers did.”

She pulled back, looked at him with narrowed eyes. “How do you know how hers smells?” She didn’t wait for his answer. “I don’t want to play the comparison game.” It hurt, simple as that. She looked down before he could read the hurt in her eyes.

Witt put his hands to her cheeks and forced her to look at him. She winced with the pain of his touch.

“He’s dead, Max. Does any of this shit matter now?”

Her heart lodged in her throat as his blue-eyed stare reached right down inside her. Swallowing was hard, speaking worse, but she did. “Maybe I want it to matter.”

Maybe she didn’t want to let go. The idea of being truly alone was beyond terror.

Witt put a palm to her face, brushed the pad of his thumb across her lower lip. “When are you gonna let him rest, Max?”

Never.

If she told Witt that, he’d leave, too. Forever.

Max closed her eyes and leaned into his touch. Then she told him what he needed to hear, what, if she were honest, she needed to do. “I know I have to choose. Just don’t make me do it here and now. Let me do whatever it is I’m supposed to do in Lines.” She raised her gaze to his and whispered, “But please be here for me.”

“I’m not going anywhere right now.” It wasn’t his promise of forever, but she’d take whatever he offered. Witt tunneled his fingers through her hair. “Let’s concentrate on something else.”

Yes, anything else. Like the mystery surrounding Cordelia.

“What kinda books you like to read?”

Her eyes snapped open. Books? He wanted to know what she read? They were in the middle of a ... what? An argument about her late husband? Visions and disappearing sisters and old girlfriends? A bizarre quest? Yet the king of frugal discourse wanted to talk about what she read?

A deep breath. Okay, he had a point. Talking about books was better than thinking right now. “I bet you read mysteries.”

He sat on the bed, patted the mattress beside him. “Hate mysteries. Got mysteries day in and day out.”

Max perched next to him. “Then what do you like?”

“Joseph Conrad. Jack London. Adventure stories.” Literary stuff and far above Max. “Bet you like romance.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding.” She raised her chin. Too late, the flush of embarrassment had risen in her cheeks.