Dark Paradise (63 page)

She wondered if he'd even said them or if she had only wanted so badly

to hear them from someone, anyone at all. She might have been dreaming.

She'd thought so before.

"I love you," he whispered, and kissed her cheek and the corner of her

mouth. His erection poked against her belly, and she felt her body

quicken and twitch in response.

"We can't," she whispered, but she made no move to pull away. Drifting,

drifting still on the fog, in the dream.

"Yes," he murmured. "I love you, Samantha. Let me show you what that's

like."

"But I-"

"Shhh . . . Let me love the pain away."

She thought she should stop him, but his hands were inside her blouse

and tracing mesmerizing patterns and it felt so good. Then he was

stroking her back and sides, and then cupping her breast and the air in

her lungs thinned.

It had been so long. She had been so lonely.

This is just a dream. . . .

He lowered her to the bed and followed her down. The spread was cool

against her bare skin. He had loosened her hair and it felt like silk

around her. His mouth fastened on her nipple and need tore through her,

The need to be loved, to be touched.

His fingers slid into the tangle of dark curls between her legs and she

opened to him, melted in his hand like warm honey. He was kind and

gentle. He wanted her.

Will didn't. She looked up into his strange light eyes as he poised over

her.

"Do you really love me?" she murmured.

Bryce held himself motionless. Energy pulsed down through his body. He

felt supercharged, electrified, on the brink of a new greatness. New

power.

"Yes," he answered, knowing it was as true as it ever had been in his

life. Then he plunged himself into pure, sweet bliss.

"You fucked her, didn't you?" Sharon spat out the accusation,

deliberately choosing the harshest, ugliest word she could to describe

what she knew had happened.

Bryce didn't dignify her charge with a response. He stood before the big

windows in the elegant living room, looking out at the night. In fact,

he was barely paying attention to his cousin. He felt huge, as if power

had enlarged his entire body in order to contain the humming energy that

coursed through him. His brain was racing with ideas and plans. In the

all-important center of his thoughts, Sharon had already been dismissed.

She didn't take to the idea with grace. She moved across the dark room

like a stalking tigress. She wore her hair slicked straight back from

her face, secured in a chignon, a style that only emphasized the

harshness of her features. In the tarnished light from the display

cases, her eyes glowed with anger.

"She's so sweet," Bryce murmured to the world at large, marveling in the

concept of sweetness. "I can't believe how sweet she was, how needy."

His wonder struck Sharon like a hail of jagged gravel, pelting her ego,

biting into her heart. She couldn't be sweet. She had never held any

sweetness inside her. Need she knew too well. What she needed now was to

distract Bryce from his preoccupation. If he became too fixated on the

girl, he would shut her out altogether. The idea terrified her, but she

would never show him that fear.

Never.

"We're all needy," she breathed, brushing up against him.

She let him feel her full breasts through the sheer fabric of the black

lounging pajamas she wore. Rubbing against him like a cat, she started

to cup him through his jeans.

He turned and moved away from her without a hint of interest.

Panic balled like a fist in the back of Sharon's throat, and she had to

fight to keep it out of her voice. "If she was so wonderful, what are

you doing down here?"

Bryce paused by the sideboard, considered the idea of a small drink,

then discarded it. He didn't want anything interfering with the high. He

didn't want anything slowing his thought processes. He envisioned

himself as a diamond - brilliant, hard, powerful. "She's fragile," he

said. "She'll need finessing. She'll probably have second thoughts. If I

smother her with Possession, she'll bolt." He rubbed his chin for a

moment, staring off into the middle distance, his face aglow with his

pleasure in his own brilliance. "Finesse." He smiled the Redford smile.

"That's the ticket."

"How about finessing me?" Sharon said, forcing a smile as she closed in

on him again. A subtle tremor of desperation coursed thru her, in her

low voice. She hoped he didn't notice it.
 
Something like a spring

coiled tighter and tighter in her chest.

"Not tonight," Bryce said impatiently.

He walked away from her for a second time. Without looking at her.

Without touching her or promising tomorrow. The spring wound tighter.

"Not tonight," she snapped, her voice low and vibrating with anger. She

stalked around a white leather sofa and cut off his path to the window.

"You have to save yourself for your precious virgin princess. Is that

it?"

Bryce gave her a flat, hooded look. "Spare me the jealous-woman act. You

stood right here and told me to sleep with her."

"For us," she clarified. "Not for you. For us, for the plan, to get what

we want, not so you can wander around in a fog, dazzled by innocence."

He huffed out a breath. "Take a Valium and go to bed. You're getting on my

nerves."

"How dare you dismiss me like some bothersome servant."

"That's exactly how you're behaving."

"You bastard!" she spat out, her voice a feral, animal sound low in her

throat as the anger burned away her control. "After all I've been to

you!
 
After all I've done for you!"

When he tried to turn away again, she grabbed his arm and dug her

fingernails in to hold him while she tore her top open with her other

hand, baring her breasts. "Look at me!" she snarled. "Look at me, damn

you!"

He looked. Without desire. Without emotion. He stared at her, repulsed

by what he saw - desperation, degradation, dissipation; a jaded, aging

harlot whose depravity knew few bounds. Never once did it occur to him

that he was looking in a mirror. He was above and beyond. Bound for new

glory. Reborn in the eyes of an innocent.

He brought his eyes to his cousin's and said without inflection, "You're

losing control."

Sharon fell back, clutching the ruined front of her top pulling it

together. Ashamed, beaten, stunned at what he had reduced her to. Numb

with the shock of it.

"I'M not the one who's losing control," she whispered. "Look at

yourself. Your brain is infected with this girl. She's all you think

about. A week ago you wouldn't have given her a second glance."

"That was a week ago. Now I know her. Now I see possibilities. That's

one of your many faults, Sharon, you lack foresight."

"No. I can see perfectly," she said bitterly. "You're obsessed with her.

The way you were obsessed with Lucy-"

He shook his head and grinned that damned Redford grin, having the gall

to be amused at her. "No. You're wrong. It's not that at all."

She stared at him, forcing herself to read the expression in his eyes,

the strange euphoria. "You think you've fallen in love with her, don't

you?" she whispered, barely able to stand the sound of the words. She

could feel her world crumbling around her. Her mind raced for some way

to stop the damage. She had leverage. Bryce couldn't drop her

altogether; she had enough on him to make her an invaluable ally or a

formidable enemy. She could destroy him if she had to.

But she couldn't make him love her. She hadn't thought him capable of

romantic love. He was a man capable of many things, but love was not

among them.

He didn't turn back as he walked to the doorway and killed the lights in

the display cases. "I don't think, I know I love her."

"She'll leave you, you know," she said, struggling for calm, clinging to

some small scrap of pride and cynicism.

"She'll find out what you really are and she'll hate you, and she'll

leave you."

"No," he murmured, feeling omnipotent. "I won't allow that."

The dream was of death. Filled with a cast of people who either in fact

were dead or metaphorically dead to her.

Lucy with a clean round hole through her body. Townsend with no skull

above his eyebrows. Miller Daggrepont wearing a jaunty purple ascot

around his fat throat.

Del Rafferty with the lower part of his face gone. Then there was Brad

Enright, a stick-on label on the pocket of his Egyptian cotton shirt

that read HELLO, MY NAME IS: ASSHOLE. And Will wearing a goofy cap that

had been outfitted to hold a beer can on either side of his head. Clear

plastic straws looped down in a circuitous route to his mouth.

The guests milled around at a cocktail party held in Del Rafferty's

cabin. Her family stood off to the side, near the guns, refusing to

mingle.
 
Kendall Morton leered at them from the corner, where he stood

in a cloud of self-generated dust.

Marilee walked in wearing a cowboy hat, boots, and a vest and nothing

else, and realized immediately that she was severely underdressed. Her

mother and sisters shook their heads.

"Marilee, you're just not one of us," her mother said.

"She's sure as hell not one of us," Will said.

They circled around her and started moving in closer and closer, their

faces grim with disapproval. Except Lucy's. Lucy was smiling her wry

half-smile. J.D. stood beside her.

"Here, peach," she said, holding out the Mr. Peanut tin. "Something to

take with you on your trip."

"What trip?"

"The trip to find yourself."

Then the floor opened up and she was falling straight down into a black

hole, staring up at the ring of faces and half faces.

Lucy waved. "Be sure to send a postcard!"

She jerked awake and her heart sprinted into high gear as she tried

without success to get her bearings. Darkness. Cool, damp. She was

sitting up . . . on the deck outside Lucy's house.

Drawing in a deep breath of night air, she pressed a hand over her

breasthone and assured herself that she was real and alive. Her eyes

adjusted to the lack of light, and familiar shapes came into focus - the

rail of the deck the towering pine trees, indistinct outlines of the

llamas in the pasture near the creek.

She had come out from town to feed them, had meant to sit in the

Adirondack chair on the deck only a moment or two as the sun set. She

had certainly never meant to fall asleep. Now the sense of being alone

in the wilderness seeped into her like cold dew.

Three people had died violently in this dark paradise.

Each of those deaths had touched her in some way. She could feel them

touching her now, like bony fingers reaching up from the afterlife,

clawing at her, pulling at her, trying to draw her deeper into the evil.

And she was going with them. Willingly. Not exactly the kind of trip

she'd had in mind when she piled her business suits in the back of her

Honda and left Sacramento a lifetime ago.

She had come here for fun. She wasn't having any. She had come here to

find herself and was instead trying to find a killer. She had come here

for companionship. She was alone.

Somewhere down the valley, coyotes began to sing. In contrast to their

high, thin voices, the air on the deck seemed to thicken with an