Evil to the Max (11 page)

“Hi.” His voice, deep and loud, pounded against her eardrums. He stuck his hand out, grabbed hers, and pumped her arm, shaking her whole body. “My name’s Jules.”

“Mine’s Max.”

“Max? That’s a boy’s name.”

“It’s short for something else.” Not that she’d ever tell anyone what that was.

He shook her hand until the bones of her fingers felt as if they’d been crushed. Jules reminded her of slow Lenny in Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men
. Sweet without knowing his own strength. He leaned down to stare into her face, his breath scented with chocolate peanut butter cups.

“Jules? Where’s that box?” Pippa’s strident tone rang out.

Jules dropped Max’s hand immediately. A shadow crossed his ruddy features, his eyes widened.

Pippa Lamont stood by her desk, one high-heel clad foot tapping on the carpet, her arms folded beneath her breasts, and her gaze pointed.

“It’s in the trunk of your car, Pip-pa.” He said the name slowly, as if the syllables gave him trouble. Or as if the harsh sound of the woman’s voice made him stutter.

“Well, go get it and bring it in here.”

Despite his bulk, Jules moved quickly and gracefully down the hall.

“Max,” Pippa snapped with command.

“Yes, ma’am.” Max kept her lips straight, though Pippa’s condescending tone threatened to bring out a snarl.

“Jules has the mind of a child. He talks too much, then doesn’t get his work done. All the girls here know not to encourage him.”

Jules had sounded like he needed encouragement, or at least a friend. And with a boss like Pippa Louise Lamont ... Max brightened. Jules liked to talk. Jules needed a friend. “Of course I won’t bother him, Pippa.” She’d go to work encouraging him to talk the first chance she got.

“See that you don’t.” With one last arched-brow glare, Pippa stepped forward and shut the door in Max’s face.

Entering the salon proper, Max caught sight of Jules outside, his head stuck inside the open trunk of a sleek, mint green Mercedes. Damn, Pippa didn’t drive a large, dark car, and Jules almost certainly didn’t have a license. Max’s best bet was still Miles’s Lincoln.

Jules approached the shop with a two-foot square cardboard box. Max held open the front door for him. Turning to the side, the tip of his tongue sticking out between his teeth, he eased past her.

As he passed, he whispered, “I like Max. I’ll call you that. Bye now.” He vanished down the hallway and presumably into Pippa’s office.

* * * * *

Pippa had stayed long enough to unpack her box. She’d sent Jules out to her car at least three more times for various items, most of which she could have had him bring all at once. Obviously, Pippa was born to give orders, and Jules appeared to have been born to take them.

After they left, Max enjoyed the momentary peace and typed the addresses she’d written down into Mapquest.

When the troops returned, the salon reverted to its natural state of controlled chaos. Max didn’t have a moment to think beyond answering the phone, taking people’s money, and ignoring the Three Stooges.

Ah, she’d never been so glad to see six o’clock in her life. She crawled into the Miata and listened to the silence for three long minutes.

“Home, James?” Cameron whispered in her ear, the sensation of his voice inside her melting the last knot of tension. He used to say that as a prelude to hot, delicious sex.

“Making love, my sweet.” His words were like the trace of fingers along her inner thigh.

“That’s what I meant.” She closed her eyes, then rolled her shoulders. Oh God, she could feel him. Still. After two years.
That
was intimacy. She
was
capable of it, despite what he’d implied the other night.

A hand slipped between her legs. It wasn’t her own. It was ghostly. She could actually hear the rasp of her zipper. She didn’t stop Cameron. She should have. She was sitting out in the open, the top down on the car. But if she stayed very still, kept very quiet ...

“What do you want, my love? My fingers, my mouth, or my cock?”

She wanted everything. She knew she couldn’t have it.

“My fingers, I think, with my tongue in your ear.”

Oh God. He entered her with two fingers, scraped her clitoris, and tongued the shell of her ear all at once. She came, just like that. Her only movement was the sinking of her teeth into her bottom lip. The spasms rippled through her, then died away.

And somehow she was cleansed. Very strange. She’d just had mind-sex in her car, in almost broad daylight, and she felt cleansed?

It washed away the stink of Tiffany’s workplace, the strange feral rake of Miles’s gaze over her breasts, and Pippa Lamont’s beady green eyes.

“We’re getting decidedly kinkier, Cameron. I’m not sure this is a good thing.”

“We were always kinky, my love. Remember that time in the restaurant when you were wearing that skirt with the slit up to your navel and no panties?”

God. She did. The tablecloths had been very white and very long, and Cameron had ...

Max straightened, then started the engine. “We’re off to search for the missing husband.”

“Party pooper.”

That was one thing she had
never
been, especially when it came to sex games.

“Aren’t we going home to freshen up first, my love?”

He had something up his sleeve, she could tell. “We don’t need to go home.”

“You’re just afraid the detective will be there.”

She waited until she’d backed out of her parking spot and started down the street before answering. “I never even thought about it.”

“Liar. You’ve obsessed about it for the last hour.” Cameron was so good at plucking the thoughts right out of her head and voicing them with the elegance of a silver-tongued trial attorney. Which was, of course, what he’d been in life.

He always tried to win with words, but she was stubborn as hell. Okay, so she had been thinking about those recurring Witt dreams, but she wouldn’t admit it to anyone. “I didn’t have time to obsess about anything.”

He ignored the lie. “And you never even turned on that cellular phone Witt gave you so he could call you.”

“I forgot I had it.”

He laughed, the sound whisked away as she sped through a light.

“I only have it for emergencies.”

“Why do you bother lying to me, Max? I know everything you’re thinking, everything you’re feeling.”

“I hate that. I really hate that.” She took the ramp too fast and ended up an inch shy of an SUV merging onto the freeway at forty-five miles an hour.

Cameron whispered against her ear. “You like him. You admire him. You’re attracted to him. You dream about his Ram truck—and nice things that go ram in the night.”

“That’s Tiffany.” She punched the gas and zipped into the fast lane, damn glad she was going in the non-commute direction.

“That’s
you
, Max. You just don’t want to admit it. And slow down. You drive like a maniac when you’re upset.”

“I’m not upset,” she growled as she flew past a BMW jockeying for her lane.

“Fine. I’ll stop begging you to control your speed. You’ll have an accident, then haunt me until I say it was my fault.”

“You’re already outta here. I can’t haunt
you
.” But she willed her blood pressure back down and let her foot up, her speed dropping to a reasonable level. The Beamer whizzed by. The driver honked and gave her the one-finger salute. She returned it with a smile.

“You’re going to miss the exit.”

She squeaked and looked over her shoulder to find a hole in the traffic wide enough to slip into the slow lane. She managed to wedge herself between two Dodge Rams. Her spirits continued to climb. The exit dumped into a four-lane road. Three blocks down, she found the street name she wanted and turned onto a tree-lined residential street occupied by rows of attractive wood-sided apartments.

“Why don’t we go to Nadine and Tiffany’s first?”

“I already know where Tiffany is. I’m looking for Jake. Isn’t that what you wanted when you told me to write down her old address?”

He snorted. “You’re just afraid of Tiffany.”

“Don’t start again, Cameron.” She was tired of the argument. Why couldn’t he for once roll
with
her instead of against her?

“I can, my sweet. I do. I just ask the questions you’re afraid of.”

She didn’t deny it. What would be the point? “Well, cool your jets. Okay?”

“For now,” he crooned. “Not forever.”

She’d rather have had forever. Better yet, she’d rather have had their life back the way it used to be. The three-bedroom condo in the Belmont hills, the quiet Sunday afternoons spent on the leather sofa in front of the fire or hands entwined in a darkened movie theater, and the short, decadent, surprise vacations to exotic places. Cameron had rarely strung more than four days away from the District Attorney’s office, but they were worth every moment.

And there was, well, yeah, the kinky things they did, like that night at the restaurant when he’d put his hand through the slit in her skirt and his fingers straight up inside her.

“I can still touch you in your dreams, sweetheart.”

It was more than most people got when fate tore their lives apart. The ache, however, would never ease completely.

Turning into a short driveway, she edged into the first parking space farthest from the buildings. She didn’t need to pull out the note to remember the apartment number.

Tiffany and Jake Lloyd had lived together on the second level in Number 234. If she was lucky, the man still resided there, despite the fact that his wife had left him. She climbed from the car and stood in the shade of a large tree. The sun wound down, the shadows lengthened, and the day’s early autumn warmth was fast turning to a cool breeze.

Waist-high, neatly trimmed bushes rimmed the dark wood-sided structure. Stone pathways free of weeds led to spacious front entryways and the stairs to the second floor units. More flowering shrubs lined the walks. Each apartment had a fenced-in sun porch or, if on the second level, a balcony. It was definitely not the kind of place where anyone would hang unmentionables to dry on the metal railings.

Nor would Tiffany have lived anywhere that allowed it.

Max climbed the set of wooden steps with Cameron’s comfortable peppermint aura surrounding her. Tiffany’s old apartment lay at the end, three doors down. No welcome mat sat in front of the door; no flowery decorations hung from the small nail jutting out just below the peephole.

Max closed her eyes and sniffed. A faint musky aroma hung in the air. It matched a scent dredged up from the murky nightmare she’d had the night Tiffany died.

Jake’s potent male scent. He’d stood right here not long ago.

Instead of using the knocker, Max placed the flat of her hand lightly to the wood of the door.

“What do you feel?” Excitement buzzed through Cameron’s words.

Nothing. At first. Not even Tiffany’s essence. The wood was warm. She’d expected it to be cool because the entry was beneath an overhang where the sun would not have reached it. Beneath her fingers, the door began to heat, so much so it almost glowed. It was as if her touch drew something from it, encouraged it, and egged it on. As if it forced Tiffany out into the open.

The door suddenly stood wide.

The world around her turned red. She couldn’t drag in a breath. She’d have screamed if her throat muscles worked. Screamed, kicked, scratched, punched, smashed. She would have howled. She could have—

Then the door slammed, the sound exploding in her head. Max jumped back with a yelp. Her fingertips pulsed, burned, and trembled. Her lungs ached when she tried to fill them with air. Blood pumped against her temples.

She blinked, cleared her vision, and the entrance was as it had been before, not even an echo of the slam remaining.

“What happened, love?”

“Did you hear that?”

“Only in your mind, Max.”

“Tiffany slammed it. She was pissed as hell, and she slammed the door on ... someone.” She couldn’t say more, couldn’t describe the dead woman’s red rage now waning inside her. Suddenly cold, Max shuddered, and wrapped her arms around herself.

“Are you sure you don’t know who she slammed it on?”

She swallowed, shook her head slowly. “I couldn’t see. Nothing except the door. I don’t know who.” She started to shake, felt Cameron’s arms slide around her body, everywhere at once, holding, stroking, calming.

It didn’t work. “Oh Jesus, Cameron, what
was
that?”

“The door. You touched the door. Tiffany’s strong emotions left some residual behind. You felt them.”

She backed away from the door, from his enveloping presence, and stabbed a finger in the empty air. “
You
did that to me, didn’t you?
You
made me feel that.”

He sighed, his breath a mere breeze ruffling her hair. “You said that about the visions, too, Max, but you’ve always been the channel for them, not me.”

“Don’t lie to me, Cameron. That’s
never
happened before.”

“You’re wrong, Max. You knew the dumpster they’d thrown Tiffany’s body in with your fingers still inches from it.”

Chills raced down her arms, across her scalp, shot down through her torso and into her legs. She locked her knees and refused to admit he could be right. “That was different.”

“How?”

Because it hadn’t terrified her. It hadn’t taken over her mind. It had been a simple tactile sensation, a fragment of a dream returning to her. She didn’t feel her control of the situation slipping away.

“You touched the metal dumpster, and you had a vision of her lying in it. This is the same thing. A residual of Tiffany.”

“It’s stronger.”

“That’s good.”

She slashed a hand through the air. “But I don’t want it. I don’t want the dreams. I don’t want these waking visions. And I sure as hell don’t want to feel dead people’s emotions when I touch a fricking door.”

“You can’t stop now. Touch it again.”

His voice came from behind. She whirled, hating that she couldn’t see him, hating that she couldn’t point her finger right in his face. “You never let up. You never leave me alone.”