Forster, Suzanne (34 page)

His arms swayed forward, and he snarled like a wounded animal as he fought to bring them back. He was shaking like a drunk, sweat pouring from his brow. He had to get the barbells vertical, then lower them a few agonizing inches into the power rack above him. Bracing himself with his legs, he gave it one last gut-wrenching heave and managed to bring the weight above his head. His hands ached as he released them with a tortured groan. The smell of his own sweat permeated his senses.

The cradle swayed with its burden, bowing above him.

"Jesus,"
he breathed, jerking off the equipment. He escaped just in time to see the rack snap like a twig. The barbell thudded to the wooden bench, broke it in two and crashed to the floor. The sound was thunderous, like a cacophony of iron doors slamming shut. It rattled the other equipment and reverberated throughout the workout room as he stepped back, no longer laughing. His solo bench-pressing days were over. It was too damned dangerous.

He grabbed the towel he'd draped over the chinning station and wiped himself down, mopping his face and his hair. By the time he was done his nylon tank top and shorts were damp rather than drenched, and his vital signs had stabilized, but his arms were still vibrating. The day he'd arrived, the housekeeper had told him that there was a weight room in the basement of the mansion, but this morning was the first chance he'd had to try it out. It had seemed like a good way to work off some of last night's frustration.

"Asshole," he muttered. How many men got themselves all racked up over a wood carving? He hadn't been able to finish the damn thing. He'd become too physically aroused. His knife had found every delicate swell of flesh, every curl and crevice and sensitive hollow. He'd probed the satin-wood and discovered things he hadn't known before about her. There was a dimple near her knee, a mole beneath her left breast. He'd brought her to life in his hands, but that was as much as he could have of her. What his hands could feel, what his mind could steal. And finally it had become too painful.

More poetry, he thought. Fuck.

His clenched gut muscles told him he wasn't done exercising yet. He flipped the towel over the chinning bar, then added some weight to the leg press machine and arranged himself on the equipment, knowing it was going to hurt. Better my thighs than other less resilient places, he thought.

As he lay back and stared up at the obscene amount of weight he'd loaded, he promised himself that once he'd worked off some steam, he would begin his search of the house, which included having another look at the Goddard he'd returned to Lake. The man's behavior had made him suspicious, but he'd also noticed something odd about the painting's canvas. In one corner he'd noticed a rippling effect that could have been air bubbles. It might mean nothing, but he couldn't afford to overlook it.

He began to work the press with his legs then, forcing the massive stack of silver bars up and down. His thigh muscles rippled under the strain, and the burn rose with every thrust, forcing him to admit that he was out of shape, at least as far as weight training went.

The weights clanked against each other jarringly as he tried to focus inward, and there was something about the jangling resonance that made him uneasy. A quick visual search of the equipment above him pinpointed the source of the noise. One of the wire cables that held the weights was frayed to the point of breaking. The tremendous pressure meant it could go at any moment, and when it did, the weights would drop like bombs, some of them might even fly. He stopped pumping, trying to figure out how to get himself the hell off the machine and still keep the foot flexors depressed so the bar wouldn't fall.

A curling barbell lay on the floor within his reach.

Once he had the barbell jammed between the flexors and a chrome fixture beneath them, he swung free of the equipment and stepped back to scan it. Curious, he pulled the barbell away and quickly moved out of range, watching as the bars plummeted. Their weight snapped the frayed cable, and the broken line unleashed a barrage of silver missiles directly at the spot where he'd been lying. Nowhere to hide, he thought.

Gallows humor coaxed his mouth into a grim line. Any one of the bars could have split his skull and killed him instantly, which made him more than curious about who normally used this equipment. More to the point, who knew he was going to be using it? A cursory inspection of the broken cable told him the fraying wasn't normal wear and tear. The cable had been cut.

He caught a sound, like the shuffling of feet, and spun around. A flash of blue darted past the doorway. Someone had been watching him from the hallway. Maybe the same person who'd rigged the weight equipment.

As he reached the door of the room, he caught another glimpse of the fleeing figure rounding the corner. He took off in pursuit. It had looked like a woman in blue jeans with dark hair. Jesus, not again! Gus? His heart roared as he sprinted down the hallway. She wasn't going to give up until she had him in the grave.

"Wait!" he called out. She was heading for the stairwell as he came around the corner. He shot after her and caught her, snagging her foot before she'd scrambled to the first landing. She fell forward in a heap, and by the time she'd turned herself over, he was on top of her.

"What the hell are you up to?" he growled. It took him a moment to realize that he was staring into the astonished face of Lily Featherstone. The shadows of the hallway had made her chestnut hair appear several shades darker.

"I'm not up to anything!" Her voice was as shrill as it was shocked. "Get off me or I'll scream for the guards!"

"Was that you in the doorway?"

"I don't know what you're talking about. I was down here looking for some china I'd packed away in the store room, and you frightened me half to death, yelling at me, chasing me. Now let me up!"

Her breasts rose against his chest with every sharp breath, and her face was flushed from the run. Jack was amazed that he found Lily in any way attractive. She was too prim and fussy for him, with her small, sharp features and her penchant for white—Lily white. But her flowery perfume permeated his senses, and he was just angry enough—and God knew, horny enough—to entertain the idea of kissing this frigid witch of a stepsister-in-law.

Instead he released her and rolled away, but she must have read his intention. With a sharp little cry of relief, she crawled up to the landing and struggled to her feet. As she glared at him, her hand flew up, covering her mouth as if she were going to be sick. She sidestepped, then turned and ran.

Jack was too intrigued to be insulted. Why the hell would Lily Featherstone want him dead? he wondered, watching her flee up the steps to the first floor. Unless she knew why he was here. He doubted that she had the strength or the skill to tamper with the weight equipment, which meant she'd had help.

Easy enough to come by, Jack reasoned. The guy who hung out in the stables, Daniel, was a big, strapping twenty-something kid, probably trying to pay his way through college and happy to do handy work for extra pay. Or maybe Lily was looking for china, just like she said. At the very least it seemed that there was more than one Featherstone who considered him a threat.

Swell, he thought, that was just swell. It was beginning to look like the whole damn family wanted him dead.

Lily's hands shook as she removed the Medusa brooch from her blouse and set it in the sterling silver tray on her dressing table. She wore the heirloom religiously, but not because it had been her mother's. She'd just begun the Evelyn Meyer Randolph's school for girls when Louise Featherstone had died and she and her mother had never been close. Lily wore it because her father had pinned it on the bodice of her ivory-white organdy dress on her thirteenth birthday and told her that all of the Featherstone women before her had worn it with pride. If he had asked her to pierce her heart with the pin, she would probably have done that too.

Her eyes had been too bright that day, too hot with hope. They were glittering like that now, she realized, wishing she could avoid their green brilliance as she gazed at her own reflection in the vanity mirror. With a sudden, sharp sigh she began to undo the delicate pearl buttons of her blouse, aware that the warmth pouring through the crisp percale fabric was her own body heat.

She still felt thoroughly violated by the manhandling she'd received from Jack Culhane. The man's sweaty fingerprints were all over her, and there were soggy blotches of his perspiration on her blouse. If she could ever get the disgusting thing off, she was going to inspect herself for damage.

She tilted her chin up to get a look at her throat. Surely she'd find several bruises, at the very least. She must be black and blue after the way he'd thrown her to the floor and fallen on her. Gus had married an animal, she decided, and an adulterous animal at that. She'd seen the look in his eyes as he'd Iain on top of her. It was blatantly sexual. But then why did that surprise her, considering the stock Gus came from. Her mother'd had a penchant for unsavory characters. It stood to reason Gus would be attracted to that sort of thing—danger and raw sex. What Lily would never understand was what her own father, a thoroughly cultured man, had seen in such a vulgar woman as Rita Walsh.

She drew her blouse down over her shoulders and peered at her skin in the lighted vanity mirror, turning this way and that. She didn't see any marks. Possibly they hadn't come up yet. Some bruises took shape like photographic negatives, gradually. Perhaps her hip, she thought, where she'd hit the riser of the stair when she'd fallen.

The allure of the illicit.

Lake's comment about Rita came to her as she undid the buckle of her woven leather belt. Her thumbnails clicked against the metal snap of her jeans. "There's a lecherous old goat hidden in our holier-than-thou father, " he'd whispered at dinner one night after Rita had shocked the small group with an off-color joke. "She turns the sanctimonious old bastard on. "

Lake had always considered their father a puritanical, emotionally rigid prig, though outwardly he'd never dared to show anything but obedience and respect. Lily's wound was that Lake, Sr., had so strongly preferred his son over her when Lake had secretly hated him, and all she'd ever wanted was his approval. Her father had never seemed to have more than a passing interest in her, and she'd often wondered if that was exactly the reason—because she had been so much like him, and not... illicit.

A moment later she had her jeans around her hips and she'd pulled her panties down by their elastic to check herself. "I knew it, " she said, feeling vindicated as she examined a large red welt on her buttock. She ran a finger over its tenderness and winced. Look what he'd done to her, the brute! It was unfortunate for all of them that the weight equipment hadn't crushed Mr. Culhane. That would have made everything so much easier.

She kicked off her slip-on canvas deck shoes and began to pin up her hair, struck by the disheveled image that bounced back at her from the mirror. She'd left her blouse hanging off her shoulders, her jeans and panties down around her hips. The flush that crept up her throat made her look all the more the sort of woman her father might have secretly desired, a woman like Rita or Gus, an illicit creature.

By the time she had the rest of her clothes off and the shower running, she'd found two more bruises and felt quite pleased with herself. She wondered if Jack Culhane abused women, and the thought gave her some small satisfaction, though she couldn't imagine any man abusing Gus. She'd kill him first.

Lily generally preferred a soak in the vast marble pedestal tub she'd had built into her spacious bathroom, but the ordeal she'd just been through called for a shower, as hot as she could get it. Lake had always accused her of harboring a moralistic streak like their father. She didn't know if that was true, but she did seem to have a personal aversion to physical men like Culhane. All she wanted now was to get his nasty, sweaty scent off her body.

The spray was powerful. Her skin tingled as if it were being prickled by hundreds of sharp little spines when she stepped into the path of the water. It was exactly what she needed. Within seconds she was stingingly alive all over, and the inner tension was melting away like the water steaming down the drain.

She was still turning in the deluge and scrubbing feverishly moments later when she realized that someone was in her bathroom. She could see the form of a man through the steam that had condensed on the glass shower walls. Her hands dropped to her sides in a defenseless pose, and the loofah mitt slipped from her grip, battered to the floor by the force of the water. She froze as the shower door slid open.

She began to shake, an inner trembling that rang through her body like a cry of alarm. Dear God, it was him again. He had violated her privacy and now, unless she could find the will to say no, he would violate everything else that she held private and sacred—her body, her dignity. Somehow she had to find the strength. She couldn't let him take advantage of her weakness again. She couldn't let him humiliate her again.

"Turn around," he said. "Turn and pick up the mitt you dropped, you clumsy girl. "

Lily barely knew what happened after that. Her heart was pounding so wildly she couldn't think. Her encounters with him had always blurred into one glaring red stream of stimulation from which she emerged gasping and ashamed. She did as he said, of course. She always did as he said.

"No, don't crouch, bend," he told her. "Bend from the waist. Show me the bruises on your buttocks. "

Moments later, she was bent double like a gymnast, and the naked man who'd joined her in the shower was caressing her flared hips and driving deeply into her quaking, madly orgasming body. God, the pleasure he gave her! She knew it was wrong—very wrong—but she couldn't resist the way he took over at moments like this. His power and unyielding control of the situation were her only addictions in life. In that way he was exactly like her father.

When there's a choice between two evils, pick the one you haven't tried.
Few proverbs spoke to the dark night of Webb Calderon's soul the way that one did. He was thoroughly versed in the distractions of sin and iniquity, so much so, he wouldn't have bet there were two choices left. But that was before the Featherstones. Their situation offered such an embarrassment of evils, even Webb couldn't seem to make up his mind. It was almost enough watching the very proper family reduced to a circus act by the presence of Jack Culhane.