Shadowed Paradise (36 page)

“
Let me see,” he said as he sank down
on the end of the bed. “I believe this is the woman who used to
ride the subway in Manhattan, push a baby carriage in Central Park.
The woman who took on the New York City D.A., the FBI, CIA, DEA,
IRS, and the Justice Department. “Did I leave any out?”

“
ATF, FAA and Interpol,” Claire recited
tonelessly, but her bottom lip gave a slight twitch.

Brad’s pale brows arched over his high Slavic
cheekbones. Point made.

“
Did it ever occur to you,” Claire
inquired sweetly, hiking up one strap of the pink froth, “that I
might prefer the whole alphabet soup to Maisie?”

“
Maisie is a danger only to
cockroaches,” Brad pointed out blandly. Victory was his. No need to
rub it in.

Claire toyed with the serged hem of the silk
that lay half way up her thigh. Her lower lip edged into a
particularly feminine pout. “You never specified I had to be
sensible,” she grumbled.

Brad had few illusions. Maisie was simply the
embodiment of all the nightmares Claire had suffered. By ridding
the world of Maisie he had done what was expected of him. Protected
her from Maisie, as she expected to be protected from other
predators. Whether they had eight legs, six, four. Or two.

Not that Claire didn’t want him. Hell, she
might even love him. The day would come—at least he hoped it
would—when she’d allow herself to love without fear or reservation,
when she would trust him enough to admit that she loved him. Until
then . . . it was his wedding night and his wife was scrunched up
in a goddamn ball in the middle of the bed, looking as if she
expected an army of Maisies to come charging out of the bathroom at
any moment.

“
Uh, Claire,” Brad ventured, his eyes
lingering on the swell of her breasts, the rosy thrust of her
nipples beneath their flimsy covering, the darker triangle that
marked her most private flesh. “Maisie’s gone, the guests are gone.
We have the whole damn house to ourselves. Do you think we might
get back to our wedding night? Ten minutes ago I was lying here
ready and waiting. It wouldn’t take much encouragement to restore
that condition.” Truthfully, even the lingering odor of insect
killer couldn’t keep a good man down. He was recovering his
enthusiasm with satisfying rapidity.

“
You’re Maisie, and I’m the cockroach,
right?” Claire sniped in one last attempt to cling to her
grievances. “You know,” she added slowly, “I was really ticked off
about Phil, flaunting it right up front, but somewhere in the
middle of the reception a thought occurred to me. If I kept telling
myself she might become your aunt, the whole situation seemed like
a sitcom.”

Brad’s shout of laughter filled the bedroom,
echoed through the cavernous bathroom and back again. In the end
they both had to resort to the tissue box to wipe their streaming
eyes. It was going to be all right, they both knew it. Whatever
their reasons for marriage, they also wanted each other. Wanted
love. Wanted to make a family together.

It was enough.

A bright flash came out of nowhere,
illuminating the room. Thunder rumbled, a gust of wind slammed back
the partially open French doors, riffled the long curtains at the
sash windows into a mass of billowing white.

In a cosmic replay of that fateful night in
June, lightning flashed and thunder rolled, and Claire’s fears fell
away. Here, close enough to touch, was life. Light flickered over
the bronze of Brad’s bare skin, the crinkle of lines around his
eyes, the pale blond halo of his unbound hair. He was here beside
her, her very own heroic statue without the fig leaf. Waiting.
Hopeful.

The lightning strokes came faster; the
thunder, nearly continuous. The deluge arrived on a sweeping whoosh
of wind. Rain beat a steady drumroll against the barrel tile
roof.

Slowly, deliberately, Brad leaned forward,
thrust an index finger under one of the spaghetti straps of
Claire’s gown, and slipped it off her shoulder. She never took her
eyes from his, never moved a muscle. She couldn’t breathe. Brad’s
finger moved again. The second frail strap tumbled down. The finger
moved on, catching a rhythm from the pounding rain, the flashes of
light, the inevitable answering roar.

He liked the feel of silk. It was almost as
fine as flesh. It tantalized. Invited. Mocked the roughness of him,
the hard edges of flesh and soul.

He palmed her breasts, rotated his hands
across the soft flesh. Claire felt it all the way to the pit of her
being. He had barely laid a hand on her, and she was dizzy. There
was only the pounding of her heart, obliterating the rain, the
thunder, every reality beyond two people and a diminishing square
of bed.

Brad inched one finger under the edge of her
drooping bodice. A slow, sensuous tug and the pink silk fell away,
pooling around her waist. Each flicker of lightning revealed the
gleam of his brilliant blue of his eyes, the sweat glistening on
his bronzed forehead, a sheen of pure lust. His sex rose rigid from
a nest of sandy blond curls.

Claire fought for air—she must have been
holding her breath. He was so beautiful, so perfect in his
masculinity. She could smell his scent, part XS by Paco Rabanne–and
didn’t he have an excess of everything a man needed to have?—and
part essence of Brad Blue. Strong, proud, arrogant, and completely
male.

Reality faded. No lightning, no rain or
thunder. No fluorescent bathroom light casting a soft rectangular
glow onto the bedroom carpet. The world was contained on a kingsize
bed. As Brad bent his head to suckle her breast, Claire fisted her
hands in his unleashed hair and gave herself up to the glory of it.
The miracle.

Not until he had devoured every inch of her,
and her own tongue had licked and teased until he begged her to
stop, did Brad—on a mumbled chant of “Oh god, oh god, oh god”—inch
his way inside to Claire’s counterpoint of “Yes, oh yes, oh yes!” A
few strokes and they were over the precipice, tumbling into
eternity, their convulsions shaking the bed, their cries echoed
back by the now distant thunder.

The rain dwindled to drips falling off the
roof and striking the wrought iron balcony outside the French
doors. Snuggled together, eyelids heavy with repletion, they felt
the lightning fade, heard the thunder diminish to nothingness. As
on that June night in the midst of a flood, the storm ended and
something more significant began.

With a smile that could only be called smug
and a gleam in the eye that could have only one ending, Brad
returned to life, nuzzling his wife’s lips with his. If Claire had
lived through the first time—and for a moment there, he’d had his
doubts—he was ready, more than ready, to try again.

The night, after all, was still young.

The elevator was taking forever.
Anticipation gripped him with a fierce joy beyond sex, beyond
reason. His whole body was growing hard. Expanding, swelling,
rising to the thrill of it, his mind soaring, gloating. Reason was
plunging into that deep pit from which there was no return.
Hell, yes!
His mind was already
there, his body soon to follow.

But not before payback time. Not before he
took care of Blue’s bitches.

The elevator door slid silently open.
He stepped out into the brisk seabreeze ten stories above the broad
harbor that gave Manatee Bay its name. It felt good, momentarily
cooling the engorged heat of him, the fevered desire. He drew a
deep breath.
Oh, yes!
This was
going to be the best one yet. The best by far. Maybe he’d do her
before as well as after. For a moment he gripped the gallery’s iron
railing, gazing out over the bay to the distant lights of the city,
then down, far down, to the parking lot below. Some niggling
remnant of rationality urged him to end it here, end it now, before
anyone else died. It would be so easy, it was such a low railing .
. .

He slammed shut that tiny glimmer of reason.
No way. He was going to finish what he started. Vengeance. Blue
could have him, but not until he’d done one bitch, then the other.
That was going to feel good, so good. Just thinking about this one
made him king of the mountain. Omnipotent. All powerful. Lucifer
incarnate.

He loosed his grip on the railing, squared
his shoulders, straightened his tie. He walked the few steps to the
condo doorway and rang the bell. The eye peering at him through the
peephole was grotesque. The face framed in the soft light of the
quickly opened doorway was anything but. Major bitch, but
stunningly beautiful. And wearing nothing but a red silk robe that
barely covered her tight little ass.

She was smiling up at him—incredibly,
shockingly sexy. Exultant that he’d come to her at last.

His breathing was erratic. If he didn’t do
something fast, he was going to come in his goddamn pants.

“
Will wonders never cease,” Diane Lake
murmured huskily. And stood aside to let him in.

On Sunday afternoon Brad and Claire
Blue opened the Amber Run sales office for business as usual.
Almost as usual. Since the construction crews were off on Sunday,
Brad normally kept an eye on Claire by hunkering down over his
paperwork at the old oak desk that had been transferred from the
trailer to the lattice-walled parking area under the model. Today,
however, he pulled up a chair next to his bride’s elegant desk and
simply gazed at her, savoring the satisfaction of knowing she was
well and truly his.
Jesus, it felt
good!
He was married. He had a son. And there would be
others. Damn right, and the sooner the better. Brad was still
wearing a fatuous grin when the first customers of the day came
puffing up the stairs.

All in all, it was a better-than-average
Sunday afternoon. One contract, a “definite maybe,” a pleasing
variety of complimentary remarks. Brad and Claire were just
beginning the lengthy process of closing up the model—shutting all
the doors and windows, turning out lights, setting the security
alarm—when Claire paused with her hands above her head, her fingers
gripping the top of one of the front windows. A white and green
deputy sheriff’s patrol car was coming up the road, followed
closely by what she suspected was an unmarked police car.

Claire sucked in her breath. Why should
she be surprised? It must be Task Force business.
Dear God, please, not another body!
There was an ominous aura about those cars pulling into the
parking area below.

Distinctly masculine footsteps sounded on the
stairs. The door opened to reveal two familiar faces. “Tom . . .
Bob,” Brad greeted the detectives who were members of the Special
Task Force. “What’s up?”

The two men, one about Brad’s age, the other
in his mid-forties, appeared decidedly uncomfortable. They glanced
at Claire, mumbled a greeting. An awkward pause as each seemed to
be waiting for the other to speak. From her position by the window
Claire could see that a uniformed deputy had remained below,
standing casually at ease next to his patrol car. The gun on his
hip suddenly loomed as large as a basketball. The hair on the back
of her neck stood up. What was the deputy doing here? Something was
wrong. Very wrong.

“
Uh, Brad,” said Bob Guthrie, the elder
of the two detectives, “maybe we should talk privately.”

“
No need. My wife can hear whatever you
have to say. What’s happened?”

Tom Rausch darted a second glance at Claire,
looked at his partner and stepped closer until he was almost
chest-to-chest with Brad. “It’s about Diane Lake,” he hissed.

“
Go on.” Brad ground out.

“
She’s dead,” said Detective Guthrie
baldly. “She was strangled. Probably raped.”

“
Oh, no.” Claire sagged against the
sill of the still-open window.

“
Shit!” The word slid softly from
between Brad’s grim lips. He stared down at the toe of his boot,
scraped it idly along the shining surface of the ceramic tile. When
he looked back up, he was all hard-eyed professional cop. “Tell
me,” he snapped.

“
She was in her condo. Probably
wouldn’t have been found until she failed to show up at the studio
tomorrow,” Guthrie explained, “but she was scheduled to appear at
some charity function at noon today. When she didn’t show and
didn’t answer the phone, the sponsors sent someone over to check on
her.”

“
Get on with it,” Brad growled, as the
detective paused.

“
She’d been strangled,” Tom Rausch
added quickly. “With her pantyhose. There’s some indication she’d
been raped, but it’s too soon for confirmation on that.”

“
Pantyhose,” Brad repeated very
quietly, “and Diane’s not a Realtor. So what are you guys doing
here?”

“
Well—uh,” Guthrie stammered, “we don’t
really see a connection to the serial killer unless it’s a copycat
situation, but—um—the Sheriff’s out on his boat and . . . well,
he’s on his way back, and since we knew you . . . he kinda asked us
if we could stop by and—um—bring you in to talk to him.”

“
You’re taking me in for questioning?”
Brad’s body tensed, like a tiger about to charge to the
kill.

“
It was our wedding night,” Claire
cried, coming off the wall in a rush. “You can’t actually think
Brad had anything to do with it. And don’t give me any of
that
we’re just doing our job,
ma’am
. It’s absolutely physically impossible for Brad
to have been in Manatee Bay last night.”

“
Maybe she’s been dead since before
last night,” Guthrie pointed out, regaining a little of his
professional cool. “We have to wait for the M.E.’s
report.”