Shameless (The Contemporary Collection) (29 page)

“I suppose I can see that,” Cammie said. “But what about the mill land? How does it come into it?”

“Who knows? It was something between the two of them, apparently. Though I've wondered once or twice if it didn't have something to do with compensation of a sort, you might call it a dream to replace a dream.”

Cammie exchanged a long, considering glance with her older relative. Finally, she said, “You think Reid is legal owner of the mill, then?”

“There's not a shred of doubt in my mind.”

Cammie finished her tea and set down the cup. Sitting forward with hands clasped loosely together on her knees, she said, “I suppose I never really expected anything else.”

“Have you considered—” Aunt Beck began, then stopped as if to collect her thoughts. When she began again, she said, “If you stop to think about it, Cammie, there are such parallels between what happened with Lavinia and with your troubles. Have you noticed?”

“Because Keith and Justin were both shot? I hardly think—”

“You were both near the same age and with independent means, both married, both having husband trouble, both involved with other men. Your husbands were both shot, and you are both suspects in the killings. Doesn't it strike you as odd?”

“What are you suggesting?”

“I may be a cynical and suspicious old woman, but I wonder if someone didn't plan it that way.”

“Oh, no, surely not,” Cammie said. She believed Reid's theory, that Keith's gambling debts were the cause of his death.

“Stranger things have happened. You will be careful, won't you, not take any foolish chances?”

Cammie looked down at her hands. “This whole thing — the problems with the mill, Janet Baylor's disappearance, the missing records, Keith's death — it's all so unbelievable. But you know, I think the thing that bothers me most is the way people are talking, the things they have said to me and about me.”

The older woman's white hair caught the light with a silver glint as she nodded. “Talking is what people do best. But I've noticed myself the sheer meanness in what's going around. It's not natural, I can tell you — like this tale I heard just yesterday about you and Reid being caught naked and fornicating in the woods, and Reid shooting at the hunter who walked upon you.”

“Dear God.” Sickness curled inside Cammie for the way the simple episode had been blown up into something ugly.

“I told the woman who dared say such stuff that she had a mind like a septic tank,” Aunt Beck went on in sardonic tones. “Couldn't be true, I said, not my Cammie. But it seemed to me, after I thought about it, that maybe there's somebody spreading nastiness for the fun of it. Or for a reason we can't see.”

“You mean as a part of all the rest?”

“Call me a paranoid old biddy, but I'm only telling you what I think.”

“Sometimes,” Cammie said wearily, “I feel like resigning from the human race.”

“And leave things to the perverts? They would like that too much. I prefer to give them Hades.”

Cammie, watching her frail great-aunt calmly sipping lukewarm tea from her fine china cup, had to laugh. It was better than crying.

She drove home with her thoughts jostling each other for position in her mind. There were a few things she had not mentioned to her great-aunt. It wasn't because she thought the elderly woman would not be interested, but rather that Cammie could guess too easily what her reaction would be. And she didn't want to hear it.

There was the gossip, for one thing. Aunt Beck's suggestion that it was being spread deliberately made excellent sense. Information might make the rounds at warp speed under normal circumstances, but the details of what she had done and was doing had spread so fast, it was nothing short of amazing. More than that, though the stories were grossly distorted, they had a bedrock of truth. It stood to reason, then, that whoever was behind them was no stranger. She hated the idea, but it had to be faced.

There had to be one person who, at any given time, was perfectly situated to know exactly what she was doing, when, and how.

Then there were the similarities between her troubles and those that her great-grandmother had endured. It gave her cold chills to think of someone manipulating her life, arranging events and circumstances so that they made the same deadly pattern. What earthly reason could there be for it?

She could think of two, offhand. The first was a species of arrogance, a need to play God either to satisfy a twisted impulse, or else to inspire fear when the design was recognized. The second was to make it look as if she was herself following in Lavinia's footsteps, trying to emulate a proven plan for murder.

There was one person who would have had a better opportunity than anyone else to orchestrate events, creating the parallels pointed out by Aunt Beck.

There was a single man who had the best possible reason for influencing public opinion, making her appear both immoral and guilty of murder.

The reason was money.

The man was Reid.

Cammie didn't go home, but turned her car toward the Fort. She would have no rest until the maddening suspicions were answered. And if the answers soothed her heart, there were things Reid should know about Lavinia and Justin.

No one answered the bell. She left the front door and rounded the big log house, to see if Reid's Jeep was in the garage. It was then that she noticed the drift of smoke in the air, hanging in a gray-blue veil touched with lavender from the evening twilight.

She stood still, gazing around her. The house seemed all right, as did the garage with its shop addition. The thickest smoke haze seemed to be coming from down a slope toward the back of the property, near the woods. With a frown between her brows, Cammie moved in that direction.

The air was cool, yet with currents of balmy warmth that was the last remnants of the sun's heat wafting from the earth. In the quiet, insects and tree frogs sang their spring songs. The woods were shadowed with the approach of darkness. She breathed in the scents of honeysuckle and damp earth and green growing things, and also the acrid tang of smoke. It was almost enough to bring peace. Almost.

She saw the red heart of fire first. It was a fairly large blaze, burning with resolute brightness. The ground around it had been raked clean to prevent sparks and embers from escaping. A man moved toward it from the shadows at the wood's edge, tossing an armful of dried limbs and green brush onto the flames. As it leaped and crackled, snapping sparks toward the sky, Reid's face and bare arms and chest reflected the yellow-orange light with a bronze sheen.

He was clearing the tangle of undergrowth at the edge of the tree line that crowded the Fort. An axe and a small chain saw lay nearby. She should have known he would be in control of whatever was in progress there.

Her steps easier, she moved forward until she stood within the golden-red nimbus of the firelight. She halted, waiting.

“I thought,” he said in tones laced with half-exasperated amusement as he reached for another load of brush without looking at her, “that we were supposed to act sensible and not be seen together. If I had known you were coming, I'd have cleaned up.”

She had almost forgotten, or rather, it had been driven from her mind by other things. “I won't stay long. I just needed to talk to you.”

“I'm not complaining.” He made a gesture with one arm toward the cleared space behind him. As she moved in that direction, he dumped the brush he held on the fire, then stepped to where his shirt hung on a tree limb. Shaking it out, he spread it on the ground under a great pine a few feet inside the tree line. When she moved in nearer, he said, “We could walk back up to the house, but I should stick close to the fire until it burns down a bit.”

“Won't you be cool?” She allowed her gaze to rest an instant on the width of his chest, with the musculature burnished with the faint sheen of perspiration and the fine mat of curling gold hair tipped red with firelight.

His smile was rueful as he met her gaze. “I've been working,” he said. “Besides…”

“What?”

“Nothing.” He avoided looking at her as he touched her arm briefly, indicating she should take the seat he had made for her. As he dropped down on his heels beside her, he kept a little space between them, not enough to be obvious, but enough that there was no chance of an accidental touch.

He had meant that she warmed him. It was nice to know, since she felt the physical attraction between them like the low vibration of an electrical charge. Dragging her mind away, she explained the things Aunt Beck had told her, then waited for what he would say.

“She's a smart old lady.” His tone was without inflection.

“Yes, but is she right?”

He picked up a dead twig, breaking off tiny pieces and dropping them. He glanced up at the fire then back at what he was doing with a wide, unseeing gaze. “How do you expect me to answer that, Cammie? I don't know.”

Nor did she. Why had she come, then?

Because she couldn't stay away. Because she refused to allow others to dictate to her. Because she had an insuppressible urge to live dangerously since she had always been so safe.

All these, and more.

What she wanted, she saw, was reassurance rather than answers. And she was not sure that could come from words, after all.

There was a piece of trash in his hair, a curling dead leaf. She reached up to flick it away, then trailed her fingertips through the fine blond strands above his ear, which were damp and darkened by perspiration. The ache of longing she felt was intense, almost painful, though it was not possible to tell whether it was physical or only emotional.

That he had some understanding of what drove her was plain in his face. He caught her hand, pressing a quick kiss to the fingers before touching them to his chest. Beneath the heated skin, she felt the heavy throb of his heart. “I'd like to hold you,” he said on a husky note, “but I'm too dirty.”

There was a fine dust of ash across the width of his shoulders, and he smelled of wood smoke and healthy, warm male. But the freshness of the outdoors and fresh-cut oak and new grass also clung to him like natural aphrodisiacs.

“I don't mind,” she said, and spread her fingers wide over his chest, absorbing his heat and the feel of him as she leaned to offer her mouth for his kiss.

The contact was brief, yet tingling. He drew away with a smile. “You taste like tea and cake. I could eat you in a single bite.”

“Do,” she murmured, and smoothed her hand across his collarbone to his shoulder, clasping, drawing him to her.

He came willingly, settling to the ground beside her. There was more than humor in his voice as he warned, “Careful. We have some unfinished business in a spot like this.”

“Several spots like this,” she agreed, thinking of the wild attraction that had sprung between them that first evening when she ran away from Keith, and later, when she had found him in the woods behind her house and they sat talking in the dark. They were fully as memorable as the afternoon they had been discovered.

“You, too?” he said on a low laugh as he reached to span her waist with his large hand. “What a waste.”

“Don't waste this time,” she whispered, and turned against him, fitting her body into his, wanting, needing, the touch of him along its entire length, needing to feel his strength against her.

He came to her, rolling her to her back, giving her what she needed. As she felt his hard maleness, his weight, desire spiraled up within her in hot coils. Refusing to think, avoiding all doubt, she buried her face in his shoulder, holding him with tight, desperate hands, wrapping her legs around his with taut muscles. The yearning for him to be everything she thought him, everything she needed, was a hollow emptiness at the center of her being that only he could fill.

Concern threaded his voice as he whispered, “Cammie, what is it?”

“Nothing, everything. Oh, Reid — just kiss me please, and don't stop. Don't ever stop.”

She felt his hesitation, knew he realized the suspicion she was trying to escape. Felt, too, the instant that his angry despair turned to passion. Then he lifted his weight from her to lie with his broad shoulders blocking the fading light, and also the view from the Fort.

His hands upon her were hard and sure. He knew her now, knew the caresses that drove her mad, the touch that turned her bones to jelly and left her mindless and pliant under him.

She was the same. She knew how to tease and torment him, how to drive him to the last, gasping edge of control.

He pushed his hand under the denim skirt she wore with a periwinkle cotton sweater, resting his hand on the soft mound he found there. Following its crease with firm strokes of his long fingers, he inserted a knee between her legs, opening them wider, extending his access. She gave way with consummate grace, gasping with the shock of pleasure as he slid a finger under the elastic of her panties to seek more perfect contact.

She dipped her head, finding the buried coin of his pap, nipping it, laving it with her tongue, suckling. At the same time, she wrenched the copper button of his jeans from its hole and slid the zipper down. Pushing under his briefs without ceremony, she grasped the heated firmness of him, tugging, rubbing, inciting.

He pressed a finger into her hot, moist softness. Convulsions of fierce pleasure fluttered her abdomen muscles, and she clenched around the finger, which probed and aroused. He ground the heel of his hand against her with slow, steady intent.