The Complete Private Collection: Private; Invitation Only; Untouchable; Confessions; Inner Circle; Legacy; Ambition; Revelation; Last Christmas; Paradise ... The Book of Spells; Ominous; Vengeance (238 page)

Little green manchineel apples.

“Reed?” she said, glancing at the sweatshirt in my hands. “What are you—oh, are you cold?”

Why? Why was she trying to kill me?

She placed the tray on a small table near the door and as she did, her huge necklace shifted. My vision zoned in on it like heat-seeking radar. A gold necklace. A big, ornate gold necklace with thousands of tiny, sharp, gold leaves.

A bubble of disgusted realization welled up in my throat. Upton’s first. Mrs. Ryan was Upton’s first. No wonder he had called her Calista. They had been . . . intimate.

I was going to vomit. I had nothing in my system to vomit, but I was going to vomit just the same.

“Are you all right?” Mrs. Ryan asked. “The bath should be ready. Or do you want to eat first?”

She stopped short of lifting a poison apple toward me, but she might as well have. I took a step back, still clutching her sweatshirt in my hands.

“It was you,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. “You hired those men to kill me.”

A brief shadow of fear crossed over her face, which she quickly replaced with a look of total confusion. But it was too late. I had seen
it. I had seen the recognition and I knew she was the one. And I also realized I should have kept my mouth shut—probably would have if I hadn’t been so exhausted from my six days alone on a deserted island. Should have asked for a phone so I could call my parents and instead called the police. Because now I was alone with the person who had been desperately trying to kill me for days. Alone and weak.

But there was nothing I could do about that now.

“It’s been you all along!” I said, still backing away. There was nowhere for me to go, except maybe the bathroom, but she could cut me off there by going back out into the hall and entering from the other door. I was trapped. Trapped with the woman who’d been trying to kill me for two weeks. The woman Upton had promised would take care of me.

Upton Giles was turning out to be a seriously bad judge of character.

“Reed, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mrs. Ryan said, reaching up to toy with her necklace.

“You did it for him. Because you were jealous of Upton and me,” I spat. “That is just sick, do you know that? He’s friends with your
kids
. You’re married!”

A flash of anger lit her eyes and she snapped. “Do not talk about what you could never understand!”

“You did it, didn’t you?” I said, stalling for time now. Noelle and the rest of my friends would be here any second. Any second now. All I had to do was stay alive until they arrived. “You spooked my horse
that day in the woods. And you rigged that Jet Ski to go haywire on me. And when neither of those little ploys worked, you shoved me off your boat and took my necklace so you could set up Marquis to take the fall. God, you must have been so frustrated when they found me alive,” I said. “That must have just
killed
you.”

Mrs. Ryan’s face had taken on almost masklike calm, but her eyes quaked in their sockets. “You’re going to have to stop saying things like that,” she said, advancing on me. “We have a large staff in this house. Someone might hear you. Someone might actually repeat your delusional ramblings.”

I glanced around at the dressing table for something I could use as a weapon. All I needed was something heavy. If I could take down Gravois, I could take down Mrs. Ryan. But there was nothing. Nothing but tiny gleaming bottles and tubes. Then something moved. Out in the hallway, I saw a shadow.

Please let it be Noelle or Upton and not Daniel or Paige or one of the other St. Barths nutbags.

“I’m not delusional,” I said, the backs of my legs pressing into the dressing table. “And you’re going to jail.”

“Oh, really?” she said with a smirk. “What makes you think anyone’s going to believe you? What makes you think I’m going to let you have a chance to make them?”

My heart stopped, but I managed to see the flaw in her plan. “If you hurt me, they’re going to know it was you. Upton just left us alone together. You’ll be the one and only suspect this time.”

“Not if I left you alone in the tub for
just a few minutes
and when I
came back you had drowned,” she said through her teeth, her eyes wide with innocent wonder. “Who knows what kind of ailments six days of exposure on an island can cause? Heart attack, stroke, simple fainting . . . any one of these things could cause you to go under. So tragic, drowning in a marble tub after surviving all those days on the island.”

Before I could even process the insanity of all this, she lunged at me and grabbed my hair in her hand. I shouted out in pain as she dragged me forward, toward the bathroom and the full tub. I struggled against her, but she was freakishly strong and I was pathetically weak. I screamed at the top of my lungs and before the sound even died away, Sawyer came bounding through the door with some kind of long object in his hand. He slammed the butt of it down on the back of Mrs. Ryan’s skull. Her eyes popped open so wide I thought I might have to catch them in my palms, but then they closed and she crumpled forward onto the floor.

Sawyer and I stood there for a moment, both of us heaving for breath. Then he dropped his weapon at his feet—I could see now that it was some kind of modern table sculpture—and reached out a hand to me. He was wearing a black tuxedo, his long black tie loosened and askew.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

I tripped over Mrs. Ryan’s ankle as I flung myself at him. Sawyer backed up a couple of steps from the force of my embrace, but I clung to him like there was no tomorrow.

“I can’t take this anymore,” I rambled. “I can’t. I can’t take it.”

“It’s okay. It’s okay,” Sawyer said, grasping the back of my T-shirt to hold me up.

“She did it. She tried to kill me,” I said, glancing over my shoulder at Mrs. Ryan. “She set the whole thing up.”

“I know. I heard everything,” Sawyer said, pulling back so he could look me in the eye. “It’s going to be all right.” He shrugged out of his tuxedo jacket and slung it over my shoulders. The warmth was like nirvana.

I sniffled and nodded, still weak as could be. “What’re you doing here?”

“Everyone’s here,” he said. “I was just the first one inside. Come on. Let’s go downstairs and we’ll call the police.”

My eyes widened in terror.

“No. Not the police,” he said quickly. “We’ll call my dad. He’ll know what to do.”

“Okay,” I said, clinging to him as we walked out to the hall. “And can we get something to eat? Something that’s not poison?” I said, glancing at the tray on the table by the door.

Sawyer appeared confused, but nodded. “Absolutely. I think something that’s not poison would definitely be a good idea.”

There was a lot of commotion. I could hear it from inside the airy kitchen with its bright aqua accents and gleaming silver appliances. I was eating a hunk of crusty bread with Sawyer and Noelle at my sides. Everyone else was out in the great hall at the front of the house, watching as Mrs. Ryan was hauled away in handcuffs. Mr. Lange had called the police after all. There was some shouting. A few slamming car doors. But I heard it all from inside a vacuum. It was over. It was finally over.

And I was finally eating.

“I don’t believe this. This is actually beyond the scope of the believable,” Noelle said.

She had brought me a black Calvin Klein sweat suit and didn’t even care that I hadn’t taken a bath before I put it on. Thanks to that and a pair of comfy white socks, plus the food and water, I had finally stopped shivering.

“Believe it, baby,” I said, then snorted a laugh, my head jerking back slightly.

Noelle leaned toward me. Her black satin gown swished whenever she moved, and her heavy evening eye makeup seemed ridiculous to me in my haggard state. “You’re delirious, aren’t you? Doesn’t she seem delirious?” she asked Sawyer.

“She was alone on an island for six days with nothing to eat and no one to talk to,” Sawyer pointed out matter-of-factly.

“Point taken,” Noelle said.

I wasn’t delirious. I was just done. I couldn’t wrap my brain around
another
near-death experience. Couldn’t really feel it. Once I had stopped crying all over Sawyer and he’d found me something to eat, all the emotions had just sort of . . . stopped. Now all I could feel was the weakness, the exhaustion, the hunger, and the pain. Maybe once I solved all those issues, the emotions would crash in on me again, but for now, there was nothing.

“Is there more of this bread?” I asked, lifting the crusty bit I had left.

Noelle got up to cut me some more and brought back a cluster of grapes and a few slices of cheese with it. Someone had decided that bland was the way to go, but I would have pretty much killed for a chili cheeseburger. Or a pepperoni pizza. Or a huge pile of jelly donuts.

“So all this time it was Mrs. Ryan?” Noelle said as she placed the food in front of me on the glass-topped table and sat down again. “Why? Was she doing it for Paige?”

Sawyer and I looked at one another. If Noelle thought Mrs. Ryan’s guilt was unbelievable, she was never going to be able to swallow her motive. I opened my mouth to respond, but a loud shout stopped me short.

“What the hell is going on here? Where’s my father? You can’t just drag her away like this! No! Get the hell off of me!”

It was Daniel Ryan. In one of his rages, it seemed. I heard scuffling footsteps. A crash. The clack of high heels. Suddenly Daniel and Paige came barreling into the kitchen, followed by Dash and Kiran. Daniel’s otherwise handsome face was red with rage, his tuxedo tie still knotted tightly around his neck. Paige’s auburn hair had come loose from its updo. The tail of her light green gown swished behind her as they stormed into the room.

“What kind of lies are you telling now?” Daniel shouted, getting right up in my face.

I instinctively skittered backward on my chair and ended up half in Noelle’s lap, half suspended over the floor. He looked a lot like his mother did when she was getting all psychotic.

“First Poppy and now my mother? Who the hell do you think you are?”

“Your
mother
tried to kill Reed!” Sawyer shouted, getting up and shoving Daniel away from me with both hands.

Everyone fell silent. It was the first time I had ever heard Sawyer raise his voice. The first time he’d gotten directly involved in a conversation of his own volition, let alone a fight. We were all stunned. But it was Paige who recovered first.

“You’re lying,” she said, her voice quaking. “Why would my mother want to kill anyone, let alone
her
?” She gave me a look like I wasn’t even worthy of her attention, let alone anyone’s ire.

Just then a female police officer stepped into the room, a blue windbreaker over the standard uniform of polo shirt and shorts. Her short black hair was pulled back in a tiny, tight ponytail and she was looking at a small pad as she entered. After a moment she flipped the pad shut and glanced around at us.

“Paige and Daniel Ryan?” she asked.

“Yes,” Daniel said, stepping forward with his sister.

“You’re going to want to come down to the station to meet up with your father,” the woman said. “Your mother has just confessed to attempted murder.”

“What?” Daniel shrieked.

Paige clutched her purse in front of her with both hands. “I don’t understand. She has no motive. She wouldn’t hurt a fly. She—”

The woman sighed and flipped open her pad again to read. “Apparently she had some sort of sexual relationship with this girl’s boyfriend . . . one Upton Giles?”

“Omigod.” Paige turned around, and without so much as a breath, puked into the stainless steel sink. My stomach heaved. It was barely ready for food, let alone seeing someone else’s come back up. I turned away and stared out the window toward the ocean.

“What?” Daniel blurted again. “No. That’s not possible.”

“That’s what your mother says.” The woman was behind me, but I
saw her shrug, thanks to her reflection in the window. She looked at Paige and wrinkled her nose in disgust. “She didn’t even need to be asked twice. It was almost like she was proud of it.”

Kiran snorted a laugh and earned an admonishing look from the rest of us. “Sorry, it’s just . . . I’ve done a few things in my life, but I’ve never shared a guy with my mom,” she said, glancing at Paige’s still heaving back.

Paige stood up straight, hand over her mouth, and ran out of the room in tears.

“She confessed?” Daniel said, staring at the officer. “To all of it?”

“Hiring the kidnappers, spooking the horse, rigging the Jet Ski,” the woman said. “She does, however, maintain that this Marquis person is guilty of the incident at sea, but it seems like an open-and-shut case to me.”

No one said a word. We all stared at the floor. Was Marquis really guilty, or had Mrs. Ryan hung him out to dry for some reason? I had no idea, and not enough energy to think about it for very long.

“This can’t be happening,” Daniel said.

As much as I disliked Daniel, I actually felt bad for him at that moment. It couldn’t be easy to find out your mother was an attempted murderer. Not to mention a pedophile who’d had sex with one of your friends and was now obsessed with him.

“Are you coming along?” the woman asked him.

“I’ll go get my sister,” he said. Without another word, he ducked his head and walked out.

“Is there anything we can do for you, miss?” the woman asked me.

My brain was still fuzzy. I wanted to tell her she could put Marshall and Gravois in front of a firing squad, but somehow that didn’t seem like the right thing to say.

“Where’s Upton?” I asked.

“Sorry. I don’t know,” the officer replied.

“We’ll take care of her,” Noelle said. She moved as if to touch my back, but then thought better of it and placed her hand on the back of my chair instead. “She’ll be fine.”

The officer left and for a long moment there was no sound inside the kitchen aside from that of my own chewing.

“Upton’s probably still downtown,” Noelle said. “I’m sure he’ll be back soon.”

“So someone really was trying to kill you all this time,” Kiran said finally. She tucked the skirt of her slim red gown beneath her as she lowered herself onto a chair in one elegant motion.