Cold Deception (23 page)

Dylan stared at the woman in front of him. The look of naked pain and loss on her face pierced the dark chip of ice in his heart. He wrapped his arms around her, just to hold her and keep her safe.

“I have to report everything you’ve told me to my Commander, Julia. You didn’t commit a crime you’ve been convicted of and the real murderer is still out there. You need to clear your name.”

She slumped against him. “No one will believe me, Dylan. You do because,” she pulled herself away from him. “…actually I don’t know why you do. Everyone will think I’m lying. And for what? To drag Blossom through it all again? Something happened to her in that room, something awful and abusive. I can’t put her through that.”

“You might not have a choice. And why do you believe you have the right to make that choice? It happened to Blossom. She has a right to know, no matter what happened. You can’t protect her forever.”

Julia looked at him doubtfully. “But she’s so unstable.”

“She’s unstable because she knows something happened to her but she doesn’t know what. It’s sending her crazy. Tell her everything. She’s an adult. Trust her. Better you do it now rather than later when it will all come out.”

Julia dragged her fingers through her hair and started pacing again, her eyes full of worry. “I guess you’re right. God, it will kill Eleanor. She’s doing so well too. Everything is working in her life.” She laughed bleakly. “Since I’ve got out everything’s fucked up. It’s like the whole house of cards was teetering on the edge, just waiting for me to turn up.”

He grasped her arms and turned her, making her look at him. “You can’t take on the whole responsibility for what happened. Someone killed Father Pat and it wasn’t you.”

The sorrow in her eyes made him want to hold her again and hide her away from everything that could hurt her. He let go of her but couldn’t resist holding her face in his hands to brush away the tears sliding down her face. Then he didn’t care about anything but his lips on hers and his arms around her, feeling her warm, strong body and her answering response to his need.

*

Julia slid her hands up his back, pressing herself against him, reveling in the feel of his hard, warm muscles. He was like a furnace, hot and driven.

“There’s no one to interrupt us here, Julia,” he said, breathless between kisses. “We have to decide. Is this what you want?”

“Yes,” she said. “No more talking. Just be with me.”

The doubt in his gray eyes disappeared, replaced with singled-minded desire. Desire just for her. She’d wanted him from almost the moment she met him. Now she would have him and just in this moment, forget everything else. At least, she’d try to forget.

He pulled her to his bedroom and she followed willingly, almost tripping over her feet with impatience, need, and she had to admit to herself, terror. Terror that she’d get it wrong, that she was really a gormless nineteen year old playing at being an adult. But all that was pushed out of her mind when he grabbed her, kissed her hard then fell with her onto the bed. She laughed as he rolled over her, pinning her to the bed and started to kiss her again, all the time pulling at her clothes as she did with his.

When they sorted out the layers, getting rid of everything that prevented skin on skin contact, Julia let herself go. She strained against Dylan, trying to get closer, running her hands up the hard, warm muscles of his back, returning his frantic kisses.

His hands on her breasts, kneading and pinching her nipples, made her make little desperate sounds at the back of her throat. Sounds that became whimpers of need when he took her breast in his mouth and pulled gently on her nipple with his teeth.

“Dylan, oh God,” she moaned, as he kissed and nibbled his way down her body. She arched her back and groaned as his mouth and tongue sucked her clit, driving her insane, bringing on a climax that ignited through her body, leaving her breathless and replete.

At the back of her mind a sensible voice told her to keep something back, to protect herself against the onslaught of need that overwhelmed her senses, but she couldn’t. Even at the moment where there was a break in their rhythm, when Dylan cursed while fumbling for protection, she had no doubt and no hesitation.

Through the haze of satisfaction she watched him lean back on his haunches as he rolled on the condom. He was broad and strong and she needed him in her now.

“God, you are so gorgeous,” she murmured.

He grinned and came down on her as she reached for him. He entered her and she realized she wanted him more than she’d wanted anything in her life. She wrapped herself around him and urged him on, urged him to thrust into her hard and to keep going, so she could feel herself become part of him, lose herself in pure, blinding sensation. When he came, she held onto him, not wanting that connection with him to end. He slumped onto her and his weight was welcome as he gathered her close to him. She pulled the quilt over them and burrowed closer wanting to shut out the whole world.

“Well,” he said. “No one interrupted us.”

“We could just stay here. Sunday afternoon in bed.”

“Sounds good.”

His hands slid up and down her back in lazy strokes as they kissed and murmured to each other. Soon, a burgeoning need grew in Julia as his hands became more insistent and his slow kisses banked up the heat between her legs. She pushed him onto his back and straddled him, grasping his cock in her hand. He smiled up at her as she reached for protection, fumbling with the slippery packet.

“You know, they ran safe sex classes in prison. The last time I did this was on a banana dildo,” she said. “I was pretty good at it.”

He roared with laughter, making her giggle as she finally extracted the condom from the shiny foil.

“I’m getting a weird picture of you doing that,” he said with a gasp as she deftly rolled the condom on.

“Thankfully that image hasn’t turned you off,” she said, as she eased herself down onto him.

“No,” he said, in a strangled voice, “not at all.”

She smiled, closed her eyes and threw back her head, letting herself ride him slowly, losing herself in pure sensation, while he held his hands at her waist.

“Look at me,” he said. “Touch yourself.”

She laughed, a low, throaty, knowing sound, she’d never heard herself make as she brought herself to the edge of her climax. When he sat forward to take her breast in his mouth, she cried out as intense, searing pleasure took her.

She held him close has he came, then let herself slump against him, again wanting the world with all its complications to disappear.

But that couldn’t happen. She heard a log fall in the wood burning stove. Dylan shifted off her, still holding her close. They lay face to face, entwined under the quilt, kissing lightly with drowsy comfort.

Soon, too soon, he stretched and threw off the quilt, then made his way out to the bathroom. She curled up in the bed aware of a pleasant ache between her legs. When he reappeared at the doorway, large, male, and naked, she almost drooled with delight. But the look on his face made her pause.

He climbed back into bed. No cuddles. Instead, he sat and leant against the headboard. Julia reluctantly joined him, a chill surrounding her and not just from the cool air.

He sighed and the sound cut into her.

“I should go,” she said, pushing the quilt away and climbing off the bed. “Ma and Dee are expecting me. They’ll wonder where I am.”

He grabbed her arm.

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?” She pulled away from him.

“Run away. What happened, happened. We have to deal with it.”

A thirty-year-old woman with ten years’ experience in the world of sex and relationships might have known what to do in this situation, but that wasn’t Julia. Instead she fell back on what she knew. Shut down.

“I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do,” she said in what she knew was a voice of ice. She’d had ten years of perfecting the tone, getting to a point where even the most seasoned prison officers became wary of her.

His eyes widened but he reached for her again. “No, you don’t. But you can’t avoid the fact we just had sex.”

She steeled herself not to react to his words when everything inside her wanted to shrivel into nothingness.

“Not only that, but I’m a cop, you’re on parole, and you told me something about the murder of the priest that has direct bearing on the commission of an offence by O’Reardon.”

He did a good line in icy too.

He let go of her and scrubbed his face with his hands. “For God’s sake, Jules, get back in bed. You’ll freeze out there.”

He lifted the quilt and she climbed in next to him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, enclosing her with his arms.

She snuggled against him, breathing in his warm, male scent. If she could stay in the circle of his arms and just block out everything, her life would be perfect.

“About what?”

“About everything. About what happened to you and Blossom, about the last ten years, about being stupid around you.”

“Stupid?”

He smiled grimly. “I’ve wanted you since I first met you. I haven’t been very clever about it. It’s not what I normally do.”

Her curiosity now piqued, she remembered how Sally had described him as mysterious. She tipped her head back to look into his face.

“What do you normally do?”

He met her gaze with a flat stare. “Go to Sydney and find someone to have quick, mindless sex with.” He dropped his gaze. “I don’t think that’s going to happen with you.”

Part of her filled with delight as any woman would when a man tells her she’s important to him, while another part filled with anxiety. She didn’t know how to do this.

“Why do you do that? I would have thought any number of women up here would be available.”

He shook his head. “I’m not good relationship material.”

She snorted with laughter. “Welcome to the club. Why not?”

He sipped his coffee again. “I was married once. It didn’t work out.”

She waited.

“She was a cop too. We got married young and led a life of hard work and hard partying. Then Melanie decided she wanted to start a family. I wasn’t opposed to the idea at all, but things changed when she couldn’t get pregnant. We started on the IVF merry-go-round. She became obsessed and I became more distant. And started drinking in earnest. We split up, I kept drinking, and she got more and more depressed. Six months after the split, she killed herself.”

“Dylan, I’m so sorry. I know everyone would’ve told you it wasn’t your fault, but you don’t believe that do you?”

He shook his head. “I did nothing to help her. Just drank myself into oblivion.”

“But you got sober.”

“That doesn’t change anything. I meant it when I said I’m not good relationship material.”

Stung, she made her own gaze go flat, and pulled away from him. “You’re making a pretty big assumption here. I’m just out of jail, my life is chaos and until now I hadn’t had sex in ten years. What makes you think I want a relationship with you?”

They glared at each other then burst out laughing.

“We do a good line in soap opera, don’t we?” Dylan said, then kissed her. He kissed her some more and it was some time, after she was again satiated and replete, that he mentioned The Talk.

“This time we need to be focused. I’ll make some more coffee and meet you in front of the fire.”

Julia smiled and made her way to the bathroom, scooping up her clothes as she went. By the time she emerged, the house was full of the smell of coffee and toast. She was ravenous. Dylan had everything set up on the coffee table and was munching on vegemite toast with a frown on his face.

“We’ll need a search warrant to get into his place and find that DVD. That’s if it really exists.”

“When will you do that?” Julia asked after gulping down some coffee.

“Not sure. You need to give a statement and we need to get some legal advice. It’s not so straightforward. Everything needs to be absolutely correct or else he’ll slither through any loophole. And I have to be in court this week in Sydney to give evidence in an armed robbery. Really bad timing. There’s no way I can get out of it. So maybe next week or the week after. It’s not like television. Wheels grind slow in real life.”

Julia munched on some toast and considered. “That’s actually good timing. Nessa’s staying with O’Reardon…”

“I saw her when I went to have a little talk with him. Some things don’t change,” he said with sadness in his voice.

“Would you believe she’s staying with him so she can find the DVD? I tried to convince her not to, but she says she’s clean and wants to punish him. She’s determined. If I can have another talk with her, I might be able to convince her to get out of there.”

“She’s clean? Are you sure?”

Julia nodded. “But I don’t know how long she’ll be able to continue like that. She told me he keeps leaving stuff around to use. I really want to get her out of there.”

“You’ve stood by her for a long time.”

“She’s worth it. She just doesn’t know that.”

Julia gasped as she realized what might be on the DVD. She clutched his arm. “If the DVD really exists, it might show everything that happened in that room,” she said. “Including who really did murder Father Pat.”

He nodded. “We have to find it. Come on. You need to give a statement so we can get this ball rolling.”

“And then what?” she asked, inwardly cursing herself for sounding so needy.

Dylan cupped the back of her head with his hand and drew her forward for a long, deep kiss, a kiss that told her everything she needed to know.

“And then we make it up as we go along,” he said. “We can’t do anything else.”

Julia crept into the house like a fifteen year old breaking curfew. She needed some time on her own. Time to think what to do next. Dylan was right: she had to tell her family the whole truth soon. Events were getting out of her control.

Dylan.

She made for the stairs, needing some time on her own to work out what was happening between them.

Too late.

“Is that you, Julia?” Eleanor called out from the back veranda. “Did you see Dylan? What did he say?”

Shit. She was supposed to line up a time for him to talk to Blossom about how she could never have killed the priest. Bit beside the point now.

She made her way out to the veranda. “Yeah, I saw him.”

“You were gone a long time,” Dee said, holding the weekend newspaper.

“I went for a walk after I talked to him to clear my head. Bloss can drop in and see him anytime. He’d be happy to talk to her.”

She leant against the doorway and contemplated her parents. They were rugged up against the cold, determined to laze away a Sunday with the papers, gazing out over the Jamison Valley. She smiled. They looked like Balkan peasants with woolly beanies, fingerless gloves and blankets on their laps.

“Determined to tough it out, are you?”

“Not for much longer. We try and stay out here until July, but it’s cold this year. Come on, old thing,” Eleanor said, patting Dee’s knee. “Now that you’re fifty, we better give you a break and go inside.”

Dee rolled her eyes. “Who’re you calling an old thing? You’ve got two more years to go, Ellie. Then we’ll see what’s what.”

They laughed at each other. Julia’s heart warmed as she watched them. Some people did really get a happy ending even after much pain. She sighed. She was about to cause them more.

“Where’s Bloss?”

“Gone to see her friend Emma. Which is good. They had a falling out after she started seeing Rez. I think she’s trying to get her life back.”

“Good. That’s good.”

“Are you okay? You seem a bit distracted,” Dee said, frowning.

“No, no, I’m fine. Just concerned about Bloss.” She couldn’t put it off.

“Look, I need to talk to you. Come inside.”

Eleanor stared at her with big eyes. “More revelations?”

“Yeah.”

The two older women shuffled inside with dread on their faces. They sat at the kitchen table with Julia opposite them.

“I need to tell you the truth. About Father Pat.”

She couldn’t look at them as she told them the whole story. Instead she focused on her hands, willing herself not to start tearing at her cuticles. When she finished she lifted her eyes. Eleanor stared at her, horrified, with tears running down her face.

By contrast Dee looked satisfied. “I knew it. I knew you could never have killed Father Pat. The whole thing didn’t make sense.” She slapped her hands down on the table, making Julia and Eleanor jump. “Right. We have work to do. Gotta contact a lawyer and get your conviction overturned.”

“Whoa! Hang on. It’s not that simple. O’Reardon says he has a DVD of the murder. Maybe it’ll show who really did the murder, but… maybe it’ll also show what happened to Blossom. Do you really want the whole world to see that?”

Eleanor stumbled to her feet and disappeared. The sound of retching could be heard from the bathroom. Dee leapt up and followed her.

Julia closed her eyes, willing herself not to cry. No good would come of that.

The two woman emerged from the bathroom, looking frail and worn out. She was responsible for their pain. They both sat at the table again.

“You say O’Reardon has the DVD,” Eleanor said in a trembling voice.

Julia nodded. “That’s what he said. He’s got something, because he knows I didn’t kill the priest.”

“Then we need to get it. We need to see it before Blossom does and then work out what to do.”

“Nessa says she’ll get it. I tried to convince her not to, that it wasn’t worth getting hurt by O’Reardon, but she wouldn’t listen to me.”

“Can you contact her? Find out if she’s had any luck?”

“I can, but there’s another way. If I tell Dylan everything I know about O’Reardon’s drug smuggling into jail, they’ll have enough for a search warrant. It’s possible they might find the DVD that way. I’m going to go down to the police station tomorrow and make a statement.”

“And then what?”

The three women jumped in their seats and all turned at the same time as Blossom stood in the doorway. Her eyes, full of fury, were stark against her white face.

“How long have you been standing there?” Julia asked, trying not to sound guilty and defensive even though that’s exactly how she felt.

“Long enough. Long enough to have you finally confirm that you lied to me. All this time you lied to me. I knew I was right.”

Julia pushed back her chair and stood to face her sister. “I never lied about you killing Father Pat, even when I thought I was. Nothing’s changed. Yes, you were there but you didn’t kill him. I know that for certain now. Neither of us did.” She grasped Blossom’s shoulders and peered into her face. “I don’t know what happened to you in that room, Bloss. If this DVD exists, it might show what did. You need to be prepared for that.”

Blossom stared back at Julia, her face wiped of all expression. There was waiting silence in the room as they all held their breath. She nodded once, then collapsed into a chair, her movements jerky.

“You said you are going to give a statement. What happens then?”

Julia explained about legal advice they had to get and about Dylan having to go to Sydney. “So it might be a week or so before they execute the search warrant. I want to see if I can get Nessa out of there. She can stay here Ma, can’t she?”

Eleanor nodded in a distracted way, her eyes on Blossom. “Are you okay, Bloss?” she asked, stretching out her arms to grasp her youngest daughter’s hands.

Bloss nodded and held Eleanor’s hands. “Just a bit shaky. It’s a big moment.” She pulled her hands away from Eleanor, scrubbed at her face, stretched in her chair and shook herself. “Okay. What next?” She returned the gaze of the others, a look of expectation on her face.

Julia shared quick glances with Eleanor and Dee. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Blossom smiled. “What? You all expect me to fall to pieces? I’ve had enough of that. What happened, happened. If Father Pat sexually assaulted me, I have no memory of that. None at all. I just remember the knife and the blood.” She frowned. “So someone, presumably the real murderer, set it up to look like I did kill Father Pat, then you stumbled in, made the same assumption and got me out of there. That means whoever did it was quite happy for an eight year old to be traumatized and blamed for a murder.”

Julia nodded, still wary of this calm and focussed Blossom.

“So we really need that DVD,” Blossom said. “I don’t care what happened to me, I just want to know who set me up like that,” she said, a ferocity in her voice that sent chills down Julia’s spine. She’d never heard her younger sister speak that way.

“I’m going to try and contact Nessa tomorrow,” Julia said. “We might get lucky. Even if she hasn’t found it, hopefully the search warrant will.”

Blossom nodded. “Good. It’s about time the truth came out,” she said coldly.

*

Blossom sat in her usual chair across from Douglas, her heart racing overtime, full of all she had to tell him.

“She finally told me the truth.”

Douglas’s eyebrows shot up. “Did she? What exactly did she say?”

“That she went up to Father Pat’s house to confront him about Sally and found him dead and me unconscious, covered in blood and with a knife in my hand. So she took me away and then took the blame.”

Douglas frowned. “Why did she do that?”

“She said she thought if she told the truth I’d get taken into care.” The tears came now and she couldn’t stop them. “Ma had busted big time and Julia thought if I was discovered, the authorities would remove me because they’d claim she wasn’t able to protect me. She still went to jail because of me.”

He frowned and stared out the window. Then his head snapped back to pin her with a fierce gaze.

“Do you believe her?”

“Yes of course!”

“Are you absolutely certain? It’s an amazing story. What will she do now? Go to the police?”

“She’s already spoken to Dylan. Apparently O’Reardon has a DVD that might show the whole murder. We just need to get it.”

“A DVD? Where is it?”

“At O’Reardon’s place I suppose.”

He nodded. “I see. Well, it’s great that she’s told you the truth. Now you can concentrate on getting well because your memories were in fact true. That must be quite a relief.”

Blossom nodded. “Yeah. The memory of holding the knife is so strong. I can feel it in my hand.”

“Let’s go through what you do remember. I know you said Father Pat took you home from Bundanoon. You think he drugged you and took you back to his house."

“I was cold. So cold. There was a great booming voice and Father Pat laughed. Then I was flying. Flying with a knife in my hand. Someone was crying. Then I woke up in bed at home with my throat on fire and my head full of cotton wool.”

“You were sick.”

“Yeah. I had the flu. Everything about that time is so hazy. Poor Ma and Dee had to cope not only with Julia being arrested but with me being really sick.”

“I know this is hard, but do you remember the priest being killed? By anyone?”

She shook her head. “Not at all. I don’t remember Julia being there at all. But someone was.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was someone other than Father Pat in the room, but it didn’t seem like Julia. It was like a shadow.” She paused and tried to remember, but it was just out of reach. “I just can’t see who it was. I always assumed it was Julia. That’s what memory does, doesn’t it Douglas? Protects us from what we don’t want to see.”

He smiled sadly. “Sometimes. It’s like those earrings you have on. Bright and shiny, catching the light and our attention but not real.”

She laughed. “These are definitely not real. They’re Julia’s. Like a typical little sister, I’ve swiped her fake emerald earrings without her permission.”

“Would she mind?”

Blossom shook her head. “Not Julia. She might grumble but that’s about it.”

“So, we’ve achieved a lot today. You seem much happier.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think I am. I know I shouldn’t be because the dead body of my ex-boyfriend has just been found in the back yard, but I know no one in our house had anything to do with it so that’s okay.”

“We need to talk about that. Are you really alright about his death?”

She stared out the window. “I didn’t want him dead if that’s what you mean and I’m sorry he is. There were only a few good times, at the beginning of our relationship when he was straight. He could be very funny. I think that’s what attracted me to him in the first place. But it hadn’t been good for a long time.” She scrubbed her face with her hands. “He had a good supply of drugs and I wanted them. In the end, that’s all there was.”

“Who do the police think killed him?”

She shrugged. “There’d be a long list I imagine. He was involved in some pretty dodgy stuff.”

He hesitated. “They haven’t mentioned Julia?”

She reared back as if slapped. “Julia had nothing to do with it. She wasn’t even there. Why would they think that?”

Douglas drew in a deep breath and let it out. “I have some connections in the police force because of the work I do with the employee assistance scheme. There is a line of investigation that Julia got one of her jail mates to kill Rez.”

Blossom exploded. “That’s absurd! Julia wouldn’t do that!”

Douglas held up his hands as if to placate her. “Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just telling you what the gossip is. I think it’s ridiculous too. But because the murder of Father Pat was a vigilante action, they are wondering if she’s done it again.”

Cold fear settled in Blossom’s gut. It wasn’t possible. “But she didn’t kill Father Pat.”

She wound her scarf around her neck with shaky hands. “I have to go and find her. This can’t be right.”

She made for the door then turned. “Thanks for telling me. I appreciate it.”

Douglas nodded. “Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.”