Paradise County (33 page)

No wonder she had gone out like a light. He only wished he could.

He took a last gulp of milk, set the glass down on the counter—and heard the unmistakable sound of a key being inserted into his back door.

It was a soft, stealthy sound. The click of the lock yielding was a little louder, but not much. Then the door opened.

Joe leaned against the counter, crossed his arms over his chest, and waited.

Unlike Alex, he wasn’t worried about a burglar. There just wasn’t that kind of crime in Paradise County. He had a pretty good idea of exactly who was going to be sneaking into his kitchen in the middle of the night.

The kitchen door closed as carefully as it had opened. The lock clicked. Joe reached out a long arm and flipped a switch.

Eli stood blinking at him in the sudden burst of bright light like a deer caught in the headlights.

“Well, hello, son,” Joe said amiably, noting at a glance that Eli was fully dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a zipped-up army jacket. This was not a kid who had just stepped out on the back porch for a breath of air. The last time Joe had seen him, about two hours previously, he’d been wearing jockeys and a T-shirt as he walked from the bathroom to his bedroom.

“Hey, Dad.” If the guilty half-smile that accompanied that was any indication, Eli had definitely been up to no good.

“Mind telling me where you’ve been?”

Eli shrugged, and started unzipping his coat. “Out.”

“You know, I kind of guessed that. Out where?”

Eli’s eyes met his. “Just out.”

For Eli, that was outright defiance. Joe straightened away from the counter and walked toward the boy. His son watched him warily. The unzipped coat hung from surprisingly broad shoulders, and Joe realized with a pang that in a few more years the kid would be as big as he was.

When he got close enough, Joe inhaled. Nothing too obvious, but a good, long drawing-in of breath.

Eli’s eyes narrowed at him. “I haven’t been drinking, if that’s what you’re smelling me for,” he said. “And I haven’t been doing drugs, either.”

“Fair enough,” Joe said, relaxing a little. Eli stood only a couple of feet away from him, glowering at him now, a little sullen. Joe almost smiled at him before he could stop himself. There were only three things that could draw a sixteen-year-old boy from his bed in the middle of the night. The first two had just been ruled out.

And he would have heard a car coming back in the driveway, so the identity of Eli’s partner in crime was pretty much a given, too.

“Did you go in or did she come out?” he asked pleasantly.

Eli’s eyes widened on his face. “Who?”

“Come off it, kid,” Joe said, sitting on the corner of the kitchen table and giving Eli a derisive look. “You know very well who. Neely Haywood.”

At the expression on Eli’s face Joe almost smiled again. Astonishment was written there plain as anything. If he’d said
how’d you know
out loud he couldn’t have made it any clearer.

“She came out.” The admission was grudging. At Joe’s assessing look, Eli blushed all the way up to his hairline and started taking off his coat to give him an excuse to look somewhere else.

“All we did was talk,” Eli said defensively.

Joe almost said
yeah, right
but didn’t.

“She says you’re sleeping with her sister.”

Talk about a good offense being the best defense. Joe had to fight to keep his face impassive. His sex life was not something he meant to discuss with his son.

“You’ve got a ten-o’clock curfew on school nights.” The offense thing worked both ways.

Eli looked pained. A curfew violation was pretty generally cause for a grounding. “C’mon, Dad. I just went up the hill.”

Joe looked at him for a minute. “All right. Go to bed. Don’t go creeping out of the house in the middle of the night again, understand? Next time I catch you at it, I
will
ground you.”

“Yeah, okay.” Eli looked relieved. Hanging his coat up on the coatrack, he headed for the kitchen door. Then he looked over his shoulder at Joe, who was putting the milk away, and grinned.

“Hey, Dad, about Miss Haywood: She’s totally hot. Way to go,” he said cheekily, and disappeared into the hall before Joe could reply.

Joe had unkind thoughts about Neely all the way back upstairs. Entering his bedroom, he glanced out the window at Whistledown: still ablaze. Had the spoiled little witch remembered to turn the security system
back on? he wondered. There was no way to check. Telling Alex that her menace of a sister was creeping around outside at night was probably a waste of time, because it was clear that Alex had no control over her whatsoever, but he would tell her anyway. As for Eli, he’d had a talk with him about safe sex years ago. Other than that, and the curfew violation, he wasn’t too concerned. The boy was almost seventeen, after all.

Joe took off his jeans, dropped into bed, and cocked an ear at the monitor. Alex was up, moving around. He could hear the soft footfalls as she crossed the floor, then the slight creak of an opening door. Must be going to the bathroom, he thought as he turned onto his stomach and kicked the bottom of his covers free of the mattress in an effort to get comfortable. A moment later he heard her sigh, and he realized that she was back in bed.

The sound of her breathing filled the room.

He almost said something to her, but then realized that starting a conversation with her now was probably not the smartest move he could make. If she said something on the order of
come up and see me sometime
he was liable to take her up on it.

Besides, she sounded like she was already asleep again. The tenor of her breathing had totally changed.

It was soft and even, just like it had been when he’d been listening to her before.

And he was responding in exactly the same way.

Here we go again, Joe thought. He rolled onto his back, threw his pillow on the floor, linked his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling in frustration. If he was as pragmatic as he liked to imagine, he would just reach over and turn the damned unit off. End of problem. Hel
-lo
Mr. Sandman. But he couldn’t do that either. Because she might wake up and be scared. Because she might call out his name. Because she was trusting him to be there for her. And he was going to come through.

Coming through was, he thought glumly, one of his specialties. He’d been coming through for people all his life.

Much good had it ever done him.

Twenty-nine

T
he night belonged to the predator. In the natural order of things, it always had, and it always would. Owls hunted over moonlit fields, soaring silently on great outstretched wings, dropping without warning to snatch up unwary mice as they scampered about their business. Coyotes roamed the dark wooded bottomland down by the creek, trotting along until they came upon a calf or a goat or a young deer unprotected, and then accelerating with fierce howls of pleasure to bring down the hapless victim.

Like God, predators giveth, and predators taketh away, he mused. They decided which creatures lived and which creatures died. They chose among potential victims, picking the ones that would provide the sustenance they needed while still keeping in mind their own vulnerabilities. It would never do for a predator to choose as prey one who might endanger him.

Taking Alexandra Haywood would endanger him. The predator reminded himself of that quite forcefully as he stood in her bedroom, his gaze sliding over her sleeping form. She was beautiful, so blond and fresh, and tonight she’d left the lights on, so he had a wonderful view of her from her silvery hair to the teeny, curling vulnerability of her smallest toes.

He’d pulled the covers down, gently, so gently, to get a better look.

She lay on her stomach, her arms beneath her pillow, her face turned toward the nightstand. Her hair trailed away from her like a platinum banner, bright against the soft blue sheet. Her body was veiled by a nightgown, a pretty floral on a white background, of some shiny soft material that looked like silk. It was rucked up around her thighs. One long, slender leg was bent at the knee, curving across the mattress. The other was quite straight.

Her ass was small but shapely, and would be, he thought, firm to the touch.

But he had not come here tonight to touch. He was, in effect, a window-shopper. Look but don’t buy. Not tonight.

He knew what was concealed from him, and knowing made just looking more exciting and harder at the same time. Watching her last night as she had gotten naked for him had given him a gnawing hunger for her. The sister had been cute, but this one was succulent. He had a gnawing hunger to taste her flesh.

But he couldn’t, he reminded himself. No, no. Bad boy.

If he took her tonight, they would be looking for her tomorrow. The search would be massive, perhaps even massive enough to uncover his lair.

But he wanted to take her. He could hardly resist. Looking was all well and good, but it was not, after all, enough. Not when the taking would be so easy. All he had to do was touch her with his taser, and carry her away.

She would be his.

If he did it tonight, he could have the double pleasure of taking her, and letting Cassandra go—up in flames.

He smiled at his little joke. When he was ready to rid himself of Cassandra—and it would be soon now, soon—that’s what he would tell her.

“Come out of your cage, darling. I’m going to let you go.”

He’d add the “up in flames” part when she was shackled to the wall and he was dribbling the kerosene over her.

But Cassandra was dull as dishwater nowadays, and he doubted she would even get the joke.

It would be interesting to see how Alexandra—ah, he was already calling her Alexandra, see how fond he was becoming of her?—would react to her predecessor’s turning into French toast before her eyes.

She sighed in her sleep, and her lips parted. Her eyelids moved, as if she were dreaming. Did she know he was there, on some unconscious level? he wondered.

He hoped that she did.

His hand hovered over her cheek. He remembered how soft her skin had been, before. He wanted to feel it again.

If he took her away with him, he could feel every inch of her skin.

He could run his finger over her cheek. Right now. It would be the test. The last time he had touched her, she had awoken. This time, if she awoke, he would consider it a sign that he should take her.

That he was her destiny.

Or that she was his.

The thought gave him pause, and he frowned and drew his hand, which hovered over her face, index finger extended, back.

He was not so greedy, his passions were not so uncontrolled, that he would satisfy them at risk to himself.

Was he?

The temptation was almost irresistible, but in the end he made himself cover her up again and turn away.

His strength of will was stronger than his desire, he congratulated himself.

At least, for tonight.

Thirty

H
annibal was crouched on the end of Alex’s bed when she opened her eyes. Just crouched there staring at her with the wide, unblinking gaze of an owl. He looked like he had been sitting that way for hours, or centuries.

“Shoo!” she said, shaking the covers to dislodge him. He didn’t budge, but he did blink, and his tail twitched.

She was too exhausted to fight with him. It occurred to her that she was able to see him so well because her bed was in a pool of light. She’d left the lamp on, of course, and now the light from it seemed so bright that it was hurting her eyes. No wonder she’d awakened in the middle of the night. She reached for the lamp, meaning to turn it off so that she could get back to sleep… .

The alarm clock on the bedside table went off. Startled, Alex grabbed for it, almost knocking over the lamp in her haste. Shutting the alarm off, she groaned. It was 6:45
A.M.
, and she felt like she had been asleep for about two hours. Her head ached, and her mouth felt like she’d been chewing on cotton balls. She wanted to do nothing more than curl back up in bed and pull the covers over her head.