Scarlet Nights (24 page)

Hours later, Mike closed the files and tucked them under the mattress. No matter how many times he read about what Mitzi had done, it still shocked him. That such crimes could go undetected and unpunished for so very long—generations—made him sick.

It was six
A.M
. when he turned off the light and for all that he’d found out, he still had no idea why the Vandlos were after Sara.

17

O
N SUNDAY MORNING
, Sara told Mike through his closed bedroom door that he
had
to get out of bed and get dressed to go to church.

“Go away,” he said, sounding like he had a pillow over his head.

“I’m not leaving without you. You get up every morning before daylight to go to the gym. It’s after nine
A.M
. now, so you can get out of bed to go to
church
.” She waited but heard nothing. Quietly, she turned the knob and went into the room. It was so dark that Sara guessed Tess had had a thick interlining put in the curtains. In anticipation of her brother visiting? Sara wondered.

Tiptoeing, she went to the window, threw back the curtains, and sunlight flooded the room. She turned at Mike’s groan. All she could see of him was one bare arm holding the pillow over his head.

“Get up, Mr. Sleepy. It’s time to go.”

“Edilean …”

She couldn’t understand what he’d said, so she lifted the corner
of the pillow, but Mike pulled it back down. “Did you say a naughty word on the Lord’s Day?”

Mike turned his head away and didn’t release the pillow.

“Michael Newland!” Sara said, her hands at her waist. “You
must
get out of bed. I’m not facing church alone. Everyone will drive me insane with questions about you. You can—Oh!” she squealed as Mike’s hand shot out and pulled her off balance. She fell forward, her hands out. When they touched the bed, Mike swiped his hand across her wrists so she landed facedown on the bed, her feet still on the floor.

“Good. Quiet,” he said, sounding more like Tarzan than ever.

Sara pulled herself upright. “Brute strength will get you nowhere. I said get up and I mean it!” She grabbed the quilt and threw it back. Mike didn’t move so much as a muscle—which was unusual, since it seemed that he slept in the nude.

For a long moment Sara stood there looking at him, her eyes wide.
“Then I take it he has his clothes on,”
Tess had said that first night, and now she knew what his sister meant.

Mike’s body was magnificent. He could have modeled for a Grecian statue of an athlete. His wide shoulders tapered down to a narrow waist, and even lying absolutely still as he was, she could see the deep muscles on his back. There were mounds and valleys that she very much wanted to touch.

Below his waist, his round, firm buttocks were perfectly shaped above legs that curved down to the back of his knees.

“Cold,” he murmured.

“Wh … what?” Sara asked but the word came out in a croak. “What?”

“I’m cold. If you’re through examining me, doc, put the cover back.”

Sara swallowed and took a breath. Heaven help her but she
wanted to skip church, forget about her promise of marriage, and climb into bed with this Adonis.

Instead, she got herself under control. “Inspect you, ha! I’ve seen the Frazier boys stark naked, and you’re not even a close second.” As she went to his closet to pull out his only suit, she didn’t add that the boys had been in preschool and she was little more than a baby. “If you can stop showing off, you have thirty minutes to shave and dress.”

When she heard movement behind her, she didn’t look back because she knew Mike had turned over. She’d resisted him once this morning but she didn’t think she could do it a second time. Besides, she didn’t know if he’d pulled the cover over the lower front of him.

“Thirty minutes,” she repeated as she left the room, shutting the door behind her.

A minute later, she was running out the back door to go to her own apartment. She was dressed for church, but once she was inside, she began to remove her clothing and toss it on the floor. She was happy to see that Luke had put in a new toilet, but that wasn’t her objective. She quickly got into the shower and turned the cold water on full blast. If she’d had time, she would have filled the tub with ice and jumped in.

She ran the shower as long as her ecologically minded conscience could stand, then turned it off. She was covered in goose bumps, but they didn’t remove the images in her mind. Mike naked, facedown on the bed. His muscular arms, legs … his
back
! The valleys of muscles in his back were deep enough to plant seeds in.

Sara stood there, dripping, and put her hands over her face. She did
not
want to be one of Mike’s women who he took to bed in order to win a case. She didn’t want—

“The hell I don’t!” she muttered as she wrapped a towel around her bare body.

She looked in the mirror at her red cheeks, and her lips were nearly blue from the cold shower. She’d been to bed with only two men in her life. All through school she’d saved herself for love, and ten minutes after she met Brian, she knew they were going to get married. She’d had no idea of his aristocratic origins or the money and property he was to inherit, she just knew that he was perfect for her.

But he had left her, and Greg had taken his place. Greg was as different as it was possible to be from Brian. Brian was gentle and sweet and loved to sit back and let Sara run their lives. His interest was in archaeology, so Sara made it possible for him to study and write. She took care of his food and clothes and their social life. The first time Sara met his parents, she saw that they were just like her and Brian. His mother ran everything, while Brian’s father piddled on a book he hadn’t completed in twenty-three years.

To Sara, she and Brian had been perfectly suited, but when she’d received the letter from him saying sorry, I’m marrying someone else, it was as though her entire foundation was destroyed. In one typed letter, the future she’d been so sure of had disappeared. For weeks, she couldn’t see clearly. If it hadn’t been for her mother forcing her to work at the grocery, Sara would have stayed in bed and cried.

She’d started getting her life back together and was doing a great job of pretending that she’d never been in love and that her heart hadn’t been broken, when Joce arrived in town. Soon afterward Sara’d been introduced to Greg. That he was wildly different from Brian pleased her. Maybe if she followed a man rather than led, she’d do better. Sometimes, she was glad that the townspeople of Edilean disliked Greg. It repaid them for all the looks of pity they’d given her after Brian had so coldly left her. “She gave up everything,” she’d heard two women in the drugstore say. “She even gave up her career for that young man and he dropped her flat.”

Sara pulled a garment from her closet and realized how good it felt to be in her own home. She took out a freshly ironed dress of dotted Swiss—her mother’d said, “Sara, you’re the only female on earth who still wears that fabric”—and put it on.

After a couple of deep breaths to regain her courage, she went outside. Mike, wearing a suit and tie—and marvel of all, shaved clean—was sitting at the iron table, reading the Sunday newspaper and drinking coffee.

“Where have you been?” he asked without looking up. “Church is probably over by now.”

“They don’t start until I get there. It’s in the bylaws.”

Chuckling, Mike folded the paper, put it on the table, and looked at her. “So why did you change clothes?”

“You had a pillow over your head. How did you see what I was wearing?”

“I saw everything.” The dimple in his cheek showed.

Sara refused to let him know how the sight of him naked had affected her; she stared right back at him. “My car or yours?”

Mike snorted at the question, and they walked together to his car where he opened the door for her. “I like that thing you have on.”

She slid onto a cream-colored leather seat. “I like your clothes too.”

“Just so I have on something, right?”

“Either way, it makes no difference to me.” She looked out the window to conceal her red face. Were lies told on a Sunday worse than other fibs?

When they got to Edilean Baptist Church, they were overwhelmed by people. The few in town who hadn’t met Mike were clamoring to talk to him. When Sara was nearly pulled away, Mike reached out and took her hand, and she heard about five women draw in their breaths. In a short time Sara was to be married in
this very church, but not to the man whose fingers were entwined with hers.

Sara knew she should let go, but she didn’t. Mike’s skin was warm and it made her feel safe. And, besides, his hand was attached to
that
body. Again, the images of him nude on the bed, the sunlight on his skin, flooded her mind.

As though he could read her thoughts, Mike looked away from her uncle James for a moment and their eyes held. Sara felt such a rush of lust run through her that she made a silent prayer for forgiveness. She should not be thinking such thoughts while in church.

She and Mike sat next to each other, and she was pleased to see that he knew all the words to the songs. As the sermon started, she looked at him in question.

“Never missed a service when I was a kid,” he whispered. “Gramps saw to that.”

Smiling, she turned her attention to the pastor.

18

A
FTER A LAZY
afternoon with Sara, it seemed like a perfect ending to the day when Mike’s cell rang at four and he saw that it was Tess. He went outside to the big tree to take the call, hoping she’d found out something about Brian Tolworthy.

“Hey, little sis,” Mike said. “Told the old man about the baby yet?”

“No, she hasn’t.” It was Ramsey, and his voice sounded as though something horrible had happened.

Instantly, Mike was so full of fear that his knees gave way under him and he collapsed onto the little iron chair. “How bad is it? Is she still alive?”

“Tess is fine. She’s under sedation, but she’s all right.”

“The baby?”

“It’s doing well. She hasn’t told me about it yet, but I’ve spent too much time near my ever-pregnant sister not to know why Tess has been so tired. That isn’t the problem. It’s Sara.”

“But she’s here with me. And how would you know if—?”

“I wouldn’t,” Rams said in dismissal. “Tess remembered that she had Brian’s number in her phone, so she called him at home in England.”

“Yeah? So how’s the bastard doing?”

“He’s dead—but his parents are alive and well.”

Mike felt his fear for the safety of the two women in his life leave him and he became professional again. “Tell me all of it.”

“It looks like the call Brian received saying his parents had been killed was a lie. When he got back to England, the rental car he was driving from the airport was hit by a train. It was stalled on the track with no lights on. Tolworthy died instantly. His parents say they called Sara several times to tell her what happened, but there was no answer. They assumed Brian was coming home unexpectedly because he and Sara’d broken up and she didn’t want to hear anything about him. They’ve always blamed her for his agitated state that probably caused the wreck.”

When Ramsey stopped, there wasn’t a sound from Mike. “Are you still there?”

“Yes. Tess took the news hard?”

“Very hard. She’s scared for Sara and for you. Whoever’s doing this means business, and it’s obviously been a long time in planning.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Can you get Sara away from this?”

“No,” Mike said. “Wherever I take her, they’ll follow.”

“Couldn’t you hide her?”

“For the rest of her life?” Mike said angrily. “If you want to help, figure out what she has that people are willing to kill to get.”

“Greg—”

“If he marries her and she dies, he’ll inherit whatever it is that
she has. Sara’s coming; I have to go. Fax what you have to Luke and think hard. And take care of Tess.”

“I will. She—” Rams didn’t say any more because Mike had hung up.

“Wow!” Sara said as she looked at Mike sitting on the iron chair. “You don’t look well at all. Is Tess all right? Is the baby—?” She broke off at his look, then sat down across from him. “What’s happened?”

“Nothing,” he managed to say, his eyes searching her face. He had no doubt that the Vandlos had killed the man Sara was to marry. Then Stefan had shown up in town, and as Captain Erickson had said, Vandlo had used his “big-city razzle-dazzle” to woo a girl whose heart had been broken. It couldn’t have been difficult, Mike thought. Sara still had no idea why the man she loved had dropped her, and Mike had seen enough of Edilean to know that the pity from everyone would have been enough to drive her mad. The Vandlos specialized in people, especially women, who were in pain.

“Mike,” Sara said softly, “you’re beginning to scare me.”

His mind was racing. There was only one way to protect Sara and that was to take the focus off of her and put it on him. “Does Edilean have a mayor?”

“Yes, but what does that—?”

“Who is it?”