Seeing Red (24 page)

It took all of her willpower. Her hands itched to bury themselves in his hair. Her tongue yearned to seek his. Her body ached to feel his pressed firmly against it.

She gently slid her hand to the side of his neck and was surprised to find his pulse tripped along as fast as hers.

His hand left her neck. The backs of his fingers ran so lightly across her collarbone that her knees quivered.

His tongue traced her lower lip, and every cell in her body responded. When his fingertips traced the edge of her knit top’s scooped neck, her breasts tingled, her nipples contracted as if touched by icy water.

She shifted, moving so his fingers slid beneath the fabric. When he grazed her nipple, she nearly cried out.

Need thrummed along her nerve endings, a need so strong, so overpowering, she shuddered. Her body seemed to move of its own accord, her pelvis seeking his.

Suddenly, something seemed to snap inside him. The trembling tension she’d felt under her hands stopped. His arms circled around her, pulling her hard against him.

As her arms went around his neck and her mouth opened fully to his, she realized that all of those years ago, she hadn’t imagined herself with a man
like
Nate; she’d imagined herself with him, and him alone.

When he lifted his head, his eyelids were heavy with passion, and his smoky eyes burned with heat. That look alone nearly sent her into an orgasm.

She wanted him to make love to her, and she didn’t want him to be gentle about it.

He blinked slowly, then again.

The primal look eased from his face, yet he still held her.

“Ellis . . . ” Nate’s voice sounded as if he stood across an empty gymnasium, not right next to her. “My beautiful Ellis.”

“Don’t stop.” Her voice was no more than a raspy whisper.

But she could see it was over.

“God, I don’t want to.” His voice quivered. He kissed her again, but it was a gesture of retreat.

He held her close and spoke against her temple. “I have to leave soon . . . .”

“I don’t care,” she said.

He put a little space between them and looked down at her. “I do. I won’t make love to you and then go away.”

She truly didn’t know how she was going to survive his leaving. But she did know that feeling this way and
never
being with him wasn’t going to make it better.

Just when she opened her mouth to try changing his mind, he said, “That would make me the creep your uncle thinks I am.”

Well, hell. This was going to take some time to work around.

She kissed him lightly. “Never in a million years.”

His smile was grateful. It broke her heart all over again to think of how he’d lived his youth with this entire town looking down on him.

He pulled her arms from around him and held her hands in his. “I’m a loner. Always was, always will be. I’m not the man for you.”

She smiled.
Oh, buddy, this isn’t over yet.

He let go of her hands and stepped back. “We have to focus on stopping Alexander.”

“Yes, we do,” she agreed.

It happened right before her eyes; the shift in his thoughts was reflected in every aspect of his body. Nate the lover disappeared. Nate the professional—the hunter—took over.

She hated for this moment to end, but there would be another. Never had she felt this electrically alive. She wasn’t about to give it up without a fight.

She followed his lead and asked, “How are we going to do it?”

He paced as he spoke. “We have to use what we know about Alexander to his detriment. He’s organized. He plans. He’s patient.” He rubbed his forehead. “I can’t figure where this murdered girl fits in. It draws unnecessary attention to him. It’s counterproductive to what I can see as his goal.”

As Ellis watched him, she had to work to stop thinking of his hands on her. She put her mind to a more productive task. After a moment, she said, “Maybe the girl wasn’t part of his plan,” she suggested. “Maybe it was like his attack on Laura—random.”

Nate fixed his gaze on her in a way that turned her insides to water. “Ellis”—he paused—“Laura’s attack wasn’t as random as everyone believes.”

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

E
llis stared at Nate. How could Laura’s attack
not
have been random? Alexander was a twenty-one-year-old Peeping Tom living miles away in a run-down section of Charleston. What possible connection could there have been between him and Laura?

Her breath caught. Had Uncle Greg been right? Had Nate somehow led the man to Laura?

As much as she feared the answer, she forced herself to say, “Explain.”

Nate took her gently by the arm and led her to the couch.

She was still burning from that kiss. His hand on her bare arm flamed the embers she was trying to stamp out. When they reached the couch, she pressed herself into the far corner.

“You were young,” he said. “You couldn’t see things for what they were. And everyone else . . . Well, everyone else only saw what they wanted to. Or maybe they saw what
Laura
wanted them to.” He paused, as if choosing his words wisely. “She was working so hard to maintain that image of perfection and to have
everyone
love her; she was like a leaking vessel, and no matter how much love and adoration you poured in, it would never fill her.”

“That’s absurd,” Ellis snapped. “Laura was always happy. She was beautiful and popular. Everyone did love her.”

“That’s how you saw it—because she wanted you to.”

Ellis crossed her arms and shook her head. “No. We grew up together. I would have known something was off.”

“You were thirteen, Ellis,” he said patiently. “Think about the perspective of the kids you teach.”

Ellis knew that a person’s brain wasn’t fully able to process emotions and make intelligent decisions until after their teen years. That’s why teenagers did such illogical and obviously stupid things. But she’d never thought of herself that way. At thirteen, although she’d been mature for her age, she supposed she’d been the same hormone-charged mess that every other thirteen-year-old girl was. And she
had
idolized Laura.

Ellis tried to view Laura from this alternate perspective as she nodded for Nate to continue.

“I know you—and everyone else, for that matter—thought I was her boyfriend. But my relationship with Laura was much more complicated.
She
was much more complicated.”

“But you loved each other.” Ellis realized her voice sounded like that of a child hanging on to her belief in Santa Claus.

“I did love her,” he said solemnly. “But Laura didn’t love me, not in the way you imagine. She sort of needed me; sometimes I think she even hated me. But now I realize what she hated most was herself.”

Ellis frowned and shook her head. “She and I were close; I would have seen it. She was
happy.
”

He sighed and appeared to weigh what he was about to say. After a moment, he said, “She
appeared
to be happy. She was a chameleon, showing everyone exactly what they wanted to see—and it was eating her alive.”

Ellis struggled to look beyond the memory of the brilliant smile, the memory of the coolest girl in school, the memory of the fearless horsewoman. But she still could not see what Nate claimed to be the truth.

Her disbelief must have shown.

Nate scrubbed a hand over his face. “Okay. Here’s the truth of it. Laura was drinking. Not just party drinking. She had a serious problem. I saw the signs, because I’d lived with an alcoholic all my life.”

Ellis shook her head. “I would have known.”

“She was expert at disguising it.” He furrowed his brow. “And you were only a kid. Would you have known if she’d been anything short of falling-down drunk?”

Ellis couldn’t deny it. At thirteen, her idea of a drunk had been fashioned from television characters with grossly slurred speech and comedic physical impairments.

“But she was the president of Students Against Drunk Driving.” Ellis just couldn’t make this work in her mind. “She worked with the local police in their substance abuse prevention program in the grade school.”

Looking straight into her eyes, he said, “How better to keep people from looking too closely, even if their suspicions were there? Laura’s life was all about creating the image.”

Ellis tried to reconcile the picture he was painting with the cousin she’d known. They
had
been close—best friends, like sisters. She’d thought Laura shared everything with her. Had she been completely blind?

What about her aunt and uncle? Had they had any idea?

He continued. “I thought I could help her. And she needed me to help maintain her illusion of perfection, to clean up her messes. She wanted me to
try
to save her, even though I don’t think she really wanted to be saved.”

“That’s what you were doing when you brought her back to her bedroom window at night,” Ellis said, her disbelief beginning to fade. “I always thought you two were . . . you know, fooling around.”

“We never slept together.” He looked her square in the eye when he said it. “A few weeks before she was attacked, I discovered she was sneaking out to the beach in the middle of the night—alone. I started checking nearly every night to make sure she wasn’t out there too drunk to get back to her room.” He ran a hand over his head and rubbed the back of his neck. “I was just a dumb kid. I thought I had a handle on it. I thought I could save her, that I was strong enough, smart enough to fix it. Maybe I was selfish in wanting to believe that.” He closed his eyes and swallowed hard. “I should have gone to her parents. I should have. But then it was too late.”

Ellis searched his face, looking for the lie. Nate had been a teenage boy. Every teenage boy Ellis had ever known had only one thing on his mind. If what he said was true and Laura was drunk on her ass so often, how could he not have taken advantage of the opportunity? If Laura had been drinking . . .

Memories broke free, coming fast and furious, flipping past like the thumbed pages of a picture book. The pages stopped falling, and the book opened fully on one particular spring evening.

March, sixteen years ago

Three months before Laura was attacked

If it wasn’t for Laura, Ellis decided, she’d
never
get to do
anything.
Ellis’s mother (the Fun Killer) didn’t even let her see R-rated movies. She was thirteen, for crying out loud. Did her mom think that seeing R-rated movies was going to make her have sex with boys or rip up her school with an automatic weapon? Seriously!

It was Friday night. The night Mom and Dad always went out to dinner with Aunt Jodi and Uncle Greg. When they’d been little, Ellis and Laura had shared a babysitter. When Laura had gotten old enough, she babysat Ellis. But now Ellis was old enough to stay alone. Every week, she worried that Laura would abandon their Friday nights at Laura’s house for something more interesting with her high school friends. But Laura stuck with her, surprising as that was.

Laura was the coolest girl in the whole high school, even though she was only a junior. Ellis hoped that next year, when she finally got to high school, some of that popularity would spill over onto her. She also hoped that she’d “bloom,” as her mother called it, and be even half as beautiful as Laura. Of course, there was no way Ellis would have Laura’s long legs and great hair, but at least the mousy brown could be fixed with a box of Clairol—if the Fun Killer would relent.

Laura came into the living room with two videos in one hand and a huge bowl of popcorn wrapped in her other arm. “Sex?” she asked. “Or sex and violence?”

“Hmmm,” Ellis said, trying to sound cool and sophisticated. “Be more specific.”

Laura set down the popcorn and held up the videos. “
Sliver
or
Romeo Is Bleeding
?”

The cover of
Sliver
looked almost like a porn movie—not that Ellis had ever seen a porn movie. But that cover was way hot.

“
Sliver
,” she said.

Laura handed her the movie. “Pop it in the VCR. I’ll go get the Cokes.”

About halfway through the movie, when Ellis couldn’t tear her eyes away from what Sharon Stone and William Baldwin were doing, she reached blindly toward the coffee table for her Coke. She was too hot to breathe and too self-conscious to look to see if Laura’s face was as red as Ellis’s felt.

She had the glass nearly to her lips when Laura’s hand clamped around her wrist.

“That’s mine.” Laura’s voice sounded odd.

She didn’t release Ellis’s wrist until she’d taken the glass away from her.

“Oh, sorry,” Ellis said, feeling like a total dork about this sexscene business.

Laura handed her the other glass. “No problem.” She picked up the remote. “Want me to rewind?”

“No!” Ellis took a sip of Coke, then added more offhandedly, “Not necessary.”

Laura paused the movie, grabbed her glass, and stood up. “I’m getting a refill. Want one?”