The Arrangement Read online

  He looked confused, as if she’d blindsided him. Probably she had, but she didn’t care about that, either. She had been shunned and shunted aside too many times, and this man held her future—and possibly her life—in his hands. There wasn’t going to be any more silence, not between them.

  “It’s never been you,” he said. “Alison was empty inside, a lovely void. Dead, even when she was alive.”

  Marnie had never asked him, but she had to now. “Is that why you killed her? Because I’m living in fear that you did.”

  “I didn’t kill her. I don’t know what happened. That’s why I’m here, Marnie.”

  He’d had no reaction to her question. She’d seen no flashes of guilt, anger or contrition. He was unequivocal. “Okay,” she said, nodding.

  “She was the exact opposite of you,” he said.

  “And what am I?”

  “A hot spark. A life force.”

  “Then why won’t you touch me?”

  He flinched again, only this time it wasn’t in disgust. It was something else, something hot and anguished. His jaw tightened as he stared at her in the black satin gown that had once been Alison’s. Water still poured from the showerhead, flooding him and the stall. He couldn’t seem to get it turned off, maybe because he wasn’t really paying attention. He couldn’t tear his eyes off her. And she saw nothing resembling revulsion in those eyes. It was all lust and desire and potent male need.

  “Take that thing off,” he said.

  His meaning was clear, but he didn’t give her time to get out of the gown before he pulled her into the shower with him. Steam roiled around her as she fell into the inferno. Marnie let out a tight little croak of joy as the drenched gown slid to her feet. She flung herself at him, hitting him so hard that they fell against the shower wall together, and then she began to laugh. It was just all so crazy it didn’t seem real.

  “Jesus,” he whispered. He probably thought he’d gotten himself tangled up with a wild creature, something straight from the dark heart of the jungle. And he had. He didn’t know how long she’d wanted this. How long she’d had to hold these feelings in check.

  She gazed up at him, her head thrown back, her throat exposed and utterly vulnerable. She could hear his low growls of desire, and shuddered as he bent to kiss her mouth. Who was the animal now? she thought, laughing. She couldn’t seem to stop.

  His body was hot and steamy against hers. Everything was dark and hard, but his kiss was achingly tender. Their mouths melted together, clinging and tasting. Thirsty. Insatiable. And she loved every wet second of it.

  She pulled back, and he grasped her arms as if afraid she’d get away.

  “You found me in the water,” she said. “Now, let me find you.”

  The scent of lilies saturated the air as she touched his face and his aroused body. He was slippery and slick, and her hands streamed through his drenched hair and down his back to his tightly clenched glutes. God, he was sexy. The water drove her to her knees, and she held him with both hands, like a glass she was about to drink from. He stopped her before she could begin to get her fill.

  “That’s as much finding as you get,” he said. “My turn.”

  She ended up in the corner, out of the direct spray, as he knelt between her legs and kissed the droplets from her mound. It was excruciatingly sweet having him search out every little bead from the folds and curls of her sex. She arched her back and opened her legs, afraid she would slide to the floor in a heap. The pleasure was so intense it made her want to scream.

  “Our turn,” she pleaded.

  She fell against him as he rose, and he lifted her off the floor by her legs. Their hot, urgent kisses led to urgent love against the wall, with warm water pouring all over them. He pressed her to the tiles, and she curled her arms and legs around him like vines. Their joining was slow and piercingly sweet, yet utterly tumultuous. They were two bodies drowning in water, but Marnie had never known what it was to drown in desire, in physical longing. As he sank into her and sighed, she sank into an ocean of her own need.

  The fit of their bodies was tight and fluid. Perfect. Deep muscles clenched as she rocked up and down. Every thrust lifted her, sending her flying like the kite in the wind. But it was the noise that set her free. The throaty groans and gurgles. The sloshing, slapping and splashing. Sex in the shower was rife with distinctly wet, lugubrious sounds that she would never get out of her mind.

  And before it was over, she understood what she was facing. Every day with Andrew Villard felt like a terrible risk, but she didn’t fear for her life, she feared for her heart. It was one thing to make a deal with the devil. It was another to fall in love with him.

  19

  Tony heard the phone ring and reached out in his sleep to turn it off. If his dad heard the noise he’d stomp the shit out of him and his phone. He’d already flushed one cell down the toilet and crushed the other under a tire of his truck.

  As Tony reared up and crammed the cell under his pillow, he realized where he was. He wasn’t sixteen years old and back in his old man’s house. He was in his motel room, and he’d probably just missed a call from his informant.

  “Shit,” he snarled, yanking the phone out from under the pillow. He flipped the lid and thumbed the talk button in one fluid motion. “Hello? Hello?”

  “Where were you?”

  “Right here,” Tony said, struggling to get his bearings. His heart was hammering, and he’d been in a crouch, ready to defend himself from his father’s flying fists. “It’s six in the morning.”

  “Go back out to the cliffs. You missed something.”

  Tony adjusted the phone’s volume to make sure he got every word the caller spoke. His snitch was at it again, thank God.

  “What did I miss?” Tony asked.

  “Evidence that will prove I’m telling the truth.”

  “Evidence on the cliffs? What kind? Tell me what I’m looking for.”

  “Dig deeper than you did before.”

  “Dig deeper? What does that mean?”

  Click.

  The piercing dial tone made Tony scramble to turn the volume control back down. The snitch had hung up. Tony tapped in *75, which automatically reported the call to his cell company’s tracing service, but he didn’t expect them to be able to trap it. If his caller was smart, he or she was probably using a pay-as-you-go mobile phone, which made tracing virtually impossible. And Tony couldn’t call in any of his FBI colleagues on this one.

  He rubbed his face, digging into his eyes to get the sleep out of them and still feeling very much like a sixteen-year-old kid. His hands were shaking, and that was death for a marksman. None of this emotion was good. It all had to be kept under strict control, and that was the very thing that eluded him. He wasn’t an automaton like one of those Hostage Rescue Team guys he so desperately wanted to be. He got angry and scared and he shook. That was bad. It would ruin him if he couldn’t get control.

  He got up from the creaky bed, stretched until it hurt and then adjusted his balls through his boxers. He needed coffee, and he was going to have to hit a Laundromat soon or buy some clean underwear. He looked around the room. Damn cheap-ass motel didn’t even have a coffee service.

  Tony replayed the call in his head as he stood at the toilet and emptied his bursting bladder. Probably the beers he drank last night, which also explained his headache. He needed to find another way to get to sleep, maybe something over the counter. Or a sledgehammer.

  The snitch had said go back to the cliffs. Tony had to assume that meant Satan’s Teeth, where Marnie Hazelton was supposed to have jumped. Tony had already been there. Twice, in fact. He’d searched the area the day after Butch’s murder, and again this trip. He wasn’t a crime-scene technician, but he knew how to look for evidence, and he hadn’t come up with anything. So, unless the caller meant some other cliffs, which didn’t make sense, Tony had to wonder what his informant was up to. This could be a wild-good chase, and if it was, the conniving bitch would p
ay. Tony would find her and throw her off the cliff.

  The bitch could be a him, he reminded himself. Voices were easily disguised.

  As he bent over and flushed the toilet, he watched the water surge into a whirling vortex, and his imagination supplied a body being sucked down the drain with it. He wanted to think it was symbolism, the body of his enemy, whoever that blight on his life might be, but he wasn’t so sure the flailing victim in the suck hole wasn’t him.

  Something about the position of the boulders bothered Tony. Two of them were propped against each other near the edge of the rocky cliffs, and even though he’d noticed them when he was here before, no bells had gone off. This time he was going to move them and have a look underneath.

  Looking under rocks. Could have been his job description.

  He scoped out the area visually, aware of the unusually low tide. Satan’s Teeth was a natural seawall. Carved by erosion, it jutted out fifty feet from the cliffs above the beach, and the drop to the water below was probably double that. At high tide, he would have been looking down at roiling ocean water, but right now, it was dangerously shallow. A jump from this height at almost any time other than high tide would be certain death.

  The beach was deserted, except for a few die-hard surfers. It was too early for people of normal intelligence, in Tony’s humble opinion. Even as a kid, he hadn’t understood the surfing culture. Most of the wave monkeys were as hopelessly retarded as the movies made them out to be—and Tony had always been a loner, anyway. When he’d gone to the beach, he’d hung out by the pier, a good mile away from Satan’s Teeth, to the northwest. That was still the hot spot, but people seeking more privacy often headed toward the cliffs, and Tony didn’t want to be noticed by lovey-dovey couples out for an early morning walk. About a mile and a half farther south was Josephine Hazelton’s cottage and the secluded glen where Butch was murdered.

  Tony had picked worn, scruffy clothes to blend in—jeans, a T-shirt and a windbreaker, but it was already too warm for the jacket. He left it lying on a rock and pulled a pair of latex gloves from the pocket of his jeans. Moments later, as he heaved the second boulder aside, he spotted the sheered rocks. Two of the outcroppings the seawall was named for were broken off.

  Satan had two teeth missing, and no one seemed to have noticed.

  Tony knelt for a closer look. He didn’t even bother with speculation about the various ways this could have happened. It dovetailed too neatly with the calls he’d been getting. Following the snitch’s line of reasoning, the boulders were meant to hide the evidence of a fight between Marnie Hazelton and whoever had pushed her from the cliff. The teeth had been broken during the struggle, but Tony knew that even forensics wouldn’t be able to determine how long ago that had happened.

  It didn’t look recent. Not days ago, certainly. There was already a greenish, mossy cast to the broken rocks.

  He stayed close to the ground, searching for whatever else he could find. A half-dozen beer caps still looked shiny and new, and some cigarette butts were scattered around, a few with lipstick prints, probably courtesy of the local riffraff, who’d been using the place to party. Anything he found of interest went into one of the plastic evidence bags he’d brought with him, but certain questions nagged at him.

  Why hadn’t the sheriff’s detectives noticed signs of a struggle six months ago? There would have been footprints and damage to the area beyond the broken teeth. The vegetation would have been disturbed, the dirt and rocks displaced.

  He was still mulling over those questions as he brushed his gloved fingers over the loose earth and felt something sharp.

  Dig deeper than you did before.

  He quickly dug free a metal object. It looked like a woman’s hair barrette, but this wasn’t the dime store variety. Underneath the encrusted dirt, it was solid gold, inlaid with diamonds and had the initials A.F. engraved on the underside.

  Tony turned the barrette in his hands. Alison Fairmont. He had no doubt it was hers. She’d worn it back when they were secretly seeing each other. That was before she’d decided it was sexier to let all that honey-blond hair of hers fall around her face. Once she’d gotten the idea of being a pop star in her head, she didn’t have room for one other fucking thing.

  Laughter caught in his throat, burning. It should have felt better, knowing he was going to make her pay. For everything. But the way his stomach was churning, he felt almost sick.

  He put the barrette in its own plastic bag. He could understand why it hadn’t been found, if it had fallen off during the struggle and been ground into the earth with their feet. Of course, everything he’d found here, including the barrette, could have been planted for him to discover, but in this case, he wasn’t sure he cared. It was evidence against Alison Fairmont Villard, public enemy number one.

  As he turned to walk back to the cliffs, where he’d left his rental car, he saw a woman walking up the beach from the other side of the seawall, from the south. At first he didn’t recognize her. Maybe the dark hair threw him off, but she seemed to be looking right at him, and as she drew a few steps closer, he saw that it was public enemy number one herself. Alison.

  His first impulse was to duck, but it was too late for that. She was barefoot and wearing a billowing dress, and she looked odd, her gaze fixed almost trancelike on the seawall. Even stranger, she reminded him of someone else. It might have been the way she was staring. The sense of recognition was strong, but he had no idea who it was.

  He continued to walk toward the cliffs, but her gaze didn’t follow him. She didn’t even appear to have seen him. She was definitely looking at the rocks, at Satan’s Teeth. Talk about returning to the scene. Tony couldn’t have asked for better confirmation of his theory.

  Tony had already concluded that Marnie was a witness to Butch’s murder and had to be silenced, but he still didn’t know why Alison had killed Butch. Maybe Butch knew something about Alison and was blackmailing her. Stupid move, but Butch wasn’t known for his smarts. More likely Butch had made a move on Alison and she’d fought him off.

  Tony focused inward, thinking, imagining the struggle between Alison and Butch. And then it hit him—the only thing that made sense. His brother had gone after Alison, but not for sex. For revenge. He’d had to wait a few years for the opportunity, but any amount of time would have been worth it. The Bogart men were proud SOBs. Butch had been defending the family name and Tony’s honor.

  Tony could easily see Butch taking Alison to a secluded area like the glen to scare her. But Butch had badly underestimated Alison’s ability to defend herself. She’d grabbed the pitchfork and gutted him—and Marnie had stumbled on all the bloodshed. She may even have helped Alison. She must have hated him enough to want him dead.

  Tony felt vindicated, justified, even triumphant. Would it hold up in court? Tony would make sure it did because it fit Butch’s M.O. perfectly. He was just the kind of kid to rip his big brother to his face, and then go behind his back and avenge him. Wouldn’t it be something if Butch had died trying to make sure the Bogarts could hold their heads up again.

  Julia was trying to figure out how to fasten her new Tiffany diamond circlet bracelet as she came upon her youngest in the kitchen. He was in a very strange position, bent over with his head inside the open refrigerator door. When he came out, he had a bottle of beer in his hand.

  It wasn’t even ten in the morning.

  Julia dropped the bracelet and her bejeweled straw tote bag on the countertop. “Bret, put that away. It’s too early to drink.”

  He groaned, apparently at the noise she was making. As he turned and his face came into view, Julia saw why. One of his eyes was swollen shut, and he had a large, nasty-looking knot on the top of his head.

  He pressed the dripping bottle to his eye. “I’m not drinking it. I’m using it as an ice pack, and praying to God it numbs the pain.”

  “What happened to your head?”

  “Ask your precious assistant.”

  “Rebecca?
”

  He moved the beer bottle to the knot and closed his eyes. “She’ll try to deny it, but she dropped a dumbbell on my head.”

  “Rebecca?”

  “Is there a parrot in here? Yes, Rebecca.”

  “What did you do to her, Bret?”

  “What did I do? Talk about blaming the victim. Your son could as easily be in a coma as not, and you’re questioning his character?”

  “Bret, are you saying that Rebecca attacked you unprovoked?”

  He set the dripping beer bottle down. “I may have annoyed her, but did you try to kill the last person who annoyed you? She’s damn lucky I haven’t called the police.”

  Julia had already begun to dig through her purse in search of her cell, but not to call the police. Bret looked bad enough to be in a coma, and he would never seek medical attention on his own behalf.

  “You’re going to the doctor,” she said, keying in the speed-dial code to her cosmetic surgeon. She’d spent a small fortune with that man, and the least he could do was see her son on an emergency basis.

  “You’re sending me to a doctor?” Bret said. “You don’t care what that little bitch did to me?”

  “I wouldn’t call Rebecca a little bitch.” Julia sniffed, as if pleased with her own joke, and that seemed to mollify him slightly. “And, of course, I care about you. If I didn’t, would I insist you see a doctor?”

  What she actually cared about was that he not disrupt their lives any more than he already had, especially with Rebecca, who was a far better assistant than Bret was a son, if Julia was being honest. There was little doubt in her mind what she would have done if she’d been free to play switcheroo right now. She would have sent Bret packing and adopted Rebecca.

  “I don’t need a doctor,” he said. “She does—a shrink in a locked ward in the psychiatric wing. What are you going to do to her?”

  “I’ll deal with Rebecca.” Julia was sure there was a great deal more to the story, but she would get the details from Rebecca—and warn her to stay the hell away from Bret. Julia didn’t want to think about what Bret must have done to provoke Rebecca that way. She was always so kind and eager to please. Kind to the point that it could get on your nerves, in Julia’s opinion, and lately she seemed to be hovering, here, there and everywhere. But still, Julia had little doubt Bret had deserved what he’d gotten.