Dearly Beloved (27 page)

S
tephen is trapped in Liza’s room, afraid to move, afraid to breathe.

He stands with his back flat against the closed door, listening for another sound from the hallway. A few moments before, he heard Laura Towne go back to her room and close the door, but he can’t help thinking it was a close call.

What if her knocking had woken Liza?

Not likely, thanks to the Seconal, but there’s always a chance. . . .

Stephen presses his fingertips against his throbbing temples and tries to calm himself, glancing toward the bed for reassurance that his sleeping beauty is still sleeping.

Even in the darkness, he can see the blond hair on the pillow, the pale, creamy skin of her bare arms against the eyelet bedspread.

He had barely been in her room for a few minutes when that Towne woman had started screaming for help. Stricken, he’d realized that she’d found herself locked in.

Thank heaven for Jasper, who had come rushing up the stairs just as Stephen opened Liza’s door and peered out into the hall. He’d wordlessly handed the key ring to Jasper, who had nodded his understanding and hurried toward Laura’s room, which had grown curiously silent.

There was nothing for Stephen to do but close Liza’s door again and wait as Jasper went to Laura’s aid. He’d listened with relief as he’d heard Jasper’s spur-of-the-moment explanation, followed by his retreat back to the first floor.

Then, just as Stephen was about to give up on Liza for tonight and slip out of her room, he’d heard Laura’s door open, and then her knocking and whispering.

Clearly, the woman is suspicious . . . or, at the very least, concerned enough to want to discuss it with the other guest.

You should just get it over with,
Stephen tells himself, clenching his fists and setting his jaw grimly.
It’s getting too dangerous
.

But then he turns to look again at Liza on the bed. And he exhales raggedly, struck by how innocent and unsuspecting she looks as she sleeps just a few feet from her worst enemy.

He makes up his mind. This isn’t something to be done in a rush. It’s something that needs to be savored.

He’ll stick with the plan.

Sighing softly in pleasure, Stephen stealthily moves across the floor to stand beside Liza’s bed, reaching with one hand for the edge of the eyelet bedspread, and with the other for the already taut fly of his trousers.

K
eegan wakes from a nightmare in a cold sweat and looks around disoriented.

He realizes that he’s on the living room couch, sprawled in an uncomfortable position, still holding the television remote control in his hand. The last thing he remembers is thinking about Jennie and wishing Laura would call him back, but knowing that if she hadn’t yet, she probably wouldn’t until tomorrow.

Keegan sits up and rubs his eyes, then glances at the television, where a real estate infomercial is blaring away at ear-shattering volume. He points the remote control at it, hits the power button, and zaps the screen into dark silence.

There.

Now, at least, he can think.

Jennie
. . .

In his dream, he had been struggling to reach her as she screamed for help, balancing precariously on a narrow raft in the middle of the storm-tossed ocean.

Hold on, Jennie,
he kept calling to her.
I’m coming. I’ll get you. Just hold on!

The dream was so incredibly real that Keegan can still hear the roar of the waves—and Jennie’s piercing screams.

“Dammit, Jen,” he says aloud into the empty room. “Where the hell are you? Why do I have this feeling that you’re not okay?”

Keegan checks his watch. Just past three A.M. He debates for a moment, then reaches for the phone. If Laura’s pissed that he’s calling her at this hour, he’ll be pissed right back at her for not calling him the moment she got home.

And if she’s still not home . . .

Well, he’ll have to figure out what to do next. Because he definitely has to do
something.

After dialing the familiar number, Keegan listens to the phone ringing and then, just as he’d anticipated, the answering machine picking up again.

“Damn,” he says, and slams down the receiver.

For a few minutes, he sits there, staring off into space and trying to figure out what to do.

Then, his mind made up, he stands abruptly and heads for the bathroom to take a quick shower before setting out.

I
n his first-floor bedroom, Jasper rolls over noisily on the narrow, lumpy mattress and punches the pillow beneath his head.

He wonders what Stephen is doing upstairs in Liza’s room.

No, you don’t wonder. You know. He’s looking at her, probably touching her . . .

Jealousy bubbles up inside of Jasper as he squeezes his eyes shut against the image of Stephen with a woman . . . Stephen with someone else.

Oh, Jasper’s no fool. He knows Stephen has been with women since he came along. And even though he believes Stephen when he promises that they mean nothing . . .

He’s still troubled by the knowledge and haunted by unbidden images that fill his thoughts, especially at night.

At least now, Jasper tells himself, Stephen is taking steps to rid himself of those women for good.

He still remembers his own excitement when Stephen had first revealed his plan nearly a year ago. It seemed too good to be true . . . just like what had happened to Lorraine.

Jasper thinks back to that horrible February day—Valentine’s Day, wasn’t it?—when Stephen was all set to marry Lorraine. He’d actually asked Jasper to be his best man, promising him, secretly, that things between them wouldn’t change.

I just need a wife to keep up appearances,
he’d told Jasper.
You know, for the sake of the business. You understand how it is.

Jasper had acted like he did, because he didn’t want to disappoint Stephen. He didn’t see any point in reminding Stephen that
he,
Jasper, hadn’t bothered to keep up appearances in his own life. No, he’d gone straight to his parents as soon as he realized he was in love with Stephen and he’d told them the truth.

Of course, his parents had disowned him on the spot. His father had told him to get his “pansy ass” out of the house and never come back.

Jasper hadn’t.

Had never wanted to, or needed to.

His home, from that day on, had been with Stephen. Stephen, who’d been generous enough to put Jasper on his payroll as an assistant. Jasper had been only too happy to be at Stephen’s beck and call.

He was the one who had made the funeral arrangements for Stephen’s mother, handling all the messy details since there was no body to bury.

Aurelia Gilbrooke had unexpectedly jumped off the Tappan Zee Bridge in the wee hours of the morning, leaving her Mercedes idling in the breakdown lane and a suicide note tucked under the floor mat.

Or so everyone thought.

Only Stephen and Jasper knew the truth. It was Jasper who, roused out of bed after midnight by a distraught Stephen, had helped him dispose of his mother’s bloodied body in the garden. And Jasper who had come up with the suicide story. And Jasper who had donned Aurelia Gilbrooke’s favorite blond wig and fur coat with the hood—just in case anyone happened to glance into the Mercedes as he drove it from the Connecticut estate to the bridge, with Stephen trailing along behind in his own car.

Luck had been with them that night, and no one had seen Jasper abandon the car on the bridge, then hop into Stephen’s Cadillac for the trip back to Connecticut. And since Aurelia had been such an unstable, miserable woman, no one had ever suspected what had really happened, either.

No one except Stephen’s father.

But Andrew Gilbrooke had gone completely off the deep end when he’d figured it out, first flying into hysteria and then slipping into a catatonic state from which he had never recovered. Now he spent his days in a mental institution, staring off into space with a trickle of drool spilling from his slack lips.

Everyone thought poor Andrew, who had always been emotionally frail, couldn’t handle the loss of his wife. No one ever realized that what he couldn’t handle was the knowledge that his only child had killed his own mother.

Jasper, of course, understood why Stephen had done what he had, although they’d never discussed it, not before Amelia’s death and not after. But he had always speculated that the mother-son relationship was twisted. Apparently, Stephen had finally just snapped.

And, luckily for Jasper, the same thing had happened with Lorraine.

As he waited in Stephen’s rose-laden brownstone that February day, he’d outwardly wondered, along with the minister and wedding guests, where the groom had gone and why the bride hadn’t shown.

But inside, Jasper had been hoping, praying, that Stephen would do to Lorraine what he had done to his mother.

And that was exactly what had happened.

Again, Jasper had helped Stephen come up with a story. Lorraine, they had told people, had simply gotten cold feet. That much, of course, was the truth.

She had taken Stephen’s car, they said, and all her luggage and left the city for an unknown destination. They didn’t report her disappearance to the authorities, of course. And by the time the car was located months later, in long-term parking at LaGuardia, most everyone had forgotten about the curtailed Gilbrooke-LaCroix nuptials.

Everyone, except Jasper.

He has long since forgiven Stephen for feeling like he needed a woman to keep up appearances, for not wanting the world to know that he, Jasper, was his one true love.

But he has never forgotten.

In the back of his mind he occasionally wonders, with a sharp little pang, whether Stephen really meant it when he promised that the two of them will sail away together for good, just as long as Jasper helps him with his plan.

Of course he means it,
he tells himself now, flipping restlessly again on his bed.

But he can’t help wondering why, if he’s the only one Stephen really cares about, he’s going to so much painstaking trouble with these three women. And why Stephen insisted that Jasper drug them with their dessert so that he would be able to creep into their rooms unnoticed after they’ve gone to bed.

After the way Stephen had hollered at him when he’d called the mansion earlier, Jasper hadn’t dared to tell Stephen that Laura Towne had barely touched her dessert. Which meant that she wasn’t drugged.

Which was obviously why she had unexpectedly awakened to find herself locked into her room.

Stephen is going to be so angry when I tell him that she didn’t eat her dessert and that I kept it from him earlier,
Jasper thinks, staring into the darkness.

So then don’t tell him,
a voice says reasonably inside his mind.

But I don’t like to have secrets from Stephen. I’ve always told him everything.

And do you think,
the voice scoffs,
that he tells you everything in return?

Not wanting to answer that, Jasper flips over and pulls the pillow over his head tightly to drown out the annoying voices in his head.

Chapter 11

S
unday morning dawns raw and stormy in Boston.

Laura opens her eyes to find herself entangled in the twin sheet on Shawn’s bed as he slumbers peacefully beside her. It amazes her how he can sleep that way—naked and uncovered. For all her own brazen sexuality, Laura always makes sure to slip her own nude body under the covers when she falls asleep.

Jennie
, she thinks idly,
probably doesn’t even sleep naked when she’s with someone.

She can easily imagine her prudish sister climbing out of bed after Keegan’s asleep and pulling one of her warm flannel nightgowns over her head.

Then again, it’s surprising that Jennie is sleeping with Keegan in the first place . . .

Was,
Laura corrects, remembering that Keegan is history.

Then she remembers something else.

Last night, she’d been worried about her sister for some reason . . .

For no reason,
she tells herself, recalling her inexplicable uneasiness over Jennie’s trip to the island.

She’d managed to put it out of her head last night, thanks to Shawn’s expert hands and lips and—well, everything. But now the memory of her worry comes back to Laura full force and she sits up and frowns.

“Laura?” Shawn asks groggily, stirring beside her on the mattress.

“Yeah. I have to go home.”

“Huh?”

“I have to leave,” she says, already on her feet and reaching for his robe to wear for a quick trip to the bathroom down the hall.

“But it’s lousy outside,” he says, sitting up and looking toward the window. “And you don’t have to work today. Stay here with me . . .”

“I can’t,” she says, feeling a distinct sense of urgency taking over. “I have to get home and check on my sister.”

“I thought she’s away for the weekend.”

“She is, but I have this feeling that she might have tried to call. I’m worried that something’s wrong with her.”

Shawn frowns, apparently about to say something but thinking better of it. Instead, he asks, “Can’t you access your answering machine from here?”

“Uh-uh. I’ve never been able to figure out how to do that. Jennie’s the one who knows how, but . . .” She shrugs. “Anyway, I have to go.”

“I’ll go with you,” Shawn says, getting out of bed and stretching, his naked body magnificent in the gray morning light.

Surprised, Laura asks, “How come?”

“Because I want to be with you,” he says simply.

A small smile plays over her lips. “Good” is all she says.

But she’s thinking that she’s found Mr. Right at last.

J
ennie wakes with a start.

Oh, God, you’ve been sleeping. . . . How could you fall asleep?
she scolds herself, looking around the room. She’s still sitting up with her knees up against her chest, and the bedside lamp is still on. She looks toward the window and sees dim light filtering through. It’s morning, and the storm is still ranting outside.