Fatal Affair: 1 (Courthouse Connections) (4 page)

“I went onstage for my shift,” she told JD,
explaining how she’d humped the pole to the beat of a raucous rendition of “Let
Me Entertain You” while scanning the crowded, smoke-filled room until she
picked out her potential mark.

“He was a stranger, not too big—in fact not
intimidating at all. His clothes looked expensive and his chestnut-colored hair
was neatly combed. He couldn’t drag his gaze away from the glitter on my pussy.
His tongue shot out between slack lips as if he could hardly wait to taste me.”
The bastard had made her think he intended to devour her the way she might go
after a strawberry sundae on a hot, steamy day.

“Once I decided he’d do as my first and
only customer for full-blown sex, I kept on looking at him as I shrugged off
the black negligee and spread my legs for him. I watched him motion to a waiter
and tuck a folded bill into his hand along with a message he’d scribbled on a
napkin. Even before the waiter handed me the message, the man disappeared.”

* * * * *

She got his message, though.
All night.
Upstairs, room two. I’ll make it worth your while.

That was all he’d said. Her stage act
finished half an hour later, Lanie stuffed the money customers had tucked in
her thong into her bag. Although the tips seemed to be decent, she could tell
without counting that they were way short of the eight hundred she needed.

She hurried up the darkened stairs,
trembling at the prospect of spending the entire night with the stranger. Never
mind that she’d zeroed in on him because he’d looked unintimidating. This
wasn’t going to come easily to her.

Come off it. It’s not as if you’re a
virgin or anything. Not that a few backseat tumbles with ham-handed teenage
boys are likely to have given much of an idea what an all-night encounter with
a grown man will be like…

She paused outside the door and tried to
convince herself that fucking a stranger wasn’t all that much different from
fucking a casual boyfriend after he’d paid for her ride ticket at the
Strawberry Festival.

Finally composed, she pasted a smile on her
face, unfastened the tie on her negligee and turned the knob on the door to the
room he’d indicated. When she stepped inside, she found her john stark-naked,
lying in the middle of the large couch in the corner.

It looked as though he’d passed out. Lanie
gasped when she went closer and saw those strange, icy-blue eyes open but
staring up at the cracking plaster on the ceiling. When she touched his chest
she couldn’t feel a heartbeat. About to scream, she bolted for the door to
throw it open but a strong, calloused hand reached out and clamped down hard
over her mouth. Its mate grasped her naked belly, keeping her from escaping.

“He’s dead. We’d better get out of here now
before somebody finds us here. Unless of course you want to be charged with
killing him.”

When she bit down on his palm, he jerked
his hand away.

“I didn’t—”

“Somebody did but never mind. I hear
somebody moving outside. Keep quiet and follow me. Trust me, we don’t want to
be found in here.”

“Let me go. I have to let the boss know…”
She tried to jerk free but he wouldn’t let go. Terrified, she stood there
shaking, her feet feeling as though glued to the floor.

Then he jerked at her arm. “He’ll find out
soon enough. Now kick off those stupid heels and come with me. We’ve got to get
out of here.”

As he practically dragged her out the back
door she heard a series of loud booms. When she glanced back at the club she
saw it was engulfed in flames. People poured out of every available door and
window into the parking lot, like rats leaving a sinking ship.

* * * * *

A dead john and another stranger
dragging her from the scene of the crime.
No wonder
Lanie was shaking as though what she just recounted had taken place last night
rather than years ago. JD picked her up and took her to the living room, where
he sat on the recliner, holding her on his lap and rubbing her back and
shoulders until she stopped trembling.

“That had to be awful, sweetheart, but you
still haven’t told me how whatever happened in the club brought you and the
senator together.”

She shifted in his arms so she could meet
his gaze. “Wayne was the man who dragged me out of the room with the body. I
assumed at the time that they had been having sex when the other man suffered a
heart attack or something.”

It didn’t shock JD to hear that the senator
was gay, or at least bisexual. What did surprise him was the fact that the
consummate political animal he knew slightly had been stupid enough to fuck
around in a sleazy strip club, whether with another man or a woman. “So what
happened after you two left the burning building?”

Lanie sighed. “He dragged me up the hill
behind the club to a beat-up pickup parked on an old dirt road. Then we just
sat there while he watched the place burn down. I realized he’d been waiting
for somebody else when a short, stocky man slid behind the wheel of the truck
and started the engine. I only found out later that night that I was with
Wayne—and Bert Davies, his campaign manager.”

Having dealt with Davies on behalf of
several corporate clients, JD wouldn’t put much of anything past the cagey
political puppeteer. He didn’t have that much better an opinion of Lanie’s
estranged husband, but he doubted that Winstead possessed the cunning to
manipulate even a young, inexperienced girl the way it was beginning to look as
if Lanie had been set up.

She looked up at him, then focused her gaze
on the empty fireplace. “For a long time the guys sat there watching rain pour
down and turn the blaze we’d escaped into smoking embers. Then they started to
look at me as though I were a skittish bull and they were planning to ride me
at the rodeo. It scared me when Bert started commenting about how I didn’t look
much like a hooker with my makeup all washed off. He scared me when he said
something about Wayne’s halfwit boyfriend having caused the trouble.

“I’ll never forget the look on Bert’s face
when Wayne pointed out to him that they had at least one witness to whatever
had gone on down at the club. I must have shrunk away from them as I tried to
figure how I could get out of the truck, but then Bert told me to calm down and
that he had a plan for all of us to come out of this on top.”

JD wanted to find Davies and the senator
and tear them limb from limb for what they’d done to Lanie. Never mind that
she’d been stripping for a living. Never mind that she’d apparently intended to
move on to prostitution that fateful night.

He slid his fingers through the dark silk
of her hair, tilting her head so he could meet her frightened gaze. “You were
just twenty years old and desperate. You have nothing to feel guilty about. Now
Davies and the senator, that’s another story. One thing that puzzles me,
though, is why Winstead, if he’s gay, had a boyfriend who was trying to buy the
services of a female prostitute?”

Lanie shook her head. “Apparently the dead
guy and Wayne had been lovers for a long time, but the lover—a man named Barry
Sumner—had a habit of luring and killing female hookers. From what they said
that night, I assume that when Barry was about to be arrested several years
earlier, Bert placed him in a private, long-term mental hospital in California.
He stayed there, locked away from temptation, until his psychiatrists decided
he was cured and let him out. Barry came back to Hillsborough County and took
up with Wayne again. According to Wayne, he followed Barry to the club and went
upstairs to be certain that Barry wouldn’t kill again.”

“So who killed Barry? And who set the club
on fire?” JD wouldn’t put it past Davies to commit murder. About the senator,
he wasn’t so sure.

“I don’t know who killed Barry. Wayne swore
he hadn’t touched Barry, that he was already dead at the time he went into the
room. I thought Bert had set the club on fire until I read later that the fire
had started in bags of fertilizer the owner had stored in an unused dressing
room. The fire marshal ruled that the fire was caused by spontaneous
combustion.”

That fire seemed mighty convenient to JD,
but then he was neither a firefighter nor a detective. “Tell me about this pact
you made that’s kept you a virtual prisoner for the last eight years.”

“The way Bert explained, it was simple
enough. I’d marry Wayne and pretend to be the devoted wife so his potential
constituents wouldn’t have reason to question his sexual preferences, and in
return Wayne would take care of me financially and pay for the rest of my
education. He could have his affairs and so could I, as long as we made sure to
be discreet about it. None of us would ever mention what had happened at the
club.

“At the time I thought I’d made the best
choice possible. Sure, I didn’t think very highly of either man—especially
Bert. I knew I wouldn’t have to spend much time around him, though. As for
Wayne, he was no great human being either, but he
had
dragged me out of
the club before the fire could roast me alive. I wanted to get ahead. I figured
dealing with one asshole who had money and didn’t mind spending it on my
education if I’d be his beard would beat hooking and continuing to scrape for
every penny.”

“What do you think now, Lanie?”

“I know better now. I made the wrong
choice. I realized that a while ago, but only in the past month or so have I
mustered up the strength to try to break free.”

JD turned her in his arms, wishing he could
make her feel better, both about the choices she’d made and the one she was
making now. “You know, I wondered when we made love the first time how you
could seem so inexperienced. You never had sex with the senator, did you?”

“No.”

“You never had an affair before, either,
until last weekend.” He didn’t have to ask—he knew instinctively because he’d
seen and felt her sexual inexperience.

She shook her head. “We had an agreement—an
open marriage—but I thought I’d done enough wrong by agreeing to marry Wayne in
the first place. It seemed bad to add adultery to my long list of crimes, not
to mention that I never ran across a man I wanted enough to violate what was
left of my principles. Until I met you.”

“You’re not a bad person. You never have
been. You’ve got to believe that.” JD brushed away a tear that had made its way
down Lanie’s cheek.

“I’m trying to. It’s my past, though, that
Bert is threatening to use to keep me married to Wayne. He’s threatened to ruin
me, wreck my career if I go ahead with the divorce.”

JD felt like chasing down Bert Davies and
strangling the life out of the sleazy bastard. “I won’t let him hurt you,” he
told Lanie, though he wasn’t quite sure what he could do, short of murder, to
protect her. “Come on—let’s forget all this for a while. I believe I promised
you that the next time we made love we’d do it in a bed, when neither of us was
pressed for time.”

He stood, still holding her, amazed she’d
retained that aura of innocence in spite of all she’d experienced. “There’s so
damn much I want to show you, so much pleasure I want us to share. Most of all
I want to drive all the bad memories out of your beautiful head and replace
them with ones you’ll remember in sweet dreams, not nightmares.”

When he set her on her feet in the bedroom,
her gaze settled on the bed. A king-size or better with a heavy-looking carved
headboard and footboard, it dominated the small bedroom. At some time before
she’d arrived, he’d turned back an appliquéd quilt to reveal snowy-white bed
linens. Two plump pillows had been propped invitingly against the headboard and
four colorful silk ties slid sensually on their surface as though JD intended
to tease her with them.

While Lanie hadn’t given much thought
earlier today to her physical needs, seeing that bed reminded her of the
adventurous sexual journey JD had promised her they’d take together.
Surrounding a huge, thick mattress, the dark wooden frame had a substantial
look about it—a look of strength, of safety. It was as though the bed offered a
reassuring promise of his caring, his dominance.

She unglued her gaze from the bed and
looked up at him. “You planned on this, didn’t you?”

His grin made her go all warm and fuzzy
inside. “I hoped. Lanie, there are so many things I want to say but I can’t
find the words. Hell, it will be okay if you want to keep this platonic for
now. It may kill me to wait but I’m ready to show you that it’s not just casual
sex I’m looking for with you.”

She wasn’t certain what she needed from JD,
but it definitely wasn’t platonic friendship. She’d had that with Wayne for
long enough to realize that without sex, there was something vital missing from
a relationship—not that all the time they’d spent together had been unpleasant.

“We don’t need to wait. I want you too. I
just hope you still want me now that you know about…everything.” It had
surprised her that he’d taken her sordid story without closing himself off from
her. Hell, she’d expected him to shove her into her car and send her away.

She wouldn’t have blamed him if he had been
horrified, and she wouldn’t be surprised if the shock hit him later when he had
the chance to mull over what she’d done. “You’re sure?”

“Come here and I’ll show you just how sure
I am that I want you.” He held out his hands, inviting her to step into his
embrace. When she did, he wrapped both arms around her, nuzzling her throat,
nipping at the pulse point above her collarbone. Then he set her at arm’s
length and bent over her.

Using his teeth, he unzipped the collar of
her sweater, his breath hot on her flesh. He toyed with the soft fabric, then
reached under it to trace the line of her bra.

“Will you strip for me?”

His eyes, shuttered by those long lashes
she envied, traveled the length of her body as though he was seeing her again
on that Key West beach, wanting her to lose her inhibitions and do a striptease
for him in broad daylight. “Will you watch?”