Hush (2 page)

The problem was, none of the three of them had ever had to work for money in their lives, and they were floundering. Whereas, until she'd married Jeff, she'd always had to work if she wanted to eat and have a roof over her head, so she had the whole get-a-second-job-if-you-have-to thing down.

Jeff didn't even have the whole get-a-first-job thing down.

When she'd become part of their family, she'd never been anything but poor, never lived in anything except run-down apartments. Her only travel had been an occasional summer trip by car to Florida. The rich, glamorous Cowans had been as alien to her as if they'd been from Mars. Margaret, Jeff's mother, was one of Houston's leading socialites. She could have treated her new daughter-in-law like dirt, could have looked down her nose, could have been snobby and cold to her. Instead Margaret had embraced her, treating Rily like a daughter from the moment Jeff had showed up with her. She'd taught her how to dress, how to navigate the upper echelons of society, how to do the philanthropy thing. When they'd had money, they had showered her with everything that money could buy. Now that they didn't, now that they'd suffered this humiliating, terrifying fall from
grace, she wasn't about to turn her back on them. They were her family now. She would help them if she could, any way she could. And Jeff knew that about her. It was, he'd told her, one of the reasons he'd fallen in love with her.

“Jeff?”
Okay, she was screeching now.

Her voice was still echoing off the walls as she paused at the first arched doorway to her left. It opened into a corridor that led to the green salon, the sunroom, and the music room. An identical arched doorway to her right led to the library and the card room and the conservatory. When she'd first arrived at Oakwood, she'd thought,
Geez, who has rooms like that?
Now it seemed normal to have pretentiously named rooms that were rarely used.

“Jeff?”

Still no answer. Jeff was probably either in the billiards room, which had built-in cushioned benches that could double as a bed, or out back in the pool area, she calculated. Either choice required her to traverse thousands of square feet of unnervingly empty house. She figured that a better idea would be to first go through the gathering room—a fancy name for what was really a big family room—and check out the pool area, which might save her from needing to go all the way down to the lower level, where the billiards room was located.

It would serve him right if I just turned around and left.

But Riley knew she wouldn't, because to do so would undoubtedly mean spending the rest of the night worrying about him.

Jeff, you ass.

Her phone was already clutched tightly in her hand: she
pressed a button and held it up, using it as a flashlight. The faint white beam was woefully inadequate, but it was all she had. She continued on toward the gathering room with dogged determination, refusing to let a little thing like a huge, dark, echoingly empty house spook her.

Yeah, right. Who are you kidding?

“Jeff?”
she shouted again.

The twin white marble staircases with their black wrought iron railings curved like swans' necks over her head to meet up on the second-floor landing. Faint sounds—a creak, a hiss, a rattle—­made her breath catch. She shot a quick glance upward, then aimed the beam of light that way. Nothing but a whole lot of dark. Any one of the sounds might have been made by Jeff, but then again, they could have been made by anything. Houses settle, she reminded herself firmly as she continued on, but that didn't really help the creeping uneasiness that was making the back of her neck prickle.

The mansion felt . . . alive. That was the only way she knew how to describe it. There was a kind of pulsing energy to it that was distinctly unsettling. It was almost like the house had a heartbeat that was throbbing around her. If she'd been imaginative, which thank God she wasn't, she would have sworn that she could hear it breathing.

That she could hear
something
breathing.

Get a grip, Riley.

If there was any breathing going on, who was it going to be but Jeff? If, say, he was passed out somewhere nearby and hadn't heard her calling him.

On the other hand, it could be anyone—or any
thing.

Her heart thumped.

Don't be such a wimp,
she told herself impatiently. But as she neared the end of the hall, as darkness swallowed her up and her makeshift flashlight found the closed, arched double doors that opened into the gathering room, she had to admit that she was (maybe just a little bit) afraid. And that ticked her off more than anything else so far.

She'd already texted Jeff when she'd arrived. Now she phoned him, using her index finger to savagely punch his call button. When she heard the muffled sound of his phone ringing—she knew the sound of his ringtone as well as she knew her own—she stiffened, listening.

He was close.

The sound cut off after four rings as his phone went to voice mail, but not before she had zeroed in on its location: the gathering room. Which was directly in front of her. Riley frowned. If he was in there, no way he hadn't heard her yelling for him. Either he'd just come inside from the pool, or he had his earphones in, or he was in there passed out. Or he'd left his phone in there and he was elsewhere, a less likely option because he was rarely separated from his phone.

In any case, she knew where to start looking. She took the few steps needed to reach the heavy double doors and pushed them open.

After the darkness at the end of the hall, the moonlight flooding the huge room made it seem almost bright.

“Jeff?”

Her shoes sounded especially loud on the marble as she walked through the doorway and looked around. In here, the
faint musty smell had an acidic overtone that she couldn't quite place. The room was the approximate size of a gymnasium, all white marble with a domed ceiling, half a dozen French doors looking out onto the pool area, a huge carved-marble fireplace at one end, and a gallery—the backside of the second-floor landing—running its length. The modest two-bedroom brick house she'd grown up in would have fit in this one room twice over, a fact that she had once found impossibly intimidating. What she'd learned since could be summed up in four words: mo' money, mo' problems. Once upon a time, she wouldn't have believed that, certainly not when she was back in Philly scrambling for every dollar.

If Jeff was in the gathering room she couldn't see him, but then again shadows lay everywhere and the silvery moonlight didn't quite reach the corners, which made them as dark as the end of the hall. She really didn't scare easily but right now, under these particular circumstances, she discovered that she was . . . uneasy. She didn't like having her stomach flutter, or her pulse quicken. She didn't like having her heart pound like it knew something she didn't.

She didn't like being here, period.

“Jeff?”
Now
that
was loud. Her voice bounced off the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the resulting echoes putting her even more on edge than before. No answer, either, which ratcheted up her annoyance to a whole new level.

This is the last time I go running after you,
she promised her ex-husband silently, on the verge of doing what she knew was the smart thing: turning around and leaving him to sort out his own damned mess.

Instead, lips tight with impatience, she scanned the shadowy corners. Could he be passed out on the floor in one of them? Narrowing her eyes and focusing on the darkest part of the room, she pressed the redial button on her phone so it would call him back and pinpoint his (or the phone's) location. At the same time, she stared hard at one corner in particular, on the left side of the fireplace well beyond the reach of the moonlight. She got the jittery-making feeling that someone was there, and directed her phone/flashlight beam toward it accordingly.

Her voice was sharp. “Jeff! Are you—?”

She broke off abruptly as, behind her, Jeff's phone rang, so close it startled her. Doing a quick about-face, she saw nothing but moonlight and shifting shadows.

Puzzled, she peered into the gloom, the words
Damn it, Jeff
just about to fall from her lips.

Then his phone rang again, making her look up. One of the shadows resolved itself into a pair of bare masculine feet dangling limply in the air a little higher than her head.

Riley blinked. The feet were still there.

Her throat tightened.

Long, slim feet. Slightly crooked toes.

She knew them.

Oh, God.
She
knew
them.

Riley stopped breathing. She stopped everything. Time seemed to stretch out into an eternity between one heartbeat and the next. She stared at the feet while her stunned mind did its best to reject what she was seeing.

The ringtone blared once more. The sense of being caught in a moment out of time shattered. Riley sucked in air. It was
Jeff's ringtone. From Jeff's phone. Following the sound, her gaze slid up over lean bare calves. He was wearing black gym shorts, a black tee: exercise clothes. The phone was
there,
probably in the waterproof pouch he clipped inside his shorts for exercise or swimming, on the lifeless body that hung motionless not ten feet away.

Jeff's
lifeless body.

Riley's heart lurched. Her stomach dropped straight down to her toes.

There was no mistake: the moonlight streaming in through the French doors touched on Jeff's blond hair. Fine and pale, it was one of the first things she had noticed about him when he had swept her off her feet in Philly all those years ago.

She must have made some kind of strangled sound, because her throat ached like something wild and fierce had just torn its way out of it. She didn't remember inching forward, but suddenly she was close enough to discover that what she smelled was the ammonia­like odor of pee: he had wet himself.

Jeff. My God.

Limp and pale, he hung suspended in midair.

Unable to believe what her eyes were telling her, Riley touched his leg. It was solid, all muscle and bone. Of course it was: Jeff was a runner. The fine hairs on it felt silky. His skin was warm. Did that mean . . . ?

She tried to call out to him, but no sound emerged. His wrist was out of reach. Frantically she grabbed his ankle, felt for a pulse.

Nothing. No beat. His leg was heavy and inert.

She let go, and his whole body moved, but not in a good way.
He swung a little, back and forth, from where she had tugged on his leg.

Horror surged through her in an icy tide.

Holy Mary, Mother of God
 . . .

In this moment of extremis, the teachings of her childhood took over: the Catholic prayer for the dead unspooled with frantic urgency through her head.

Hands shaking now, Riley drew back a step and ran the light from her phone over him.

His head was tilted at an odd angle. Something narrow was wrapped around his neck, digging into the skin beneath his jaw.

His face was dark. Purplish. His handsome features were hideously contorted.

His eyes were open. They gleamed dully as the beam hit them.

He didn't blink. His pupils were fixed. Unseeing.

It hit Riley then like a thunderclap:
Jeff
was hanging by the neck from the gallery railing. He was
dead
.

Agony exploded inside her chest.

Oh, God. Oh, God
.

A scream ripped into her already aching throat, where the constriction of the muscles there strangled it before it could escape.

Everything seemed to blur. The room spun. Her phone fell from her suddenly nerveless fingers. Realization merged with grief merged with fear, combining into a deadly lance that stabbed her through the heart.

Jeff
.
Oh, God. Jeff.

Her knees gave out abruptly, and she crumpled to the floor.

THE CLATTER
of her phone hitting marble was unexpected. The sharp sound made Finn stiffen. But there was no threat to him, and his mind recognized that even as his body responded instinctively to the unexpected noise by reaching for his gun.

Chill out. Wait.

His hand dropped.

Still concealed by the darkness that she had almost breached with her makeshift flashlight, he watched her sink to her knees, watched her head drop forward to meet them, watched her shudder and shake. He knew who she was, of course. It was his business to know all the players in the game. Even before moonlight had touched the bright flame of her hair, even before he'd gotten a look at the beautiful, fine-boned face and slender, shapely figure that had prompted the only son of a billionaire to marry Little Miss Nobody from Nowhere (which was what Houston's catty female upper crust called her behind her back), he'd recognized her voice.

After all, he'd been listening in on her phone conversations with Jeffy-boy for the last couple of days.

Riley Wozniak Cowan. With her blue-collar Philly roots and her matching Yankee accent, which by itself was enough to make her voice a stand-out in this world of the slow Texas drawl.

Watching her now as she huddled there on the floor, clearly in the grip of strong emotion, he felt nothing, no pity, no concern, only a mild impatience as he waited for the shock to wear off, for her to start to cry, to scream, to run away.

She did none of those things. After a long moment, she picked up her phone. Then she got to her feet, stuck her phone
down inside the small purse that hung from her shoulder, and stepped close to the corpse. She was wearing a snug little white dress with a short skirt and sky-high heels, and Finn couldn't help but notice the long, slim line of her legs as she went way up on her toes and her hemline rode up her thighs almost to the curve of her ass.