Vengeance to the Max (36 page)

She woke to Witt’s big body enveloping her. He snored lightly in her ear, a comforting, soothing sound of life, of normalcy. Warm and sated, she fit the spoon he created. She pulled the covers over her shoulder.

She thought of Cameron’s touch, and an unsettling sense of disloyalty threw off the last vestiges of sleep. Disloyalty to Witt. She should have been dreaming about him. Instead, as always, it was Cameron. Cameron whom she’d robbed of the one thing he’d sought, the ability to make love to his wife.

“You robbed yourself.” Cameron glimmered before her, his ethereal breath bathing her face.

“I love you,” she whispered aloud. “I’m sorry we never made love, not really.”

“We did in our dreams.”

Her throat clogged and the back of her eyes ached for the mess she’d made of her life with Cameron.

Against her back, Witt stirred. She must have been sleeping on his side of the bed, the clock was next to her. Half past eleven. They’d tumbled naked into his bed amid crisp white sheets and fallen asleep without making love again. She’d thought of waking him in the middle of the night...

She’d banked her blood lust for Bud Traynor, but she couldn’t forsake her vow to Wendy.

She had an hour and a half to sneak out, get to her car, or Sutter’s, and find the Rolls Royce. In the vision, the clock on the dashboard was the key. Whatever was going to happen would happen at one in the morning. She’d been given directions to the site.

Witt’s penis twitched at her backside, and his arm tightened around her as if her plans had entered his dreams. She’d never get out of the bed without waking him.

Still, she repeated the directions to herself, repeated them until they played endlessly in the back of her mind, like a tune that came back over and over throughout the day.

“You can’t take him with you.”

Cameron’s insistence quaked inside her. He knew something she didn’t. “Why?”

“It’ll never end if you don’t go alone.”

She closed her eyes, snuggling into Witt’s warmth and solidity. “He won’t let me leave.”

Witt mumbled something unintelligible, and both arms enveloped her, pulled her close until their flesh fused with the heat between them.

“There’s a way.”

“What?”

Cameron didn’t answer.

Witt did. “Who ya talking to?” His voice boomed in the quiet bedroom after the softness of Cameron’s in her head.

She didn’t have to answer. He knew. Silence. His body tensed against her back. He smelled of clean sheets, sex they hadn’t washed off, and the distance she’d put between them. She wondered how much he’d heard, how much she’d actually said aloud. Most likely all, which was why his arm shackled her waist.

He’d never understand she had to do whatever it was on her own. He’d never let her go.

The phone rang. It, too, was on the side she’d slept in. Rising on his elbow, Witt reached over her. She said a prayer of thanks. Cop thing, he’d have to go.

He laid back down behind her, his side to her back, his voice a pleasant buzz near her ear. “Calling awfully late, Mom.”

Max plummeted, remembering he was on leave or suspended or whatever the cops called it. His job wouldn’t be calling. No rescue there.

“What’s wrong?” Muscles rigid. “Are you sick ... Jesus, call the doctor.” Max shifted to her back and met his gaze. “I’ll be right there.” His nostrils flared. “And I’m bringing Max.” His blue eyes turned icy. “Why not?” All Max could hear was the frantic murmur of Ladybird’s voice and the utter quiet surrounding Witt. “I’m not leaving her alone.” His whitened fingers clutched the phone. “I don’t give a shit what Horace says.”

Max knew. Cameron had talked to Horace who had talked to Ladybird who had called Witt with an excuse to get him out of the house.

“We’re wasting time. If you’re sick, I’ll—” He sat up. Max lost sight of his face. “What do you mean she’ll die if I don’t leave her?”

God, Ladybird was laying it on thick.

“Fine. I’ll be there.”

Max soared—

He punched a button and turned to Max, his index finger pointing, “But you’re going with me no matter what she says.”

—and took a nose dive.

He rose from the bed, beautiful and unashamed in his nakedness. Digging in a bureau drawer, the muscles of his butt flexing in the moonlight streaming through the window, he turned. “My mother’s sick.”
Maybe
, he added facially. “We gotta go.”

Max sat up, the white sheet pulled to the top of her breasts. “Why don’t I stay here?”

Witt straightened, a pair of briefs, socks, and T-shirt in his hands. Without benefit of overhead lighting, his eyes were steel. So was his voice. He knew he’d been set up. “No.”

“But—”

“You”—his finger stabbed in the air—“are not leaving my side.” He bent, stepped into the underwear, then pulled the T-shirt over his head and down his chest, his skin dark against the snowy white. “We’ve established you need an alibi. Now my mother can testify as well.”

“I’m tired. I want to sleep.”

“Don’t whine.” He grabbed his jeans from the chair he’d thrown them over.

“I’ll be here when you get back.”

Sitting on that same chair, he pulled on socks, then shoes. “It’s where you go in between that worries me.”

“I won’t leave.”

He stopped, hunched, a shoelace in mid-tie. “Don’t lie.”

“Where can I go? I don’t have a car.”

“You want me to disconnect all the phones, too, so you can’t call a taxi? Forget it, Max.” Done with his shoes, he stood and settled the jeans in place with a shake of his legs. “I know you. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. You’ve got one helluva will.”

“I thought that was one of things you loved about me.”

He stared, mouth flat. Okay, so it wasn’t the right time for a quip. She tried another tack. “Your mother said I’ll die if you make me leave with you.”

His fist cleaved the air. “That’s fucking paranormal bullshit. Horace told her that.”

The
F
word wasn’t good. “You said you believed.”

“I believe—” He stopped. “I don’t know what I fucking believe except that I’m not leaving my woman alone with a freak like Traynor out there.” His voice rose with every word until he shouted at her.

His woman. She liked it way too much. Bad timing for that emotion. “You forgot about Bootman.”

“Bootman?”

“The last one. The one who shot Cameron. The one who beat me and kicked me and raped me and left me for dead.” Harsh, unrelenting words, she used them to make her case, but guilt tightened the muscles of her throat. “He’s out there.”

He closed his eyes and put his head back, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. “All the more reason not to leave you alone.”

“You said you loved me, Witt.”

He looked at her, not a muscle moving, his eyes unreadable. “I do. But you’re obsessed with Traynor. Don’t try to kid me it’s about Bootman.” He fairly spat the name at her.

She didn’t try to answer the accusation in his words, or lie. “You said you loved me.” She stopped, let the words sink in, letting him know by the tilt of her chin that she wasn’t finished. “But you never said you trusted me.”

His aura of emotions—rage, pain, and powerlessness—shimmered around him. “Don’t ask me to do this.”

“I will never ask you to stop being a cop.” She hoped he’d have his life back soon. “You’d wither without it.”

“It’s my job.”

“It’s who you are. I’ll never ask you to change for me. I’d never want you to. I love you the way you are.”

“So you’re saying if I truly love you, I have to let you go.”

“I’m asking you to let me fight my own battle, to not expect me to change now when the stakes have never been higher. Is that so much?”

His fists clenched, released, clenched. “You watched your husband die.” He shook his head slowly. “Don’t make me step back and do the same thing.”

“If you don’t, I’ll die anyway.”

“I’ll keep you safe.”

“Bud Traynor won’t let you.”

He groaned. His knees bent beneath the weight of what she asked. He hit the carpet. “Max, you’re killing me. Don’t ask me to let you go alone.”

She rose from the bed, went to him naked, without bothering to pull the sheet with her or grab a scrap of clothing. She went on her knees in front of him. With her hand to his cheek and her lips only inches from his, she whispered, “Trust me to do this.”

“I don’t know what
this
is.”

“Neither do I. I only know I have to do it.”

His hands skimmed her arms, then came to rest at her waist. Something moist sparkled in his eyes. “If you die, I’m gonna beat you nine ways to Sunday for it.”

She’d won but felt no elation. She didn’t tell him that dying might be part of what she had to do.

“Are you going to kill Traynor?” He knew after all.

She almost said no, but let the lie die on her lips. “If I can.”

Witt pulled away from her as if something had broken between them. “Remember when I asked if your husband had planned to kill Traynor?”

“Yes.”

He stared down at her for a long moment. “I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had. Sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” Another Witticism.

“Or a woman?”

He closed his eyes, opened them two heartbeats later. “Or a woman.”

She wanted to put a hand to his cheek, but didn’t, afraid to touch him again until this thing with Bud was over. She stood with him.

He yanked open the top drawer of the tallboy against the far wall and pulled out a box. It looked like a damn piece of Tupperware. Tossing it on the bed, he marched to his nightstand. The drawer slid, stopped. Moonlight flashed on metal in his hand. A magazine, full of cartridges, she was sure. Returning to the end of the bed, he opened the box with a vacuum whoosh and pulled out a gun.

A Glock 9MM. Like Cameron’s.

He jammed in the magazine, only then looking at her. “I assume you know how to use it?”

“Cameron taught me.” With a
legal
gun that time.

He handed it to her. “Don’t pull the slide until you’re close. There’s no safety, but—”

“I know, I know. There’s a little trigger inside the big trigger, and it won’t go off till you push that in.”

He regarded her, jaw flexing, and let the gun lecture go. “Do what you have to do.”

She held the instrument of Bud Traynor’s death in her hands, and all she felt was weariness. It would be over soon. That was all she had left.

Witt squeezed her hand to the point of pain. “Don’t come back to me dead.”

“I won’t.” She’d do her damnedest not to. Putting the gun back on the bed with extreme gentleness, she looked at him. “What if you need this yourself?”

“I’ve got a feeling you’re gonna need it a helluva lot more than I am.”

He cupped her cheeks and chin in his big hands, his gaze roaming her face, then lowered his mouth to hers. His kiss was sweet, savage, and reached down into her bones. The roughness of his clothing imprinted against her bare skin. Her fingers memorized the set of his shoulders, his arms.