The tone, more than the actual words, stopped him cold. He’d heard that tone before, the sunny day eighteen years ago when the police chief had shown up on his grandfather’s doorstep.
“I’m sorry, Sebastian. I don’t want to be standing here any more than you want me to, but I didn’t want you to hear from strangers. There’s been a terrible accident…”
Adrenaline spewed nastily, prompting Dylan to turn toward Zito. The white porch rail and neatly trimmed hedges blurred, but the grim-faced detective looked carved of stone.
“Knew what?” Dylan bit out.
“There was some kind of struggle,” Zito said. “Someone took a fire poker to the side of his head. He probably never even knew what hit him.”
“Never knew what hit him?”
His friend frowned. “Looks like the end came pretty damn fast.”
Horror slammed in, hard. Shock numbed the pain. Lance. His smooth, invincible cousin. The St. Croix prince. Dead. Just like so many St. Croixs before him.
“The ex called 911,” Zito added. “She was pretty incoherent.”
The point-blank statement jolted Dylan back from the whirring vortex like a frayed lifeline. “B-Bethany?”
“The first officers on the scene found her in the living room wearing a torn nightgown.”
“She’s alive?”
“Found the body…or so she says.” Zito glanced at a small notebook in his hands and shook his head. “Story’s got more holes than the ozone layer.”
Dylan swore softly. For the past forty minutes, images of Bethany hurt and bleeding, dead, had tortured him. Now…
Lance.
Jagged emotion cut in from all directions, but Dylan didn’t miss Zito’s insinuation.
“You think she did it?”
“It’s her house, her fire poker, her ex. The blood was on her hands.” Zito shrugged, shook his head. “I count my blessings when Pam was done with me, she was content to sign a few damn papers. Don’t know why people have to complicate a good divorce with murder.”
Blood on her hands.
The image formed before he could block it, turning everything inside him stone cold. Disbelief surged. Too well, he knew how misleading Bethany’s porcelain-figurine exterior could be. Intimately, he knew there was nothing she couldn’t accomplish, if she put her mind to it. Hell, she’d cut him out of her life with the ruthless precision of a heart surgeon. But murder?
“Where is she?” He needed to see her, to—
To nothing.
Zito flipped his notebook shut. “Out back, by the pool.”
“Is she…hurt?”
“A nasty blow on the side of her head, but no concussion.”
Dark spots clouded Dylan’s vision. “Someone hit her?”
“Maybe. Or maybe she hit herself.”
Revulsion knocked up against disbelief. He’d heard worse, a young woman slashing her throat with a steak knife to cover the fact she’d killed her lover, but Bethany…
“I want to talk to her.”
“This is a crime scene. I can’t have you contaminating—”
“Her, damn it! I want her.”
Zito cocked an eyebrow.
“You’ve already taken her statement,” Dylan reminded, fighting a pounding urgency he didn’t understand. “What do you think I’m going to do? Tell her how to change her story?”
Zito’s dry smile said just that. “Stranger things have happened.”
“Ten minutes, Zito. You can listen to every word. Just let me see her.” He had to. God, he had to. He didn’t know why, just knew that he needed to look into those languid blue eyes and see if he saw a murderer looking back at him.
Zito sighed, motioning for Dylan to follow him around the wide porch. “Five minutes.”
The side of the house boasted a wall of windows, giving Dylan a distorted view into Bethany’s world. The thick, beveled glass denied detail, but not impression. Everywhere he looked, shades of white glared back at him—flooring, furniture, art.
Near the back of the house, French doors hung open, revealing another room, where a sheet lay draped over a form near the fireplace. Three uniformed cops stood around talking, while two technicians examined the fire poker. A photographer busily recorded the scene.
“No matter how hard it is, boys, we go on. From now on, I’ll be more like a father, than a grandfather. And you’ll be more like brothers than cousins.”
“But you’re not my father!” eleven-year-old Dylan raged. “And he’s not my brother! We don’t even like each other.”
“Then you’ll just have to pretend, won’t you?”
“It’s the St. Croix way,” thirteen-year-old Lance added, earning his grandfather’s approving smile. “It’s not so bad once you get used to it.”
But there was no pretending now. Lance, the complicated cousin who’d never become a brother despite how hard Dylan tried, really did lie dead on the living room floor. And apparently Bethany had blood on her hands.
Remorse clogged Dylan’s throat, the hopes and dreams of two very different little boys who’d grown up to fall in love with the same woman. Somehow, he kept walking.
“She’s just around the corner,” Zito said.
Dylan stopped before turning, taking in the elaborate cabana and pool area. In the distance, the fading light of early evening cast the Cascades a giant, misshapen shadow against a horizon streaked with shades of crimson.
Even the sky seemed to be bleeding.
And then, for only the second time since that cold night on the mountain, when a snowstorm had shattered the preternatural indifference he’d lived with for six years, he saw her.
“She’s all yours,” Zito indicated with a sweep of his hand.
A hard sound of denial broke from Dylan’s throat. Zito couldn’t be more wrong. Bethany Rae Kincaid had never been all his. Never all anyone’s.
But still, his heart kicked, hard. And the years between them crumbled, just like they had on the mountain.
The ice princess, they’d called her in high school. She held herself apart from the world, refusing to fully give, fully surrender herself to anyone, least of all Dylan. Except when they’d been in bed. Then, she’d literally come apart in his arms. But after, after she’d always sewn herself up a little tighter.
Some things never changed.
The sight of her sitting in a chaise lounge, holding a black-and-white cat and staring toward the mountains, stirred something he’d thought finally dead. Her long chestnut hair was tangled, her creamy skin alarmingly pale. Blood stained her slinky ivory robe. Her feet were bare.
“Pink or red?”
She looked at him, laughing. “What?”
“Your toenails,” he said, running his hand along her high arch. “I want to paint them. Pink or red?”
The memory cut in from somewhere long forgotten, prompting Dylan to swear softly. In the end, she’d chosen red. At her wedding, she’d worn pink.
That damning, defining night in the cabin, there’d been no color at all.
Dylan clenched his