Darkness Before the Dawn (Maggie Bennett 2)

Slowly he sat up beside her and waited until his voice was steady and his breathing had quieted. “If you’re that good already,” he drawled, his voice cool and distant, “I can’t wait till you’ve had a little practice.” And he’d sat and watched her withdraw, close in on herself without a word. And then he’d watched her as she slept.

Randall tossed back the brandy with less than his usual respect, slammed the snifter down on the fake antique furniture, and headed for the bathroom. Damn Maggie Bennett. By the time this was over, he’d be able to forget her. That was a promise, and he never broke his promises to himself. To others, perhaps, but not to himself.

But he never lied to himself, either, not if he could help it. As he stood under the icy beads of a cold shower, he wondered whether it was going to be a promise he had any chance of keeping.

six

When Maggie awoke the next morning, she was lying fully clothed in the guest-room bed. The sheets were tangled around her body, and she had no memory at all of how she had got there. Her head was pounding and throbbing, her mouth tasted like dust, and her spirits had plummeted even lower. For a moment she considered burrowing down under the sheets, bursting into tears, and hiding away from everything she didn’t want to face. But Kate would have left for work hours ago—there was no one to witness her weakness. And Maggie Bennett was made of stern stuff. She threw back the covers and staggered, moaning, to the shower.

She was standing in the tub and turning around under the stinging spray of the shower when full consciousness returned. And she remembered what shower she was standing in.

She screamed and jumped out of the tub, bringing down the new shower curtain that Kate had bought the day before, and then collapsed on the toilet seat, shaking. “Hell and damnation,” she said out loud in a shaky voice, pushing her sopping hair away from her face. She was tough, but nothing on this earth was going to make her get back in that shower.

She leaned over, turned off the spray, and headed down the hallway to her sister’s bathroom to finish her shower. Her wet feet left a trail of footprints on the pale gray carpet. The living room curtains were open letting in a flood of pale yellow sunlight, and Randall Carter sat on the couch watching her.

Her Scandinavian blood had left her essentially unconcerned about her nude body, but having Randall see her was another matter. She would have preferred Jack the Ripper. She could feel the flush covering her pale skin as she met his incurious gaze. “Pervert,” she said, and kept walking. His soft laugh followed her.

By the time she climbed into Kate’s shower, she was well and truly awake. She stalled as long as she could. There was no question but that Randall would be there when she emerged, but she intended to be completely in control before she made her second appearance of the day. Kate kept aspirin in her medicine chest, makeup under the sink, perfumes and skin creams and everything a sybaritic female could want. That Kate usually had only minimal interest in such things didn’t pass Maggie unnoticed.

Maggie washed her hair, blew it dry, shaved her legs, flossed and brushed her teeth, rubbed Chanel 22 body cream all over her skin, gave herself a manicure, a pedicure, and a facial mask, discovered a partially done crossword puzzle in the trash and completed it in eyebrow pencil, and finished it all with stretching exercises. It was damned hard to stretch an almost-six-foot-tall body in a six-foot bathroom, but she managed—the thought of Randall in the living room waiting spurred her on. She tried not to think much about Randall Carter, but one thing was indelibly etched in her memory: He hated, he absolutely detested, to be kept waiting. She doubted he’d learned patience in the last six years.

She had no choice but to make use of Kate’s silk Chinese bathrobe, which didn’t do much to cover her statuesque proportions. Now, if she really had guts, she told herself, she’d walk back down that hall stark naked, just to show him how little he mattered to her. But that much guts she was sadly lacking, and even the skimpy turquoise silk bathrobe was too revealing to be completely comfortable.

He was still sitting where she’d left him, immaculate and at ease, the Italian gray suit fitting him to perfection. He’d helped himself to coffee, in Kate’s best Limoges cups, of course, and he lounged, if Randall could ever be said to lounge, on the wide white sofa with his long legs stretched out in front of him.

He looked up when she reappeared in the hallway, and his gray eyes swept over her, impassive as always.

“Still here?” she demanded.

“Still here,” he replied. “Did you expect otherwise?”

“No. But one always hopes.” The animosity in her own voice startled her. She wasn’t that sort of person. But her outward hostility disturbed her far more than it seemed to disturb him. Carefully she pulled her self-possession back around her. “You could get me a cup of that coffee while I dress. I drink it with cream.”

His faint smile was hardly reassuring. “I remember,” he said. “Do you want anything to eat? Your sister left some croissants.”

“Sounds good,” she said with equal courtesy. “I’ll take one with grapefruit marmalade.” Better to attack, she thought, than to wait for him to bring it up.

She didn’t waste any time dressing, making do with faded jeans and an oversize cotton shirt. Randall hated jeans, hated casual clothes. She left her feet bare as a final act of defiance.

In the full daylight of her sister’s living room, she got her first good look at him in six years. He’d aged, of course. That handsome face of his had new lines, lines that certainly hadn’t come from smiling, she thought as she accepted the coffee, being careful not to touch him. No gray in his hair yet, no drooping of skin and muscle. It was his eyes that were old, she realized. Their expression belonged to a man twice hi

s age. He’d already seen too much when she’d known him before—what more had he seen in the last few years?

He waited until she’d seated herself in the overstuffed chair where she’d spent most of last night, then went calmly, gently on the attack. “Why did you scream and rip the shower curtain down?”

She’d taken a sip of the coffee, and the blissfully strong caffeine was flowing through her veins. She didn’t even falter; she lifted her eyes to meet his. “The hot water shut off, and I got a blast of ice water,” she said.

“How long did it take you to come up with that answer?”

“I would have had plenty of time while I was in Kate’s room,” she replied. “But actually, I just thought of it right now. Pretty good for spur of the moment.”

“Not good enough. Did you kill Francis Ackroyd in that bathtub?”

She leaned back, considering him for a moment. “Did Bud Willis send you here to extricate us?” she demanded, refusing to answer his question.

“No.”

“Let me rephrase that. Did Bud Willis send you to Chicago three days ago?”