Intimate Strangers Read online

  He was on the edge, desperate to bring her satisfaction before his body demanded fulfillment. Then he spun out of control in a tight spiral of urgent need that shattered in a burst of pleasure so intense that he cried out in wonder.

  He thought he had forged ahead too quickly, and knew a surge of regret. Then he felt her nails digging into the slick flesh of his shoulders, felt her body convulsing under him, around him.

  When the storm had swept past, he shifted his weight off her, taking her with him, holding her in his arms.

  “Thank you,” he said, his voice hoarse with emotion.

  “Thank you.”

  He held on to her, unable to break the connection.

  He knew they had done this in the wrong order. There was so much he needed to say to her. He had to tell her who he was and why he had come to Perry’s Cove. But he was too wrung out, physically and emotionally. And when she snuggled down against him, he felt himself drifting off to sleep, thankful that the dark curtains blocked the morning light.

  He woke once, glad of her warmth beside him. She murmured something he didn’t catch before snuggling back against him.

  The next time he woke, she wasn’t there. When he realized he was alone, he felt a prickle of uneasiness skitter over his skin.

  “Molly?”

  She didn’t answer, and his gaze flicked to the bathroom door. It was open and the room beyond was dark. She wasn’t in there, either.

  Sitting up, he glanced across the floor. Her clothing was missing, but his was still scattered where he’d left it.

  Had she gone out?

  His heart was pounding as he pulled on his slacks. Barefoot and shirtless, he hurried down the hall.

  Relief washed over him when he saw Molly, dressed in her clothing of the night before, standing beside the dining-room table where they’d dumped their luggage. Then he realized what she was doing. She had opened the case with his mask—the case he had forgotten to relock—and had reached inside. As he watched, she held up the mast and looked at it, her face contorting as she smoothed out the ripples in the rubber.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  She jumped and spun to face him, the mask still in her hands. “What the hell is this?” she asked.

  “What the hell are you doing poking through my stuff?” he countered.

  “I was looking for some clean clothing for you.”

  “So you opened the case,” he snapped, defensiveness making his voice more harsh than he intended.

  “It felt light, like it didn’t have anything in it. I wondered why you’d brought it.” She sighed. “But you’re right, I shouldn’t have been prying. Unfortunately, I did,” she added, her voice turning sharp and edgy. “And now I want to know what kind of sick game you’re playing with me.” She gestured toward the mask. “It’s hard to get a fix on this thing in its current form. But it’s Mike Randall’s face, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. I was going to tell you. I was going to tell you as soon as we got here.”

  Her eyes flashed. “You were never going to tell me what you’re up to.”

  “We need to talk,” he answered, his voice going from gritty to raw.

  She gave a sharp laugh, her eyes challenging him as she put the mask back in the case, then sat in one of the large wicker chairs.

  He felt too restless to stay still, but he forced himself to sit in the chair opposite her.

  He wasn’t sure how to say what he knew he had to tell her. So he started with ground they’d trod before. “Like most people in town suspect, I came to Perry’s Cove to investigate the Mike Randall case.”

  “Well, you denied that to me once. Are we making progress?”

  He ignored her sarcastic tone and said, “Somebody in town wanted it to look like he killed his wife. And they did a good job. He was convicted of the crime and sent to prison—where he might have sat and rotted for the rest of his miserable life. Then he read an article about the Light Street Foundation. They offer various charitable services, and they’d just started a program to reexamine the evidence in cases with merit. Mike Randall wrote them a letter, laying out the facts of his case. He was lucky that they took him on.”

  “And you work for the Light Street Foundation?” Molly supplied. “But why did you bring a mask of Mike’s face?”

  “It’s hard to explain. Let me work my way up to it.”

  She gave him a tight nod, and he saw that her hands were gripping the arms of her chair. He was just as tense as she was. In fact, it had become impossible for him to sit still, so he heaved himself out of the chair, paced toward the window and slid the curtains aside so he could look out briefly before turning back to her.

  “Mike Randall wanted to find out who railroaded him into prison. So he came up with a plan to poke around in Perry’s Cove. See, for one thing, he had a fair amount of money at his disposal. The Light Street Foundation makes a hundred-thousand-dollar cash payment to the people they prove innocent.”

  “That’s pretty generous of them.”

  “Yeah. It’s to help them get back on their feet. Probably you could have used something like that after your husband’s death.”

  “Yes,” she murmured. Then, “You’re getting off the subject.”

  “Right. Mike had another source of money, too. There was a million-dollar policy taken out on his wife’s life. A policy he didn’t know about until after she was killed. But he was the beneficiary. It was bought only a couple of months before her death, which was one of the pieces of evidence the prosecutors used to convict him.”

  Molly nodded.

  “After he was convicted of her murder, he forfeited the money, of course. But when he was exonerated, they had to pay out.”

  “A million dollars,” Molly whispered.

  “Yeah. With five years of interest, actually. The Light Street Foundation got them to pay that, too.”

  “A lot of money.”

  “Right. So Mike Randall had plenty of cash to play with. He decided to be really clever.” He swallowed, then went on rapidly while he could force himself to say what he had to.

  “He had plastic surgery on his face to make him look different, and he bought a new identity,” he said, letting those facts sink in. She stared at him, and he knew the exact moment when she put the pieces together.

  “You…” Her voice trailed off in a kind of incredulous wheeze. She looked as if a bomb had gone off next to her. Every rigid line of her face silently begged him to say it wasn’t true.

  He ached to oblige her. He ached to take it all back, to tell her he had simply been making up a story. But neither one of them would have believed that now.

  Swallowing around the boulder in his throat, he said, “Yes. I used to be Mike Randall.”

  She sat there like a doll with the stuffing shaken out of her. But her eyes moved. Her gaze slid over his face, his body.

  “I kept trying to figure out why I thought I knew you. But you’re different. Not just your face.”

  “Yeah.” He didn’t feel any better than he had a few moments ago. But at least now the lie was out in the open. “One of my chief recreational activities in prison was pumping iron. I acquired some new muscles. And my voice is different, too, courtesy of a fellow inmate who slammed his fist into my throat.”

  “Oh.” For a moment she looked sorry that he’d been injured. But almost instantly her features hardened again. “So you’ve been playing games with me since you got here. Like that bull about how you came here before and saw me.”

  “That wasn’t bull. I was here before and I did see you. And I was attracted to you. You must have known that. You must have known that I wanted you from the moment I saw you. Don’t you lie and deny it.”

  He was sorry as soon as he’d said the last part. He had no right to push her on anything. He wanted to go to her, hold her, make her feel the incredible connection between them.

  She had opened her mouth to say something he doubtless didn’t want to hear.

&nbs
p; Before she could speak, he hurried on, trying to soften the harsh words. “You were attracted to me, too, in the old days. But neither one of us would have done anything about it back then because we were both married. Both trapped in bad marriages. At least I know mine was. And from what you’ve told me, life with Phil wasn’t a picnic. But I’m not going to rationalize my feelings for you back then or my feelings for you now. All I know is that when I was in prison, I spent a lot of time thinking about you. Not some other woman. You.”

  “Was I your masturbation fantasy?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way.”

  “How would you put it?”

  “Thinking about you, maintaining a connection with you, helped me keep my sanity.”

  She made a snorting noise. “Right. You formed such a deep attachment that when you came back here, you told me right away who you were.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  She folded her arms across her chest. “What’s your rationale for that?”

  “I didn’t know who was involved in Veronica’s murder. For all I knew, you could have been deep into it.”

  Anger flared in her eyes. “Oh, right. I’m into murder. What was my motive?”

  “Look, your husband killed himself. We don’t know why. Maybe it had something to do with Veronica.”

  “Oh, come on. That was two years later.”

  “So something went wrong.”

  “I don’t have to listen to this.”

  “No, you don’t. But I was hoping you would.”

  “I was a fool to get so wound up with you,” she muttered. Springing out of the chair, she stalked out of the room, and he heard a door slam, then a lock click.

  IN THE PARKING LOT of the real estate office, Doris Masters clicked off her cell phone. Reaching up, she began to finger her short blond hair. When she was nervous, she played with it, and this morning she was very nervous. For several heartbeats she sat staring into space. Then, with a scowl on her face, she climbed out of her car and stalked back into the building. Sometimes she wanted to murder Oliver Garrison.And sometimes she wondered how she had let him trap her in this whole harebrained scheme. A long time ago she’d been so in love with the bastard that she’d let him talk her into a whole bunch of stupid moves. Moves she now regretted. She’d wanted to leave Perry’s Cove. He’d wanted her with him. So she’d gone to a lot of pain, trouble and expense to stay here.

  That was when she’d been convinced they were going to get rich. Now she was spending a lot of time thinking about how she could get away from him. He was too unpredictable. She’d turned her life upside down for him. But then she’d been sickened as she watched him manipulate people. Like herself, she silently admitted. And Jerry Tilden. Oliver had chosen to work with the man. Now he was getting ready to force him out of the partnership. Did that mean he was planning to kill him? Send him to jail?

  Once she’d been in awe of Oliver. Now their relationship was barely tolerable to her—and only when things were going well. She’d honestly thought the bad part was over. But every time she thought she was safe, something else happened to shake up her feeling of complacency. Like Mark Ramsey showing up in Perry’s Cove. Mike had sent him on ahead to stir things up. Then he’d showed up, too.

  She just wished she knew exactly what their motives were. Revenge, certainly. And maybe blackmail. She shuddered.

  Then, with a sigh, she unlocked the door and entered the building.

  Inside, she went back to the rental property section. She didn’t know where Mike had gone, but it was a sure bet that Mark Ramsey and Molly Dumont were still in town. They had gone somewhere after that thughad broken into her house, and there were only so many places they could be hiding. Her orders from Oliver were to find them, and she didn’t like taking orders. But in this case, she understood the urgency. The faster they did something about Mark Ramsey, the better.

  The man’s face leaped into her mind, and she went very still, mentally studying his features as a sick, unsettled feeling swept over her. The moment she’d gotten close to him, every nerve ending in her body had begun to tingle. There was something so familiar about him that she could almost bring the context to mind. But not quite. So she stopped trying to pull it into focus, thinking that if she didn’t dwell on it, it would come to her.

  Of course, there were other unknowns, too. Had he and Molly Dumont cooked up something together before he’d come to town? Or had she hooked up with him by accident? Either way, it was too bad for Molly.

  Doris was a supremely practical woman. The Mark Ramsey–Molly Dumont puzzle would solve itself eventually. Right now she had to figure out where in the hell they had gone to ground so Oliver’s hired thugs could take care of them. Sitting down at the computer, she brought up the file on rental properties and began to search.

  IT WAS EVENING AGAIN when Molly uncurled her legs and shifted to her back. She was lying on the bed in the smaller of the condo’s two bedrooms. Not the room where she and Mark had made love. The other one.

  She’d lain there for a long time because she couldn’t bear to look at the man who was still out there beyond the closed door.

  She’d longed for the oblivion of sleep, but sleep had been impossible. She was too keyed up. At first she’d been angry about the way he had treated her. Then she’d been sad. Then she’d been numb. Then she’d been angry again. And the worst part was that he’d fooled her so completely. She’d even wondered if they’d been lovers in a past life. What a joke!

  Since Mike Randall had left town, he’d been in her thoughts all too often. She’d had fantasies about him. She’d imagined the two of them together. She’d even thought about writing him in prison.

  She sat up and snorted.

  Now he was back. And he hadn’t trusted her enough to tell her who he was. But he’d taken her to bed.

  She stopped herself there, struggling to be fair. That part hadn’t exactly been his fault. She’d wanted to make love with him and she’d pushed them into it.

  Her hands clenched, and she squeezed her eyes shut as though that could wipe away the pain. She’d fooled herself into thinking that she might have a future with this new man who had come to Perry’s Cove. Another sick joke.

  Again she told herself to play fair. On an intellectual level she understood why Mike—no, she’d better call him Mark, or she was in danger of betraying him, the way he expected her to do—had been cautious. He had to be cautious.

  From his point of view somebody had set him up for murder six years ago. And there was no reason they wouldn’t do it again. Or worse. In fact, it was a hundred percent likelihood. They had already pulled off their big play. Now they had to protect their interests. Since Mark Ramsey had come to town asking questions about the old case, he was a logical target. Probably they’d been nervous ever since the conviction had been overturned. Probably they’d been waiting for somebody to show up and try to figure out who they were.

  So who were they? Her mind tried to shy away from that, too. But grim conclusions kept working their way back into her thoughts. Oliver Garrison. His new girlfriend. Phil. Bill Bauder. Probably the sheriff, too.

  She was picturing them making plans together, when the door opened and she looked up. Mark crossed the room, heading for the bed where she sat propped against the pillows.

  His voice was a harsh whisper when he said, “Come on. We’ve got to get out of here. Now.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Get your shoes on,” Mark ordered.

  Molly blinked, even as the urgency in his voice propelled her to action. He wasn’t here to invite her to tea. He had respected her privacy—until now.

  She pulled on her shoes, then raised her questioning gaze to his.

  “I was standing by the window looking out at the parking lot. I saw two men get out of a car and head for this building. They don’t look like they came here for a beach vacation.”

  “How did they find us?”

  “I’d like to know,” he said tightly
as he led her out of the bedroom and down the hall to the great room.

  “I didn’t tell them.”

  He uttered a curse. “I wasn’t saying you did.”

  The conversation ended abruptly when she heard the rasp of metal against metal. Her gaze flew to the door as she watched the lock turning.

  They had the key! But the chain was on the door. That should hold them—for another ten seconds.

  Mark hurried her through the dining area, where he picked up the box with his mask and stuffed it into her carryall. They had just stepped into the kitchen when the front door creaked on its hinges. Through the gap where the chain held the door closed, she could see a man’s face. He was wearing a mask like a Wild West outlaw’s.

  “Come on!” Mark growled when he felt Molly hesitate.

  “Wait!” She used up precious seconds to pick up the bottle of olive oil she’d left on the counter and hurled it at the door with all her strength. She felt a surge of satisfaction as the man jumped back and the bottle shattered against the hard surface, sending shards of glass and oil flying all over the hall floor.

  Mark’s hand clasped hers in a death grip. “Out of here! Now!” he urged as he pulled her toward the balcony.

  They were two stories up. Did he expect her to jump? She’d never make it.

  Still he dragged her along after him, and when she stepped outside into the twilight, she saw that a rope was coiled on the concrete and tied to the metal railing. Apparently, while she’d been brooding in her room Mark had been busy arranging an escape route for the two of them, just in case.

  She would have bet that nobody could find them at the condo. Obviously she’d been wrong. Thank God Mark had been prepared for disaster.

  He tossed the rope over the side, and she heard the end hit the concrete below.

  Concrete. Not a nice soft flower bed.

  “Go!” he urged her.

  She eyed the rope, thinking that there was no way she could go down that thing. She’d failed every climbing test they’d ever given in high school, and she’d told herself she was never getting near another dangling piece of hemp again.