Voices drifted into the parking lot. A man and a woman. The sound of a door shutting softly.
“He’s coming.” Her body tingled with Cameron’s words. “What are you going to do, Max?”
“Confront.”
“Are you sure?”
“Confront,” she hissed once more.
He swirled around her in a cloud of peppermint. “That’s my girl, Max, taking the bull by the horns.”
Then Jake Lloyd appeared out of the darkness. Up close, the guy was potent. In other circumstances, she would have ... but no, she wouldn’t think about what she might have done.
The man’s tie was gone, his shirt open to the third button, his chest tanned and dark against the white material.
She stood a foot or two from his driver’s side door, but she didn’t give him the chance to call her on it. “I saw you with her the night she died.”
His eyes widened, the only change in his expression. Then his gaze slid to the apartment he’d just left. He didn’t ask who nor where she meant. He didn’t need to. “What do you want?”
Mmmm. Such a voice. She felt as well as heard it. It was the kind of voice you wanted next to you in the dark—on a bed, a kitchen table, against the bathroom counter, or the driver’s side of his work truck.
Tiffany thrummed inside her, inserting her thoughts, her feelings, and her sensations.
Max licked her dry lips. “You know exactly what I want.”
“Money? I don’t have any.”
Her palms were sweaty, and her heart pulsed a staccato rhythm at her throat, but there wasn’t so much as a quaver in her voice. “Information.”
Again, his glance skimmed Nadine Johnson’s front door and returned. “I don’t know who killed her.”
“That’s a quick denial for a question I didn’t even ask. Guilty conscience, Jake?” Max smiled. The more she let him say, the sooner he’d hang himself. If he was guilty. “You were with her at the Round Up. You left the bar with her. Later, she was found dead in the dumpster outside.”
His jaw worked, and his fists clenched. “I didn’t leave with her. She left alone, before me.”
Max widened her eyes. “You screwed her in the men’s room in front of thirty horny guys, and then you let her leave alone? Tsk, tsk, and they say chivalry is dead. Guess they’re right.”
His flesh went pale beneath the tan. “That’s the way we planned it, and she wasn’t—” He cut himself off.
“Wasn’t what, Jake? Wasn’t alone? Someone else was with her?”
He remained silent, but the answer lay in his furtive glance. It touched everywhere but on her.
“Who watched you two on the dance floor, Jake? Is that who was supposed to make sure she got home safely?”
He took a literal step back, opened his mouth, then shut it. Finally, “If you were there, you already know who it was.”
“I want you to tell me.” Too late. He’d called her bluff, and she’d lost him.
He shook his held slightly, narrowed his gaze. “You really don’t know a damn thing. Who are you?”
“A friend of Tiffany’s.” A psychic prisoner of his ex-wife was more like it.
“She didn’t have any friends.”
Tiffany conquered. Gender didn’t matter; they were all conquests. She hadn’t had a clue how to make or hold a friend.
Max pushed, hoping to glean additional information by pretending she knew more than she did. “Why do you think she told me you’d be there then? Why did she ask me to watch, too?”
“Because she was kinky as hell.” Jake crossed his arms over his chest. “Were you one of her lovers?”
For a moment, Max couldn’t say a thing. Tiffany didn’t want her in the physical sense, no, theirs was a battle of minds. But it was a battle Tiffany wanted to win even in death and a fight Max refused to lose. “Not,” she answered.
His nostrils flared, and his lips flattened. She wondered how many skirmishes he’d fought with Tiffany. Of course, he had never won. Now he never would.
“You know whoever was watching killed her, don’t you?” she prodded.
“I thought you said I did it?” he countered.
She sliced him with her smile. “You didn’t have the guts. Just like you didn’t have the guts to stop her from going to the Round Up that night. Didn’t have the guts to tell her no.”
He dropped his hands to his sides and clenched his fists, but didn’t answer.
“You didn’t want to be there, did you? You didn’t want to be watched while you screwed her. You hated that. Hated sharing her. But you could never tell her no.” The sneering tone came from deep inside, from Tiffany. She’d called him the Gutless Wonder even as he did everything she told him.
Still Jake wouldn’t answer. Everything she said was true and too painful for him to admit.
She stepped closer, bringing her face to his. “Did you want to kill her, Jake?” she whispered. “Were you secretly glad when they found her body in that dumpster? Or did you do it yourself?”