Authors: Jan Bowles
Tags: #Romance
With her heart beating a thousand times a minute, she watched intently, figuring he was talking to the cops. Leon’s face was solemn as though set in stone, and all she heard him say in answer to the person on the other end of the line was, “Yeah.
“Okay.
“Uh-huh.
“I understand.
“The sick bastard.
“Are you sure?
“Are you absolutely sure there’s no mistake?
“Well, thank you very much, Detective Cassello. You have no idea how great your call is gonna make a certain lady feel.” After replacing the receiver back in its cradle, he then turned to her, a huge beaming smile lighting up his beautiful face, and Paige hoped with all her heart that the nightmare had finally come to an end.
Finding it hard to breathe, and get her words out, she panted, “Tell me they’ve caught him?”
“Better than that.”
“You mean—”
“He’s dead, Paige. He can never harm you again. The cops killed him trying to rob a store.”
“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.” Her peripheral vision darkened and she thought she might faint. She dropped to her knees. “He can’t harm me again, Leon. He can’t harm me. Oh, God.” The tears came in a flood, and when Leon hunkered down and lovingly wrapped his arms around her, they just wouldn’t quit.
“We can carry on with the rest of our lives now, Paige. My only regret is that I never got to pull the trigger myself.”
She lay flat on the floor with her hands covering her face. “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it’s all over. I feel so strange, Leon. I mean, is it right to feel so euphoric when someone has just been shot dead?”
“Don’t feel sorry for the piece of shit. He was coming for you, Paige. He was coming for us both. Detective Cassello told me that when they searched the body they found this address and photos of us with our faces gouged out. He had every intention of torturing and killing us. The guy was a sicko who doesn’t deserve any sympathy. Don’t waste a single thought on him.”
“Photographs you say?” She shuddered.
“Uh-huh.”
“He would have—” She placed the flat of her hand over her heart. “It just doesn’t bear thinking about.”
“Yep, probably killed us both, unless I’d killed him first.” He took hold of her hands and pulled her from the floor. “Hungry?”
“Yeah, oh yeah. I’m really hungry for the first time in a long time.” The sense of relief was overwhelming, even more so than when she’d first told Leon what Nolan had done to her.
He put his arm around her shoulder and kissed her cheek. “In that case, baby, I’m gonna make you the best pasta dish you’ve ever tasted, using my grandmother’s recipe.
* * * *
“Paige, I insist that you sit down, relax, and put your feet up. I’ll only be in the kitchen. You can talk to me while I’m cooking.”
Surfing a natural high, Leon strode from the living area. He felt good, because Paige felt good. They were so inextricably linked now, both physically and emotionally, that he doubted one could ever be truly alive without the other.
Her nemesis that had plagued her for well over a year was finally dead, and he couldn’t be happier about it. He figured that Paige, being a compassionate and benevolent woman at heart, didn’t get the same feeling of satisfaction as him, but the relief showing on her beautiful face was priceless. Now, at last, she could finally move on.
Leon opened the refrigerator and took out fresh tomatoes, onions, and garlic. “Baby, believe me when I say, you are in for a treat you will never forget.”
“Then knowing you, I expect nothing less than perfection,” she joked.
Yeah, she was lightening up, and this time there was nothing on the horizon to darken her elevated mood, or his. He reached up and lifted a saucepan from the overhead rack, and placed it on the stove, then, after liquidizing the tomatoes, onions, and garlic, put the ingredients to one side. With his thoughts focused on their future together, he added butter to the heated pan, whistling happily to himself as it melted across the nonstick base. Leon then added flour, and using a wooden spoon, artistically beat the thickening mixture into a roux.
Taking a long deep breath, he then savored the aromatic contents of the blender before adding them to the pan, then whispered to himself, “Oh, yes, Leonardo Caparelli, you really are a culinary God.”
“Did you say something, Leon?”
A mischievous smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “No.”
“Not praising yourself then?”
“No. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Just the sound of her voice made him feel good. He plucked some fresh basil from the plant growing on the kitchen window ledge, unable to resist imbibing its heady scent. “Mmm, just as nature intended.” Then, after placing it on the well-used chopping board, he finely shredded it with a large cook’s knife before adding it to the mouth-watering ingredients.
As he leaned over the pan, taking in the subtle Mediterranean aroma once more, a thought suddenly struck him like a bolt from the blue. Everything was settled now. Paige loved him and he loved her, and that sick fuck of an ex-boyfriend of hers was finally history. Why didn’t he ask the girl to marry him? He felt sure she’d say yes. He shrugged his shoulders as he stirred his creation with the wooden spoon. After all, what woman in her right mind could refuse such an offer from Leonardo Caparelli?
Do it.
Now?
Yes.
Just the thought of asking this beautiful lady to be his wife made him feel like he owned the whole world.
Enjoy yourself, Leon. It’s later than you think.
Still stirring the pasta sauce, he turned his head to one side. “Paige, I want us to get married. I love you, and my life can never be complete until you become my wife.”
Silence.
He waited a little longer, listening intently for her reply, the wooden spoon now stilled in the thickening mix.
Silence.
“Paige.” Had he overestimated her love for him? Surely not? “Paige.” This time he spoke louder.
“Leon, did you say something? I can’t hear you. I’m in the bathroom. You’ll have to speak up.”
He chuckled with relief, seeing the humorous side of the situation. The one and only time in his life that he’d loved a girl enough to ask her to marry him, and the lady in question is taking a piss. How fucking comical is that?
He raised his voice. “I said—” Thinking better of it, he’d wait until she came out. He’d ask her then face-to-face, even go down on one knee if she wanted him to, because for all his undoubted success and wealth, his life was nothing without Paige.
The pasta sauce was becoming too thick, so he added water and gave it a stir. When he heard footsteps coming up behind him, he smiled, expecting tiny hands to cover his eyes and the voice of an angel to whisper in his ear, “Guess who?”
Instead, he felt a hard metal tube ram into the back of his head with such force that it brought him close to blacking out.
“Hey, motherfucker, you ain’t gonna be marrying my woman anytime soon. Didn’t your momma tell you not to steal things that don’t belong to you? She’s got my name written right across those sweet little titties of hers. Perhaps I should have burned my mark even deeper into her soft, creamy flesh, so there could be no misunderstanding.”
He rammed what Leon now realized was the barrel of a gun hard into the back of his head again. “You hear me, motherfucker?”
The severity of the impact caused his vision to blur and his brain to scramble, but even so, he knew it could only be one guy—Nolan Wells. The cops had fucked up again, big-time.
The voice behind him was malevolent and full of resentment. “Your guy, the one you sent to find me. What’s the prick’s name again? Ah yeah, Ryland Black. That’s the guy. Your private detective pleaded for his momma to help him when I held a gun to his head. Told me everything I needed to know about you and my woman, right down to this very address. You’re not as smart as you think you are. If you hadn’t come looking for me, I’d probably never have found you.”
He laughed—the laugh of a madman who had no grasp on reality.
Leon needed to get his head together, but his vision was still blurred and his legs threatened to buckle beneath him. He had no gun in the kitchen. Every other room in the house, yes, but not in the kitchen. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
“Yeah, you’re not a smart guy, are you? Smarter than the cops though. They’re a bunch of real dumbass bastards. I found some fucking sleazeball junkie lying in the street. Some guy who looked vaguely like to me. Cleaned him up. Gave him a hundred bucks along with that useless prick Ryland Black’s wallet and credit card. Told the sleazeball to go enjoy himself. I’m a real thoughtful guy deep down. Just to reinforce the right impression, I slipped a picture of yourself and my woman into the wallet. I figured the credit card would flag up as fraudulent, seeing as your man had been found dead in the desert some two weeks before. To make sure things went to plan, I made an anonymous phone call to the cops, telling them that I’d been seen with a gun and was about to rob some godforsaken drugstore.” He laughed again. “Worked even better than I dared hope. Thought the cops might just pick the guy up. Instead, some trigger-happy prick blew his fucking brains out. Crazy thing is, the junkie wasn’t even armed. You gotta love the cops.”
Leon needed time. Something he didn’t have. Time to recover. Time to wipe the fuzziness from his head. Time to fight back. “The cops will know the guy in the store isn’t you.”
“Yeah, even they’re not that dumb. They’ll figure it out eventually, but it will be too late for you.”
“Gonna kill me?”
“Yeah, but if you beg me not to, maybe I’ll let you go.”
This guy had already killed Ryland Black and badly disfigured the woman he loved. “Go fuck yourself, sicko.”
Wells tut-tutted dismissively, before ramming the barrel of the gun into the back of his head again, even harder this time, making Leon almost collapse, yet refuse to fall to the floor. “No wonder this great country of ours is in such a fucking mess. Whatever happened to good manners? After I kill you, Paige and me will take up right where we left off. She wants me back, she just doesn’t know it yet.”
Leon couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You sick, sick fuck. You don’t even know she’s had your branding removed from her skin, do you? Hates you so much for what you did to her. She despises you and wants you dead. Whatever you do to me, she’ll never be
your
woman.”
“Fucking liar. We were always meant to be together. Hey, I won’t be committing any crime by killing you. I figure God wants me to kill you. Don’t you know it’s all part of his grand plan? Why do you think he let me get this far? If he’d wanted me to fail, the cops would have caught me by now. In fact, if he’d wanted to stop me, he’d have never let me escape from the hospital in the first place.”
Leon figured there was no reasoning with this guy, and in his weakened state he knew he was going to die. He wasn’t frightened though, because he’d already accepted his fate. It was Paige he worried about. He’d make sure the last picture in his mind was of him and Paige laughing and joking, even making love together, and not the sicko standing behind him with a gun buried in his skull.
He felt his knees buckle as he became weaker still, and he knew he was badly wounded, even without a bullet in his brain.
“Times up, Caparelli man. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.”
Leon was in no fit state to fight back, however futile it would be. He guessed his brain was bleeding internally. For some strange reason his mind focused on the pasta sauce, burning in the bottom of the pan. It was almost black now, and the smell that reached his nostrils had long since lost its aromatic beauty.
Think of Paige. Think of Paige. Think of Paige.
In a completely different place now—a place so serene and beautiful, one where subhuman life like Nolan Wells didn’t exist—he distinctly heard the bullet that entered his brain and finished his life. Followed by the unmistakable sound of his lifeless body dropping to the floor.
But, but, something didn’t fit. Why could he still see the pasta sauce burning in the pan? On legs that would barely hold his weight, he turned to be greeted by the most hauntingly beautiful, yet frightened woman he’d ever seen. Her skin was deathly white, her eyes the size of saucers, and her arms lay limp at her sides, and when he looked, he saw a gun drop from her hand and crash noisily to the tiled floor.
“Leon, I–I–I—”
“Had to, baby. You had no choice…” His final weakly spoken words as his peripheral vision closed in, and complete blackness took over…
Two months later
As Paige teased the soft brush through her hair, she stared at her naked reflection in the bedroom mirror. She smiled, pleased to see that her deathly pale pallor had finally disappeared, to be replaced by a life-enforcing glow.
She’d spent the last couple of months in therapy, spilling every emotion she possessed, often tearfully, to a lovely lady by the name of Doctor Marion Joyce. Over time Marion had convinced her that she’d responded courageously to the situation she found herself in some eight weeks ago. The understanding therapist had explained that she had nothing to reproach herself about, and any woman who loved her man as much as she loved Leon would have done the same thing.