Darker the Release (18 page)

“She ran to the store,” Jack explained. The sun was coming in through the window, which meant it must be morning. “She thought you might want some ginger ale or ice cream or chocolate or something. So she went to stock up on provisions.” He gave her a small half-smile.

Kelly almost, almost smiled back. “Thanks for coming,” she said, her throat still painful and dry. “I think I might have had a breakdown.”

Jack nodded. “I guess things kind of fell apart for you.”

He wasn’t prying, wasn’t presuming to demand answers she might not want to give. And because of this she was able to reply hoarsely, “Yeah. I’d thought…I’d thought I’d gotten over a lot of this. At least the worst of it. But it’s like an old wound was just ripped open, and it hurts more than it did at the beginning.”

It still did. Hurt so much. With no hatred or apathy or drive for revenge to shield her from the bitter truth of it, the loss of her father hurt more now than it ever had.

Jack was quiet for a long time.

Then he finally said, “I can’t imagine how much it must hurt. But maybe…maybe…” He paused. “Maybe it’s like you were saying before, when you decided to go back to him.”

“I don’t remember what I said.”

So he told her. “Maybe this time the wound will heal clean.”

One of the strangest things about life was you eventually started to feel better.

No matter how torn apart Kelly was, no matter how much it felt like the pain would actually kill her during the night, she felt a little better the next day.

Not good. Not anything close to good. But just a little better. Enough that she could take a shower, get dressed, and drink some coffee.

Jack hadn’t yet left, so the three of them sat around Reese’s small living area with their coffee, with a kind of bleak exhaustion that was at least a little better than the traumatic grief of the night before.

When no one said anything for a while, Kelly told Jack, “You need to shave.”

He rubbed his chin, the bristles making a rasping sound in the quiet room. “Yeah. I guess I do.”

“So what now?” Reese asked, looking from one of them to the other. “What happens now? Are you going to expose what you know? I mean, the whole story. I know you’re not going to put the story out there that Caleb did the killing.”

Kelly sighed and closed her eyes. “I’m not going to expose anything. I know Caleb and Moore were wrong. Obviously they were. But I just…” She cleared her throat. “I’ve been wrong too. And it doesn’t feel right for me to punish them, when I’m just as guilty as they are.”

“You’re not—” Reese began.

“Yes, I am. I know I am.” She stared down into her mug at the black coffee. “You don’t get to play with other people’s lives the way I did and claim you did something good. The truth is good. Knowing the truth is worth doing. But the way I got it…It doesn’t feel right to me. Not any more right than what Caleb did back then.”

She could still see Caleb’s face—how utterly broken it had been. She’d done that to him. She’d loved him, and she’d still broken him. “I don’t get to claim I did something good.”

“So no justice at all,” Reese murmured. “Are you going to be okay with that?”

Kelly shook her head. “Who could be okay with that? If there was justice available for me, I think I would take it. But the person who is really guilty is dead, he’s beyond justice now. And all that’s left would be…would be a gesture that accomplishes nothing.”

She could still hear Caleb’s voice on those old tapes—how horrified he sounded, how young and upset he’d been. He hadn’t taken any pleasure in her father’s death. It had twisted something in his heart that had never been untwisted.

Actions had consequences, even if they were never addressed in the criminal justice system. Caleb hadn’t been untouched by his sins.

Neither was she. She was paying for them even now.

“We can put all the evidence away,” Jack said. “But I think you’ll need to talk to your mother. She knows what we learned yesterday. I called her last night to tell her we weren’t going through with it, but I’m not sure…” He cleared his throat. “You need to talk to her. I’d do it soon.”

Kelly felt a flicker of anxiety, a sharp emotion that was almost a relief as it slashed through her chilly numbness. “You think she’ll go ahead with our original plan? Publicize the evidence that makes it look like Caleb did the killing?”

“I think it’s possible. She’s a lot angrier than you ever were. And she’s a lot less reasonable.”

Kelly knew Jack was right, and the knowledge propelled her to her feet. “Shit. This thing is never over, is it? Where is she? Do you know?”

Jack stood up too. “She’s in hospice care,” he said. “She’s not been doing well.”

She was dying. It shouldn’t matter that much to Kelly, since her mother had abandoned her a long time ago and she’d done nothing to make up for it.

But it did matter. It made Kelly’s stomach twist with feeling. Like here was another sad story that was about to reach its end.

An hour later Kelly was walking into her mother’s room.

She was shocked by how frail her mother had grown in just a couple of weeks. She was dying of cancer. She’d had a prognosis of three months almost three months ago.

She didn’t have much time left.

She was awake, though, and fully alert when Kelly entered the room.

“Jack said he called to tell you what happened,” Kelly said without greeting or preamble. She and her mother were way beyond the niceties.

Her mother nodded. “He told me. It doesn’t make a difference.”

“It does make a difference. Caleb isn’t guilty of this after all. Our whole plan to seek justice can’t go anywhere now. I told Jack to call the whole thing off.”

“I know you did.” Her mother’s voice was thin and brittle. “But you’re not the only decision maker here.”

“I know that.” Kelly sighed and rubbed her face, feeling so tired she could barely keep her eyes open. It was like the last three months, the last seventeen years, had finally caught up with her, leaving her with no energy at all. “I don’t want to do anything, though.”

“That’s because you fell for him, like a silly girl, but I’m not so blinded by feelings or hormones or whatever it is. Caleb Marshall has never been anything but a cold, selfish bastard, and I can still make him pay for that.”

“He didn’t kill Dad. I heard the phone calls. It was Earnest. And he’s dead—beyond the scope of our vengeance now.”

“Someone has to pay for it.” That had been her mother’s refrain all along. It had turned her into this driven, obsessive, pitiless creature. She hadn’t always been like this. Grief and injustice had twisted her into it.

Kelly released another long breath. “Someone has paid for it. You and I have paid for it. For way too long now. I’d like to…I’d like for us to stop, and only we can make that happen.”

Her mother met her eyes across the distance. Kelly didn’t expect anything to change. Her mother had hardened herself so much to this battle she’d lived to fight that nothing was going to soften her. Not her daughter. Not her death. Not the truth.

But something did change in her mother’s eyes. Not softness or sympathy—but something that looked almost like understanding. “And you think it’s that easy. You just let go. Release. And we finally stop paying.”

“I don’t know. But I want to try. I’ve done everything I could to make this change, and there’s nothing left for me to do but let go. So that’s what I’m going to do. I really want…I really hope you’ll be able to let go too, if only so you can have some peace at the end here.”

“I want justice. All I ever wanted was justice.”

“I know. Me too. But what we have instead is the truth. It’s going to have to be good enough. If you expose Caleb as the killer, when we both know he’s not, then you’ve taken the truth away from us, so we’ll be left with nothing again.”

Her mother was silent for a really long time. “What are you going to do?”

Kelly gave a little shrug. “What I should have done a long time ago? I’m going to live my life and not keep reopening old wounds.”

“And Caleb?”

“That’s his choice to make.”

“Are you going to go back to him?”

“He’d never take me back, but my choices aren’t dictated by his. I know that now. It’s not a happy truth, but it’s the only one I have. I’m still going to live my life.”

Indecision and bitterness twisted on her mother’s face for a few moments, until it finally resolved into an exhaustion that was akin to what Kelly felt herself. “Okay, then.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay. So you live your life.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to die.”

And that was the answer, Kelly realized. Her mother was too far gone to embrace forgiveness or reconciliation. But in her own way she was letting go too.

It was the best she could hope for.

Two weeks later Kelly waited in the lobby of the Vendella building and wondered if Caleb would agree to see her.

She figured there was about a fifty-fifty shot. He’d made it clear he didn’t want her in his life again, so it was possible he would simply reject her request for a few minutes with him. On the other hand, however, he was naturally curious, and he would want to know what she wanted, showing up at his office out of the blue like this.

He might let her up just to see what she was doing here.

As she stood, twisting her hands together nervously, she wondered what she was doing here herself.

For the last two weeks, she’d done what she’d told her mother she would do. She’d lived. She’d finished up her in-progress jobs, tried to round up a few new clients, had dinner with Reese and breakfast with Jack, and actually thought about getting a dog.

She’d also thought a lot about Caleb. So much so that she knew she wouldn’t be able to move on without making one more attempt to see him.

She was starting to feel a little better about her father, but the thought of Caleb was still like a twisting knife in her heart. She didn’t know what could come of this—not after all of the lies and manipulations and false pretenses from both of them—but there had been something real underlying all of that, and she wondered if it was something that could survive even the kind of breaking they’d been through.

There was only a slim chance of it. Caleb wasn’t the kind of man to forgive and forget. But she’d finally realized she wouldn’t be able to move on unless she tried.

So here she was. Waiting in the lobby of his building. Wondering what he would say.

“You can go up,” the receptionist said, after calling to see if she’d be allowed up to the executive suite.

Kelly swallowed hard, a wave of both fear and relief rushing over her. Then she stepped onto the elevator and pressed the button for his floor.

She watched as the digital numbers increased on the display above the doors, and she told herself that either way she’d be better off at the end of this conversation.

If Caleb rejected her, then he rejected her. He would have every right to do so. At least she would have tried.

She was filled with an unnatural kind of calm as she walked off the elevator, down the hall, and into his suite. His assistant eyed her coolly but said politely enough, “You can go on in.”

And that was it. Kelly walked through his office door.

Caleb was standing by the window, the way he’d been when she’d shown up in his office just a few Sundays ago to play a sexy little game and then sneak into the storage room.

It felt like a lifetime ago. Like it was someone else who had done that.

Not her.

Not Kelly.

He turned around as she entered, and she closed the door behind her.

He looked older, somehow, and tired, but he was as handsome and controlled as he’d always been—with the exception of that one terrible night. He wore one of his expensive business suits, and his gaze was utterly cool.

“I’ve been standing here,” he said, not waiting for her to make the first move, “in the time it took you to come up, trying to figure out what you could possibly want from me.”

She swallowed so hard it hurt her throat. No niceties here. She shouldn’t have expected them. “I just wanted to talk, and I thought there was a better chance you would see me here, in your office, than if I’d shown up at your place in the evening.”

“I haven’t been staying at the house lately anyway. I wouldn’t have been there.”

“Oh. Okay.”

They stared at each other, and she saw his eyes lower to scan the length of her body—in her flowing skirt and lace top, the slightly bohemian style she always wore for her work—before his gaze traveled back up to her face.

Finally he asked calmly, “So what did you want to talk about?”

She sucked in a slow breath and gave a little shrug. “I didn’t like how we’d left things. It’s been nagging at me. So I thought it was worth trying to…”

He gave her a bitter little smile. “To make peace? To become friends?”

For some reason the words and the smile hurt her chest more than the coolness in his manner. “I never expected to be friends. No. We were never really friends. Were we?”

“No. We weren’t.”

“We were…” She paused but then made herself say it. “We were more.”

“What we were was a lie. You know it as well as I do.”

“Some of it was. You lied to me just like I lied to you. But I don’t think all of it was a lie. There was something…real.”

“But even real things don’t survive something like this.”

He was rejecting her. Obviously. He wasn’t even leaving open the possibility of there being any future between them. He wasn’t even letting her ask.

But she was here, and she could sense something fragile and wounded beneath Caleb’s coldness, and she hated it. She hated that she’d done it to him. She hated to leave it like that. So she said, “I don’t know if that’s true.”

He walked over closer to her, and he gave a dry, humorless laugh. “Seriously? You think we’re going to fall into each other’s arms now? Everything forgiven? After what you did?” Before she could respond, he added, “After what I did too?”

At least he was acknowledging that. He’d had as long to think things through as she had. They were both guilty in this. They’d both torn apart what had been real between them.

But in some ways it was better, since it meant they were in the same boat.

“Relationships have survived worse.”

“Have they?” He shook his head. “I don’t know if that’s true. But I can at least speak for myself.”

She stared at him for a full minute, trying to figure out what to say, what to do, whether to even keep trying when he was clearly slamming the door in her face.

Then, suddenly, she was so tired that her legs didn’t want to keep holding her up. She slumped to the leather couch against the wall.

To her surprise, Caleb came over and lowered himself to sit beside her, leaning back as if he were as tired as she was. They didn’t look at each other. They both stared out at the view of DC through the wall of windows.

“I can’t believe you came here,” he said at last, not sounding quite as bitter as before.

“Honestly, I can’t believe it either. I knew there wasn’t much chance. But I just can’t…”

When she didn’t finish, Caleb turned his head to look at her. “You can’t what?”

“I can’t breathe. All the way. Leaving it like that with you, it just didn’t feel like I could breathe.”

Caleb let out his own breath in an audible gust. “Yeah. Me either.”

She sat up straighter, feeling a little hope at this admission. “So maybe we don’t leave it like we did.”

“Then what do you suggest? If it’s not broken but there’s no rosy future waiting for us, what’s left?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know.” Without thinking, she reached out and put a hand on his knee. When he didn’t pull away, she stroked it slowly, wanting to touch him, needing to feel the solid warmth of his body beneath his clothes.

He still didn’t pull away, and it made her feel better, so she kept it up—the touch intimate but intentionally not sexual.

After a minute of silence, Caleb murmured, “I guess I should thank you—for not making what you know public. At least not yet.”

“You don’t have to thank me.”

“You could have told the world what you know.”

“Yeah. And that would have accomplished absolutely nothing. I’m working on…”

“On what?”

“Letting go,” she admitted.

“How are you doing with that?”

“It’s not my natural inclination, but it’s…it’s helped. Some.”

“That’s good.” Caleb’s brown eyes had been focused on her face, but now they shifted down to watch her hand as it still stroked his thigh.

Something about the adjustment in focus made her suddenly conscious of his body. Not just his presence but his body. His strong, lean, virile body.

A body she’d always loved.

Her eyes drifted down to her hand too, and she realized it was farther up his thigh than she’d intended. Then she saw Caleb’s response to her touch in the bulge she could see in his trousers.

Her own body responded to seeing how he’d responded to her.

“I guess that doesn’t go away,” Caleb murmured in a thick voice she well remembered.

“What doesn’t go away?” Of its own accord, her hand had slid a little closer to his groin.

“How much I want you.”

Kelly gulped and flushed hotly. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t touched her. All he’d done was say those words and give her that intense look.

But it was enough to cause her pussy to clench in excitement. “I still want you too,” she admitted. “I don’t think it’s ever going to go away.”

The words were true, and she realized how true they were as she said them. She dropped her head, suddenly pained at how hard it would be to go through the rest of her life wanting Caleb and never being able to have him.

He leaned over and pushed her hair back over her shoulder so he could see all of her face. “I haven’t been able to sleep. I stay awake all night thinking about you, and no matter how futile I know it is, my body just won’t stop wanting you.”

“My body wants you too,” she whispered, her breath quickening as she raised her hand from his thigh to his chest. This felt right. This felt like them.

This felt real—in a way it hadn’t when they were together before.

Like she knew who Caleb really was now—in all of his strength and weakness and light and shadow. And like he knew who she really was too.

Her hand rested on his chest, the soft texture of his suit oddly sensual, particularly when paired with the solid strength of the chest beneath it. She fisted her hand unconsciously, her fingers clenching around a handful of fabric.

“I’d convinced myself this would never happen again,” Caleb murmured.

“It can. If you want to.” She slid her hand down his chest toward his belly.

His abdomen was hard too. All of him was hard. And tight. And masculine.

And exactly as she’d known it would be.

“I do want to.” He reached out and slowly stroked down the long fall of her hair. “But this isn’t a happy ending. If we do this, you can’t be hoping for that.”

A tiny part of her had been hoping for that, but it wasn’t the deepest or most important part.

She could have this with Caleb now, and it would be good. It would be so much better than the way they’d parted before.

That alone would be worth it.

“I know what this is,” she told him.

She could feel the tension in his body as he leaned toward her. “Then we’re agreed.” His words were a simple statement, but his thick voice sounded more like a promise.

Kelly felt her whole body washed with heat, and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath. Without thinking, she licked her dry lips, and she saw his hungry expression as she did so.

And she wanted it. She wanted him to look at her that way. She wanted to feel his hands on her body. She wanted to press up against the hard strength of him. She wanted to feel the texture of his face, his hair, his palms.

She waited for him to make a move, but he didn’t. He just kept gazing at her, like he would swallow her whole.

And she realized he wasn’t going to make a move. He wanted this, but it wasn’t going to happen unless she initiated things.

So she pushed him back gently until he was leaning against the sofa. Using his shoulders to brace herself, she crawled over him until she was straddling his lap, hiking up her skirt to free her legs.

“Oh, fuck, Kelly.” Something hot and compelling ignited in his eyes, and his hands settled on her hips possessively.

Kelly felt confident and powerful and genuinely alive for the first time in so long. “Caleb,” she murmured, leaning so close to him she could see each dark bristle on his jaw. “I know what this is, and I want it anyway. What are you afraid of?” She pitched her tone to be a clear challenge.

A challenge she knew he would meet.

His hands had moved slightly until they were spanning the full curve of her ass. “I’m not afraid.”

The feel of his hands there made her intimate muscles clench in excitement. “Aren’t you? Then why aren’t you moving?”

The smolder in his gaze was even hotter than before. “I am moving. I’m just taking my time.”

His hands slid to her hips—very slowly. Then to the dip of her waist. Then up to cup her breasts. “You were always so eager. You need to learn a little patience.”

Her lips parted slightly as she arched into his hands, trying to rub her tight nipples against his palms through the fabric of her shirt. Her whole body clenched in excitement, and her heart and mind leapt into the same state. Because this was Caleb—in all of his intelligence and humor and sexy provocation and power. The Caleb he’d always been, with nothing in between them anymore.

On that revelation, she twined her hands behind his neck and leaned down into a kiss.

He moaned softly into her mouth as their tongues and lips tangled and dueled.

When she pulled away, his hands had slid down to palm her bottom again. “Fuck, Kelly, you’ve never been this eager before.”

Her pussy was wet and aching, and she couldn’t stop herself from rubbing it against his groin.

He was aroused too—the tight bulge in his pants thrilling and increasingly evident. She rubbed herself against it until he groaned.

“I’m not the only eager one,” she said.

“I’ve never been anything but eager when it comes to you,” he said thickly and pulled her down into another kiss.

This one was even better, even deeper. He wrapped one arm around her, pressing her chest against his. The position pushed her groin against his even more, and she groaned into his mouth at the delicious friction.

When their mouths tore apart, he grabbed the back of her head to keep her face close to his. He rubbed his skin against hers, the rough texture grating with a slight discomfort that was distinctly erotic.

She gasped against his cheek, momentarily afraid she was going to come just from the pressure of his erection against her clit and the friction of his jaw against hers.