Hooked Up: Book 3 (16 page)

Finally I said, “Why?” I didn’t even know what I was referring to but ‘why’ seemed like a good thing to ask.

“Remember I told you I was protecting someone I love?”

“Yes,” I said bitterly, conjuring up a host of ex girlfriends. Or was he talking about Laura herself? The idea of him loving someone else sent a wave of jealousy to course through my veins and circle my stomach.

“I was talking about my mother,” he said, in a grave tone.

I exhaled with relief but then asked, confused, “What on earth does Laura have to do with your mother?”

“Laura’s threatening her.”

“What?
How?
”

“Laura has something that belongs to her, something incriminating, something . . . look, Pearl, I’ve already said enough. I made a promise to my mom that I wouldn’t ever say a word and . . . ” His eyes tightened as he started chewing his lip with worry.

“Your mother did something and Laura has evidence?”

“I knew if I said anything you’d pick up on it straight away. I’ve revealed way too much, I need to go, I—”

“You can trust me. I don’t care what your mother did, or what you did. I love you,” I pleaded. “I would never say a word. Never.”

“Please come back with me tonight. I need you in my arms, baby. I need to sleep with you. I’ve been going crazy without you.”

I took his head in my hands and said, “Look me in the eyes and tell me the truth.”

He nodded.

“Have you had sex with Laura since you’ve been with me?”

He fixed his gaze on me, and I felt sick for a moment. The dark flecks in his green eyes flickered with hesitation. Could I bear what I was about to hear?

“I swear by my mother, by Sophie, and Rex, and all those who I love. I swear by you, and the moon and stars, I have not touched, nor even kissed any woman since I met you, least of all Laura.”

The relief I felt in that moment was indescribable. I searched his eyes for clues . . . he was telling the truth, I was sure of it. Now it was my turn to well up. A hot tear rolled down my cheek.

He continued, his mouth pinched, “I despise Laura. She’s trying to ruin my life. If it were just
my
life she wanted to butcher, I might be more forgiving, but she’s threatening my mother. And you.”

“Me?”

“I know you, Pearl. I know that if you don’t spend the rest of your days with me you won’t be truly happy. I don’t mean to sound conceited saying that, but deep inside me, I feel exactly the same. If we can’t be together we’ll both go through life half dead. Without you, my flame is snuffed out. I function on autopilot. Without you, I’m half the person I should be.”

I took his chin in both hands and tilted his mouth toward mine. I ran my tongue along his upper lip to ease the tension in his angry mouth, and we kissed gently. To my surprise, he was not ravenous for me but just returned the kiss sweetly. Innocently, even.

He breathed into my mouth, “If I can’t marry you, Pearl, my life will be running on empty.”

“I want to marry you more than anything,” I whispered back. “I love you. I can’t be without you, either.”

“Will you come home with me tonight and we can talk?”

“If you promise to tell me the whole story. If you promise to trust me. I don’t care
what
you’ve been hiding from me,” I said honestly. “What hurts me is that you’ve been hiding it.”

“If I tell you everything, will you promise to marry me, Pearl? No more running away?”

For some reason, his request caused a rush of adrenaline to stream through my body. Fear? Excitement? Panic? This was it. I’d been running from him, using every excuse. But I couldn’t run anymore. I needed to trust him, to show my loyalty. I took a deep breath and replied, “I promise.”

Alexandre got up onto his haunches and lifted me up, cradling me in his arms as if I were a baby. His eyes strayed to my pregnant breasts again. But I didn’t care if he had sex on the brain—I wanted him even more than he wanted me. I could feel my nipples pucker with desire, my breathing shallow. He set me down and kissed me lightly on my temple. I grabbed my long overcoat from the hall closet, my Birkin bag, and slipped into my thermal boots. I couldn’t get back to his apartment fast enough.

“You’re coming just like that? In your PJ’s?” he asked, surprised, yet eyeing up my ass with a look of lust.

“I think we’ve both waited long enough, don’t you? I just want to be back in your bed even if Rex
has
taken it over.”

He laughed. “You’ve heard, huh?”

“Yes, Sally told me.”

“I’ve been lonely. Missing you like crazy.”

As I was scrawling out a note to Daisy (so she didn’t think I’d been abducted), I said, “Are you going to tell me everything, Alexandre?”

He nodded.

“
Everything
about Laura?” I asked again, double-checking that this wasn’t a trap of seduction to get into my panties (or PJs).

“I promise. Let’s go.”

THE WHOLE TIME I had been in my new apartment, it felt like limbo, and now back at Alexandre’s, I knew I’d come home. We sat on one of the huge white couches in the living room, snuggled up with Rex. I kept the bedroom at bay, for fear of letting desire get in the way of my mission; to find out everything I could. If Alexandre didn’t come one hundred percent clean about this insidious situation with Laura, which was eating into our relationship, then I would give up for good. This was Make or Break time, and I think he sensed that.

My eyes strayed to the bald patch on the wall where my engagement gift had been; the Jim Dine painting of the big red heart that was now hung in my new apartment, and I felt a wave of sadness. So much time had been wasted because of our own fears. It all boiled down to trust issues on both sides. I had not trusted him; not trusted his judgment about Sophie—of course he would never have put me in danger, of course he knew his own sister. And he had been keeping secrets from me, for fear I might abandon him, or worse, report him for whatever wrong he or his mother had done—that I would betray his family.

I lay back with my head in his lap as he stroked my hair, the soft touch of his long fingers caressing me, making me remember that I belonged to him, and nobody else.

“I’m breaking my promise to my mother, but if I don’t tell you, I know that our lives will be ruined. I’m trusting you to keep this to yourself, take it with you to your grave, Pearl.”

“I swear.” I made a cross sign on my heart.

“You know what I told you about my father? That he disappeared?”

I held his hand to let him know that I was on his side, no matter what he told me. “Was it a lie?”

“Yes. Not all of him has disappeared—that’s the whole problem.”

“What do you mean?” This was sounding really crazy. “Sophie told me that he’d gone to Rio, that he’d been spotted there.”

“That’s what she still believes. I told her that a friend of mine had seen him there. This friend doesn’t exist, of course. My father’s dead, Pearl.”

“Did you kill him?”

He said nothing for a beat, and then answered in a cold voice. “No. My mother did. No, let me be completely honest here. She didn’t just kill him, she murdered him.”

I tried to sound unemotional. I didn’t want to spook him away. “Was Laura witness to the murder, then?”

“No. It happened when I was only nine.”

“Well what does Laura have to do with it? Even if you told her, she has no proof!”

“Oh, but she does. She’s got proof that he’s dead. And he has never been declared dead. No death certificate, nothing. Officially, he’s still alive. And there are some people still wondering where he is. His brother—my uncle—for starters.”

“I don’t understand, how does Laura
know
he’s dead?”

“He was lying peacefully in his bath. Ironic that. Some of the only times when he was being truly peaceful was when he was wallowing about in warm water. My mother had bought him his favorite Scotch. She was plying him with it so he was completely relaxed. She’d had enough, and knew that the only way to be free of him, once and for all, was to kill him. He’d threatened her that if she ever left him, he’d hunt her down and kill her, then search for us, too.” Alexandre looked at me and hesitated.

I absorbed all that Alexandre said. It sounded crazy but I’d read about these people and saw them on the news often: the crazies that shoot their families down, killing each and every member, or massacring them in a stabbing frenzy before doing themselves in, too. I squeezed Alexandre’s hand. “I empathize, Alexandre. I really do. Please go on.”

He stared into space as he reeled off the story in a monotone, hardly stopping for breath. “She had the electric heater plugged into the wall with the extension cord. She’d planned everything. When he was lying back with his eyes closed, she came into the bathroom with the pretense to top up his drink and threw the heater into the water to electrocute him. She was even wearing rubber shoes and gloves, just to take extra precaution.”

I gasped. The scene was gruesome. “Did he die instantly?”

“I don’t know. My mother had assumed she could pretend it was an accident, but there were huge burn welts where the water level was. It was obvious it was cold-blooded murder. She had to think on her feet. Had to get rid of the evidence—there was no way she could pass it off as an accident.”

“So then what happened?”

“Luckily she had some French doors in her apartment that led onto a balcony. She unplugged the electricity, drained the bath, hauled him out, little by little, and rolled him into bed sheets, wrapping him like a mummy. Then she pushed him off the balcony in the dead of night. Once she was sure nobody had woken from the thud of the body landing on the ground—she was two flights up—she dragged him to the car. Amazingly, nobody saw her, or if they did, they never said a word. The neighbors hated him anyway—even if they’d seen something they would have probably been relieved. She managed to haul him into the trunk of her car.”

“That must have been hard. Was he tall and strong like you?”

“No, my height comes from my mother’s side of the family. But still, it was no mean feat. She drove to the countryside. When she found an isolated place, miles from anywhere, she made a bonfire and set him alight.”

“Oh my God. Nobody saw? No farmer or anyone?”

“She doused him with gasoline, he went up fast.”

“I still don’t understand what Laura has to do with all this.”

“Not everything burns, does it?”

“There were remnants?”

“My mother waited for the fire to burn all the way down, but there were two things left over: his teeth, and bits of his hip replacement, both identifiable through medical records. There was the titanium part of the fake hip and a ceramic ball bit that didn’t burn either. They have identification numbers, not on the parts themselves, but from the factory where they make the prosthesis. These are kept by the hospital on a register with the name of the patient and the date of operation, in case of problems like breaking or premature loosening. They can be traced back to their source. It’s the same with teeth and dentist’s records—a common way of identifying corpses.”

“How the hell did Laura get her hands on those?”

“Years ago, I found them in my mother’s house in a drawer, when I was looking for something. I put two and two together; that’s how I knew he was dead. I’d always suspected, anyway, because I knew if he’d been alive he would have hunted her down. Anyway, I had a long talk with my mom and she told me the whole story. I’ve kept it a secret all these years; I never even told Sophie.”

My nose was prickling, tears threatening, as Alexandre’s voice sounded as if it was about to break at any moment.

“But what on earth was your mother
doing
with all that evidence? Why didn’t she chuck it all in a river or take it out to sea?”

“That’s the multi-million dollar question, but she had a reason, crazy as it was. Having the remnants, she said, reminded her that he was truly dead, that he could never harm her again.

Anyway, I took away the bits of evidence and took them to Provence with me. I didn’t want my mother having them in her house, in case her husband found them. But at the same time, I didn’t throw them away because I didn’t feel it was my right to, if they were so important to her. I was an idiot. A fool. I should have taken it into my own hands. Instead, I hid the teeth in a multi-volume Encyclopedia. Call me a heathen, but I’d cut out the center of one of them and placed the evidence inside. Nobody looks at Encyclopedias anymore with the Internet and Wikipedia. I thought they’d be safe there. And the titanium bit of hip was wedged behind the book. Laura knew exactly what it was because she, too, had a hip replacement a couple of years after her accident. And I’d mentioned to her once, years ago, about my father having had one—tried to assure her that they worked.”

“She discovered them?”

Alexandre looked down at the floor ashamedly.

“But even if I found that stuff, I wouldn’t know that they were
body parts of a dead man
. How did she
know
?”

“When I started dating you, Laura became obsessed. I didn’t realize this, of course, until just a few weeks ago. I thought we were friends. I had no clue that she wanted me back, that she was still in love with me. Although, when ‘love’ is that warped it’s hardly a word I’d use to describe her feelings for me. Basically, she became obsessed, possessed, and will stop at nothing to get me back.”