Ann Major - The Hot Ladies Murder Club

You shouldn’t have told me about your grandmother in San Antonio. Nor about that year when you were nineteen and lived with her when you got your Realtor’s license.

He scowled. He was the clever one. He was the one who planned while she just drifted, hoping for the best. Her disguise wasn’t that good. As soon as his detective had shown him the pictures, he’d put two and two together and had boarded a plane.

She was his wife. His. She belonged to him forever. She had no right to run away, no right to take little Georgia. No right to leave him all alone. No right to have another man. He’d show her.

When he’d stumbled to the bathroom that awful night to inspect himself in the mirror…to see…When there hadn’t been anyone in the mirror, he’d begun to quake and then to claw the mirror in an attempt to make his reflection reappear. When it hadn’t, he’d begun to weep and pound the mirror with bare fists.

The same thing had happened when he was a little boy. He’d been very, very bad—so bad, mirrors had been empty when he’d tried to see himself. After his father’s death, his mother had been so frightened, she’d sent him away to boarding school. For a long time he’d felt powerless, as if he’d simply ceased to exist.

The night Georgina had left him, he’d broken the mirror with his bare hands. Then he’d scrawled Georgina’s name on the white bathroom tile floor with his own blood. The last thing he’d heard before he’d collapsed was a siren.

She must have called the ambulance as soon as she’d known she was safe because when he’d awakened, he’d been in a trauma unit and they’d been praising his famous, beautiful wife to the skies.

Where was she, the famous Georgina, they’d wanted to know? Why wasn’t she with him? Their unspoken question had been, if she wasn’t with him, who was she with?

He’d known what he had to do.

Find her. Teach her. Retrain her…as he had in the beginning when she’d been a young bride. The wages of sin…

Like a cat, he’d toy with her awhile. He’d tie her up with bloodred satin ribbons like before. He’d…

He got hard just thinking about how her husky voice would sound when she begged him to kill her.

“Say, ‘Please,”’ he’d whisper. “Say, ‘Please, Sir.’ Kiss me down there and say you love me.

He touched himself, gently, very gently, just like he’d taught her to.

Just the thought of her lips there had him hard as a rock. Then he came, wetting all over his suit.

See what you made me do?

She would pay for that, too.

When we look into the mirror we see the mask. What is hidden behind the mask?

DIANE MARIECHILD

Campbell never forgot a face. Never.

Joe Campbell’s posh law offices with their sweeping views of the high bridge, port and bay were meant to impress and intimidate. The tall ceilings, the starkly modern ebony furniture, the blond hardwood floors and the Oriental rugs reeked of money and power and social prestige—all of which were vital to a man with Campbell’s ambitions. Not that he was thinking about anything other than the exquisite woman he was supposed to be deposing.

The case had been dull, routine; until she’d walked in. She was beautiful and sweet and warm—and scared witless of him.

This should be good. He rapped his fingers on his desk and tightened them into a fist that made his knuckles ache.

The minx had him running around in circles like a bloodhound that had lost a hot scent. His ears were dragging the ground, his wet nose snuffling dirt.

Minutes before the deposition, Bob Africa, one of the partners and a former classmate at UT Law School, had strutted through his door as if he owned the place—which he practically did. Bob specialized in class-action lawsuits and had just won big, having collected more than two million dollars in legal fees from a cereal company for a food additive.

There hadn’t been a shred of evidence any consumer had been injured. Africa’s fee had come to $2,000 an hour. Consumers had received a coupon for a free box of cereal.

Campbell was jealous as hell.

All smiles as usual this afternoon, a triumphant Bob had slapped him on the back and ordered him to win this one—or else. Salt in the wound—after the Crocker loss.

“I went out on a limb for you, buddy. I told the other partners you just had a run of bad luck in Houston and got a rotten hand here with that medical case.”

“Thanks.” Campbell hadn’t reminded Africa that he’d been the man who’d rammed that loser Crocker down his “buddy’s” throat and then he’d kept the more promising cases for himself.

Bob had smiled his wolverine smile and slapped his back again. “You’re the best, buddy. But, we don’t pay you to lose—”

Lose. Campbell had felt the blood rising in his face. Hell, at least Africa hadn’t reminded him about the death threats all the partners had been receiving ever since Campbell had lost the case. Hell, the incompetent quack had won. What was he so mad about? Crocker’s wife, Kay, maybe? She’d made a play for Campbell, a helluva play.

Today a letter from some crackpot, who said he was praying for Campbell, had arrived. The letter was in the same loopy handwriting as the death threats. Strangely, somehow it was even scarier. Mrs. Crocker had called three times this week, too.

But it was the woman across from Campbell who had him rigid with tension. He had to beat her—or else.

Her face was damnably familiar. Her husky voice was so exquisite and raw, it tugged at Campbell on some deep, man-woman level.

He hated her for her easy power over him even as his cold lawyer’s mind told him she was a fake. This was a staged performance. There was definitely something too deliberate and practiced about her lazy, luscious drawl.

To buy time he played with his shirt cuff. He’d asked dozens of questions and had gotten nowhere. She was a liar, and if it was the last thing he did, he would expose her.

“I—I swear I knew nothing, absolutely nothing about mo-o-old in the O’Connors’ house,” she repeated for the tenth time.

I think the lady doth protest too much.

When he shot her his most engaging smile and leaned toward her as if the deposition were over, she jumped. Her lovely, long fingers and unpolished nails twisted in her lap so violently, she almost dropped the damning photographs he’d jammed into her hands a few seconds earlier.

“I—I swear…no mold,” she pleaded.

Then why won’t you look me in the eye?

“Toxic mo-o-old,” Campbell drawled, pleased his o lasted even longer than hers. His mocking gaze drilled her.

She shook her dark head like a true innocent and began flipping through the photographs he’d made of the black muck growing inside the walls of the O’Connors’ mansion.

“There has to be a mistake,” she whispered.

No, you little liar. No mistake.

Campbell’s long, lean form remained sprawled negligently behind his sleek ebony desk. His beige silk suit was expensive. So was his vivid yellow tie.

Hannah Smith, her knees together beneath her full white skirt, sat on the edge of the black leather chair opposite him. Flanking her was the attorney from her insurance company, a mediocre, colorless little stick of a man. Hunkered low in his chair in an ill-fitting undertaker’s suit wearing smudged, gold-rimmed glasses Tom Davis looked about as dangerous as a terrified rabbit.

“No mistake,” Campbell said. “The O’Connors had to abandon their home. It’ll cost more to remediate it than they paid for it, which was a substantial sum—”

“More than a mill…But it’s not my fault!” she protested. “I was only the Realtor. I thought smart lawyers like you only sued rich people.…”