The Lady Has a Past (Burning Cove #5) - Amanda Quick Page 0,4
would fly into a rage when he saw you. That would give her the excuse to kill him. She would be the heroine of the situation because she stopped her husband from murdering you. She certainly would not have been arrested in those circumstances, and her terrifying husband would be safely dead.”
Lyra began to pace the room. “But things went wrong. He turned on her first.”
“If you hadn’t arrived when you did, she would have died. You saved her life when you used that golf club on Adlington.”
Lyra stopped in the middle of the room. “But suddenly Marcella was faced with an unplanned scenario. The whole point was to make sure she got rid of her husband, but she wasn’t sure that Adlington was dead. Neither of us could tell if he was alive, and we didn’t dare get close enough to check for a pulse.”
“So when you went around the house to greet Detective Brandon, Marcella picked up the golf club and made certain that her husband would not survive.”
Lyra nodded slowly. “Yes, that is exactly what happened. I don’t believe Marcella ever intended to hire Kirk Investigations. She just wanted her husband dead.”
Raina sighed. “Welcome to my world. Rule number one is always assume the client is lying or, at the very least, not telling you the whole truth. Everyone has secrets to protect.”
“Right. I’ll remember that.”
Raina sat forward and clasped her hands on the desktop. “Are you sure you want to be a private investigator?”
“Please don’t fire me because of what happened today.”
Raina raised her brows. “I’m not going to let you go because of that. After all, you saved the client—”
“Non-client.”
“You saved the non-client and yourself. You exhibited remarkably sharp thinking under extraordinarily dangerous circumstances. I am very impressed with your golf swing, by the way.”
Lyra’s jaw tightened. Shadows veiled her eyes. She turned away and went back to the window.
“What bothers me is that I’ll never know,” she said quietly.
“Never know what?” Raina asked.
“If I’m the one who killed Charles Adlington. I only struck him once, Raina, but I hit him very hard. There was a lot of blood. But Marcella Adlington hit him several more times.”
Raina tried and failed to come up with a comforting response. She said the only words she knew to be true.
“You did what you had to do to save yourself and Marcella Adlington,” she said. “That’s all that matters. There are always unanswered questions in this business. Fact of life. You have the makings of a good investigator, but I believe you should give your career plans some serious thought before you decide if you want to stay with this firm.”
Lyra folded her arms. “Okay.”
“And now we are going to follow a long-standing tradition in this business.”
Lyra gave her a wan smile. “What’s that?”
“We’re going to celebrate.”
Lyra looked bemused. “What are we celebrating?”
“How about the fact that you and Marcella Adlington both survived?”
Lyra took a deep breath. “You’re right. That is definitely something worth celebrating.”
“This evening you and I will go out on the town. We will start with cocktails and dinner at the Burning Cove Hotel and then we will catch a cab to the hottest nightclub in town, the Paradise.”
Chapter 3
I’m afraid you have become a problem, Mr. Cage.” Erling Lennox took a pistol out from inside his hand-tailored coat. “You have served your purpose. I am delighted with the Milton you found for me. But I’m afraid that in the process of tracking it down you learned too much about my collection and my business. I regret I won’t have the opportunity to make use of your expertise in the future. You came highly recommended.”
“I appreciate the compliment,” Simon Cage said, “but I won’t be able to return it. In the course of my work I have encountered any number of murderers, blackmailers, and embezzlers who were a hell of a lot smarter than you are. On a scale of one to ten, I’d put you at about a three.”
It took a couple of beats for the insult to register. When it did, Lennox reddened with fury. Like so many men born into a world of wealth, privilege, and power, he assumed he was vastly more intelligent than those he considered his social inferiors. Simon never ceased to be amazed by the fact that people who got away with blackmail or murder once or twice came to the conclusion they were superior beings. Men like Lennox experienced an intoxicating sense of power when they discovered they