The Lady Has a Past (Burning Cove #5) - Amanda Quick Page 0,76
anyone to talk,” he said around a mouthful of eggs.
Lyra sat down, deliberately moving her body in a subtle, gliding twist that caused the silk dressing gown to swirl around her. She watched covertly, but as far as she could tell, Simon did not notice the glimpse of bare thigh that she had allowed to be revealed. He was too busy wolfing down the scrambled eggs and bacon and biscuits she had ordered for him.
She stifled a small sigh and reminded herself that he was working now, doing his job. Conducting an investigation. Clearly he had set aside all thoughts of the passionate interlude they had shared only a short time ago.
Or perhaps he was trying to forget the episode entirely.
That possibility cast a shadow over an otherwise lovely desert morning. She reminded herself that she had no right to be in good spirits anyway. A woman had been brutally murdered during the night and Raina was still missing. This was no time to be indulging romantic memories; no time to dream of a future with a man who was annoyed because she hadn’t met all of his requirements in a lover.
She put down her cup and buttered a bite of biscuit.
“I do now,” she announced.
Simon snapped off a piece of bacon with his teeth and chewed with the determination of a man who is worried about where his next meal will come from.
“What?” he said.
She popped the little chunk of buttered biscuit into her mouth, munched, swallowed, and then dabbed at her lips with her napkin. She smiled.
“Oh, nothing important,” she said. “I merely remarked that I now meet all the requirements you demand in a lover. Okay, I’m not a divorcée, but aside from that—”
Simon turned red. “This is not the time to discuss that.”
She raised her brows. “Our relationship? All right, we’ll save the chat for later. Back to business. You heard what Ted from room service said. The hotel management is going to try to pass off the murder of Miss Frampton as a dreadful accident.”
Simon went back to his eggs and bacon, clearly relieved by the change of subject.
“It won’t work,” he said. “I doubt the police will go along with it. But even if they do, the hotel and spa staff won’t be able to keep their mouths shut. This is a small town. I can see the headlines already: Fiend Buries Woman in Hot Wax at Local Spa.”
“No doubt.”
“The murderous-fiend-on-the-loose angle will work better for the killer or killers, anyway. It will distract the public and the police.”
“I agree.” Lyra picked up her coffee cup. “Well? Don’t keep me in suspense. What did Luther Pell tell you?”
Simon’s eyes heated with a familiar intensity. “We’re looking for a nice house in the foothills about thirty minutes from the cabin where we found Miss Kirk’s notebook. Mrs. Merryweather told Luther she was held in an upstairs bedroom, chained to the wall. Food came from the hotel kitchen.”
“This hotel?”
“Yes. Her captors always wore spa masks that covered their faces and heads. And yes, the kidnapping was done for the usual reasons—money and blackmail.”
“Blackmail?”
“Photos were taken.”
“Those bastards. They not only kidnapped her, they raped her?”
“She was assaulted, and the photos appear graphic, but she said the man who did it was unable to get an erection. He was never able to penetrate her but in the photos it appears that he succeeded. The man wore a spa mask, but he had a distinguishing birthmark on his upper chest.”
“Anything else?”
“Dark hair on his chest and . . . elsewhere. Athletically built. The ransom demand was telephoned to Mr. Merryweather within hours after they grabbed her.”
“But there has been no ransom demand in Raina’s case. It’s exactly as Kevin Draper told us—they took her for a different reason.”
“Pell is convinced this is connected to Miss Kirk’s past.”
“He thinks Raina may have been the woman in those clippings, doesn’t he?” Lyra said. “The one in Bar Harbor who disappeared on a sailboat.”
“Yes. Pell told me that Irene Ward dug up some new information. There were rumors in Bar Harbor that the marriage was unhappy. Mr. Whitlock kept his wife a virtual prisoner. A lot of people in town suspected that he somehow murdered Mrs. Whitlock and made it look as if she had been lost at sea.”
“But he died about eighteen months later.”
Simon finished the eggs and put down his fork. “The rumor in Boston is that he died in an asylum, not at home. Suicide.”