Silver Falls - Anne Stuart [53]
Nobody noticed that it was David who’d bought the architect’s house, three years after Caleb had picked up the man’s half-built disaster. He hadn’t stolen Libba away from David—they’d been secretly going together for a long time before David decided to put moves on her.
The problem was, he’d had such a hellish reputation that Libba hadn’t wanted to tell her mother, and they’d kept the affair, the first and best of his life, a secret. But David had known. There was no way he could have missed it. And when he started publicly courting her, public opinion swung directly against Caleb, as it had so many times before.
He wondered where Libba was now. He hoped to Christ she was happily married, with children. He hoped the scars had healed. Even with them crisscrossing the left side of her face she was still beautiful.
He’d been blamed for that as well. He’d been driving David’s car and David had followed. By the time he woke up in the hospital David had explained it all to everyone else…how his jealous older brother had chased after them, ramming their car with his trashy beater.
David had the story right. He just had the roles reversed. And Libba’s concussion had taken care of the rest of the truth.
He should never have taken the rap for the cat so many years ago. It still made him sick to think of it, no matter how many atrocities he’d witnessed overseas, but he couldn’t stand to see his apple-cheeked baby brother painted as such a horrific creature. So he’d made excuses—a spilled can of gasoline, a careless cigarette—and they’d bought it, sort of, looking at him funny and knowing he was lying. They just didn’t know who the lie was protecting.
It was too late to save David. He could no longer ignore the fact that he’d graduated to killing women, and by saying nothing, doing nothing, despite his suspicions, he was guilty as well.
But he wasn’t covering up anymore. Wasn’t walking away. This was going to stop, stop now, before anyone else got hurt.
But first he had to get Sophie and her mother out of the line of fire. Or they might be the next to go.
Stephen Henry Middleton waited until his personal assistant drove out of the driveway. Dylan was a charming boy—the generous salary Stephen Henry paid him was going a long way toward covering his college expenses, and he was smart enough not to notice anomalies. Or if he did, not to mention them.
The curtains at the front of the house were drawn, the lights were on, the doors were locked. No one would stop by unannounced, not his argumentative sons, certainly not his snooty daughter-in-law who liked to think he didn’t realize that she considered him a dirty old man. It amused him to play into it. In fact, he much preferred his sexual partners to be experienced, mature and male, though he kept that as one of his many secrets.
He set the brakes on his top-of-the-line wheelchair, kicked up the foot plates and rose. It was a good thing his house had wall-to-wall carpeting—there’d be no telltale scuffs on his shoes. He walked over to the small drinks table Dylan had set up, pouring himself a generous glass of his favorite Scotch, the one he never shared. Most palates were too unsophisticated to appreciate it. And besides, he wanted it all to himself. At his age he deserved to indulge himself.
He was going to have to do something about the current situation, though he wasn’t quite sure what. In his worst nightmares he could envision total disaster, but he firmly believed that things couldn’t be as hideous as they seemed. He simply wouldn’t let them be.