This Winter Night Read online

  “We should definitely destroy his videotape collection,” she told Nichole.

  “Of course,” Nichole agreed. She went over to an antique armoire inside which sat a flat-screen TV and bent down to open the bottom drawer. “They’re all in here.”

  “We can burn them in the fireplace,” Lauren said. “And make him watch.”

  In a matter of minutes they had a fire going in the fireplace and were tossing the videotapes into it. They talked while they tossed.

  “You know,” said Nichole. “When we met I was prepared not to like you. He talked about you like you were Satan’s daughter. How you never supported him. You wouldn’t quit your job to entertain his clients. To think I was preparing to quit my job.”

  “Oh, no,” Lauren said. “You should never give up your career for a man. If he’s a real man he wouldn’t want you to give up something that means so much to you.”

  Nichole tossed a videotape with the letter N on it into the fire. “I’m glad I didn’t quit. Where would I be now? I’d be out of a job with no way to pay my bills.”

  “What do you do?” Lauren asked.

  “I’m a massage therapist,” Nichole said. “That’s how we met. I gave him a massage. I should have known he was no good when he asked me if I could please him with my hands. But I thought he was just flirting. I’m a certified massage therapist. These fingers are for healing, not for giving happy endings.”

  After they’d put all of the tapes into the fire, they turned their attention to Adam once more.

  “I think we should videotape him in his present state and keep copies for ourselves as a guarantee that he won’t try to seek revenge for what we’re doing to him,” Lauren suggested.

  Nichole wrinkled her nose, thinking about it. “Okay, let’s do that. But I also have an idea.”

  “I’m all ears,” said Lauren.

  “We can’t unbind him,” Nichole said. “He’s strong. He may be able to overpower us. Maybe we could cut the clothes off him and film him using that expensive camcorder of his. And after we’re finished we could roll him outside and leave him naked and taped to his chair on the front lawn.”

  Adam really started yelling then. However, with the tape over his mouth the sound was muffled and didn’t carry very far.

  Lauren laughed. “I wish we could do that, but there’s no way to cut his clothes off him while he’s duct-taped to that chair. We’re going to have to leave him where he is and call 911 on the way out. He’s been hit on the head twice. He might need medical attention.”

  Nichole looked in the middle distance for a few seconds then said, “Yeah, you’re right.” She glared at Adam. “You’re not having a fun day are you, sweetheart?”

  Shortly after that, the partners in crime got busy. Lauren filmed Adam as he thrashed around in the wheeled office chair, trying his best to hide his face from the camera. Once she had a few minutes of footage she removed the tape and put another in so that they would each have a copy. Nichole wiped down all surfaces that might have their fingerprints on them. Lastly, she wiped the gun down and returned it to the desk drawer.

  Finished, the two women stood facing one another. Lauren offered Nichole her hand to shake. “I’m sorry things didn’t work out well for you. You seem like a nice person.”

  “Ditto,” Nichole said, smiling. “Do you want to call 911, or should I?”

  “I’ll do it,” Lauren said. She picked up the phone on Adam’s desk and dialed. When the dispatcher asked what the nature of her emergency was, she said, “This guy brought me home with him and he started getting rough with me. I hit him and tied him up. I think I might have hit him too hard. I’m outta here!” She then hung up the phone. “Since this is his house phone. They’ll know exactly where to come,” she explained to Nichole.

  Lauren reached into her coat pocket and removed a business card. She gave it to Nichole. “We’re connected now. Here’s my contact information.”

  Nichole’s face lit up. “I don’t have a card,” she said regrettably. She walked over to Adam’s desk and borrowed a pad and pen to write down her address and phone number. Walking back over to Lauren, she gave her a slip of paper and said, “Who knows, one day we might get together over drinks and reminisce.”

  Lauren smiled at that. “Stranger things have happened.”

  Then they left Adam where he sat and vacated the premises. Outside, Lauren waved to Nichole as they both hurried to their vehicles.

  * * *

  Too keyed-up to go home, Lauren drove around awhile, relishing the fact that she was finally rid of Adam. He no longer had the means with which to blackmail her, unless Nichole was wrong and she had not discovered his entire stash of videotapes. However, she had a good feeling they’d destroyed all of them. And there was nothing left to come back to haunt her.

  While driving she put in a follow-up call to Arielle. Arielle answered her personal number. “Hey, Lauren,” she said, “I don’t have to come get you out of jail, do I?”

  Lauren laughed and told her what had happened.

  When she was finished relating the tale, Arielle said, “You must really care about Colton Riley to do all this to prevent him from seeing those tapes.”

  Lauren did care about Colton very much. What she felt for him was hard to put into words. “I don’t know if it was out of the humiliation I felt for being secretly recorded or my fear that if I let Adam get away with what he planned that I would always be subject to his whims. I got away from him once. I wasn’t going back there again.”

  “I’m just glad the police didn’t get involved,” Arielle told her. “If Adam knows what’s good for him he’ll keep quiet about it. But if he does decide to raise a big stink and report you and Nichole, you don’t have any evidence that you were provoked to do what you did. You burned all the tapes.”

  Lauren patted her coat pocket. She felt the two small rectangular objects she’d secured earlier. “No,” she told her lawyer. “I didn’t destroy them all. I kept one with an N and one with an L. I’ll send Nichole hers tomorrow and explain why I kept it.”

  “I knew some of my smarts would rub off on you eventually.” Arielle laughed a good ten seconds, then said, “So, none of your actions had anything to do with Mr. Riley?”

  “I already told you I didn’t want to lose him because of Adam’s treachery,” Lauren said.

  “Are you going to tell him what you did?”

  “Yes, I can’t take the chance that Adam will be vindictive in spite of everything and tell him about the tapes just to hurt him.”

  “He doesn’t play well with others, our Adam,” Arielle said wisely.

  “I’m going to try Colton now and see if he’s available to talk,” Lauren said. “Thanks again, Arielle.”

  “You take care,” Arielle said and disconnected the call.

  Chapter 12

  Colton had just come out of a meeting with the company’s accountants when he received Lauren’s call. He was happy to hear from her and told her so. “You’ve been on my mind all day,” he said, his voice husky with longing.

  “You’ve been on my mind, too,” she said, “Something’s happened and I need to talk to you. Can you spare a few minutes?”

  “Sure,” he answered without hesitation. “Where are you? I can either come to you or you could come here.”

  “I’m not too far from you,” Lauren said. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “This must be important.” A hint of worry was apparent in his voice. “You’re not in any trouble?”

  “I was,” she said softly, “I think the problem’s solved but you should still know about it.”

  “All right,” said Colton. “I’m here for you.”

  The Riley Construction Company offices were downtown. Lauren had a hard time finding a parking space and wound up tak
ing longer than ten minutes to get there. When she walked into Colton’s office, he breathed a sigh of relief and pulled her into his arms, kicking the door closed. They hadn’t seen each other since Wednesday when Colton had cooked for her at his place. The workweek kept them busy and the time between their next meeting felt agonizingly long.

  He gazed down into her upturned face. He was wearing dark gray dress slacks and a long-sleeved light blue dress shirt, its sleeves rolled up, and black wing tips. His suit jacket hung from a coat tree in the corner. He’d removed the tie earlier in the day. As he peered into her eyes, he drank her in. Her widely spaced eyes were smoky with desire and he was happy he was the one who put that expression in them.

  “God, I’ve missed you,” he said breathlessly and lowered his head to kiss her sweet mouth.

  Lauren had missed him, too, and returned his kiss with fervor. She moaned softly, relishing the delicious taste and feel of his mouth on hers, the slow, deliberate, extremely sexy havoc his tongue wreaked on hers. She felt the kiss down to her toes. She looked into his eyes when they parted and reached up to caress his strong jaw. I did do it for him, she thought, astonished.Arielle was right. In that instant, she knew that she would have done anything not to lose him. Adam’s threat had thrown her into protective mode. She had thought she was protecting herself and doing what she’d always done, which was solve her own problems.

  She realized now that she always wanted Colton to look at her in the manner he was looking at her right now: with admiration, longing and sensual intensity. She believed that if he had seen those tapes, he would never have looked at her in the same way again. Therefore, she’d gone with her gut and tried her best to put Adam in his place.

  Her hand still on his jaw, she said softly, her gaze locked with his, “It’s been quite a day.”

  She told him everything from the beginning. Her fight with Adam on the street, what had happened when she’d gotten to his house, and the burning of the tapes except for the couple she’d saved for insurance.

  His gray eyes were riveted on her face. A frown creased his brow. His inner turmoil was evident from the pained expression in his gray depths. “Why didn’t you call me?” he asked, his jaw muscles clenching in obvious irritation. “You could have been hurt going to his house like that. What if Nichole had been convinced that you were the reason he’d dumped her? What if she had shot you in a jealous rage?”

  Lauren reached out and touched his cheek to soothe him, but he drew away from her. “Lauren, I think you take your independence too far,” he said, his eyes narrowed in anger. “It never occurred to you to call somebody? Myself, your father or your sisters? Your first reaction was to phone your lawyer.”

  “For legal advice,” she said in her defense. “You or my father or my sisters couldn’t give me that.”

  “No, but one of us would have talked you out of going over to Eckhart’s house after you’d hit him.”

  “I was afraid he’d suffered a concussion,” she cried. “I had to make sure I hadn’t injured him too badly. Believe me when I tell you I took no pleasure in setting foot on Cone Manor Lane again.”

  He sighed heavily. “You’re so stubborn. You should have called me. You think that because you’ve got a black belt in karate and know how to use a handgun, you’re invulnerable, some kind of superwoman. You’re not. You foolishly risked your life today.”

  “I had no way of knowing what I was going to walk into when I went to his house.”

  “That’s my point,” Colton ground out. He took a deep breath in an attempt to calm down. “Why did you do it? I know you have better sense than to trust Eckhart. Why didn’t you call his bluff? I wouldn’t have watched that tape for anything in the world. The last thing I want to see is Eckhart making love to you.”

  “I know that,” Lauren said as if that proved her point. “That’s why I had to make sure you never got the chance to.”

  “You still should have called,” he repeated.

  “What would you have done if I had?” she asked.

  “I probably would have strangled him,” Colton admitted, teeth bared in a snarl.

  “That’s why I didn’t call you.”

  “I don’t need your protection,” he practically shouted but reeled it in because his secretary was in the outer office and he didn’t want his and Lauren’s business all over the office.

  “And I don’t need yours,” Lauren countered fiercely. “It’s true, I’m independent. It’s the only way I know how to be. Adam threatened to send you the tape he showed me unless I broke things off with you. I did what I thought was the right thing. I fought back.”

  “You would have done better by dumping me,” Colton told her angrily.

  Lauren saw red. “Okay, consider yourself dumped!” Arms crossed over her chest, she stubbornly turned her back to him.

  Colton laughed. “There’s that stubborn streak again.”

  “I’m serious,” Lauren insisted, turning back around to face him. “I’m here to tell you we can’t see each other anymore. I’m obviously too far gone on you for my own good if I would do anything in my power not to lose you. So, let’s call it quits, shall we? It’s probably the best thing for both of us.”

  “You can’t quit me,” Colton told her angrily. They were standing facing one another in front of his desk. She was so upset her chest was heaving.

  “I most certainly can,” Lauren begged to differ. Her eyes bored into his. “Apparently, what we have between us is a chemical reaction.”

  “If that’s how you look when you’re getting ready to dump me, with your breasts about to burst out of your blouse, you’re not very convincing,” Colton said, “because you know that chemical combustion you mentioned only happens between you and me. It’s unique. Stop making it sound trivial. I got angry because I was scared that I might have lost you due to the fact that you’re so stubbornly independent you couldn’t call me when you got into trouble. That pisses me off. I’m a man and a man has to feel needed. We are cavemen in that respect. Got that? It’s our duty to protect our women. Superwomen like you don’t understand that, or don’t want to understand it. Your father loved you but he did you a disservice when he taught you to be so remarkably self-sufficient. If you ever do anything as foolish as you did today, you won’t have to quit me. I’ll be forced to let you go.” Then he roughly pulled her into his embrace and kissed her hard. He kept the kiss intact until she fell limply into his arms.

  After they came up for air she looked up dreamily at him. “You win this round. I’d better go.”

  She reluctantly left his warm embrace and turned to leave.

  “Are you capable of driving?” he teased with a broad grin.

  “Shut up,” she said as she walked to the door on wobbly legs.

  * * *

  Colton had every intention of letting it go. The remainder of his workday he tried to put Adam Eckhart and what he’d done to Lauren out of his mind, but he hadn’t been able to shake it, so he decided to have a man to man talk with him. It wasn’t hard to track him down. He went to the closest hospital to Eckhart’s home address. When he got there he tried the emergency room and, masquerading as Eckhart’s brother, he learned that they were keeping him overnight for observation. Apparently, he’d taken a good beating. He found him asleep in a semiprivate room, the other bed occupied by an elderly man channel-surfing and mumbling about nothing being on TV.

  When the guy looked up and saw Colton, he said, “Who’re you looking for?”

  “Adam Eckhart,” said Colton.

  “That’s sleepyhead,” Adam’s roommate said. He laughed. “But if I’d been hit over the head like that I’d probably want to sleep, too.”

  Colton strode over to Adam’s bed and loudly cleared his throat.

  Adam startled awake. When he saw who was standing beside his bed, his eyes narrowed w
ith hatred. “What the hell do you want?”

  “Just checking to see if you were still alive,” Colton said with a smile. “How does it feel to get your ass kicked by two women?”

  Adam winced as he sat up in bed. The back of his head had a huge bandage on it and he was wearing a hospital gown. “Go ahead and issue your threat, Riley. I know that’s why you’re here. Lauren came running to you and now you’re here to demonstrate what a big hero you are.”

  “No,” Colton denied calmly. “I’m not going to threaten you. I’m going to make a promise to you. I vow that should you ever even look at Lauren funny I will put you in the ground, not the hospital.” He smiled. “Are we clear?”

  Adam didn’t say anything. The color had drained from his face, and he felt dizzy. “I suppose it makes you feel better coming here and threatening me in my weakened state. I can’t defend myself. But, yes, we are clear.”

  “Listen, if you’d like to revisit this when you’re healthy again, you know where to find me,” Colton offered. “I just wanted to state my case and be done with it. Trying to blackmail Lauren was despicable. But I’m sure you already know that. Plus, the fact that you taped unsuspecting women for your viewing pleasure is plain sleazy. It amazes me that a man as successful as you are can’t find something better to do with his time. Seek help, Eckhart.”

  “I’m not a head case,” Adam said, holding his head with both hands. “Get out!”

  “I’d be happy to,” Colton told him. “Just repeat what I said to make certain you understood me.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m not to ever go near Lauren again. I got it. Good riddance to her. She never appreciated the finer things in life. She wants to roll around in the gutter with the likes of you.”

  Colton laughed softly. “You’re a piece of work, Eckhart.”

  “What, are you surprised I’m unrepentant? Was I supposed to cower and say I’m sorry for what I did? I’m just sorry it didn’t succeed. I was looking forward to her starring in more of my home movies,” Adam said with a smirk.

  Colton almost hit him when he said that. Restraint was aided by the sudden appearance of a nurse who had come to take Adam’s vitals.