Dangerous Women

THE LAST KISS by S. J. ROZAN

Washing her blood off his hands (sticky and clinging, then hot and slippery, red trails swirling, pink clouds rushing away), he thought of their first kiss. Not until then, and strange, that was: He’d burned for her so, and that kiss had ignited him. Different from all the others after, because unfamiliar; electrifying not just with her heat and the spicy salt taste of her but with newness, the nearly uncontainable excitement of the threshold.

The softness and sting of that kiss had returned at odd times in the past months, when he was not with her but also when he was, sometimes even as he was kissing her, that kiss overlaid on others; he could summon the memory, and often did, but the thrill was far greater when it ambushed him, as now. Sometimes its impact was so great that he stumbled, had to reach out and hold something to keep from falling.

“Not tonight,” she’d said that first night, butterfly fingertips inflaming his skin, lips grazing his, then flitting away; then melting into him with a rush so urgent he thought she’d changed her mind and it would be tonight. But she released him and smiled and didn’t say, “No,” only, “Not tonight.”

She thought she was denying him, that she had control. No. He’d waited not because she wanted it, but because waiting tightened the wire, drove the fever up.

And it must have been waiting that made this happen: that kiss-for a few days, all he had-flowed through his memory and flesh, saturated him. And then, at moments he couldn’t predict, it concentrated, rose and crashed over him like a wave.

Moments like this.

With it now, for the first time, came an ache. Not entirely unpleasant, it added sweetness, softened the edges. The ache was regret: Memory, all he’d had at first, was all he was left with, now that she was gone.

As she had to be.

As she’d wanted to be.

That was what he’d seen, though none of the others had. She’d declared it clearly, and if to him, then surely to each. But he’d thought it wild exaggeration, and no doubt they thought the same. Only later, when she’d pulled the single string that dropped the web over him and stood back smiling, did he realize who the true quarry was intended to be.

Not him, but she herself.

He wished he’d seen it earlier, but he couldn’t claim that. He was smarter than the others, and certainly smarter than she was, but he was only a man. When she’d come to him, he’d wanted her. When she’d leaned into him for that first kiss he’d felt only promise and pride.

She’d come to him as a client. The way, he’d understood later, she’d come to them all, but at the time he hadn’t known that.

“Jeffrey Bettinger’s been my attorney until now.” She’d spoken crisply, settling in his office chair. She wore a soft wool suit the mahogany color of her hair, a blouse a shade darker than her ivory skin. Her cheeks glowed from the cold. As she crossed her legs, a gem of melting ice slid from her boot to his carpet. He molded his features into a mask of polite interest, his true attention riveted by the wool and silk, the mounds and hollows and the darkness beneath.

He’d noticed her with Bettinger, of course, been as amazed as anyone to see the oil-painting richness of her sharing a drink with the faded snapshot that was Bettinger. He hadn’t known she was a client and he hadn’t known about Cramer or Robbins or Sutton, then, either. He hadn’t known what she wanted, or what she’d done. Though when he discovered the truth of that, he couldn’t honestly say he’d have done anything in any different way.

With her to that first meeting she’d brought a kidskin portfolio with a tiny silver lock. Valuable papers, she told him. As her new attorney, he need not execute any of the papers, except in the event of her death, in which case she was hereby instructing him to break the lock and follow the wishes expressed inside. Right now he need merely lock the portfolio in his office safe. He did have a safe, of course?

Of course. He’d taken the portfolio, allowing his fingers to linger on hers, breathing slowly her rich summery scent.

From the first he’d been a completely professional lawyer. What happened between them-first in his imaginings, then, soon, in nights and days-never distracted him from his duties, as it would a weaker man. Probably, he told himself, that was why she’d left Bettinger: The man was a wimp. He’d likely never advised her, just let her lead him around with a ring through his nose. Himself, he wasn’t like that: He’d objected, argued, offered alternatives each time she’d instructed him to sell a property at a hopelessly low price, to draft a codicil to her will leaving a bequest to some suspect cause. She was a rich woman, he told her, but there was an end to wealth if unhusbanded.

The phrase unexpectedly drew from her a bitter laugh: the word “husband,” she explained. Hers had been a lawyer, a cold, vile man who’d forbidden her children or friends, beaten and bound her, made living an unending hell. More than once he’d threatened to kill her if provoked, and she despised herself for the cowardice that stopped her from forcing his hand, or from performing the act herself. She’d plotted against him in dark, secret fantasy; she thought, she admitted without blinking, that she might have actually been insane for a time, driven mad by isolation, pain and fear.

“Did you try?” he asked, feeling desire grow as she spoke, seeing behind his eyes visions of her shivering and bruised, cowering below a looming shadow.

“To kill him? He died.” She spoke contemptuously. “Before I worked up the courage to kill either of us.”

Her husband’s sudden death, she said, had been a surprise, and the wealth she was left with was her only source of pleasure. (When he heard that his face blazed, his mind racing to the night before, the heat of their kisses, the crescendo of their rocking, together, together.) She paused a deliberate moment. With a smile, and with no amendment or exception to her statement, she went on to say that she would spend his money how and where she liked.

He didn’t answer. He crossed the room and closed the door, and took her right there on his office carpet.

When their flesh intertwined she did whatever he asked, however odd, painful or humiliating. In the light of the business day, on the other hand, he was entirely unsuccessful in persuading, cajoling, insisting. But he tried each time, because there was no ring through his nose.

Now, as he worked, the memory of that first kiss flooding through him, he found himself awash in other memories also, unlooked-for but welcome. Swaddling her body in blankets for the trip to the hillside where he’d leave her, a place she’d shown him and told him she loved, he heard her voice, the breathy whisper that slithered like ice along his spine. The coppery smell of blood metamorphosed to the jungle blossoms of her perfume as he cleaned the room. No one would look here for her, or come here for any other reason, to this gloriously isolated, derelict house across the river. But he was by nature careful. He washed away the bloodstains, turned the mattress over.

They’d had no need to slip away to this secret spot, except for the shiver it gave them both. They were single, they were adults, they could have carried on their affair at high noon on Main Street. But she’d found the house, and when she told him about it over a roadhouse table, her stockinged toes trailing along his calf, they’d agreed to agree that it was best to be seen together only as attorney and client.

The heat in his palms as, his work finished, he toweled dry, made him think of her skin, pale velvet always warmer than his, as though she lived in a feverish cloud, a torrid private tropics out of which she reached for him.

At the time he’d thought, to him, she was reaching out to him. But he was mistaken.