Tempting Danger by Eileen Wilks Page A

lately.” She stood very still, hugging her arms to her, looking down—or into the past. “I’m going to tell you how it happened, how Rule and I got together. I don’t want to. I don’t want it to be any of your business, but I want you to catch him. Whoever did it, I want him to pay.”
    “Catching him is my job. Making him pay is up to the DA.”
    “Good enough.” But she didn’t move or speak, just stood there, her arms wrapped tight around herself.
    Lily tried to give her a place to start. “I understand you met Rule Turner at the club.” That much she’d learned from Turner. He’d been closemouthed about most everything else about his relationship with Rachel, though he had admitted to knowing Carlos.
    “Yeah.” A small, sad smile played over Rachel’s mouth. Her eyes softened as if she was looking back at memories that comforted. “I never thought it would work. Most men are easy—they think they have a chance at sex, they take it, you know? But Rule . . . he could have pretty much anyone, and I’m nothing special. Not ugly, but not beautiful, either. But he made me feel beautiful.”
    Heady stuff, Lily thought. And all related in the past tense . “You fell for him.”
    “Not the way you mean. I was dazzled, I guess. But not in love or anything, no more than he was.” She woke from her memories to give Lily a sharp look. “He liked me. He was kind to me, too, the sort of kindness that’s hooked to respect, not pity. But he wasn’t jealous, not at all. You might say he was born with what Carlos wanted, or thought he wanted.”
    “What do you mean?”
    Her mouth thinned, though whether from pain or anger or some combination of the two, Lily couldn’t tell. “You must have guessed that Carlos and I didn’t have a picture-book marriage. More like a roller coaster. Things were really good, or really bad. He’d be super sweet for awhile, then he’d twist off, and I’d be the one trying to hold steady so we could put things back together.” She took a shaky breath. “I got tired of being the steady one.”
    Lily took a guess. “He had affairs.”
    “He screwed around.” She’d held still as long as she could, apparently. Her legs pushed into motion. “He loved me. I knew that, even when I was crazy with hurt. But he had to prove something to himself, over and over. See, he had mumps when he was sixteen.” The words stopped; her legs kept moving.
    “He was sterile?”
    She nodded, reached the wall, and turned back. “We’ve been together ever since I was a sophomore, got married right out of high school. He was the only one for me. The only one I wanted, the only one I’d ever been with. I needed him to feel the same way. I needed to be the only one he wanted, too, but he couldn’t give me that. Time came when I couldn’t deal with it anymore. So finally I gave in. This last time, when he started in about how jealousy’s the big evil, not infidelity, I said, okay. Let’s see who’s right.”
    “You decided to have an affair.”
    “I agreed to have an affair.” She stopped, chin up, mouth in a bitter twist. “Does that shock you? It was Carlos’s idea. He wanted me to unlearn my jealousy, he said. He talked about equating sex with love, said it was a childish attachment to a romantic ideal that messed up people.” Her eyes blazed. Her fists clenched at her sides. “Only it was all their words. Not his. He was just mouthing what they’d taught him.”
    “Who taught him to say that?”
    “That stupid church he went to. The Azá.”
     
     
    AT eleven-thirty on Friday night, Lily was curled up in the chair and a half that constituted one-third of the furnishings in her living room. The other two-thirds were the teak coffee table by the window and the red floor cushion next to it. What she lacked in furniture, she made up for in plants—ivy on the kitchen pass-through, an ambitious azalea in one corner, and eleven terra-cotta pots sharing space beneath the single large