Page 62 of Enticement
Sensing impending doom, Evie mentally braced herself for the details of a road accident or drunken misadventure. Drugs were out; Kit was far too clean living for that, although maybe this would explain his obsession with green tea and muesli. Maybe it was something simpler like he’d got the girl pregnant and bailed on her. She hoped not. She didn’t have much respect for people who wouldn’t accept responsibility for their actions, and she didn’t want a reason to dislike him.
“Just tell me, Molly.”
“He killed her.”
“What?”
“Oh, I can’t prove it. But I know he’s responsible. They found her clothes in a ditch. Wallet too.”
Evie gawped at Molly, completely dumbstruck. There weren’t really words to express the shock and disbelief that flattened her thoughts. Kit a murderer… Ridiculous. Sanity prevailed. She shook her head. “No. Oh, no.”
“It was fine between him and Sammie while she was going along with his pervy demands, but it was a different matter once she started saying no,” Molly explained.
“No.”
Molly didn’t seem to hear Evie’s denial; she just kept layering on the dirt, thicker and thicker. Painting an image of a man so alien to what Evie knew of Kit, the dichotomy finally snapped her out of her stunned daze.
Yes, admittedly, Kit played hard and fast with his sexual morals, but that hardly made him evil. And he’d shown no indication of being the sort given to violent rages. Molly’s account just didn’t tally up straight.
Evie gulped a mouthful of steaming coffee to dislodge the lump in her throat. The liquid scalded her tongue, and brought stinging tears to her eyes, but also finally loosened her tongue. “You’re mistaken, surely. Not Kit. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. That’s not him.”
Molly abruptly pushed herself upright and paced around the coffee table. “You don’t know what he’d been asking her to do. It wasn’t the sort of stuff you wanted passing around the neighbourhood. It was disgusting. Really crude.”
Disgusting as in threesomes and anal sex, Evie wondered, though she kept the thought to herself. There’d be no placating Molly’s moral outrage.
“Was he charged?” she asked, fearing for a moment that the six year stint in Japan was fiction to camouflage a stint in jail.
Molly shook her head. “The police reckoned there wasn’t enough evidence. No signs of any obvious scuffles and they never found her body. They just stuck her on the missing persons register and forgot about her.”
“But Kit—”
“Was the last person to see her and the only one with a motive. Of course, he denies everything. And your boyfriend backed him up.”
“Ross!”
The possibility that he was somehow involved in this too threatened the contents of her stomach. Evie flailed blindly seeking a reassuring purchase, some slice of sanity, but there was only Molly and her vitriol, black tears streaking her face where her mascara had run.
Evie rose and hurried back to the conservatory. If the police hadn’t charged him, there had to be reasonable doubt despite Molly’s insistence.
“Did she tell you?” Lillianna turned her head as Evie pulled a tenner from her purse and left it on the leather chair as payment for her nails.
“Why didn’t you?” Still fevered with shock, Evie stared at her friend. Lillianna refused to make eye contact.
“Not everyone sees it the same way as Molly.”
“Do you believe it?”
Lillianna thoughtfully chewed her lips. “I don’t know. I can’t deny that the relationship was rocky. They were both pretty wild, but on the other hand, regardless of what I think of Ross, he’s always been honest. I don’t think he’d lie even to cover Kit’s back. He claimed Kit was with him so he couldn’t have had anything to do with it, in case Molly didn’t say.”
Lilli dug her teeth so hard into her lower lip that they came away stained with burgundy lipstick. “I’m sorry, Evie. I just thought you should know, and I figured they hadn’t told you.”
Snapshot images of Kit touching her, of the three of them entwined, were suddenly overlaid with the frozen image of Sammie smiling and her body lying naked in a ditch.
“Go home, Evie. Talk to Ross. Talk to Kit. Draw your own conclusions.”
“Right.” Evie glanced up and caught a glimpse of the scene playing out next door. Jason and Saul smeared in baby oil, Greek wrestling, while a woman in thigh high leather boots and a PVC cat suit half-heartedly flogged them with what looked like a suede jellyfish. “I thought you said it was kinky, not surreal.”
“It’s kinkier in my head. There’s a bit more sand in there and some trees, and they have two nice matching slave collars, and when they’re disobedient I have them lick my shiny boots clean. She—” she nodded at the woman, “—isn’t exactly cut out for the role. She’s much better as the naughty nurse, or the naughty schoolgirl, the naughty anything, really. She’s pathetic when they make her top. One of these days, I’m going to work up my nerve and offer to give them a proper work out.” She tugged the cord so that the blinds swivelled, obscuring the view. “I didn’t do this to wreck it for you, Evie. I just thought you deserved to know a bit about him. I’d hate to think you got yourself into something without ever having seen the full picture.”
