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Overview
CAN'T FORGET THE PAIN
It took years for Adam to stop drowning his regrets in alcohol, and running the local bar doesn't make it any easier-especially not when everyone he knows gathers there to discuss the shocking allegations that have shattered his hometown. When another murder rocks sleepy Madison to its core, it becomes chillingly clear that even more vicious wounds are waiting to be exposed.
WON'T RESIST THE PLEASURE
Nothing is sacred anymore, and no one is safe, least of all the mystery woman who shows up in town out of the blue, looking like every fantasy Adam's ever had. She may have her own dangerous secrets, but she can't ignore the urgent heat between them any more than he can. As a killer's quest for vengeance explodes into violence, Adam is tempted to lose himself in the delicious promise of her body-until he realizes he'll risk anything if she'll give him her heart...in Sweeter than Sin by Shiloh Walker.
"Shiloh Walker's writing just gets better and better...[and] the sex is sizzling." -RT Book Reviews
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466825895 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/30/2014 |
| Series: | Secrets & Shadows , #2 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Sales rank: | 975,216 |
| File size: | 641 KB |
About the Author
Shiloh Walker is an award-winning writer…yes, really! She’s also a mom, a wife, a reader, and she pretends to be an amateur photographer. Her Secrets and Shadows series includes Burn for Me, Break for Me, and Long for Me.
Read an Excerpt
Sweeter Than Sin
By Shiloh Walker
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2014 Shiloh WalkerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-2589-5
CHAPTER 1
It could be said that Adam Brascum loved women.
It could be said.
But it would be off-target. Adam didn't love women — he didn't hate them, but he didn't love them, either. He needed them.
The soft curves, the scent of their skin, the husky voices as they whispered to him in the night. If he worked it right, he could spend the night with any number of them and he wouldn't have to be alone unless he wanted.
Wouldn't have to be alone, with just the voices in his head, the memory of a phone call, the memory of a smile, the memory of the girl he might have been able to save.
If only he'd done something.
Now, years after, when it was far too late, he was doing something. Drowning his sorrows between the thighs of just about any woman who would have him.
There had been a time when he'd drown his sorrows with a woman, along with the help of his good friend Captain Morgan or maybe some Jack Daniel's, but that had all stopped on a cold, wintry day. He could still remember the soft, sad words spoken in his ear, and at the foot of a grave he'd made a promise.
He didn't make them often, but when he did, he kept them.
So the booze was gone.
His only vice now was women.
Lately, though, that vice wasn't doing it for him anymore.
He barely knew the name of the woman in bed next to him. She was beautiful, a long, sleek woman maybe ten years older than him, and she had left him feeling like she could put him through his paces for the rest of the night. He'd slept maybe thirty minutes, her neck tucked against his chest, her hand resting on his stomach.
And then the nightmare hit.
He was standing in front of the house.
Just standing there.
It was dark.
It was cold.
The dimly lit windows mocked him. If he moved any closer, the lights would go out and he'd find nothing.
But he could hear her. Her voice, whispering his name.
Adam ... why didn't you help ...
Why didn't you ...
Why didn't you ...
* * *
He came awake, choking back the oath. He'd learned long ago that when he made noise, whatever partner he had in bed with him tended to ask questions. Questions weren't the kind of thing he liked to entertain in bed, so he eventually figured out how to strangle the groans, the curses ... even the screams.
After all these years, it was second nature.
Next to him, there was a long, soft sigh. He froze, listened.
After years and years of slipping out of beds, he'd all but perfected it to an art and he could almost tell to the second when a woman was about to wake.
She shifted, rolled onto her belly.
Adam turned his head, stared at her in the dim light filtering in through the skylight. Her face, all but lost in the darkness, was a clean oval, her skin a warm, rich brown, her lips sweet and full. She had a wicked laugh and she'd looked at him like she had more than a few ideas about any secrets he might harbor. She'd looked, and she hadn't cared.
I just divorced a son of a bitch who'd been cheating on me for eight years. I knew, and I couldn't leave him. Now I can. She told Adam that, sitting across from him at the sports bar he owned, staring at him with clear eyes. This is how I burn those bridges.
He'd lifted an eyebrow at her. Just how do you burn them, Jez?
He was the only man I ever shared my bed with and I plan on changing that damn fast. I'm almost fifty years old and I don't want the only man I've slept with to be a lying, cheating son of a bitch.
Adam was a son of a bitch, but he couldn't be called a cheater. He'd never married, never even had a serious relationship. Again, it went back to promises. If you didn't make them, you didn't have to worry about breaking them.
I might be a son of a bitch, but I'm clear on the rest of it.
She'd smiled at him.
They'd ended up in her room at the B&B, not the big one in town but a smaller, quieter one out near the river, and she'd all but turned him inside out. A hungry woman, a hot woman ... who should have left him too burned-out to dream.
But here he was, on the edges of a desolate nightmare.
While Jez slept on.
He leaned in, brushed her cheek with his lips. "Find somebody who'll do more than just share your bed, Jez," he murmured.
She made a grumbling sound under her breath and then sighed, a faint smile curving her wicked, delicious mouth.
Then she shoved her face into the pillow.
He was gone in less than three minutes.
But he didn't go home.
Instead, he drove out to the house that had haunted his nightmares. Yet again.
It stood there, a silent sentinel on the river. What secrets it guarded Adam didn't know.
It hadn't yielded an answer in all this time.
And now there was a new owner. It wasn't likely any answers would ever be found. A new owner — pretty lady, from what he'd heard. A young kid. Blowing out a sigh, he put the car in reverse and did a three-point turn.
He hadn't gotten answers in all this time.
It wasn't going to happen now, either.
Chicago
She had a ritual.
Get up in the morning.
Run three miles. Come back home. Do one hundred push-ups, two hundred situps, shower, brush and braid her hair and then sit at the computer and take care of business before she went down to work. After work, she'd come up here, check her email again, read and then eat. Sometime around midnight or so, she would go to bed.
And all the while, she waited and she worried.
This was her life.
This was the only life she knew.
It was boring.
It was lonely.
It was safe.
It was comfortable.
Sometimes she hated it, but mostly she needed it.
Needed it because she remembered a time when she hadn't had the safety. Nights when she hadn't even had a bed. Days when she hadn't had food in her belly. Days, weeks, months that had passed in a blur of nothingness, all because she had to forget, had to bury who she thought she was.
You can do anything you set your mind to, baby. ...
She'd been told that from the time she'd been just a little girl. Was it arrogance that she'd believed it? She hadn't thought so at the time. But looking back, she'd realized those words had just been encouragement from an adult to just convince her to try.
She'd thought she could do extraordinary things; she'd set out to do just that. Then came the one thing that seemed so simple.
In the end, it had been huge, an insurmountable wall, and although that wall needed to be scaled, she just wasn't strong enough to do it.
Instead of changing things, she'd ruined her life and the lives of how many others?
She couldn't even begin to count.
So she didn't try to change things in a big way anymore.
She focused on little things. If a guy needed food, she'd give him food. If somebody needed clothes, she'd find a way to give him clothes. More than once, she'd taken the shirt off her back — she always wore two around here, a T-shirt and a bigger outer shirt, a flannel in the winter, a work shirt in the summer. If she came out with fewer clothes than she left with? No big deal.
When she first started this new ... life ... if that was what she had to call it, somebody had told her, Keep your head down. Don't cause trouble, don't look for it. Don't attract attention.
So that was what she did now. She helped in small ways, because she hoped it might balance out the scale eventually. But she avoided trouble. She worked hard and she kept her head down.
It wasn't enough, but she tried to pretend it was.
She wasn't going to let anybody get hurt over her again.
But then the day came when she couldn't keep up her nonexistence. The day, boring as it was, started like any other. She could hear the rattle of the L outside her window, smell the scent of coffee, bread from a bakery down the street. Car horns beeping and she rolled over, stared up the window with a sigh.
It was never quiet in Chicago. She'd long since gotten accustomed to it, but she missed silence, even now. After a minute or two of lying there and letting her brain wake up, she rolled out of bed, hit the floor and headed to the bathroom.
Five minutes later, she was out the door and ready for her run.
It was miserable hot, even at six a.m., and she dodged the commuters, the people rushing to and from the subway. Businesswomen in pretty suits with sensible shoes they'd swap out later. Some brave souls already wore their toothpick heels even to navigate the streets of Chicago, and that always made her smirk a little.
She was more at home in her boots and tennis shoes, but some of those heels did fill her with a wistful sort of envy, made her remember a time when she'd had a small — very small — hoard of pretty clothes. She'd had to bust her tail to get them, but she'd cherished them that much more. She'd loved just being a girl, pairing this shirt with that skirt, messing with her hair, playing with makeup, spending a ridiculous amount of time in the bathroom as she got ready for the day.
These women reminded her of who she might have become. Their sharply cut suits, the way they moved through life. They had a sense of purpose.
She envied it.
She had no purpose anymore. She hadn't had purpose in far longer than she cared to think about. No purpose, no goals. No goals, other than maintaining the status quo.
You can't worry about him now. You need to rest up, heal.
Those words echoed in her mind, even now.
She wished she could banish that voice.
Wished she could just silence it, forever.
But that wasn't going to happen, and she knew it.
While memories chased her, she ran, her feet pounding the pavement, her breathing sawing in and out of her lungs.
She consoled herself with the knowledge that the monster responsible for all of this was dead and the evil he'd spawned had also died. It wasn't good enough and it didn't undo what he'd done.
It wasn't much, but it was all she had.
The memories still haunted her and her impotence, her fear, chased her, choked her.
So she ran harder.
That was part of her routine, too.
Life was just routine, and it had been for a good long time.
Her routine crashed to a halt that hot, muggy day.
It was at precisely 7:42. Eighteen minutes before she was supposed to be downstairs, when she took over the store.
Her life went straight to hell ... all because of a Google alert.
Clifty Drive.
The words jumped out at her, quick as a snake.
She knew that name. She'd tailored this search down to catch only the things she needed.
And this was something needed.
It was an announcement in the paper. A small paper, from a town in southern Indiana. A place so small, most people had never heard of it.
She had, though.
The announcement was short, simple and to the point.
All about a house, one that had sat empty for years.
And now it wasn't.
Somebody had bought the damn thing.
Leaning back in her chair, she rubbed her hands over her face and tried not to panic.
Somebody had bought the old Frampton place.
That didn't have to mean anything ... did it?
CHAPTER 2As it turned out, it meant everything.
She didn't realize it until later.
Several weeks later.
Part of her had already been prepared. She had money stashed. No bank accounts. She hadn't had one of those in decades. But she did have money, some saved, and then there were people who owed her. Those who could pay she tried to collect.
The people in her life she cared about, she made sure she visited them, one more time.
She'd learned the value of that. The hard way. You never knew just when might be the last time you got to see somebody you cared for. The final memories should be good ones.
She didn't let herself admit she was saying good-bye.
Not at the time.
But deep inside, she knew what she doing.
Then the day came when she read about the discovery that rocked the little town.
A body, discovered in a cellar, in that small town on the Ohio River.
In a city like Chicago, the discovery of a corpse wouldn't even make most of them blink or pause for more than a second. Some might murmur about what a waste, might wonder who the victim was, but it wouldn't slow life down, not a bit.
It would bring the little town of Madison to a halt.
She haunted the website for the town newspaper, day in and day out. Had a few messed-up moments when she was skimming the archives and discovered an article about a body found in a submerged car that had been pulled out of the river.
Who —
But then she made herself stop.
Don't, she cautioned herself. The body had been in the river for years, but she wouldn't let herself think negative things. You can't think it. If you think it, you might make it happen.
Once, she hadn't believed in such a thing. Paranoia had been something she would not let herself dwell on. She'd always believed that if she just pushed hard enough and did the right thing it would make a difference.
She'd been wrong.
Bad shit happened and nothing she did or said could stop it, and sometimes that bad shit just kept right on rolling.
And this was that bad shit, in force. It was like dominos. One thing after another happened.
The body in the river, the one in the cellar, the fire ... and then the arrests.
She'd read about those with a mix of horror, despair and rage, her hands shaking, her vision blurring to red, while part of her wanted to rage and shove the computer to the floor.
No. No. No. This wasn't happening —
Except it was.
That was when she understood.
She couldn't hide anymore.
It didn't matter if she stopped thinking about the bad shit, because the bad shit had never stopped and she'd been up here, blissfully unaware, while monsters continued to exist.
You'd promised me, she thought, half-desperate as she read through the article, reading the disbelief in the reporter's words even as he tried to be objective:
Years of rape and abuse ...
Going back for generations ...
She dropped her head into her hands as darkness crowded in on her.
She barely remembered anything from that night so many years ago. All of her memories came from after, nearly two days later while she was recovering, her head aching from a concussion that had left her with headaches that haunted her for months. There was also shock, from her injuries, from what she'd seen, what they'd had to do.
Memories of blood, pain and screaming had taunted her.
And when she came out of the darkness, all she'd heard was a voice.
I know you're still healing up, but it's not safe here. You have to go.
That low, steady voice, so full of certainty and so steady, as she tried to argue. Go?
No, what she needed to do was find him. Had to help.
It's too late to help now. You can't. And if you stay, you'll be in trouble. You didn't do anything wrong ... you just tried to help. But nobody will believe that —
Setting her jaw, she pushed all of that aside and continued to read, hoping that somehow the words on the screen would change.
But they didn't.
The depravity appears to go back some fifty years, spanning across generations. The Cronus Club, as reports have called it, allegedly consists of several well-known families, all men, and their sons are inducted into the club through acts of sodomy and sexual molestation that start in their early teens and last for three years —
That was all she read before the need to puke hit her.
Hard and fast.
She bolted for the bathroom and emptied her belly.
Heart racing, head pounding, the violent spasms racked her body for endless minutes, but she didn't mind — she almost welcomed it.
The Cronus Club.
Son of a bitch.
It hadn't stopped.
Everything she'd left, everything she'd walked away from — her father, her friends, herhome — it had all been because she thought they'd managed to stop it. That one good thing had come out of that night.
And it had been worth it. Even the nightmares, vague bits of memory that she would never fully recover, all those faded bits and pieces of a night she'd never understood. Even the misery of the next few years, when she'd lost herself, that had been worth it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sweeter Than Sin by Shiloh Walker. Copyright © 2014 Shiloh Walker. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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