The Hot Ladies Murder Club

Joe Campbell was yet another dark prince. She should walk away, leave him alone, but when her tears and rage at herself subsided, what did she do? Like an idiot, she punched her answering machine play button again.

“Look, I’m sorry for the way I behaved. I wish…I wish we’d met under different circumstances…. Because I like you.”

She made a fist and brushed the tears from her eyes. You can’t let yourself want him. You can’t love him or save him. You can’t save anybody. Haven’t you learned anything?

Frantically, she dug the phone book advertisement that had his picture on it out of her trash can, smoothed it out and lost another piece of her soul the second she glanced into his fierce, predatory black eyes.

Because I like you.

Joe Campbell was a lost soul. Just thinking about him made defeat slump her shoulders.

“I like you, too,” she whispered. “But don’t you dare tell anybody.”

Also by ANN MAJOR

MARRY A MAN WHO WILL DANCE

WILD ENOUGH FOR WILLA

INSEPARABLE

The Hot Ladies Murder Club

Ann Major

To my readers:

Love doesn’t transform. It forms.

What if we smashed the mirrors And saw our true face?

ELSA GIDLOW

Contents

Prologue

Book One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Book Two

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Book Three

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Book Four

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Prologue

Corpus Christi, Texas

The wages of sin must always be paid. That’s what his headmaster used to say right before he tied him up and locked him in that awful cupboard. It came as a pleasant surprise that the familiar phrase, as well as thinking about her punishment, could give him such a thrill.

Yesterday the handsome, debonair Sir Dominic Phillips had lunched at his club in London. Today he was sweating like a pig in a nondescript rental car in a shadowy parking garage in south Texas contemplating his wife’s murder.

Please…Please, sir, let it be her.

He used to say please, pretty please to the headmaster. It had been part of their ritual.

This wasn’t the first time Georgina had tempted him to murder. The trouble with murder was the risk that it would catch her unawares. That wouldn’t do.

He wanted Georgina to feel the blow coming, to dread it with a morbid, soul-destroying anticipation. That was part of the game. He wanted to overwhelm her in death as he had in marriage. He wanted her last dying thought to be that her precious, darling Georgia, whom she’d unwisely favored over him, was now his to do with as he pleased. And Georgina knew his tastes when it came to little girls.

His heart beat in a frenzy. Maybe it was the late-summer, south Texas heat that had him so feverish and crazy. Even in the dark garage the sun seemed to scream out of a too-bright, almost-hostile blue haze. Two minutes ago he’d turned off the air conditioner. Two minutes, and already his Savile Row suit that was a blend of silk and wool was dripping wet, and his fine silk shirt was sticking to his armpits. It wouldn’t be long before he stank, too.

Even though he’d rolled the windows of his car down, he was suffocating. He wiped his damp brow with his soaked handkerchief.

Had he found her?

According to Morrison’s report, she was to be deposed at three o’clock by an unscrupulous, hotshot local attorney, Joe Campbell. Apparently, Campbell had been run out of Houston for his shady legal dealings with a CEO by the name of Rod Brown. Together they’d looted Brown’s company and run off with the funds. Brown was living it up in a mansion in the British Virgins while Campbell was exiled to this backwater hellhole doing personal injury law. The creep was representing former clients of Georgina’s, who were suing her for not disclosing mold growth in a property she’d sold them.

Georgina, or rather Lady Phillips, a Realtor—here? How appalling!

As always Morrison had been painstakingly thorough. So thorough, Dominic nearly laughed out loud as he thumbed through the detective’s report.

And she’d thought she could hide. If the plain-looking woman in Morrison’s grainy photos really was his dazzling, wild Georgina, he now knew everything about her new life, her address, little Georgia’s school—everything.

When he heard her ancient Mercedes rumble up the ramp of the parking garage, he felt as devilishly excited as a child playing hide-and-seek. As he was about to crouch behind the wheel, a woman laughed close by. She was short with red hair. Walking toward her car, she fumbled in her purse for her keys.

Bugger. This could ruin everything.

A man in the truck that she climbed into started the engine and drove toward the exit. Dom held his breath until he heard Georgina’s Mercedes, closer now.

With her fear of dark, enclosed places, he hadn’t expected her to dare the garage even in broad daylight. Nevertheless, just in case, he’d parked in a reserved spot two floors beneath Campbell’s plush offices, so there’d be no danger of her parking anywhere near him.

You should’ve killed me when you had the chance, darling.

That last hideous night in their ultramodern flat on the Thames, she’d enraged him by begging for a divorce. He’d grabbed her, and when his hands had closed around her throat she’d hit him with a paperweight. Just the memory was enough to contort his aristocratic face into a mask of rage.

He’d plummeted to the floor and landed with a resounding thud. He remembered staring up at her in a weird, semiconscious state as she knelt over him in fear and alarm.

“You’ll be all right,” she’d whispered in that throaty voice of hers.

“Help me,” he’d mouthed, the way he’d once begged the headmaster for mercy.

“I’ll get help, but I can’t stay. This whole thing, us, is getting worse and worse. Please try to understand.”

Understand? He’d tried to talk, to say he was sorry, but because of the coke he’d been on, his words had slurred. He’d struggled to move, but it was as if his limbs had been made of lead and he was paralyzed from tongue to toe, helpless to do a thing to stop her as she’d gotten to her feet and packed and taken Georgia. Finally, he’d regained sensation in his limbs and had been able to crawl to the couch and then to stand.

Slut. That night she’d taught him she was like all the others, who’d made him love them and then used and abandoned him. Unlike the others, she was his wife, and she still consumed him. Constantly he imagined her with other men.

A diesel engine purred up the ramp. He knew he shouldn’t risk her seeing him, but when her Mercedes inched past him, belching plumes of black diesel, he couldn’t resist a glance just to make sure.

One look had his heart trilling with excitement and he got hard.

Yes!

Huge sunglasses hid most of her pale, slim face. Sure enough, just like in Morrison’s pictures, she’d dyed her hair and swept it untidily into a cheap plastic clip. Neither the color nor the style flattered her. Still, how clever of her to mute her dazzling beauty, to dye her honey-gold hair and discard her beautiful clothes and glamorous sense of style, to hide here, of all the dull places—Corpus Christi, Texas—which was so far away from who and what she really was. So far away from him and their glittering life together.

You shouldn’t have told me about your grandmother in San Antonio. Nor about that year when you were nineteen and lived with her when you got your Realtor’s license.

He scowled. He was the clever one. He was the one who planned while she just drifted, hoping for the best. Her disguise wasn’t that good. As soon as his detective had shown him the pictures, he’d put two and two together and had boarded a plane.

She was his wife. His. She belonged to him forever. She had no right to run away, no right to take little Georgia. No right to leave him all alone. No right to have another man. He’d show her.

When he’d stumbled to the bathroom that awful night to inspect himself in the mirror…to see…When there hadn’t been anyone in the mirror, he’d begun to quake and then to claw the mirror in an attempt to make his reflection reappear. When it hadn’t, he’d begun to weep and pound the mirror with bare fists.

The same thing had happened when he was a little boy. He’d been very, very bad—so bad, mirrors had been empty when he’d tried to see himself. After his father’s death, his mother had been so frightened, she’d sent him away to boarding school. For a long time he’d felt powerless, as if he’d simply ceased to exist.

The night Georgina had left him, he’d broken the mirror with his bare hands. Then he’d scrawled Georgina’s name on the white bathroom tile floor with his own blood. The last thing he’d heard before he’d collapsed was a siren.

She must have called the ambulance as soon as she’d known she was safe because when he’d awakened, he’d been in a trauma unit and they’d been praising his famous, beautiful wife to the skies.

Where was she, the famous Georgina, they’d wanted to know? Why wasn’t she with him? Their unspoken question had been, if she wasn’t with him, who was she with?

He’d known what he had to do.

Find her. Teach her. Retrain her…as he had in the beginning when she’d been a young bride. The wages of sin…

Like a cat, he’d toy with her awhile. He’d tie her up with bloodred satin ribbons like before. He’d…

He got hard just thinking about how her husky voice would sound when she begged him to kill her.

“Say, ‘Please,”’ he’d whisper. “Say, ‘Please, Sir.’ Kiss me down there and say you love me.

He touched himself, gently, very gently, just like he’d taught her to.

Just the thought of her lips there had him hard as a rock. Then he came, wetting all over his suit.

See what you made me do?

She would pay for that, too.

BOOK ONE

When we look into the mirror we see the mask. What is hidden behind the mask?

DIANE MARIECHILD

One

Campbell never forgot a face. Never.

Joe Campbell’s posh law offices with their sweeping views of the high bridge, port and bay were meant to impress and intimidate. The tall ceilings, the starkly modern ebony furniture, the blond hardwood floors and the Oriental rugs reeked of money and power and social prestige—all of which were vital to a man with Campbell’s ambitions. Not that he was thinking about anything other than the exquisite woman he was supposed to be deposing.

The case had been dull, routine; until she’d walked in. She was beautiful and sweet and warm—and scared witless of him.

This should be good. He rapped his fingers on his desk and tightened them into a fist that made his knuckles ache.

The minx had him running around in circles like a bloodhound that had lost a hot scent. His ears were dragging the ground, his wet nose snuffling dirt.

Minutes before the deposition, Bob Africa, one of the partners and a former classmate at UT Law School, had strutted through his door as if he owned the place—which he practically did. Bob specialized in class-action lawsuits and had just won big, having collected more than two million dollars in legal fees from a cereal company for a food additive.

There hadn’t been a shred of evidence any consumer had been injured. Africa’s fee had come to $2,000 an hour. Consumers had received a coupon for a free box of cereal.

Campbell was jealous as hell.

All smiles as usual this afternoon, a triumphant Bob had slapped him on the back and ordered him to win this one—or else. Salt in the wound—after the Crocker loss.

“I went out on a limb for you, buddy. I told the other partners you just had a run of bad luck in Houston and got a rotten hand here with that medical case.”

“Thanks.” Campbell hadn’t reminded Africa that he’d been the man who’d rammed that loser Crocker down his “buddy’s” throat and then he’d kept the more promising cases for himself.

Bob had smiled his wolverine smile and slapped his back again. “You’re the best, buddy. But, we don’t pay you to lose—”

Lose. Campbell had felt the blood rising in his face. Hell, at least Africa hadn’t reminded him about the death threats all the partners had been receiving ever since Campbell had lost the case. Hell, the incompetent quack had won. What was he so mad about? Crocker’s wife, Kay, maybe? She’d made a play for Campbell, a helluva play.

Today a letter from some crackpot, who said he was praying for Campbell, had arrived. The letter was in the same loopy handwriting as the death threats. Strangely, somehow it was even scarier. Mrs. Crocker had called three times this week, too.

But it was the woman across from Campbell who had him rigid with tension. He had to beat her—or else.

Her face was damnably familiar. Her husky voice was so exquisite and raw, it tugged at Campbell on some deep, man-woman level.

He hated her for her easy power over him even as his cold lawyer’s mind told him she was a fake. This was a staged performance. There was definitely something too deliberate and practiced about her lazy, luscious drawl.

To buy time he played with his shirt cuff. He’d asked dozens of questions and had gotten nowhere. She was a liar, and if it was the last thing he did, he would expose her.

“I—I swear I knew nothing, absolutely nothing about mo-o-old in the O’Connors’ house,” she repeated for the tenth time.

I think the lady doth protest too much.

When he shot her his most engaging smile and leaned toward her as if the deposition were over, she jumped. Her lovely, long fingers and unpolished nails twisted in her lap so violently, she almost dropped the damning photographs he’d jammed into her hands a few seconds earlier.

“I—I swear…no mold,” she pleaded.

Then why won’t you look me in the eye?

“Toxic mo-o-old,” Campbell drawled, pleased his o lasted even longer than hers. His mocking gaze drilled her.

She shook her dark head like a true innocent and began flipping through the photographs he’d made of the black muck growing inside the walls of the O’Connors’ mansion.

“There has to be a mistake,” she whispered.

No, you little liar. No mistake.

Campbell’s long, lean form remained sprawled negligently behind his sleek ebony desk. His beige silk suit was expensive. So was his vivid yellow tie.

Hannah Smith, her knees together beneath her full white skirt, sat on the edge of the black leather chair opposite him. Flanking her was the attorney from her insurance company, a mediocre, colorless little stick of a man. Hunkered low in his chair in an ill-fitting undertaker’s suit wearing smudged, gold-rimmed glasses Tom Davis looked about as dangerous as a terrified rabbit.

“No mistake,” Campbell said. “The O’Connors had to abandon their home. It’ll cost more to remediate it than they paid for it, which was a substantial sum—”

“More than a mill…But it’s not my fault!” she protested. “I was only the Realtor. I thought smart lawyers like you only sued rich people.…”

Didn’t she get it? The deep pocket here was her insurance company. Not her. So, why was she working herself into a sweat?

“Mold was not in your clients’ disclosure statement,” he said.

“There was no mold!” Her voice shaking, she began a boring repeat of her defense.

“Maybe you didn’t realize mold is a very serious issue on the Texas Gulf.”

“Because lawyers like you have made it into a billion-dollar industry?”

“I’m supposed to be asking the questions. And you are liable—”

She opened her pretty mouth and gulped for a breath.

Hannah Smith was lying. And she wasn’t all that damn good at it, either.

And yet he liked her.

This was bad.

Joe Campbell, or rather just plain Campbell, as he was known to most people, at least to those with whom he was on speaking terms, and there were fewer and fewer of those in this town since his line of work tended to alienate a lot of people, had been a trial lawyer too long not to be able to smell a liar a mile away.

He’d been screwed, glued and tattooed by the best liars in the universe—his ex-wife and his former best friend and boss had taken him to the cleaners.

Here we go again. The pretty little con artist across from him smelled warm and sweet. And thanks to his air-conditioning register that wafted her light fragrance Campbell’s way, he was too aware of that fact.

Chanel. He frowned, shifting his long legs under his desk as another unwelcome buzz of man-woman excitement rushed through him. By now he should have boxed her in. She was scared and pretty, and he should have had her on the run. And yet…she had him oddly off balance.

Her nervous fingers shuffled and reshuffled the photographs of the O’Connors’ estate. He caught glimpses of the abandoned pool, the empty hot tub, and the red brick path that wound through the strawlike remnants of formerly showy flower beds. Her slim, graceful hands trembled so badly when she came to his damning shots of the mold, she nearly dropped the whole bunch.

“Think how those images will affect a sympathetic jury, Mrs. Smith.”

“That’s not a question,” her lawyer said. “You don’t have to answer.”

Deliberately, she licked her lips with her pink tongue. “I’m sorry Mr. O’Connor’s sick, but…”

Hell. She sounded sorry. A jury would believe her, too. He almost believed her. When she began talking faster and faster, swallowing, and glancing everywhere but at him, Campbell found himself studying her wide, wet lips with obsessive interest.

Sexy voice, intoxicating scent…and that delectable mouth…Everything about her seemed soft and vulnerable and likable. She was too damned likable. Not like him.

Suddenly Campbell wanted her to shut up and just look at him, and that scared the hell out of him. His big house was lonely and empty, his footsteps echoed when he finally made it home and climbed the stairs to his bedroom alone every night.

Was anything about her for real? Was she sucking him in…as Carol had?

Mrs. Smith was damned attractive, too damned attractive, despite that shapeless white sack that concealed her figure, despite thick, inky bangs and huge dark glasses that masked her face. Her legs were long and shapely, her ankles slim…even though those low-heeled, stained canvas shoes did nothing for her calves.

Yes, she was pretty despite the fact that she’d gone to a lot of trouble not to be. Why had she done that? Most women liked to add pretty to their arsenal of weapons when they went up against him or a jury. For an instant, he remembered Mrs. Crocker’s slit skirts and shapely legs. She’d been built like a gymnast.

“Call me Kay,” she’d said the day Campbell had lost. “Better, call me…anytime.”

He’d been angry because he’d lost. “I don’t mess around with married women.”

“So, my husband’s wrong about you,” she’d purred. “You do have a principle or two. I like that.”

“No principle. I just don’t want to get shot by a jealous husband.”

“My husband’s a good shot, too. He’s a hunter.”

“This lawsuit wasn’t personal, you know.”

“So, why are you so sore you lost?”

“I’m sore about a lot of things.”

“So am I.” Her eyes had sparked.

Forget Kay. Concentrate on Mrs. Smith. Campbell ran a tanned hand through his jet-black hair and yawned, pretending he was bored by what Mrs. Smith was saying. Bored by her. If only he was, maybe he could concentrate on the O’Connors’ case and finish her off.

She was tall. From the moment she’d glided into his office, he’d been riveted by her exquisite lightness of being. Something sweet and vulnerable screamed look at me, love me, please. Her every gesture—her quick, nervous smiles at Tom—hell, even the frightened glances he got both charmed and maddened him.

A jury would be equally charmed.

Then there was the way she couldn’t seem to catch her breath when he got too close. She was playing the role of damsel in distress with a vengeance that should have infuriated him. And yet…Her fear felt so real and palpable, he wanted to protect her.

Damn it, he had to get her. Africa had made it clear, his ass was on the line.

If her accent was fake, he’d bet a year’s salary her black hair came out of a bottle. The harsh color was wrong for her fair complexion, the style too severe for her narrow face. He kept eyeing the thick, glossy mass, longing to undo the cheap plastic clip.

Hell, what were those white bits of dust that clung to her bangs? What had she been doing before she’d dashed late to his office.

“If the O’Connors are so concerned, why aren’t they here today?” she finished in that velvet undertone that undid him.

“They hired me to represent them.” His voice cut like ice.

“You mean to do their dirty work?” she finished, glancing out his windows like a trapped animal.

Damn it, Campbell felt sorry for her. Then Tom put a cautionary hand over hers, and Campbell felt a wild, really scary emotion.

“What’s all that stuff in your hair?” Campbell growled, wanting to rip Tom’s hand away.

“Oh!” Her eyes flew self-consciously to his. She gulped in another big breath, and he felt like the air between them sizzled.

This was bad.

She stirred her fingers through the mess of her purse and finally plucked out an elegant, gold-framed mirror. When she saw herself she wrinkled her nose. Quickly, she yanked at the hideous clip and shook out her long, thick hair.

When lots of little white bits showered onto his gray carpet, she smiled, revealing deep dimples, and he felt that damn buzz again. Despite a bad haircut, she was way sexier with her hair down. She studied herself in her mirror and wrinkled her nose again.

Campbell squirmed in his leather chair. He didn’t need this.

“Bits of Sheetrock,” she explained airily. Lifting her triangular chin, she shot him a pious look. “I was inspecting one of the waterfront properties I represent. For mold, Mr. Campbell.”

“Just call me Campbell.…”

“There was a suspicious stain on the ceiling.…I wanted to be sure.…”

She and Tom exchanged self-righteous glances.

“My expert didn’t find any,” she said.

Touche, Campbell thought grimly, even as some part of him cheered for her.

Again, her hands fluttered prettily as she reclipped her hair. She didn’t wear a wedding ring. For no reason at all he longed to remove those huge glasses that hid her eyes.

Were they dazzling blue or soft velvet brown? Or fiery black? He wanted to sweep her hair back, get a good look at her. Maybe then he’d remember where the hell he’d seen her.

Damn it. He grabbed one of the mold photographs from his own duplicate pile and forced himself to focus on his clients and their toxic-mold problem.