Chapter 43
Kelsi
McGuinness looked her over silently for a moment before he relaxed in his seat once more. He steepled his fingers under his chin, elbows on the chair arms, and smirked. “All right. You want to know how I got away with it?”
“I would also like to know why you did it. Wasn’t Tripp one of your best friends?”
He snarled at her, curling his upper lip back. “He was not my friend. He was a leech. Not worth the mud on the bottom of my shoes. But Scarlett liked him, for some reason I could never figure out. So he got to stick around.” He stood and started pacing the room, but continued speaking.
As much as Kelsi wanted to use his distraction to examine more of the room, she couldn’t keep her attention off him as he told the story. From the corner of her eye, she could see Sheridan watching the man raptly as well.
“He came from nothing, another forgotten son of a trailer trash whore. He wanted everything I had. He hung off my arms, eagerly accepting any scraps or handouts I gave him. At first I didn’t mind it so much.
He was so obsessed with me that he was willing to do about anything I asked him to, without question.
All to be included.” He stopped pacing and turned to Kelsi, unnervingly making eye contact, unblinking.
“But then we graduated. He went to a good college on a scholarship, got a business degree, and made it out. Got picked up by a hedge fund and started making his own money.” He resumed pacing again.
“He no longer needed me, but he needed to stick around. Because, all along, he’d had a crush on Scarlett.
” He broke off abruptly and kicked the leg of the chair he had abandoned, sending it spiraling across the room with a series of loud crashes.
Kelsi and Sheridan flinched in their seats.
“It’s not as if I didn’t know about his crush, of course I did.
But it didn’t matter. She was mine. He was nothing.
Until he wasn’t fucking nothing anymore.
” He was so angry he spat the last sentence, spittle flying in front of him.
“But I still didn’t think he could actually get her to go out with him.
I mean, she never expressed any interest in him.
Then one day he called me and said she’d agreed to go on a date.
With him!” McGuinness seethed. “He didn’t realize that Scarlett is mine.
There is no other girl beautiful enough or connected enough to be worthy of being seen on my arm. ”
Kelsi blinked slowly, processing the information he was feeding her. He did all this because he felt like he was losing—like he wasn’t getting what he thought he was owed? Scarlett had told them he was used to getting everything he wanted, but to go to these lengths was beyond crazed.
“So, I began to plan.” He smiled, picking up his kicked chair nonchalantly and dragging it back to the card table.
The chair’s legs on the floor were like nails on a chalkboard, and icy tendrils of fear snaked down her spine.
Instead of bringing it to where it had been before, at the table, he diverted at the last minute and placed it closer to her chair.
Still far enough to be out of reach unless he leaned forward with an outstretched arm, but close enough that she was tense and on edge.
McGuinness sat in the chair and leaned back, his emotions settled once more.
“They loved coming to my parents’ vacation home.
It was our summer tradition, as I’m sure you remember from your own childhood.
” A corner of his lips tugged upward as he seemingly reminisced on the times he and his friends had terrorized the children in town.
“We’d go for a month at a time, my au pair the only adult supervision we had.
It turned into a monthlong party. Drugs, alcohol, and decadent sin.
” He turned his head and stared unseeingly at a spot on the wall, lost in the memories now, his mind on a different point in time.
“After college it was harder for everyone to take a month off work. Not everyone has a multimillion-dollar trust fund, like I do.”
Kelsi rolled her eyes at his self-importance.
He darted forward faster than she could have anticipated and lost the calm, contemplative aura, slapping her sharply across the face.
Her head reeled back, black spots dancing in her vision.
He gripped her chin tightly between his fingers, nails digging into her so sharply that she felt the skin split open beneath them.
Her blood warmed the skin underneath his icy fingers as she stared with loathing and fear into his eyes.
Sheridan made a distressed noise before he clambered to his feet, knocking his own chair over, and ran from the room.
McGuinness laughed, and there was genuine amusement in the sound. “He’s such a weak, pathetic fool, isn’t he?” he whispered to Kelsi, so close to her that his breath, foul and reeking of stale cigar smoke, heated her face. Apprehension swirled uneasily in her gut. “Shall I continue?”
She didn’t trust herself to speak, so instead nodded.
Kelsi was afraid to take her eyes off him.
Some innate instinct told her this was a predator and she was his prey.
He was circling her, and it would take a single moment of weakness, of distraction, and she would be dead.
Never mind that she was already good as.
“So, I figured my best chance to stage an . . .” He paused as he searched for the right word.
“. . . accident, would be at our annual trip. One weekend, the perfect opportunity to ruin him. I hadn’t actually planned to kill him, you know.
Really, I thought maybe I’d get him high enough that he’d do something to make Scarlett dump him.
Except that once we were there, it was clear they’d been lying to me and going around behind my back longer than they’d said.
” A flush rose to his cheeks and his fists clenched, although this time at least he seemed to have a tighter control over his temper.
“They were making a mockery of me. So, when I got him alone, I took it too far.” He shrugged nonchalantly.
It was as if he’d said he decided to wear blue socks today instead of black.
There was no emotion on his face at all.
Nervously, Kelsi cleared her throat. “But, how did you know they were sneaking around on you?”
“Excellent question, Ms. Cameron.” He tipped his head at her in acknowledgment.
“I caught them, of course. The second night of the trip, they got drunk and snuck off, but I followed them. Our other friend was already passed out on the couch, so she didn’t notice anything.
” He leaned closer to her and whispered, as though they were friends, “She’s always been a lightweight.
” McGuinness reclined once more, and any trace of amusement vanished from his face.
“They went out to the pool house, and I watched through the window as they stripped each other and fucked.
“After they were done, they snuck back into the house. Scarlett headed to bed, and I stopped Tripp, a bottle of Eagle Rare bourbon in hand. It was his drink of choice but cost more than he could regularly afford, so he couldn’t pass on it.
I asked him if he wanted to have a nightcap with me.
” An oily smile snaked across his face. “I walked him out to the dock, where we drank from the bottle. I made sure he drank more than I did. I needed to keep my head to enact my plan. Once he was drunk enough, I suggested we go out on the boat. He didn’t want to, but he was too drunk to really argue. ”
Kelsi hardly dared to breathe as he told her about how he murdered his friend.
“When we got out to the next point, I cut the engine. I looked at him, and he knew. He tried begging, crying, and pleading for his worthless life. Pathetic,” he spat.
“When he finally realized he would find no mercy from me, he tried fighting. But he was drunker than me. He could barely keep his feet under him on the rocking boat. Even still, he managed to distract me enough that the boat drifted and ran into a bulkhead.” He appeared infuriated, even now, that Tripp had bested him for even a second.
“Of course, it didn’t do any real damage to the boat, but that scrape of paint caused more than one headache for me that I could have done without.
For that, I wish I could bring him back and kill him all over again.
So inconvenient.” He shook his head in disgust. “I grabbed him by the back of his neck and slammed his head down onto the side of the boat. He was out cold.”
Kelsi swallowed roughly. McGuinness licked his lips as if savoring the words on them.
“I threw him overboard. I made sure he went in face down and left him in the middle of the water. Afterward, I went back to the house and went to bed. When the girls woke me up the next morning looking for him, I joined the search and faked my grief when his body was found. Of course, I was suspected at first, and those stupid cops arrested me after that crazy woman came forward and said she’d seen me out there on the boat.
But she died, and what little evidence they had against me slowly started disappearing.
” He chuckled briefly and cocked his head sideways, looking at her with an unnervingly cold stare.
“Then you came along. Suddenly, people started talking. Evidence began accumulating again. I knew something had to be done about you.”
“So, you asked Sheridan to get close to me and scare me off the case?”
The man in question chose that moment to return to the room.
He was still an unnatural shade of puce, but he had a bit more color than he had when he fled.
His eyes darted nervously toward her when he heard her question.
Kelsi didn’t back down and tracked his movements through the room to his chair, before she flicked her eyes to McGuinness’s.
“Yes, I asked him to do what it took to scare you away from the case.” He leered at Sheridan before slowly turning to Kelsi.
“You were too clean to blackmail like the others, so we had to resort to different methods. I didn’t ask him to date you, though.
That was a stroke of pure genius on his own initiative.
I was very impressed with him for that.”
McGuinness shrunk in his chair, his head sinking down to meet his shoulders, neck disappearing somewhere in the middle.
“Now, do you have any other questions, or are you done trying to distract me from killing you?” He uncrossed his legs and extended them in front of him as he leaned forward, toward Kelsi, and rested his elbows on his thighs.
“Personally, I don’t really want to kill you, but if you can’t be bought, you’ve given me no other choice. ”
He smiled coldly at her and reached one hand out to painfully grasp her chin again, forcing her head up to meet his eyes. She let him see the anger and hatred in her own.
McGuinness’s phone chimed from inside his suit jacket. Scowling at the interruption, he reached his free hand into the interior left pocket and pulled his phone out. He looked down at it, and whatever he saw there made his already-thin lips disappear further in his displeasure.
“Well, this will have to wait until later, I’m afraid. I have a date with Dylan. I trust you’ll be waiting here patiently for me when I get back.”
The bastard winked at that and walked out of the room.