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Despite everything, Rafe thought he heard the love in her voice, and he was glad she’d found that. He doubted though he’d be glad about the other things that had happened.
“Best to start at the beginning,” Tessa said. “I met Callum Buckner at a party when I was twenty.” She snapped her fingers. “Instant, intense lust between us. We had sex in a closet after knowing each other for less than an hour.”
Again, Rafe didn’t react, and he hoped that Bree understood it didn’t bother him to hear about Tessa’s sexual partner. By then, Tessa and he had obviously moved on with their lives.
“The intensity continued for about a month,” Tessa went on. “Sex, drugs, alcohol. One party right after another.” She swallowed hard. “Then, at one of those parties, I danced too long with another man, and Buckner came unglued. Lots of yelling and accusations. So, I ended things with him. I thought I’d seen the last of him. Hoped I had,” she whispered. “But I know now he was obsessed with me and had no intentions of letting me go.”
“What happened?” Bree asked when Tessa fell silent.
Tessa looked at her. “I can tell you, and then you’ll have to arrest me. Isn’t that what military people say?” She waved that off. “But in my case, it’s true.”
Rafe felt Bree’s arm muscles tighten. “Arrest you for what?” Bree demanded.
“Murder.” Tessa sighed, and that’s all she said for a long time. “About a month after I broke up with Buckner, Sandy Lynn Franklin walked up to me when I was in a bar, and she got in my face, claiming that she was my sister and that she was tired of me covering it up.”
“Covering it up?” Rafe repeated. “Were you?”
“No. I didn’t even know about her, but I could see the resemblance, so I believed her. She kept harassing me,” Tessa went on. “I didn’t want to confront my dad about it. I just wantedit to stop so I called Sandy Lynn and asked her to come over to the estate so I could have it out with her. Dad wasn’t home. He was away on a long business trip, and he’d given the staff time off.” She paused again. “I had a gun.”
“You what?” Bree blurted.
“A gun,” she repeated, wincing. “I know it was stupid. I was just going to threaten her with it. But things turned…bad. The worst kind of bad.”
Hell in a handbasket. Tessa was confessing to murder.
“Damn right, it was stupid.” Bree groaned. “That could be construed as premeditation, Tessa.” She stopped, made a visible attempt to rein in her reaction. “Keep talking. Tell me what happened.”
It took Tessa a moment to gather her breath. “I answered the door, and there she was. She was wearing a red jacket identical to mine. But I’m sure you know that part,” she muttered. “What you don’t know is that Sandy Lynn was going to try to ruin me.”
“What do you mean?” Rafe asked.
“Someone, I suspect Buckner posing as a man calling himself Parker Livingston, had, well, manipulated her mind and her feelings. He’d gotten her to fall in love with him and then told her about me. Somehow, he convinced Sandy Lynn that I was trying to kill her so I wouldn’t have any competition for our daddy’s money.”
Rafe thought of Patricia, of the person who’d prodded her into coming after Bree. Buckner, probably.
“How did Buckner find out Sandy Lynn was Wade’s daughter?” Bree wanted to know.
“I’m not sure, but Sandy Lynn and I did look alike. I’m guessing he saw her, maybe even figured out she was my half-sister and then tried to use her to get back at me. That last part isn’t a theory,” Tessa added. “Buckner told me that no womanwalks away from him, and that he would find a way to pay me back for breaking up with him.”
Rafe jumped right on that. “When did he tell you that? After you killed Sandy Lynn?”
Tessa looked at him, and a single tear slid down her cheek. She nodded. “Sandy Lynn was convinced I was trying to kill her. Buckner had put a rattlesnake in her car. He’d made her sick by poisoning something she ate. Obviously, not enough to kill her. Just enough to make her come after me.”
“Why didn’t Sandy Lynn go to the cops?” Bree asked.
“Because Buckner also managed to make her believe they couldn’t be trusted. That your father would cover up anything I did because Wade and he were friends.”
Bree huffed. “My father would have never covered up anything.”
“You and I know that. Sandy Lynn didn’t, and Buckner worked her up into a very agitated state. I’m guessing with drugs. She started yelling the moment she saw me. She said she was going to ruin me, that she would let everyone know I attacked her. She was wild. Out of control. She just wouldn’t stop cursing me, and when she spit in my face, I took out the gun I’d put in my pocket.” She paused. “And I shot her.”
“You shot her?” Bree repeated.
A bullet wound hadn’t shown up on any of the bones, but it was possible the shot hadn’t hit bone and that the injury they had found—the bashed in part of the skull—had come from the fall after being shot.
“There was so much blood on her shirt,” Tessa murmured. More tears came.
“You didn’t call an ambulance?” Rafe asked.
