Free Wicked Game by Lisa Jackson, Nancy Bush Page A

memories, a dizzying kaleidoscope not unlike one of her visions. It was all she could do to murmur a hello to their chorus of greetings and fumble her way to a seat.
    “I wondered when you’d get here,” Tamara said, a friendly smile stretching across her face. Tan in the dead of winter, Tamara was crowned with the same wild red hair she possessed in high school. Flamboyant was the word Becca would use to describe her, then and now. Her arms jingled and glittered with rows of bracelets, her hair curled around a face that showed little aging in the twenty years since she’d been a pain in the neck for the nuns and lay teachers at St. Elizabeth’s.
    “Becca Ryan. God, it’s been a while,” a man with blond, short-cropped hair said before Becca could do no more than murmur a hello to Tamara.
    Her heart sank. She’d know that voice anywhere even if she didn’t recognize the sharp features of Christopher Delacroix III. The Third hadn’t changed much in the twenty years since Jessie’s disappearance. Older, a bit thicker, maybe, although it looked like all muscle, he still possessed the leadership quality—or should she say “belief that they should all do his bidding”—that had made him their unofficial but indisputable ruler. In the past Hudson hadn’t paid attention to The Third’s despot ways, but he hadn’t challenged him for the role, either. Hudson hadn’t been interested in those group dynamics. A part of the group and yet not. Even then, he’d been his own person and had told The Third to “shove it” more often than not. Somehow, despite his disdain for authority, or maybe because of it, he’d been allowed to stay. And Becca had loved him for it.
    “It has been a long while,” Becca admitted. “And it’s Becca Sutcliff now.”
    “That’s right, you’re married.” He snapped his fingers as he remembered. “You’re with Bennett, Bretherton, aren’t you?” The Third was a lawyer at another firm, and Becca had spoken on the phone with him a couple of times.
    Already Becca was regretting attending this meeting. Two minutes with The Third and she remembered what she’d hated about high school. “I’m widowed, actually.” She didn’t add anything else, didn’t want to expose herself. Let them think what they wanted.
    He snorted, intense blue eyes focusing on her. “Divorced, here. Don’t know why I ever thought I could be married to anything other than my job.”
    She forced a smile and dared a glance around the table. No sign of Hudson yet, though his sister Renee was seated at the end of the table, her dark hair in the same short style Becca remembered from high school. She gave Becca a tight return smile, but Becca sensed it wasn’t anything personal. Renee seemed her usual uptight, disinterested self.
    But she called the meeting, remember? According to Hudson, this get-together was her idea. On the table in front of Renee, near an untouched glass of wine, was a stack of papers—along with a neatly folded newspaper with the picture of the Madonna statue.
    Tamara said to the group at large, “Is Hudson going to show?”
    “He’ll be here. He’s always running late.” Renee met Becca’s eyes, and for the first time in her life, Becca definitely did not feel invisible to Hudson’s twin.
    “Well, of course he’ll show,” the woman at the other end of the table stated emphatically as Becca took an empty chair between Tamara and a man she recognized as Jarrett Erikson, another one of The Third’s buddies. With dark hair and a swarthy complexion, he, along with The Third, had loved mercilessly teasing Mitch and Glenn, referring to Glenn as a “nerd with a complex.”
    “We all had to show, didn’t we?” the same woman said. She was petite, blond, and nervous, and clung to the hand of the man seated on her left. Beneath the pendant lights suspended above the table, a huge diamond glittered on her left hand. “Kind of a command performance.” She shot a dark look toward