by Linda Howard
“Regardless of what she is, where is she now?”
“At his house. He took her there last night, and she’s still there.”
Cael was silent, so Ruben simply waited while his cousin ran that through his convoluted brain.
“Okay,” Cael said abruptly. “She has to be the key. Wherever it comes from, her power is strong enough that he held the four of you to a draw. But that’s in the past. You can’t use fire again without the bastard getting suspicious, so you’ll have to think of something else that’ll either look accidental or can’t be linked to us. I don’t care how you do it, just do it. The next time I hear your voice, you’d better be telling me that Dante Raintree is dead. And while you’re at it, kill the woman, too.”
Cael slammed down the phone. Ruben replaced the receiver more slowly, then pinched the bridge of his nose. Tactically, killing the royal Raintrees first was smart. If you cut off the head of a snake, taking care of the body was easy. The comparison wasn’t completely accurate, because any Raintree was a force to be reckoned with, but so were the Ansara. With the royals all dead, the advantage would be theirs and the outcome inevitable.
The mistake they’d made two hundred years ago was in not taking care of the royal family first, a mistake that had had disastrous results. As a clan, the Ansara had almost been destroyed. The survivors had been banished to their Caribbean island, where most of them remained. But they had used those two hundred years to secretly rebuild in strength, and now they were strong enough to once more engage their enemy. Cael thought so, anyway, and so did Ruben. Only Judah had held them back, preaching caution. Judah was a banker, for God’s sake; what did he know about taking risks?
Discontent in the Ansara ranks had been growing for years, and it had reached the crisis point. The Raintree had to die, and so did Judah. Cael would never let him live, even in exile.
Ruben’s power was substantial. Because of that, and because he was Cael’s cousin, he’d been given the task of eliminating the most powerful Raintree of all—a task made more difficult because Cael insisted the death look accidental. The last thing he wanted was all the Raintree swarming to the homeplace to protect it. The power of Sanctuary was almost mystical. How much of it was real and how much of it was perceived, Ruben didn’t know and didn’t care.
The plan was simple: kill the royals, breach the protective shields around Sanctuary and take the homeplace. After that, the rest of the Raintree would be considerably weakened. Destroying them would be child’s play.
Not destroying the Ansara homeplace two centuries ago, not destroying every member of the clan, was the mistake the Raintree had made. The Ansara wouldn’t return the favor.
Ruben sat for a long time, deep in thought. Getting to Raintree would be easier if he was distracted. He and the woman, Lorna Clay, were evidently lovers; otherwise, why take her home with him? She would be the easier of the two to take out, anyway—and if she were obviously the target rather than Raintree, that wouldn’t raise the clan’s alarm.
Cael’s idea had been a good one: kill the woman.
FOURTEEN
Monday afternoon
“What happens if you die?” Lorna asked him, scowling as, car keys in hand, he opened the door to the garage. “What if you have a blowout and drive off the side of the mountain? What if you have a pulmonary embolism? What if a chicken-hauler has brake failure and flattens that little roller skate you call a car? Am I stuck here? Does your little curse, or whatever, hold me here even if you’re dead or unconscious?”
Dante paused halfway out the door, looking back at her with a half amused, half disbelieving expression. “Chicken-hauler? Can’t you think of a more dignified way for me to die?”
She sniffed. “Dead is dead. What would you care?” Then something occurred to her, something that made her very uneasy. “Uh—you can die, can’t you?” What if this situation was even weirder than she’d thought? What if, on the woo-woo scale of one to ten, he was a thirteen?
He laughed outright. “Now I have to wonder if you’re planning to kill me.”
“It’s a thought,” she said bluntly. “Well?”
He leaned against the door frame, negligent and relaxed, and so damned sexy she almost had to look away. She worked hard to ignore her physical response to him, and most of the time she succeeded, but sometimes, as now, his green eyes seemed to almost glow, and in her imagination she could feel the hard, muscled framework of his body against her once more. The fact that, twice now, she’d felt his erection against her when he was holding her only made her struggle that much more difficult. Mutual sexual desire was a potent magnet, but just because she felt the pull of attraction, that didn’t mean she should act on it. Sometimes she wanted to run a traffic light, too, because it was there, because she didn’t want to stop, because she could—but she never did, because doing so would be stupid. Having sex with Dante Raintree would fall into the same category: stupid.
“I’m as mortal as you—almost. Thank God. As much as mortality sucks, immortality would be even worse.”
Lorna took a step back. “What do you mean, almost?”
“That’s another conversation, and one I don’t have time for right now. To answer your other question, I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.”
She was almost swallowed by outrage. “What? What? You don’t know whether or not I’ll be stuck here if something happens to you, but you’re going to go off and leave me here anyway?”
He gave it a brief thought, said, “Yeah,” and went out the door.
Lorna leaped and caught the door before it closed. “Don’t leave me here! Please.” She hated to beg, and she hated him for making her beg, but she was suddenly alarmed beyond reason by the thought of being stuck here for the rest of her life.
He got into the Jaguar, called, “You’ll be okay,” and then the clatter of the garage door rising drowned out anything else she might have said. Furious, she slammed the kitchen door and, in a fit of pique, turned both the lock on the handle and the dead bolt. Locking him out of his own house was useless, since he had his keys with him, but the annoyance value was worth it.
She heard the Jag backing out; then the garage door began coming down.
Damn him, damn him, damn him! He’d really gone off and left her stranded here. No, not stranded—chained.
Her clothes had been delivered earlier, and she’d changed out of the ruined pants—and out of his too-big silk shirt—so he wouldn’t have had to wait for her to get ready or anything. He had no reason for leaving her here, given that he could easily prevent her from escaping with one of his damnable mind commands.
Impotently, she glared around the kitchen. Being a drainer—king—whatever the hell he’d said—had made him too big for his britches. He pretty much did whatever he felt like doing, without worrying about what others wanted. It was obvious he’d never been married and likely never would be, because any woman worth her salt would—
Salt.
She looked around the kitchen and spotted the big stainless steel salt and pepper shakers sitting by the cooktop. She began opening doors until she found the pantry—and a very satisfying supply of salt.
She’d noticed he put a spoonful of sugar in his coffee. Now she very carefully poured the salt out of the salt shaker, replaced it with sugar from the sugar bowl, then put the salt in the sugar bowl. He wouldn’t much enjoy that first cup of coffee in the morning, and anything he salted would taste really off.
Then she got creative.
About an hour after he left, the phone rang. Lorna looked at the caller ID but didn’t bother answering; she wasn’t his secretary. Whoever was calling didn’t leave a message.
She explored the house—well, searched the house. It was a big house for just one person. She had no frame of reference for estimating the square footage, but she counted six bedrooms and seven and a half baths. His bedroom took up the entire top floor, a vast expanse that covered more floor space than most families of four lived in. It was very muc
h a man’s room, with steel blue and light olive-green tones dominating, but here and there—in the artwork, in an unexpected decorative bowl, in a cushion—were splashes of deep, rich red.
There was a separate sitting area, with a big-screen television that popped out of a cabinet when a button was pushed and sank back into hiding afterward. She knew, because she found the remote and punched all the buttons, just to see what they would do. There was a wet bar with a small refrigerator and a coffeemaker in case he didn’t want to bother going downstairs to make his coffee or get something to eat. She’d replaced the sugar with salt there, too—and mixed dirt from the potted plants in with his coffee.
Then she sat in the middle of his king-size bed, on a mattress that felt like a dream, and thought.
As big and comfortable as the house was, it wasn’t what she would call a mansion. It wasn’t ostentatious. He liked his creature comforts, but the house still looked like a place to be lived in, rather than a showcase.
She knew he had money, and a lot of it—enough to afford a house ten times the size of this one. Throw in the fact that he lived here alone, with no daily staff to take care of him and his home, and she had to draw the obvious conclusion that his privacy was more important to him than being pampered. So why was he forcing her to stay here?
He’d said he felt responsible for her, but he could feel that way wherever she stayed, and because of that damned newly discovered talent of his for making people do whatever he wanted, she couldn’t have left if he’d commanded her to stay. Maybe he was interested in her untrained “power” and wanted to see what he could make of it just to satisfy his curiosity. Again, she didn’t have to stay here for him to give her lessons or conduct a few experiments on her.
He wanted to have sex with her, so maybe that was what motivated him. He could compel her to come to him, to have sex, but he wasn’t a rapist. He was possibly a lunatic, definitely a bully, but he wasn’t a rapist. He wanted her to be willing, truly willing. So was he keeping her here in order to seduce her? He couldn’t do that if he went off somewhere and left her here, not to mention doing so made her mad at him.
Somehow the sex angle didn’t feel right, either. If he wanted to get her in bed, making her a prisoner wasn’t the right way to win her over. Not only that, she wasn’t a femme fatale; she simply couldn’t see anyone going to such extraordinary lengths to have sex with her.
He had to have another reason, but damned if she could figure out what it was. And until she knew…well, there wasn’t anything she could do, regardless. Unless she could somehow knock him out and escape, she was stuck here until he was ready to let her leave.
Last night, from the moment the gorilla had “escorted” her away from the blackjack table and manhandled her up to Raintree’s office, had been a pure nightmare. One shock had followed so closely on the heels of another—each somehow worse than the one before—that she felt as if she’d lost touch with reality somewhere along the way.
Yesterday at this time she had been anonymous, and she liked it that way. Oh, people would come up and talk to her, the way they did to winners, and she was okay with that, but being alone was okay, too. In fact, being alone was better than okay; it was safe.
Raintree didn’t know what he was asking of her, staying here, learning how to be “gifted.” Not that he was asking—he wasn’t giving her a choice.
He’d tricked her into admitting that she had a certain talent with numbers, but he didn’t know how nauseated she got at the thought of coming out of the paranormal closet. She would rather remain a metaphysical garment bag, hanging in the very back.
He had grown up in an underground culture where paranormal talents were the norm, where they were encouraged, celebrated, trained. He had grown up a prince, for God’s sake. A prince of weird, but a prince nonetheless. He had no idea what it had been like growing up in slums, skinny and unwanted and different. There hadn’t been a father in her picture, just an endless parade of her mother’s “boyfriends.” He’d never been slapped away from the table, literally slapped out of her chair, for saying anything her mother could construe as weird.
As a child, she hadn’t understood why what she said was weird. What was so wrong with saying the bus her mother took across town to her job in a bar would be six minutes and twenty-three seconds late? She had thought her mother would want to know. Instead she’d been backhanded out of her seat.
Numbers were her thing. If anything had a number in it, she knew what that number was. She remembered starting first grade—no kindergarten for her, her mother had said kindergarten was a stupid-ass waste of time—and the relief she’d felt when someone finally explained numbers to her, as if a huge part of herself had finally clicked into place. Now she had names for the shapes, meanings for the names. All her life she’d been fascinated with numbers, whether they were on a house, a billboard, a taxicab or anywhere else, but it was as if they were a foreign language she couldn’t grasp. Odd, to have such an affinity for them but no understanding. She had thought she was as stupid as her mother had told her she was, until she’d gone to school and found the key.
By the time she was ten, her mother had been deep into booze and drugs, and the slaps had progressed to almost daily beatings. If her mother staggered in at night and decided she didn’t like something Lorna had done that day or the day before—or the week before, it didn’t matter—she would grab whatever was handy and lay into Lorna wherever she was. A lot of times Lorna’s transition from sleep to wakefulness had been a blow—to her face, her head, wherever her mother could hit her. She had learned to sleep in a state of quiet terror.
Whenever she thought of her childhood, what she remembered most was cold and darkness and fear. She had been afraid her mother would kill her, and even more afraid her mother might not bother to come home some night. If there was one thing Lorna knew beyond doubt, it was that her mother hadn’t wanted her before she was born and sure as hell didn’t want her after. She knew because that had been the background music of her life.
She had learned to hide what numbers meant to her. The only time she’d ever told anyone—ever—had been in the ninth grade, when she had developed a crush on a boy in her class. He’d been sweet, a little shy, not one of the popular kids. His parents were very religious, and he was never allowed to attend any school parties, or learn how to dance, anything like that, which was okay with Lorna, because she never did any of that stuff, either.
They had talked a lot, held hands some, kissed a little. Then Lorna, summoning up the nerve, had shared her deepest secret with him: sometimes she knew things before they happened.
She still remembered the look of absolute disgust that had come over his face. “Satan!” he’d spat at her, and then he’d never spoken to her again. At least he hadn’t told anyone, but that was probably because he didn’t seem to have any buddies he could tell.
She’d been sixteen when her mother really did walk out and not bothered to come back. Lorna had come home from school—“home” changed locations fairly often, usually when rent was overdue—to find her mother’s stuff cleared out, the locks changed and her own meager collection of clothes dumped in the trash.
Without a place to live, she had done the only thing she could do: she had contacted the city officials herself and entered the foster system.
Living in foster homes for two years hadn’t been great, but it hadn’t been as bad as her life had been before. At least she got to finish high school. None of her foster parents had beaten or abused her. None of them ever seemed to like her very much, either, but then, her mother had told her she wasn’t likeable.
She coped. After she was eighteen, she was out of the system and on her own. In the thirteen years since then—for her entire life, actually—she had done what she could to stay below the radar, to avoid being noticed, to never, ever be a victim. No one could reject her if she didn’t offer herself.
She had stumbled into gambling in a small way, in a little casino on the Semino
le reservation in Florida. She had won, not a whole lot, but a couple hundred dollars meant a lot to her. Later on she’d gone in some of the casinos on the Mississippi River and won some more. Small casinos were everywhere. She’d gone to Atlantic City but hadn’t liked it. Las Vegas was okay, but too too: too much neon, too many people, too hot, too gaudy. Reno suited her better. Smaller, but not too small. Better climate. Eight years after that first small win in Florida, she regularly won five to ten thousand dollars a week.
That kind of money was a burden, because she couldn’t bring herself to spend much more than she had always spent. She didn’t go hungry now, or cold. She had a car if she wanted to pack up and leave, but never a new one. She had bank accounts all over the place, plus she usually carried a lot of cash—dangerous, she knew, but she felt more secure if she had enough cash with her to take care of whatever she might need. Unless and until she settled somewhere, the money was a problem, because how many savings books and checkbooks could she be expected to cart around the country?
That was her life. Dante Raintree thought all he had to do was educate her a little on her talent with numbers, and—well, what did he expect to happen? He knew nothing about her life, so he couldn’t have any specific changes in mind. Was she supposed to become Little Mary Sunshine? Find other people like her, maybe develop their own little gated community, where, if you ran out of charcoal lighter fluid at the neighborhood barbecue, one of the neighbors could breathe fire on the briquettes to light them? Maybe she could blog about her experiences, or do talk radio.
Uh-uh. She would rather eat ground glass. She liked living alone, being alone and depending only on herself.
The phone rang again, startling her. She scrambled across the bed to look at the caller ID, though why she bothered, she had no idea; she wouldn’t recognize the number of anyone calling Dante Raintree, anyway. She didn’t answer that call, either.
