by Kay Hooper
He waved a hand with grand impatience. “We’ll get to that later. Here comes one of the sticky places: how did we manage to keep this powerful love of ours aflame for two months? Passionate phone calls and stolen weekends?”
“Passionate phone calls, maybe. But stolen weekends—” She broke off abruptly and frowned. “Wait a minute. There have been three weekends since the conference that I’ve been out of town. Some business with my father’s estate…and I went to visit my sister…and an old professor invited me to stay with him and his wife while I was using some of his rare books for research.”
“Now you’re getting the hang of it. By the way—you didn’t happen to call up one of your friends during those weekends, I hope?”
C.J. looked surprised. “No. But what would it matter if I had?”
He shook his head pityingly. “People engaging in passionate, stolen weekends don’t call up their friends to chat. I have it on the best of authority.”
C.J. didn’t probe. “I’ll bet. Keep spinning, Maestro; the web’s nearly complete.”
His lips twitched again, and again she watched with fascination. “Now for the second of the three sticky points,” he said wryly. “Why didn’t you tell your friends about me? If you’re so close? Or are you the secretive type, cherishing love quietly in your heart and unwilling to lose the magic?”
She frowned at him. “That doesn’t sound like me at all. Not that I’d shout it from the rooftops, but I would tell my friends. Especially since they’ve been matchmaking for years.”
“There is that.” He frowned. “Well, we’ll just have to tie up the secrecy in the reason we tore out our souls.”
“What?” she asked somewhat blankly.
“The reason we can’t be together always,” he explained patiently. “The reason we parted in New York and had to settle for stolen weekends and passionate phone calls.”
“Which is?” When he continued to stare at her, she said, “I can’t wait to hear this one.”
He sighed. “That’s the third sticky point. And, at the moment, I can’t think of a way to explain it.”
Fate rose to his feet and began pacing the narrow walkway between the door and the window. C.J. allowed her eyes to follow him back and forth, feeling rather like a spectator at a tennis match. Against her better judgment—which didn’t seem to be in control today, anyway—she found herself trying to think of some logical reason why they couldn’t be together. Nothing occurred to her.
He halted at last by the window and turned to stare at her. “I can’t think of a thing. We’ll just have to look pained and refuse to discuss it.”
“Jan will do everything in her power to worm it out of me,” C.J. said despairingly. “She always roots out secrets. And Brian’s a policeman.”
“So?” Fate looked amused.
“So Brian’s taught her to think logically. At least as logically as she can think, being Jan. She won’t rest until she knows exactly what’s going on, Fate.” C.J. used his name quite unconsciously for the first time, and missed the sudden gleam in his dark eyes because she was scrambling off the bed.
“We’ll muddle through somehow,” he said cryptically.
She pushed her hair off her forehead and glanced at the broad masculine watch on her wrist. “It’s almost dinnertime. I’d better go face them and get it over with.”
“Why don’t we have dinner together,” he suggested, moving slowly toward her. “We need more rehearsal time.”
C.J. shook her head, not without a certain amount of regret. “They’ll be hurt if I don’t tell them something. You could be waiting in your room for a phone call or something—” She broke off and looked up at him guiltily. “I’m sorry. You probably have plans of your own. This is going to ruin your vacation.”
“If it does, I’ll have only myself to blame, won’t I?” His lips twitched again in that odd, suppressed smile C.J. found so completely fascinating. He reached up, two large, warm hands framing her face, a smothered, soft laugh escaping from his lips. “Don’t look so confused and nervous, pixie. As adorable as it makes you look, I just won’t have it. We’ll come through this with flying colors—see if we don’t.”
Before C.J. could respond, he bent his head, his lips touching heres so gently that it felt to her like a sigh. A strangely shocking sigh. Over almost before it began.
Staring up at him with even more confusion in her eyes as he drew back, she fought to keep her voice steady, and to ignore the hands still framing her face. “Why are you doing this?” she asked again, wary, perplexed—and not sure whether she was questioning his active participation in her charade…or the kiss.
“I fell in love.” His voice was whimsical, velvety dark eyes caressing. “Apparently I do very strange things when I fall in love with a beautiful pixie.” Without the slightest change in his tone, he added, “You go and have dinner with your friends. I’ll make an appearance later for the first act of our play.”
C.J. found herself sinking back on her bed as the door closed behind him. Her eyes connected with her reflection in the mirror again, and again she suffered shock. How strange she looked. A not unbecoming flush lightly colored her cheeks, and her eyes appeared huge and startingly bright.
Had he really said that she looked adorable? And had he really called her beautiful? Twice? Why was her heart thudding against her ribs like a jungle drum gone mad? She felt both hot and cold, and she was quivering from head to toe. And the room suddenly felt very, very empty.
Oh, but he was good! He’d accepted with enthusiasm the role of lover, thrust upon him by her own reckless action. And he was absolutely perfect in the part. Practicing, that was all. Not that he needed it. He’d even practiced telling her that he loved her. And she had not the slightest doubt that her friends would believe that much, at least. That he loved her.
For one heart-stopping moment, she’d believed it herself.
And now she had to act as though she did believe it. She had to convince her friends that she was a woman in love. That realization sent panic bouncing around in her mind, adding to the confusion of Fate’s effect on her senses.
She stared toward the door, tearing her gaze from the stranger in the mirror. Maestro. She’d called him Maestro. And he was a master in this particular art. The art of skillful deception. Pulling all the threads together to insure that the entire web didn’t fall apart. And suddenly, she wished that she’d agreed to have dinner with him. Not because she wanted to, of course.
She needed more coaching from the master.
“Who am I fooling,” she muttered despairingly to the empty room. “I couldn’t act my way out of a paper bag. I couldn’t act like I was drowning if I was. I couldn’t act…”
She was still muttering to herself—rather like whistling in the dark—when she left her room. And she devoutly hoped that the stranger she’d seen in the mirror remained there. She didn’t know that woman. She was afraid to know that woman.
That woman had the look of someone waking up. The look of a butterfly coming out of its cocoon, soft and vulnerable. And ready to test its wings for the very first time.
And, no…C.J. didn’t want to see that woman again. Flying was a dangerous business. A scary, dangerous business. She wasn’t ready to test her wings yet. Not yet…
As soon as she entered the huge, rustic dining room off the lobby, C.J. spotted her friends seated around a table in the far corner. She began threading her way through the crowded room, only dimly noting the pine-paneled walls dotted with paintings of snow-covered landscapes and the thick carpet beneath her feet.
Her insides felt like jelly, and panic had fogged her brain until she couldn’t think at all. The only fact that kept dancing through her mind was that she was going to regret until her dying day her first impulsive, reckless action in twenty-six years.
She slid quickly into the empty chair at the table and smiled with what she devoutly hoped was gentle apology. “Sorry I’m late.” She was astonished at how calm she sou
nded.
Immediately, she came under the battery of five pairs of eyes of various colors, holding identical expressions of lingering shock, disbelief, and not-so-quiet anger.
“C.J. Adams, who was that man, and why didn’t you tell us about what is obviously a hot-and-heavy love affair?” Jan demanded irately.
C.J. all but jumped out of her chair, casting nervous glances at several nearby, startled diners. “Why don’t you yell a little louder, Jan, and wake the dead?”
“Well, who is he, C.J.?” Ann asked softly. “You’ve never said a word about him.”
“She still hasn’t said a word,” Kathy offered flatly, tossing her auburn hair and aiming a challenging glare at C.J.
“You haven’t given her a chance,” Susan pointed out coolly.
When an expectant silence finally fell, C.J. toyed uneasily with her water glass and tried to remember the master’s farcical story. “His name’s Fate Weston,” she managed at last, stubbornly refusing to meet anyone’s eyes.
“Fate? What a marvelous name,” Tami bubbled.
Ignoring the interruption, C.J. went on firmly, determined to get the story over with. “He’s a lawyer and he lives in Denver. We met two months ago—that weekend I was at the conference.”
“What was a lawyer doing at a librarian’s conference?” Jan asked skeptically.
“Nothing. I mean—he wasn’t. He was just staying at the same hotel. A mutual friend introduced us and—and that’s all there is to it.” Her brief explanation wouldn’t have mollified a curious three-year-old, and nobody knew that better than C.J.
Kathy was frowning at her. “C.J.—what about the last two months? If he lives in Denver, and you live in Boston, how’ve the two of you managed to meet? And when?”
C.J. was sorely tempted to say something soulful about stolen weekends and passionate phone calls, but didn’t trust herself to. Striking a happy medium, she said vaguely, “Phone calls, you know. And there were several weekends…”
“You said you were visiting your sister,” Tami exclaimed.
“And seeing to your father’s estate,” Jan added wryly.
“And doing research,” Susan murmured.
“Now for the sixty-four-dollar question,” Kathy put in, looking rather intently at C.J. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“There were reasons.” C.J. was still trying desperately to come up with a few. “I didn’t mean to hurt any of you, it’s just that…there were reasons,” she ended lamely.
Her friends weren’t, of course, satisfied with that, but C.J. stuck to her non-explanation with unusual tenacity. During the next hour she got a great deal of practice in fielding unanswerable questions and talking without saying much. She devoted most of her attention to her meal and made vague replies to curious questions without looking up. Later, for the life of her, she couldn’t recall what she had eaten.
Normally calm even in a crisis, she found her nerves growing more and more taut as the meal stretched interminably. She was still very much disturbed by the changes she was afraid Fate had brought into her life, and her friends’ probing was only making matters worse.
Finally she felt she had pushed the food on her plate around enough, and escaped from the table with a few murmured words that could have been taken to mean anything. At the door of the dining room she realized with dismay that her stubborn friends were right behind her.
She wandered into the large lounge at the back of the building’s ground floor, reluctant to escape to her room where the stranger in the mirror waited. She glanced at the comfortable chairs and divans placed in conversation-inspiring groupings around the two huge stone fireplaces in the room, and headed immediately for the warmth of a blazing fire.
“C.J., can’t you tell us what the problem is? My God—we’ve known each other since we were snotty-nosed brats.”
“Is it something about him? Does he—Oh, C.J., does he have a wife or something?”
“Honey, you can tell us.”
“You look so strange, C.J.—not at all like yourself.”
Her friends.
Quite suddenly, her nerves stretched to the limit and snapped. Turning with the abrupt movement of someone who has to move or jump out of her skin, she exclaimed, “Damnit, will you just leave me alone!”
The silence was sudden and devastating. The girls couldn’t have looked more shocked if she had pulled out a gun and threatened to shoot them. A part of C.J. wanted to laugh, but another part of her wanted to cry hysterically.
“I’m sorry.” There was a wealth of bewilderment in her quivering voice. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me…”
A hand gripped her arm just then, and C.J. turned with an instinct older than time to bury her face in the soft wool of a sweater. It wasn’t until she was breathing in the tangy scent of Fate’s cologne that she understood her body had known it was him. She had turned to him like a confused child seeking comfort and security.
Oh, God, what he must be thinking! Embarrassed by her abandoned gesture, she was nonetheless powerless to pull away from him; she just couldn’t face her friends right then. She heard Fate speaking over her head, introducing himself to her friends, and then heard the voices of her friends returning the courtesy.
He had his arms around her, she realized dimly, and she felt her heart begin its thunderous knocking again. Oh, what was wrong with her? There were tears on her cheeks, wetting his sweater, and she didn’t remember shedding them. What was wrong with her?
A large white handkerchief was thrust into her hands. They gravitated to the divan. She sat beside Fate, in the circle of his arm, automatically wiping her eyes with the handkerchief he had given her. Her friends were sitting in a little semi-circle around them, watching her as though she were a total stranger.
Fate began speaking to them, and C.J. noted with relief that their attention turned immediately to him.
“You’ll have to forgive her if she’s seemed a bit distracted since I arrived,” he told them with a grave smile. “You see, until then, she hadn’t known why we couldn’t be together.”
“She didn’t?” five voices exclaimed.
“I didn’t?” Fortunately C.J.’s bewildered voice got lost among all the rest.
Fate’s sheltering arm drew her a bit closer. “Poor darling—she’s had a shock, I’m afraid. It was good news, but when she found out what I’d been keeping from her all this time…”
“And what was that?” Jan’s suspicion was offset by definite interest.
“When we first met, I knew that C.J. was the only woman in the world for me. She looked up at me with those great yellow eyes…and I thought the building had fallen in on me. I wanted to tell her that I loved her, needed her desperately.”
Fate’s deep voice throbbed with such passionate sincerity that C.J. stared at him in utter astonishment. Rather hastily, he gathered her into his arms, one hand on her head firmly—and ruthlessly—pressing her face into the curve of his shoulder.
“But I had to let her go,” he told his listeners thickly, holding C.J. in what looked like a desperately adoring embrace. “I just couldn’t bear to tell her the truth…”
“What was the truth? What was wrong?” Jan’s voice had lost the suspicion and now held only sympathetic anxiety.
“I was in New York for tests…medical tests. I’d been told weeks before that I had only a few months left…”
“Oh, no!”
“You poor man!”
“And you couldn’t tell C.J. How sad!”
“You mean you’re—you’re—?”
“Of course he isn’t! He said it was good news.”
Amazement warred with a powerful desire to burst out laughing as C.J. listened to Fate’s absurd story. The tears of only moments before were gone and forgotten. She was incredulous that he thought himself able to get away with such a ridiculous tale, and dumbfounded to realize that he was getting away with it.
Her friends were not fools. Ann and Susan had graduat
ed from Wellesley, and both Jan and Kathy had gone to Radcliffe—although neither had finished—with C.J. They were intelligent, well-read, well-traveled, very aware women.
But they were buying Fate’s story.
And that, she knew, was due to his delivery. He was so obviously moved—so utterly convincing and so damn believable—that C.J. had to remind herself at least twice that it was all one big fat lie. She found herself beathing in the fine wool of his sweater, and realized suddenly that her mouth was hanging open. And no wonder!
She struggled to raise her head and stop the whole thing before her friends figured out that they were being led down the proverbial garden path, but Fate’s strong hand kept her face hidden with vastly irritating ease.
“Don’t cry, darling,” he murmured soothingly into her hair as though she were sobbing her heart out. “It’s all over now.”
C.J. managed to work one hand around where the others couldn’t see it and fiercely pinched the flesh over his ribs. She felt him jump slightly, but he went on talking as if nothing had happened.
And as he continued, C.J. began to make muffled choking sounds which probably sounded like crying. She only heard about half of what Fate told the girls, but that half alone made her feel desperately in need of someplace quiet and dark where she could laugh herself silly.
Apparently, he’d picked up some kind of wild, rare parasite in Egypt (Egypt?) months before, and then came back to the States to be told that the bug was going to kill him. No cure. No hope. An experimental treatment being offered in New York had been his only hope. A treatment with…laser beams.
Laser beams? Laser beams? For two solid months, laser beams and parasites had warred within his frail body. It was a wonder he didn’t light up a dark room all by himself. Clinging hopelessly to his love for C.J., he’d borne the painful, nauseating treatments in brave silence. With a nobility which would have done credit to a saint, he’d hidden the truth from her, sustaining himself on the rare phone calls and stolen weekends they shared. They couldn’t be together, he’d explained to a wonderfully trusting C.J., but he couldn’t tell her why. He could only tell her that he needed her desperately.
