by McKenna Dean
“Who was that, dear?” Em bit into the canape, careful not to mar her lipstick.
“Rian Stirling. And no, he’s not my date. He just asked me to dance.”
“Pity.” Em gave me a feline smile. “You know what I told you about rich boys versus poor ones.”
Eddie flicked a startled glance at her, but she just patted his hand. His brow cleared. “Well, that’s all right, then.” He helped himself to some hors d’oeuvres. “As long as it’s not Stirling. He doesn’t have the best reputation.”
“Is that so?” I took a puffed pastry shell myself. Dinner seemed a long time ago.
Frowning, Eddie nodded. “He’s known for being a ruthless businessman.”
“He makes the most divine things, though. Really clever gadgets that are so useful around the house. Remember that corkscrew we got as a wedding present?” Em pushed Eddie playfully on the arm. “You just attach it to the top of the bottle and it clamps down on and sucks out the cork all by itself. Simply marvelous.”
I could imagine the conniptions Ryker must have gone through when that little item hit the mass market. Or how much money Stirling must make on such an innocuous use of the technology he’d recovered. And how had he adapted it for use by non-shifters? I’d have to ask him the next time I saw him.
“I’d still stay away from Stirling if I were you, Rhett. He makes Father uneasy, and there aren’t many people who can do that.” Eddie blinked at me in all seriousness. I could picture him ten years from now, looking like a sage owl on the board of his father’s company.
His concern for me was oddly touching.
Where was Knight? I’d seen neither hide nor hair of him since we’d parted. I checked my watch again. I should head to our rendezvous point, but there was something I had to do first. I rose and made my way to the other side of the table, pausing to give Eddie a peck on the cheek. “You’re really a dear old thing to be worrying about me. Don’t. I’ll be fine.”
Eddie blushed to his roots. Men of his class rarely show concern for those around them.
“Speaking of dates, I need to find mine. Catch up with you later?”
“If not here, then at the house in the morning.” Em reached for Eddie’s hand without looking in his direction, certain he would meet her halfway for a clasp of fingers.
He did.
“He’s a keeper, Em. Don’t let that one get away.”
She beamed at me. I suppose I hadn’t been as approving of her decision to marry—and specifically to marry Eddie—as I might have been. She’d been right, though. They made a good couple. As much as Eddie would never be my idea of the perfect husband, a sudden spurt of envy struck me.
It wasn’t the fancy wedding or the country club life I envied. It was knowing someone would stand at your side, watch your back, and be prepared to lift you up or fall down with you. That’s what I desired more than anything else.
But the wistful thoughts of a schoolgirl had no place in the mind of a Redclaw agent. And I needed to find Knight so we could contact Ryker right away.
Chapter Sixteen
After waiting by the entrance for almost fifteen minutes, I gave up and went searching for Knight. Remembering his bleary-eyed state that first night at Moneta’s, I feared the worst. No doubt the free-flowing champagne had gotten the better of him.
Disappointment fumed just below the surface. Knight’s actions shouldn’t have surprised me. Even though he’d given me the impression these last few days of a man sobering up and moving on, no doubt it was because Redclaw had been keeping him on a short leash.
What did I expect? Since the end of the war, everyone in my set seemed to be of the opinion they should play hard and drink hard, for tomorrow we might die. Fast cars, hard drink, smoking like chimneys, and washing down fistfuls of “Mother’s Little Helpers” was how most of the people in my circle lived. I grew up seeing with my own eyes the lengths people would go to keep drinking, and the lies they would tell themselves and others. Namely, that they could quit anytime they liked. It had been foolish to think I could rely on Knight. I’d have to handle everything myself—as usual—and hope he didn’t screw things up with any drunken antics.
There was no sign of Knight on the dance floor or with the other diners. The billiard room, perhaps? Or out on the terrace? One of the private rooms? I’d have to go door-to-door to find him. “When I get my hands on him....” I muttered as I headed down the corridor.
Something of my anger must have shone in my eyes, as the staff member who stepped up to offer yet another glass of champagne wheeled and headed in the other direction. I gave a little snort of satisfaction as he skedaddled. The hallway contained more people than I expected. A couple of women fanned themselves, overcome with the heat in the ballroom. Two men in evening dress, their ties askew, weaved their way out onto the terrace. A woman, smiling as she smoked from an ebony cigarette holder, listened with rapt attention to a man as they stood to one side of a marble-topped table against the wall.
I almost passed them both, intent on heading to one of the private rooms off the hallway, when I realized the handsome man with the movie-star features was wearing bedroom slippers. He was also Knight. I’d forgotten about the disguise.
“There you are. I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” Holding my clutch, I slipped my arm through his, and aimed a bright smile at the woman.
“Is it that time already?” Knight squinted first at me, and then his watch, which had the unfortunate effect of drawing all eyes toward his feet. “I’m sorry. I’ve got the most frightful headache.”
His pained expression, which I’d taken for drunkenness at first glance, sent a pang of guilt through me. He’d complained of a headache earlier, and his control over his image was obviously slipping. Who knew what the effect of prolonged use of the image-enhancer might be?
“I was just telling Peter here I wish I’d had the good sense to bring my own mules with me. My feet are killing me.” Knight’s new friend tipped one foot sideways, the better to display her trim ankles.
Knight had already forgotten his fake name.
“I see. Yes. We need to get Richard back to his room, don’t we, darling?” I placed additional emphasis on the name, and with my free hand, circled my temple with an index finger. I gave Pretty Ankles a meaningful glance.
“Pooh,” she said inelegantly, stubbing out her cigarette in the ashtray. “All the nice ones are taken, pink, or nuts. Never mind, Peter, or Richard, or whatever your name is. I think you’re the only sensible person here.”
She patted Knight on the cheek with a smile, trailing her fingers across his skin as she withdrew. She went down the hallway back toward the ballroom, swinging her purse in a little circle by its strap.
“What was that all about?” Knight peered down the hall after her.
“Didn’t you notice?” I pointed to his feet.
He wiggled his toes within the slippers, moving the tips up and down. “Ah. Bedroom shoes. I was just thinking about how nice it would be to get comfortable, and there they were.”
“Are you all right?” I placed a hand on his arm, causing him to look up at my face again.
He rubbed his temple. “Not really. I wasn’t joking about the headache. Feels like someone’s stabbing an ice pick through my eye.”
I was about to suggest we should leave so he could drop his disguise when the doors to the terrace opened, sending a welcome current of cool air into the heated hallway. Over Knight’s shoulder, I saw two people come in from outdoors. I recognized the man right away. It took me a second longer to place the woman’s face, but when I did, the shock of it was like being plunged into an icy stream. A quick glance at Knight showed he was losing his ability to maintain any part of his disguise. Even as I blanked on what to say to him, his face slowly morphed back into his own.
I had no time to think it through. I just acted, grabbing Knight by the back of his neck and pulling him into a kiss, all the while fumbling behind me, clutch in hand, for the hand
le to the room beside us.
It wasn’t a chaste peck on the cheek. It couldn’t be, not for my purposes. I angled Knight so anyone approaching him from behind would just see his back, the passion with which we were kissing, and our desperate need to find a room where we could be alone.
His eyes flew open at the onslaught of my lips on his, and he stiffened at the contact. Nevertheless, I persisted. I pulled him in, thrusting up against him as I dragged him with me, silently begging him to pick up on my signals. After that initial moment of surprise, he closed his eyes and opened his mouth.
I’d thought I was in control of the situation but in a flash, the tables turned. No longer was I kissing him. Instead, he kissed me. And he was very thorough about it. My back thumped up against the door as he pressed in, and for an instant, I completely lost track of my intention to get us out of the hallway as fast as possible. I gave a sharp inhalation, and he took that as an invitation to plunge into my mouth as his hand slid down my back and his fingers tightened on my derriere. Acting on instinct now, I lifted one leg to hook my calf behind his, practically purring as I moved against him. It was perhaps just as well my dress limited movement to a degree, or else I might have seriously embarrassed myself right there in the hallway. I pushed my fingers into his hair, delighted Knight didn’t rely on heavy pomades to tame it.
Until that instant, I don’t think I’d ever been well and truly kissed. Don’t get me wrong. I’d dated in college. But I’d never understood the emphasis most people put on kissing. It seemed a bit like holding hands. Nice, but nothing terribly exciting.
Obviously, I’d been doing it wrong. Or with the wrong person.
Knight didn’t just kiss me. He inhaled me. He opened up and demanded I open in return. He was that forbidden bottle of whiskey I’d refused to drink but every cell had been craving. His kiss struck me with the same hot, smoky intensity of a straight shot of Glenlivet. Wasn’t that a kicker? Warning bells should have gone off in my mind, but instead I gave a little whimper of relief when I grasped the door handle and felt it turn behind me. As the door opened, I dragged him into the dimly lit room without breaking contact. He kicked the door shut behind us with a slippered foot.
Only then did I have the sense to push him back. He stared in open-mouthed disbelief. A momentary pulse of perverse pride shot through me when I realized he was just as wrecked by the kiss as I was. The unexpectedness of it must have blown his concentration, for he stood before me wearing what must be his real clothes: a rumpled cotton shirt in pale blue and slacks that had seen better days. His actual shoes, it relieved me to see, were a pair of battered loafers.
“What the hell was that?” He passed a hand over his mouth and jaw, his pupils wide and dark in the low lighting.
“A kiss. If you’re not sure, it’s been too long since you’ve experienced one.” Too late, I remembered the last person he’d kissed with that kind of passion had likely been Margo. Add breathlessness to that gaffe, and I’m sure my nonchalance wasn’t convincing. There was no time to dwell on the matter, though. I ducked around him and cracked open the door.
As though she could sense my eyes upon her, the woman about to enter the ballroom looked back over her shoulder. I flinched away from the opening, resisting the instinct to slam the door shut. With luck, she hadn’t seen me.
When I turned away from the door, I ran slap into Knight. He steadied me by grabbing my arms, a move that made me gasp due to the tenderness of my healing wound. Knight didn’t notice. His nostrils flared as he growled. “You know what I mean.”
I gave him a little push. My hands met the immobility of his chest—more muscular than I would have given him credit for—so I pushed again, harder. “Look, I understand you’re mad, but I don’t have time to be gentle with your feelings right now. The couple who just passed us in the hall—”
“What couple? I didn’t see anyone.”
“They came in from the terrace. Hence the kiss. You never saw their faces. More to the point, I didn’t want them to see our faces.”
“Because...?” His anger dissipated, leaving him standing too close to me as his gaze briefly dropped to my lips. When his eyes met mine, he lifted his eyebrows and gave me one of his crooked smiles.
Damn. Damn. Damn.
There was no way to do this kindly. “Because it was my old boyfriend, Tommy Stanford, with his new girlfriend.” I raised a hand when Knight would have interrupted. “Your not-dead wife, Margo.”
He stood in stunned silence for several seconds as the impact of what I’d said struck him. Then his eyes went flat and cold. He stepped back as though I were radioactive, and yet there was no safe distance from me. “Impossible.”
Never had a single word sounded so clipped and deadly.
“Look, I’ve spent a lot of time staring at pictures of her lately. I know what I saw.”
“You’re delusional!” A pause while he breathed hard. “Or you’re part of the coverup.”
His words were like a slap to the face. Had I thought Knight angry before? Standing with clenched fists, he tucked his chin as his chest heaved with the force of his breathing. He reminded me of a bull behind the gate at a rodeo, just waiting for the buzzer to explode out of the holding pen. I believe if I’d been a man, he’d have punched me.
I held my ground.
“It was Margo. Her hair was different, but it was her, I’m telling you. I’m good with faces. I ran into you just once back in March and remembered you—and where I’d seen you—when I got handed your file.” I gave my head a little shake. “That’s not important. What matters is that Margo must have faked her death. Why would she do that, and why is she here now?”
I hadn’t paid attention to the room when we’d entered. The lighting was subdued, coming from a couple of lamps positioned on tables beside several wingbacked chairs. A comfortable-looking sofa faced a small fireplace, now unlit and swept clean of ashes. Most likely a reading room, a place where people could go to get away from the other club members for a quiet conversation, or to pour themselves a drink stronger than you could get in the ballroom.
Knight spied a decanter on a side table. To my dismay, he sloshed whiskey into a tumbler and knocked it back in a single swallow. I moved to stop him, but dropped my hand to my side as he thumped the empty glass back down on the table.
“She wouldn’t. She couldn’t. I was there. She lay crumpled like a broken doll. There was blood everywhere. I can see it pooling around her, even now.” He spoke without looking in my direction, gripping the sides of the table as he shook his head like a prizefighter who’d taken one too many blows but couldn’t admit the fight was over.
“You were across the street when she got hit, and you weren’t looking in her direction. You turned when you heard the squeal of brakes. That’s what your statement to the police said. She was flung to one side, and the car sped off. Think about it. It would have been easy to throw herself against the car in passing, particularly if she knew the driver.” Most likely she’d had a pouch of calf’s blood, designed to rupture when she fell. Which meant she had to have accomplices when they took her away....
“Stop it.” He clutched his head in both hands.
But I couldn’t. “An ambulance arrives out of nowhere, but you don’t know who called for it. She’s taken to the nearest hospital, where she’s pronounced dead. But you know as well as I do, you can’t always trust your eyes.” I waved a hand up and down the length of his body. “If she had similar technology, she could have faked her death.”
“I buried her.”
The raw sorrow in his voice gaped like a non-healing wound, and I was the one who’d ripped the bandage off. I had no choice. Now I was about to pour alcohol on his injury.
“You thought you buried her. It was a closed casket funeral.” I put my hand on his arm.
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Shut up!” He wheeled around and took me by the shoulders. Startled, I let the force of his momentum carry us both to the
door, which slammed shut as my back hit it. He gave me a little shake. “You saw a woman coming toward you from down the hall. In the span of what—two seconds?—you decide she’s Margo and drag me in here. And yet you’re so bloody sure you know what you saw. Because Rhett Bishop never makes a mistake, does she?”
I lifted my chin to meet his furious gaze. “Prove me wrong.” Shoving him off me, I opened the door. “Let’s go find her and Tommy and see what they’re up to.”
He would have blown past me, but I caught him by the arm. “Disguise.”
His response was unprintable. I’m not even sure what some of the curses meant. Still, his clothing shimmered back into evening dress. His face lacked the detail of before, instead taking on the unformed look of a store manikin, but it would do. His own mother wouldn’t have recognized him.
Or wife, either, I hoped.
I had to almost trot to keep up with him as he stormed down the hallway like General Eisenhower about to order the invasion of Normandy. We stood at the entrance of the ballroom, scanning the crowd, but our quarry had vanished. Spying Em dancing with Eddie, I motioned for Knight to wait as I threaded my way through the dancers toward them.
“Darling, have you seen Tommy?”
Em frowned, pulling Eddie to a halt. “He just came through with Eve. I think they were on their way out.”
Oh, is that what Margo was calling herself these days? How appropriate. If Knight and I hurried, we might be able to catch them in the parking lot. I started to turn away, but Em caught me by the wrist.
“What do you want with Tommy? I thought you were done with him.”
“I am. The best part of being done is saying so. I want to say my bit, that’s all.”
“That’s not like you.” Em glowered at me with unaccustomed speculation in her eyes. “What are you up to?”
“Nothing for you to worry about. See you back at the house?” I gave her hand a little squeeze and pulled away. Catching Knight’s eye across the room, I signaled for him to meet me at the door.
