Moving Target

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Why?”

  “Most people just want to find out how much something is worth.”

  Her smile was a quick, hard curve. Making a living from her own weaving creations had taught her that no matter how much work she put into a piece, the price didn’t change. Not really. “It’s worth whatever someone will pay for it. No more. No less.”

  Erik looked at her curving hips. His hands itched to feel what he was seeing, to shape her rear and squeeze, filling his hands with her flesh. The depth of his hunger baffled him; she was attractive, yes, but hardly the type to bring a grown man to his knees with lust.

  Yet his knees were weak.

  “Then why don’t you just put the pages up for bid?” he asked irritably, looking away. “The marketplace will tell you what they’re worth.”

  “I don’t want to sell them. I just want to know if they’re real.”

  “For insurance?”

  Her mouth turned down. If you decide to go after your inheritance . . . be very careful. Forgery is a dangerous art. “In a way.”

  “What way?”

  “Does it matter?” she asked tightly.

  No matter how unnervingly familiar he seemed at times, she wasn’t about to share her grandmother’s lifetime secret with him: the Book of the Learned. Yet she had to know more about those pages to go after the rest of her inheritance. Right now she was playing a game of blindman’s buff, and the penalty for losing was very high.

  Trust no man.

  He looked at her narrowed eyes and full mouth. “It’s hard to work with someone who doesn’t trust you.”

  “Trust isn’t a problem for me,” she said distinctly. “I always work alone.”

  “So do I.”

  “Is that why you came out here today? To be alone?”

  Reluctantly Erik decided that the lady was as intelligent as she was attractive. “You never answer your phone.”

  “And?”

  “I wanted to see the pages. I couldn’t, so I came here instead.”

  “How did you find out my grandmother’s address?” Serena asked baldly.

  “Rarities.”

  “How did Rarities find out?” she asked through her teeth.

  “Ask—”

  “Dana,” she cut in ruthlessly.

  He smiled. “Right.”

  She thought of a golden wolf. Not the kind that seduced maidens. The kind that dined on them. “You’re here. She isn’t.”

  “We could fix that.”

  “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

  “Think of it as a trade secret.”

  “Think of me as your fairy godmother,” she retorted.

  His smile changed. It was warmer, but it didn’t make her feel less hunted.

  “There is an elfin quality about you,” he agreed.

  She made a sound of disgust and brushed off her dusty jeans. “Try again. I’m five feet seven. Hardly an elf.”

  “Witch, then. No. Sorceress. Witches have black hair and bad breath. All those toad stews.”

  She tried not to smile, but the wicked light in his eyes told her she wasn’t fooling him. Absently she ran her fingertips over the cloth that nestled around her throat and lifted on the least stirring of the air. “Do you know many witches?”

  “The margins are full of them.”

  “You lost me.”

  He held out his hand. “You found me. Now lead me out of here.”

  Before she realized what she was doing, she had taken his hand. She made a sound and snatched her fingers back.

  “I’m not contagious,” he said.

  “You’re way too charming.”

  He laughed out loud. “That’s another first.”

  “What margins?” Serena asked.

  He blinked and hung on to the slippery conversational thread with both hands. “Margins?”

  “The ones with witches in them,” she said impatiently.

  “Medieval manuscripts.”

  “Oh.” She frowned and absently grabbed her scarf, which had developed a will of its own; it kept lifting up and sticking to Erik’s shirt. “I didn’t notice any witches in mine.”

  “Not classic witches, certainly. The pointy hats came later. Your pages would have had Learned witches. Or what the Learned called Glendruid.”

  Serena blew out her breath with enough force to lift the wisps of hair that had escaped from her braid. It also launched her scarf again. She grabbed the wandering end before it could dive into the opening of his shirt. “Smart witches? A bottle of scotch? You sound like you’re speaking English, but . . .”

  “Scotch?” Erik asked, confused.

  “Yeah. You know. Glenmorangie, Glenfiddich, Glendruid, whatever. Brands of Scotch whiskey.”

  Wryly he wondered how the ancient Glendruids would have liked being compared to a bottle of scotch. “Now that you mention it, I’m having the same problem speaking English with you. Maybe what we need is to get better acquainted. Want to take a walk?”

  “Where?” she asked warily.

  “Back to the vehicles. You’ll feel less edgy about being alone if you’re closer to a place with locks.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I raised two younger sisters. What about you?”

  “I’m an only. I’m used to being alone with the world.” With locks, she amended silently.

  “That explains it.”

  “What?”

  “Your lack of trust in your fellow man.”

  “Reading a newspaper is all the explanation that’s required,” she said flatly, but she was thinking of her grandmother, trapped and dying alone in her fire-bombed home. “The fellow man you meet in the headlines is enough to give Pollyanna stomach cramps.”

  With that, she turned and began leading him down the shortcut to the cabin.

  He followed, enjoying the view. Sunlight turned her hair to an intriguing shade of fire that was echoed in the floaty, flirty scarf she wore. The strength and ease of her stride told him that she wasn’t a stranger to hiking over something more interesting than cement sidewalks. As she had pointed out, definitely not an elf.

  But then, he had never had more than a scholarly interest in the delicate little things. He liked women who could go toe-to-toe with life—and him, if it came to that.

  His sisters assured him it would. According to them, he was too overbearing to be endured. He didn’t argue the point. Wasn’t that what an older brother was for, particularly one who had had to be both mother and father to two teenage girls?

  Thank God neither of his sisters carried herself like Serena. He would have had to chain them in the cellar and hold off eager males with a double-barreled shotgun. Watching Serena move was enough to make a statue come to a point, and he was a long way from unfeeling stone.

  The relentless sexual pressure of his own body annoyed Erik. He was long past the stage of permanent adolescent rut where he got a woody just thinking about a girl’s breasts. Or he damn well should be long past that stage. Otherwise, what was the point of the gray hair that had begun showing up over his left temple?

  If you don’t get smarter, getting older is more trouble than it’s worth.

  Deliberately Erik looked away from Serena’s gently swinging hips and concentrated on the desert that surrounded him. Their footsteps made gritty noises on the trail. Plants slid over cloth with scratchy, whispering sounds. A quail boomed a warning from somewhere ahead. A distant hawk made an elegant spiral down to a spiky perch in a Joshua tree. Sunlight felt like a caress, far different from the hammer blows of stark power that was the desert sun in July. The air was dry and faintly fragrant, tasting of light and distance and time. Except for the vapor trails of jets far overhead, there was no sign of man. He and Serena could have been the last people on earth, or the first.

  As always, the space and solitude uncurled nerves in Erik that he hadn’t known were coiled. He didn’t understand how people lived in a city’s concrete canyons without going mad; even sedate and se
nile Palm Springs got on his nerves after a while. Dana, and to some degree Niall, were different. They didn’t understand how he lived in Hollywood’s graveyard out at the edge of the desert without going stir-crazy.

  Erik smiled to himself. The interesting thing about people was that they came in so many flavors.

  Ahead, a chimney rose like a soot-stained tombstone from the ruined walls. Serena stood waiting for him by her car. She had the air of a woman who had just run out of what little patience she owned.

  “If you didn’t follow me here—“ she began.

  “I didn’t,” he cut in.

  “Then why did you come all the way up a bad road to my grandmother’s burned-out house?”

  Chapter 16

  I came here to find out what I could about Ellis Weaver,” Erik said evenly.

  Part of Serena noted that he indeed had more to discover about her grandmother, including the fact that Ellis Weaver wasn’t her real name. “Why?”

  “You don’t answer your phone.”

  “What does that have to do with my grandmother’s death?”

  He looked at her intently. “What possible connection could there be between your irresponsible phone habits and Ellis Weaver’s death?”

  Serena set her teeth. “Just answer my question.”

  He noted the tight line of her jaw and smiled rather grimly. “There’s no connection that I know of.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “You don’t answer your—”

  “We’ve already established that,” she cut in savagely.

  “—phone,” he finished. “If you did, I could have arranged to see the originals or at least asked you questions about them. But I couldn’t reach you, so I decided to come here and see if I could learn anything about what kind of woman would have four complete leaves from the Book of the Learned and never let them see the light of day.”

  “The Book of the Learned?” Serena said instantly, remembering her grandmother’s enigmatic note. “She never told me more than the book’s name. What do you know about it?”

  “See, I learned something already. She didn’t know what she had. Or probably had. I can’t be certain until I’ve had a chance to examine the pages themselves.” He waited for her to offer him that chance.

  She watched him with clear, wary eyes.

  “If you don’t trust me,” he said evenly, “why did you send me copies of the pages in the first place?”

  She blew out a breath, looked away, and gave him half of the truth, the half that didn’t matter. “I didn’t expect to meet you over my grandmother’s grave. It made me . . . jumpy.”

  “Something certainly did,” he agreed under his breath. He wanted to ask her outright to show him the pages, but reined in his impatience. Controlling himself was a lot more difficult than he expected it to be. The violet-eyed not-elf got under his skin faster than cactus thorns. He didn’t expect women to drop at his feet, but he didn’t expect them to turn and flee, either—especially a woman who could push his sexual buttons without even trying. “Would you be less nervous somewhere else?”

  The edge to his voice made her wince inwardly. She supposed she couldn’t blame him for being impatient. After all, she had come to him first.

  “No.” That, at least, was completely true. Until she found out if the pages were forged, and if pursuing the rest of her family’s heritage had led to Lisbeth’s murder, Serena knew she wouldn’t be particularly relaxed no matter where she was.

  Her grandmother had been in her own home, and look how much good it had done her.

  Serena blew out another breath. “Here is as good as anywhere else.” She made a gesture with her hand, half warding off Erik, half apologizing to him. “What do you want to know about G’mom?”

  He opened his mouth to ask about the rest of the pages to the Book of the Learned. Then he thought better of it. In addition to wariness, there was grief in her eyes each time she spoke about her grandmother. “What was she like?”

  Serena’s eyes burned with more than the dry wind. “Solitary.”

  “No friends?”

  “No.” Then she remembered the lawyer. “Morton Hingham, maybe. He was her lawyer.”

  “Was your mother Mrs. Weaver’s daughter or her daughter-in-law?”

  “Daughter.”

  “Didn’t they get along?”

  “They must not have. Marilyn Charters ran away from here when she was seventeen. Joined a hippie commune, smoked pot, got pregnant, had me, took a bad acid trip, ran out in front of a car, and died.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Five. I don’t remember much about her except long, blazing red hair. It looked beautiful in candlelight. She taught me to weave and sold my bracelets for money.”

  The image of a young woman with fiery hair down to her hips, wary violet eyes, and a loom in front of her went through Erik like icy lightning. She had stood and watched him just that way, as though uncertain if he meant to kill her.

  A chill flowed over his spine in the instant before he shook off the odd memory. No, it couldn’t be a memory. He had never seen a loom like that except in his imagination. He sure hadn’t ever seen Serena with her hair drifting in a blazing curtain down to her hips.

  Get a grip, he told himself harshly. Serena has a bad effect on what passes for your brain.

  He looked at her closely. Obviously whatever feelings there had been between mother and daughter were long past the stage of grief or anger. When she spoke of her mother, there was nothing in her face or voice but a kind of detached interest.

  “What about your father?” Erik asked.

  “I was what is so coyly referred to as a ‘love child.’ “ Her lip curled in a cynical line. “Love had nothing to do with it. That’s why my parents weren’t married. They weren’t even engaged, except sexually, and it wasn’t an exclusive engagement. I had lots of ‘uncles.’ And what does this have to do with the pages, anyway?”

  “I think you might underestimate your parents’ feelings.”

  The angle of her chin told him that she thought he was wrong.

  “She took his name,” Erik pointed out. “A lot of women don’t do that, even when they marry.”

  “What are you talking about? She never took his name.”

  “Your mother didn’t change her name?”

  “That’s right,” Serena said curtly.

  “Interesting.”

  “Why? Most single mothers keep their maiden names.”

  “Did your mother ever marry?”

  “Never.”

  “Did your grandmother marry more than once?”

  “No.” Serena gave him an impatient glance from the dark end of the rainbow. “According to G’mom, Mother was legitimate. I wasn’t. Any more questions?”

  “Yes. Why didn’t your grandmother and mother have the same last name?”

  Too late, Serena realized where Erik’s questions had led her. Silently she apologized to her grandmother for giving away a secret she had carried to her grave. On the other hand, did it really matter anymore? Her grandmother was dead. So was her mother.

  “G’mom was very touchy about her privacy,” Serena said. “She raised Marilyn, my mother, under the name Weaver, but after my mother ran away, she changed her name to Charters. That was why my grandmother never so much as spoke to her again.”

  The woman who chose to call herself Weaver had also made it very clear to her stubborn granddaughter—who refused to call herself anything but Serena Charters—that no one had a right to ask any questions about where “Ellis Weaver” came from or if she had any other names. As far as the outside world was concerned, Serena’s name was Charters because her father’s name had been Charters. Or at least, that was the lie he had given the girl he had seduced and abandoned.

  And that was the story they told the outside world.

  It didn’t matter to Serena, as long as she got to keep the only fragment of her mother that time and circumstance had allowed—her m
other’s name. Even now the ingrained secrecy of a lifetime was hard to break. Especially now, with her grandmother’s warning ringing in her mind. Trust no man.

  Erik was definitely a man.

  With brooding eyes, Erik looked around, waiting for Serena to keep talking. When she didn’t, he prodded, “So?”

  “She bought this land under her own grandmother’s maiden name, Weaver.”

  “So her husband’s last name was Charters and she simply changed it to Weaver when she moved here?”

  “I don’t know. She never mentioned her husband. Not once.” Serena shrugged and told herself she didn’t know Erik well enough to trust him with the name Lisbeth Charters. “My guess is she was never married, despite the gold band she wore.”

  “Like mother, like daughter?” he suggested ironically.

  “Maybe. Does it matter?”

  Only to Factoid and his computer search, Eric thought. But that wasn’t something he was going to say aloud. “Provenance is a big part of any appraisal. In order to trace the provenance of your inheritance, I have to know what name to look for on sales receipts.”

  A thought struck Serena: she hadn’t mentioned in her note how she came to own the pages. “How do you know I inherited them?”

  Norman Warrick had told him, but Erik didn’t think this was the time to bring it up. He had already said too much. He had been so tangled up in Serena’s eyes and bedroom voice and long legs that he had made the kind of mistake even an amateur could pounce on. “A logical assumption,” he said evenly. “Is it wrong?”

  “Why is it logical?”

  “Nothing like those pages has been on the market since before you were born.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s my business to know that kind of thing. Did you inherit those pages from your grandmother? Yes or no, Serena. If you can’t trust me that much, we’re both wasting our time.”

  She met his eyes squarely. “Yes. I inherited them from my grandmother.”

  He let out a long breath. “Progress.”

  “You’re making me sound as difficult as you are.”

  “Then I’m not doing a very good job. You’re more difficult than I ever thought of being.”