The Silver Fox and the Red-Hot Dove

by Deborah Smith

  “How sad.”

  “Yes.” The increasing reluctance in Bernard’s face told her there might be another unpleasant story behind the sister’s death. “Well,” he said brusquely, smiling, “I shall go and make certain that Mr. Audubon knows you’re waiting …”

  “Was it a happy family?”

  Bernard studied her in silence, as if assessing her right to know. Then he said softly, “No, it was always a most un-happy family, Miss Petrovic. Why do you ask?”

  “I want to understand him.”

  “He’s a very fine man despite his family, but also because of it. Sometimes the saddest upbringing molds the strongest character.”

  “I like to think so, myself.”

  “Your parents?…” Bernard let his words hang, a question.

  She shook her head. “My father was killed in a factory accident when I was a baby. My mother was a schoolteacher, but she disappeared when I was five. I hardly remember her. But what I remember is very good.”

  “She disappeared?” Audubon asked.

  Elena pivoted, startled to see Audubon between the open French doors. “Please, don’t spy on us,” she teased after a second. Her heart beat wildly. His slow, inscrutable examination of her new look could be disapproval or disappointment. It was very intense. “I have so few secrets left,” she added.

  “I’m sure that’s not true.”

  He crossed the patio to her and Bernard, who stepped back, smiled, and glided into the house. She smoothed sweaty palms over her trim, black skirt. It was knee-length and rather demure, she thought, except that she’d never worn a skirt made of leather before. She hoped that he didn’t think her too prim in the plum-colored blouse with its billowing sleeves and buttoned collar. Suddenly she wished that she’d worn high heels instead of black flats. And lighter-colored clothes. American women dressed so cheerfully for spring, but she, like an ignorant peasant, had chosen purple and black!

  He was dressed in a handsome casual shirt with large, graceful pockets on the chest and rolled up shirt sleeves. It heightened the width of his chest at the same time that the drape of it scooped dramatically into his well-honed waist, surrounded by the slender belt he wore with pleated tan trousers.

  His studied casualness whispered of strolls past cafés on the Riviera, of comfortable elegance lounging in the seat of a Ferrari, of sheer masculine confidence combined with very old, very aristocratic money. She began to get a headache.

  “You look very ethnic,” he said, stopping in front of her. “The blouse is very … cossack. Yes. You’re a very attractive female cossack, even if you don’t know how to ride a horse.” He paused, and now that he was little more than a pace away, she saw the admiration that made his green eyes glisten like polished jade. “And your hair …”

  He lifted a hand and ran his forefinger along the wavy strands that ended in a gently blunt style at her jawline. Mr. Rex had told her to keep the side part, but he’d performed some kind of cutting magic so that her thick hair only draped to the outside edge of her brow. She no longer had to peer through it or yank it back with barrettes.

  She almost wished for its privacy screen. Audubon’s admiration and the closeness of his body made her quiver inside; the look in his eyes sent direct signals to every reckless impulse she’d never been able to indulge before—and had never wanted so badly to indulge now.

  But she kept her eyes trained on his, scolding him for trying so openly to hypnotize her, scolding herself for being such a gullible kitten, eager for stroking. “I was investigating you,” she warned. “If you hadn’t shown up so soon, I would have pried all of your secrets out of poor, unsuspecting Bernard. I am actually a Soviet spy, you know, and very tricky. My code name is Red Delilah.”

  “Oh? I thought the Kremlin would have named you the Anti-Stealth Pigeon.” He chuckled so warmly that she bit her lip but smiled regardless. “Turn that lip loose,” he commanded, his expression mischievous. “Or I might have to rescue it.”

  She moved away a little, not wishing to push her recklessness too far, and dabbed at her new lipstick with hot fingertips. “You’re a great deal of fun, but all American men are that way, I’ve heard. Playboys.”

  “And all Russian women are either sly, cold vipers or dumb cows. They get messy-drunk on vodka and dig potatoes for fun. And they grunt when the walk.”

  “What a lie!”

  “Of course it is. Turnabout is fair play. That’s an old American saying. Memorize it.” Behind his rebuke he was laughing at her, at them both, and she began to laugh too.

  “I can only judge you by what I’ve been told about American men, Audubon. I’m sure I have many mistaken ideas, but you’ll have to prove them wrong one at a time.”

  “But you see, I don’t have any mistaken ideas about you. So one of us, at least, can move ahead without worrying. Now, about your mother—what do you mean, ‘She disappeared’?”

  Elena looked at him wistfully. “She was in trouble with the police. She wasn’t Russian, she was Lithuanian, and they said she belonged to an underground group that promoted the old way—separatism, independence.”

  “Everything that’s happened in Lithuania during the past years shows she wasn’t the only rebel.”

  “But she was a rebel twenty-five years ago, when people kept quiet about their beliefs. Imagine, she’d lived in Moscow most of her life, but they accused her of being a traitor.”

  “She ran from the police?”

  “That’s what they said. They came to school one day and took me out of class. They took me to our apartment and showed me that all her clothes were gone. A few days later they sent me to Kriloff’s institute, just outside the city.”

  “But how did they know about your … I don’t know what to call it. What do you call it?”

  “Sometimes I call it a curse, but usually I think of it as a gift. All I remember is that I came down with a fever when I was five, and I almost died. Afterward, I wasn’t … I wasn’t the same. I could do things I hadn’t done before, things no one else could do. Mother took me to a pediatrician and asked for help, but he laughed at us. A few weeks later, Mother left.”

  “And you were taken straight to Kriloff’s institute?” Audubon put a hand on her shoulder and asked softly, “Do you think what the police told you was true?”

  Elena shook her head. “I’ve wondered ever since. I’ll never know for sure. It’s hard, not knowing.” The loss of her mother, and her fear that it was connected to her gift somehow, was an old, grinding pain inside her chest. She hugged herself. With all the jeopardy in her current situation, she couldn’t brood about the past as well. “But about your parents …”

  “Oh, no. It’s time for the pre-dinner floor show.” He pulled her chair out and gestured gracefully.

  “You are a manipulative man who values his privacy much more than you value the privacy of others.”

  “I have an unusual number of dastardly deeds to hide. Silence, Anti-Stealth Pigeon.”

  Shaking her head, she sat down, never taking her eyes from him, one brow arched in dismay. “What are you going to do?”

  “Demonstrate my musical talent. Some call it a curse; I call it a gift.” He retrieved a violin and bow from the seat of the opposite chair. Tucking the violin under his chin, he peered down at her with a quaint expression. “I’ll be your strolling musician. Only I’ll stand still.” He clicked the heels of his burnished loafers. “Miss Petrovic, Mozart and I welcome you to America.”

  He began to play, and she was surprised at how good he was. Excellent, really. The piece was slow and lyrical. Watching his large, brutally built fingers coax the delicate instrument made streamers of sensation wind around her. Before long she was leaning forward, her lips parted, her body longing to dance a pas de deux with him.

  Ballet had been her pastime, her savior from the long, lonely hours of winter, when she was so rarely allowed to leave the institute, and her imitation of freedom. When she practiced at the bar in the small studio Kriloff ha
d created for her, she felt that no force could contain her.

  Now, lost in Audubon’s music and charisma, she knew that he could lead her to real freedom—or if she were wrong about him, to desperate disappointment. When he finished and lowered the violin to his side, she stood shakily. They were silent, looking at each other in breathless anticipation.

  “This pigeon will try to trust you,” she whispered.

  His eyes glowed. “Not a pigeon. A dove. Thank you for trusting me. You won’t regret it.”

  She stepped close to him, raised on tiptoe, and kissed his cheek. He made no move to pull her to him, but the slow caress of his eyes did it for him. Elena savored his mouth with a lengthy kiss, slicking her tongue between his welcoming lips, exploring him with a finesse borne of both tenderness and greed. She put her hands on his waist and slid them upward, until her sensitive fingers found the scar under his right rib cage.

  He sighed into her mouth as she pressed her hot, healing hand over the scar, communicating with him in that vulnerable way while she continued to kiss him. Be everything I need for you to be, she begged silently. Be as wonderful as you seem.

  “Mr. Audubon, excuse me. It’s urgent,” Bernard said from the doorway.

  Elena drew back, sorry that the intimacy had been witnessed, even by Bernard. So few things in her life had been private. Feeling Audubon’s breath on her temple, she raised her eyes to his and found a similar regret. “Nyezabvyonniy,” he said, distorting the word absurdly with his Rhett Butler drawl.

  Delight rushed into her throat. “Unforgettable. I agree.”

  “Mr. Audubon, Clarice says you have a call from Mexico,” Bernard interjected in a diplomatic but hurried tone.

  Audubon’s mood changed in an instant. He tossed the violin and its bow into a chair. “I’ll be back,” he told Elena, but strode into the house without another glance at her.

  “I’ll bring you some canapés and a glass of wine, Miss Petrovic,” Bernard offered, sounding as if she might have a long wait.

  Bewildered, she walked to the edge of the pool and gazed blankly at the waterfall. Audubon’s mysteries filled her with dread. She trusted him, yes. Yes. She had to trust someone in this country, after all, and what ulterior motives could he possibly have? He didn’t need more money, power, or business success.

  She searched for more reassurance, more logic, until finally she admitted that there was nothing logical about her trust in him. She was falling in love as if the first twenty-nine years of her life had been building up to it all along, and what she’d felt for Pavel seemed like a poor joke. This time she’d lose much more than a few layers of pride if she was wrong.

  He took the stairs rather than the elevator down to the complex of offices beneath the main floor, then paced the intricate patterns of the Persian rug in his office.

  In her whiskey-and-peanuts voice Clarice ordered, “Put your ramp on the powwow blanket, Chief, and stop shakin’ your feathers.”

  He threw a grim smile at her. She sat at her computer with her silk skirt hiked above her knees, her imported pumps tossed in the corner under a bank of televisions tuned to various national and international news shows, with the sound turned down. She frowned at the computer screen and chewed the tip of a gold pen that she usually kept tucked in her gray chignon. She was the widow of a Texas police captain, a former data-processing specialist for the CIA, and a crack poker player.

  Now, as a light blinked rapidly on the computer’s telephone modem, she squinted at the screen and muttered a word that would have scared rattlesnakes off a warm rock. “They’re saying that Kash was seen Friday at the de Valdivia hacienda not far from Tuan. If that’s where he is, he’s in more trouble than we thought.”

  Audubon stopped pacing to pound a fist against the side of a lacquered bookcase filled with reference volumes. In an open space between them were personal photographs of friends, celebrities, politicians, and the photo of an exotic, fiercely handsome young man with a braid of black hair hanging over the shoulder of his Armani suit. Kash Santelli, twenty-six, wasn’t quite young enough for Audubon to think of him as a son, but since he and Douglas Kincaid had smuggled the outcast Vietnamese-Egyptian-American boy out of Vietnam nearly twenty years ago, he was family to both of them.

  Last year Kash had grown restless working in Douglas’s rather conservative business empire; despite a master’s degree in business from Harvard he felt that he had much more to prove to a world that had often mistreated him. When Kash had asked to work for him, Audubon had agreed reluctantly. He tried to maintain an emotional distance between himself and his people, though he was deeply protective of them; with Kash, the barrier was impossible to maintain, and he constantly worried about the young man’s safety.

  “If Traynor doesn’t locate him by this afternoon, I’m going to Mexico.”

  Clarice snorted. “I’ll call every one of the team who isn’t up to his or her eyebrows in business and have them here before you set one toe out the front gate. They’ll hold you down. It’ll be a war party of your own braves, Chief. You’d be in more trouble than Kash, if you went! You know that. Let our folks handle it. They’re the best. You trained them all, remember? And you’re the best.”

  “Except for this time, you mean. I’m not objective.”

  “Well, yes. But I understand why. You’ve never had to worry about a member of your family before.”

  “My only family.”

  He slumped into a richly upholstered swivel chair and raked both hands through his luxurious hair, leaving it completely disheveled, which his vanity would ordinarily have never allowed. All he could think about was Kash versus Elena, and he prayed that he wouldn’t have to use her to save his adopted son.

  “I’m going to Mexico tonight,” he called to Clarice.

  By the time Audubon returned, Elena had finished her wine and nervously eaten half a plate of toastpoints piled with smoked salmon while she paced by the pool. She was accustomed to hearty, slow, sit-down meals, not “grazing,” as the Americans like to call their fondness for nibbling on the run, but she wanted to learn to eat as Americans did.

  She halted, staring at Audubon’s approach. Already uncomfortable and worried, she grew even more upset as he took her hands and raised them to his lips for a cool, distracted kiss. His face was drawn because of some private problem; he had aged and become harsh looking in just an hour’s time. His tall, athletic body was wound tight; every movement conveyed command and swift action. “I have to leave on a business trip to Mexico. I apologize.”

  “Business? This evening? Your import/export company demands such emergency action?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you return soon?”

  “I don’t know.” He swept a frowning gaze over her alarmed and wary reaction. “A little while ago you said that you trusted me. I assumed that you meant it.”

  “I trusted a different man from the one who took a mysterious phone call. How can you expect me to feel secure among secrets? Does this trip have anything to do with me?”

  “No.”

  “If Kriloff discovers I’m here while you’re gone, what will happen?”

  “Nothing. Elena, I don’t have time to be diplomatic. Here are the bare facts—very little that you do outside your own suite goes unwatched. I have people working here whom you never see, but they see you. They’ll make certain no one comes here to take you away.”

  She drew her hands from his. “And they’ll also make sure I don’t escape. While the master is gone, the servants will spy.”

  “All right, look at it that way, if you want. Hell, you don’t even know where you’d go if you did get your precious freedom. And I assure you, before you had time to enjoy it, you’d be caught, reprimanded, and shipped back to Russia at Kriloff’s request. I think I have a little better future to offer you than he does.”

  “I’ll make my own future.”

  “For the time being, you’ll do as I say.” He grimaced at those words and reached for her h
ands again. She snapped them out of range, cursed him in Russian, and stepped backward proudly.

  Right into the pool.

  He dropped to his heels as she splashed to the surface, slinging her newly cut hair out of her eyes. The water was only chest-deep. She righted herself and shot him a burning look of humiliation and fury. “Go!”

  “I’m sorry. I wish you found something funny about this,” he said. But there wasn’t a trace of humor in him either. “I’ll tell Bernard to bring you a towel. I don’t have the time or patience.”

  He rose, pivoted, and went back into the house, while she stared after him in complete shock, realizing that she didn’t know him at all.

  Five

  Elena was wary when Audubon sent an apology the next day, particularly because the apology was delivered by a woman.

  Elgiva Kincaid, the wife of Audubon’s friend Douglas, arrived with considerably less fanfare than Elena expected of a billionaire businesswoman. Elgiva toted her own suitcase through the double doors of the front entrance, despite Bernard’s protest. Her long auburn hair spilled from under a broad sun hat that matched her white T-shirt and overalls. An enormous diamond wedding ring she wore on her left hand lent interesting contrast to the overalls.

  “Very American, wouldna’ you say, lass?” she noted, pointing to herself as Elena stared. Her Scottish burr sang with good cheer. “Audubon asked me to come and have a visit with you while he and my Douglas are off on business together. I suppose he thinks a fellow female can talk you into relaxing. Men! They do no’ understand us, sometimes, do you think?”

  “I don’t understand him, either.”

  “There’s a wise lass. We’ll be friends.”

  As they drank mint tea in the manor’s white-on-white breakfast nook, Elena tried to compose tactful questions about Audubon and Douglas Kincaid. “Are they doing something illegal?”

  Elgiva Kincaid almost bit the edge of the china cup. “My husband’s no criminal, lass, and neither is Audubon. Agh! If you’re asking me to explain Audubon to you, you’ve come to naught. In most ways he’s as much a mystery to me as when I met him, and that was two years ago.” Elgiva chuckled. “You see, Audubon doesna’ approve of marriage, and the poor, misguided man is keeping to himself now that most of his cronies have found wedded bliss.”