by Kay Hooper
“I know.” Oh, yes, she knew. The fuse had been lit now, and it was only a matter of time before hate exploded. What had the fortune-teller said? That the desire for revenge was a terrible hunger and thirst? Michele knew only too well that her father was hungering now, that whatever restraints had held the feud away from the brink of violence had been snapped. Her father wouldn’t wait for proof; he had all he needed.
Michele stared out the plane window at the blanket of clouds below, fear for her brother and the painful uncertainties about Ian tearing at her, and filled with the knowledge that any hope of peacefully stopping the feud was gone now.
“You cannot change what must be…”
Was there nothing she could do except endure, stand by helplessly and watch while everyone she loved was torn apart by this?
The company limo was waiting when she and Jackie emerged from the frenetically busy terminal at the airport. Their luggage was quickly stowed, and they were driven directly to the hospital. It was still November in Atlanta, and far from paradise a cold rain was still falling. The city looked bleak and dreary, especially at night.
At the hospital, they were directed to the right floor, and as soon as they stepped out of the elevator Charles Logan strode toward them. He was still upright and vigorous in his sixties, conceding nothing to age except the gray streaking his brown hair and the lined, weathered face of a man who had worked much of his life outside. His gray eyes were the only similarity between him and his daughter; he was a tall man and powerfully built, his rugged features holding none of the delicacy Michele had inherited from their Celtic ancestors.
“Dad? Is Jon—?” She hurried toward him with Jackie at her heels.
“It’s all right,” he said, hugging her briefly. “A mild concussion and broken wrist, but he’ll be able to go home tomorrow.”
The relief was overwhelming, but Michele was still very aware of the tautness in her father’s expression and the cold gray gleam in his eyes. “Can I see him?”
“Room 484. He’s awake.”
“I’ll wait out here,” Jackie said, obviously as relieved as her friend to hear the news.
With the somewhat courtly air he inevitably adopted whenever he was around young women—especially pretty ones—Charles Logan offered his arm to Jackie. “Why don’t I buy you a cup of coffee?”
“Sounds good to me. Michele, tell Jon I said hi.”
Nodding, Michele left her father and Jackie and made her way down the hall to Jon’s room. She opened the door cautiously, but he was sitting up and looked around quickly, his frown smoothing away. There was a strip of bandage over his right eye, and his left arm was held in a cast from fingers to elbow.
“Michele! Sorry to drag you back from your vacation. Dad shouldn’t have called you.”
She crossed the room and bent over the bed to kiss him lightly. “Don’t be stupid.” She kept her voice easy with an effort as he smiled at her.
Jonathan Logan was a tall and physically powerful man like his father, and he shared the slightly rough-hewn features that made both men ruggedly good-looking. He had medium brown hair and had inherited blue eyes from both parental sides. But his father’s genes were clearly strongest in him. Like the elder Logan, Jon was stubborn, a bit arrogant, and easy to anger. He was close to his sister despite a five-year difference in age, and his protectiveness of her stemmed both from his affection and from an extremely strong sense of family responsibility.
Michele had always adored her big brother, but love had never blinded her to his faults. He had never quite accepted the fact that she was a grown woman perfectly capable of taking care of herself; to Jon, she was still the little sister with a troublesome streak of rebelliousness.
“You don’t have much of a tan,” he noted critically.
“I have enough. Haven’t you been listening to the surgeon general?”
Jon grunted. “I’ve been listening to too damn many doctors in the last few hours. Pull that chair over and have a seat.”
She obeyed, trying to keep her expression calm under his searching scrutiny. Apparently without success.
“You look worried to death,” her brother said softly. “Cut it out. I’m fine.”
Michele linked her fingers together in her lap and looked at them for a moment, then raised her gaze to his. “Jon, what happened?”
“I’m sure Dad told you.”
“Yes. But I want to hear it from you.”
He shrugged. “I got a tip yesterday afternoon—”
“From whom?”
“Beats me. A man, or sounded like it. Maybe one of Stuart’s people turned traitor. He called the office and said if we didn’t want anything to happen to the building we’d better keep an eye on it during the night.”
Michele felt a helpless sense of anger sweep over her. “And of course you didn’t even consider increasing security or calling the police.”
Jon avoided her eyes. “I knew who it was, and I wanted to catch them at it. Hell, I’d been waiting for a chance like that for years.”
“You could have been killed!”
“I wasn’t.” His mouth firmed stubbornly. “I decided not to tell Dad, to go myself. It seemed to me the only kind of sabotage the bastards could hope to get away with would have to be pretty subtle, but I knew they’d want it to be crippling as well. I rigged a couple of booby traps in the control room for the electrical system, figuring that was most likely. Then I decided to check the elevator banks, and that was where I caught him. He’d already planted explosive charges to snap the cables.”
“What happened?” Michele asked, dry-mouthed.
“Well, I didn’t know he’d set a timer that was busy ticking away. Once I got my hands on him, he was only too happy to talk. He said he’d been paid in cash—half up front a couple of weeks ago—and been told in detail what he was supposed to do. He’d gotten the call yesterday telling him to get busy. Ian Stuart hired him.”
“He was sure of that?”
“Of course he was sure. For God’s sake, Michele, he called him by name!”
Something was nagging at the back of Michele’s mind, a lesson learned in her own investigative training. Slowly, she said, “Did he say how he was hired? I mean, had he met Ian Stuart in person, or was it some other arrangement?”
Jon was frowning at her. “I didn’t have time to ask. The explosives went off, and instead of just snapping the cables, part of the blast went outward. Half a wall came down on top of me. I didn’t know anything else until our security guys dug me out of there. Unfortunately, the saboteur was long gone by then, and we aren’t likely to find him.”
Michele looked at her brother searchingly. “But don’t you see, Jon? That man could have been hired to say anything. Maybe his job wasn’t so much to cripple the building as it was to have the Logans and Stuarts at each other’s throats. Maybe that’s why you were tipped. Just so that you could be pointed at a specific target.”
“What’d be the point?” But even as he asked, Jon was scowling.
“You know as well as I do. That Techtron contract is worth millions; the Logans and Stuarts are the top commercial builders in Atlanta, but not the only ones. If we eliminate each other, somebody else is going to come out on top. Look, everybody knows that Dad and Brandon Stuart are in a race to finish their current projects. Their bids on the Techtron contract were so close that the decisive question is: Who can start first? If both companies get bogged down in fighting each other, Techtron won’t be able to start their project when they want—unless they hire someone else.”
Jon shook his head. “The Stuarts are behind this. I know they are.”
“Jon—”
“Dammit, Michele, they’ve already tried to sabotage us! They’ve bribed the inspectors to slow us down.”
“How do you know that?”
“I told you. I have a source at city hall.”
“How good a source?”
“He’s never been wrong. And I pay him a fortune to make
sure he never is.”
“Maybe somebody else is paying him more.”
Jon moved restlessly on the bed. “Will you listen to yourself for a minute? You’ve dreamed up this whole conspiracy theory just because you don’t want to admit the Stuarts are out to get us. You’ve always given them the benefit of the doubt.”
“What’s wrong with that? Jon, you don’t have any proof. You’ve never had any proof—just reports from elusive sources that you pay to feed you information. Sources who could be taking somebody else’s money to tell you what you want to hear. And I didn’t dream up the fact that everyone in Atlanta knows the Logans and Stuarts would rather fight each other than anything else. You don’t have to tell me the explosion wasn’t reported to the police, or even to the insurance company; the feud doesn’t work that way and everyone knows that, too.”
“So?”
“So, a third party could easily decide they could do what they liked without any threat of being caught or prosecuted. They could know that the Logans and Stuarts would never look further than each other for a villain. Just point us at each other and keep applying pressure until we destroy ourselves.”
“That’s ridiculous, Michele.”
“Is it? Is it any more ridiculous than—than carrying on a battle that started with some petty grievance nobody can even remember more than five centuries ago? Any more ridiculous than hating because we’re supposed to hate, because we’ve been told we should?”
“They’re our enemies,” Jon said, staring down at his immobilized wrist.
“Are they? Are you sure?”
“Yes. After—” He broke off abruptly.
“After what?” A memory surfaced, and she went on evenly. “Jon, you said something once about Brandon Stuart and Dad years ago. What happened then?”
“Never mind.”
A wave of absolute fury swept over Michele, and her voice shook with it. “Never mind? That’s a hell of a thing to say to me, Jon. You and Dad can’t wait to launch an all-out war with the Stuarts, and you tell me to never mind? Don’t you think it’s my business? Damn you, it’s my family, too! I think I deserve to know why my father and brother hate so deeply they can’t even be rational about it. Tell me!”
“All right,” Jon snapped. He drew a breath, then said, “Thirty-five years ago, Dad and Stuart fell in love with the same woman.”
Despite Ian’s remark that the bitterness between their fathers must have been deepened by a woman, the information still came as a shock to Michele. “What?”
He laughed shortly. “Pretty, isn’t it? Dad wouldn’t say much, but she must have played them off against each other. Dad fell hard, would have done anything for her. And he thought she loved him when—well, when they slept together.”
“What happened?”
Jon shrugged. “A few weeks later, she broke down and told Dad she’d made a mistake, that she had realized she loved Brandon Stuart. She and Stuart announced their engagement, and he was strutting like a rooster for having beaten Dad. I’m not sure what happened then, except that there was some kind of confrontation between them and the woman left. Just walked out on both of them, apparently.”
Michele could see how her father would have been enraged at losing to a rival—particularly a Stuart—but the story seemed incomplete to her. There had to have been more to it than what Jon knew. “And that’s why Dad hates Brandon Stuart so bitterly?”
“Isn’t it enough? Dad loved that woman, Michele, and Stuart took her away from him.”
Slowly, Michele said, “It sounds to me as if she made up her own mind, and probably with a lot of pain. But she ended up without either of them.”
“Maybe she found out she didn’t love Stuart as much as she thought. Dad sure as hell wouldn’t have taken her back after that.”
“Right.” She stared at her brother. “Even though he loved her so much.”
Jon’s eyes narrowed at the sarcasm. “Obviously, you don’t understand how Dad felt.”
“Obviously. Has it occurred to you that Dad and Mom were married a little more than thirty-four years ago? His heart must not have been too broken. Or maybe Mom caught him on the rebound. Is that his story?”
“I didn’t ask,” Jon said tightly.
“Maybe you should. Maybe we should both ask.” Michele wondered if she looked as shaken as she felt. How odd, to find that so many certainties in her life had been built on shifting sand. Her father had always talked as if his children’s mother was the one great love of his life; now it seemed that he had loved once before, and that the emotion had been great enough to spawn an equally powerful hatred.
Holding her voice steady, she said, “That may or may not give Dad a good enough reason to hate. But what about us, Jon? Where is it written that we have to hate because of something that happened before we were born?”
“Michele, they’re trying to ruin us!”
“And if they aren’t?” Everything inside her seemed to be focused on her brother, all her will bent on finding a chink somewhere in the wall of hate. “If someone else is using the Stuarts—and us—for their own gain? Can you at least consider the possibility?”
“Give me some real proof,” he returned flatly. “Something more than theory.”
She rose to her feet and stood gazing down at him for a moment. “Isn’t that funny,” she murmured. “You didn’t need any real proof to believe it was the Stuarts.”
Jon didn’t react or speak again until she reached the door. Then his question dropped quietly into the silence. “What’s happened to you, Michele?”
She half turned to look back at him. “Maybe I don’t want to be a lemming.”
“A what?”
“A lemming. It’s a little animal. Every so often, the lemmings crowd together and rush toward a cliff. They commit mass suicide. Maybe a few centuries ago, someone told them it was the right thing to do.”
After a moment, Jon shifted his gaze back to his broken wrist. “See you at home tomorrow, Michele.”
She left the room, feeling tired and angry. The anger was new, and she welcomed it, because it was better than pain and hopelessness. She was angry at the stubborn blindness of her father’s and Jon’s hatred, angry at whatever long-ago ancestor had started this mess, and angry at herself for not having the courage to tell Jon what had really happened to her.
As for the latter, she realized it was less a matter of courage than a desire to cause the least amount of pain by her confession. God knew this was the worst possible time to break the news to her family, though there would never be a “good” time. Still, if she could somehow stop the feud, or at least defuse it before something horrible happened, before someone else got hurt because of it…
She didn’t get the chance to offer her theory to her father until late the following morning as he was preparing to go to the hospital and get Jon. The brunch they had shared had been silent, with Michele trying to think of the best way to bring up the subject and her father preoccupied with thoughts of his own. In the end, she blurted it out, and like Jon, her father didn’t believe it for a moment.
“Don’t be absurd, Michele. Jon choked a confession out of that saboteur.”
“Maybe he was paid to lie.”
“No, it was the Stuarts all right. And this time they’ve gone too far. Jon could have been killed, to say nothing of the time and cost to repair the damage to the building.”
She felt cold as she looked into the hardness of her father’s eyes. “What are you going to do?”
“Nothing for you to worry about,” he said calmly.
“Not worry? Dad—”
The phone on the hall table rang just then, and her father grasped the interruption. “Get the phone, honey,” he said, laying aside his newspaper and rising from the table. “If it’s for me, tell them I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
He went out into the hall with her to get his coat, and Michele answered the phone with half her mind still occupied with the possibilities her f
ather was considering for revenge. None she could think of was at all comforting.
“Hello?”
“Michele.”
Her heart seemed to stop and then begin pounding against her ribs. Nobody said her name the way he did, and just the sound of it made her ache with longing. But she couldn’t talk to him, not now when everything was so confused, and not with her father three feet away shrugging into his coat.
In a polite voice, she said, “I’m sorry, you have the wrong number.” And hung up the phone.
It was a pity, she thought vaguely, that phone manners didn’t extend to the rest of life. If everyone apologized for the mistakes others made, the world might be a kinder place.
“Are you coming to the hospital with me?” her father asked briskly.
Michele stood in the entrance hall of their stately old home and looked at her father. “No. I haven’t even unpacked yet. I’ll see Jon later.”
Looking at her narrowly, he said, “You’re too pale. Did you sleep well?”
“Not very. Jet lag, I expect.”
“Good thing you’re still on vacation for the rest of the week. You should get some rest, honey.”
“I will.”
When she was alone, Michele admitted to herself that rest was the last thing she could afford. Unless she could somehow prove that neither Ian nor his father was working against her family—and prove it quickly—then violence from both sides wasn’t just probable, it was inevitable.
As so often in the past, the calm but tense status quo between the families had been disturbed. A rivalry that was equally matched and that employed the same tactics could hold steady for years with neither side gaining the upper hand; in world politics, it was called the balance of power, and though it was a brutally delicate high-wire act, at least it preserved both sides. But it required no more than a single nudge to upset the balance.
And someone was supplying that push.
Michele wasn’t even sure that her theory was correct. It was still possible that Ian’s father was bent on delaying his rival’s building. It was even possible that Ian himself had planned the sabotage. But she couldn’t believe that. Despite all the doubts and dark suspicions, the almost instinctive compulsion to believe the worst of a Stuart, she simply could not accept that the man she loved was capable of such treachery.
