by Kay Hooper
Clinging to him, she said unsteadily, “It just hit me tonight, all at once, that anything could happen now. Then the message came, and it didn’t make sense, but I had to tell you about it. Jon called a cab for me because he wants to check my car out, and he told me not to take the elevator here—”
Michele broke off and drew a deep breath, trying to quiet her own surging emotions. But they wouldn’t quiet. For the first time, she felt her own exhaustion, the strain of too much worry and fear held taut for too long, but it wasn’t rest or sleep she needed, and she felt that, too. She needed to be with the man she loved, just be with him; she needed to draw strength from the certainty of their feelings.
Raising her head from his shoulder, Michele looked into his beautiful warm eyes, and her heart was thudding so hard she thought it would burst. “I don’t need to rest,” she whispered. “I need you.”
Ian touched her cheek tenderly, and then his hand slid around to the nape of her neck, beneath the soft weight of her hair. He kissed her, the first gentleness disappearing rapidly as she made no effort to hide her own taut desire. Her mouth opened under his, her hands going to his neck as she moved restlessly in his lap, and a soft sound tangled in the back of her throat.
His concern for her had prompted gentleness rather than desire, but as always her honest need for him instantly ignited his own passion. It had been too long; no matter how urgent the worries and dangers surrounding them, once they were together nothing else seemed to matter.
He carried her to his bedroom, and to his bed. They were both too wound up to allow patience, too eager for one another to permit a slow joining. Clothing was flung aside carelessly in the lamplit quiet of the room, and they fell onto the bed together.
“Love me,” she whispered, trembling under the onslaught of his hungry caresses, burning with the feverish, all-consuming need to belong to him. The time apart had caged that necessity, but now it burst free like something alive and on the wing, and she gloried in the freedom of it.
He was murmuring to her, husky words of love and desire, his hands shaking as he touched her, and when he eased into her they both caught their breath raggedly.
Michele totally lost control in his arms, and she didn’t care. The pleasure was so intense it was like being drawn into a whirlpool of sensation, a quickening spiral that wound tighter and tighter until she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t stop the sounds escaping her, couldn’t do anything except cling to him wildly and cry out as all her senses shattered.
Chapter 9
“Can you stay?” Ian asked quietly.
“Yes.” She would have stayed even if it had been impossible, because she needed to be with him too badly to leave him. “Jon’s going to have it out with Dad first thing in the morning, so he probably won’t even notice I’m not there. If he does notice, Jon said he’d cover for me.”
“I’m beginning to like your brother very much.”
“He’s been a bit of a surprise,” Michele admitted. “I think he saw how badly I wanted to be with you right now, and he seems worried about how I’m holding up.”
“You’re too thin,” Ian murmured, his fingers gently probing the tiny indentations between her ribs.
They were lying close together, and he was propped on an elbow as he gazed down at her. Michele opened her eyes slowly and looked up at him, relaxed now and feeling both stronger and more content than she had in weeks. She took his hand and guided it to rest on her lower stomach.
“I won’t be for long,” she said softly.
He actually paled, his darkening eyes fixed on their hands both resting over her slender body. His fingers moved slightly, almost compulsively, as if he were seeking signs that wouldn’t be visible for weeks yet.
“You’re sure?” he asked huskily.
“Yes. Do you mind?” She was watching his face intently, certain of his response but needing reassurance as any woman does at such a time. And she found it when his gaze lifted to hers, his eyes still dark and filled with tenderness and a moving look of wonder.
“Michele…” He kissed her, a slow, warm, drugging kiss that was love and delight and a purely male pride.
Understanding that last emotion made Michele laugh softly as her arms went up around his neck. “Didn’t you think you had it in you?” she asked.
He chuckled as well, gathering her even closer against him. “I didn’t know. You said there was a good chance, but that was weeks ago.”
“As near as I could figure it,” Michele said dryly, “that twenty-four hours we were together on Martinique was the perfect time for me to get pregnant. In fact, it was the only time all month I could have. My doctor once told me that he never recommended the rhythm method of birth control because it was so undependable, but that it would probably be as effective for me as the pill.” Suddenly grave, she added, “It wasn’t deliberate though, Ian. I hope you know that.”
Just as seriously, he said, “There were two of us there, remember? I’m just as responsible for not taking precautions. In fact, when you told me it could have already happened, I wondered if maybe that’s what I wanted. Now I’m sure. I love you, Michele Logan. And I want our child very, very much.”
It was some time later before Michele could rouse herself from the blissful warmth that had surrounded them both, but she made the effort even though it cost her a pang to bring up what had to be faced. It wasn’t over yet, and until it was the stolen moments with Ian couldn’t be all peaceful ones.
“That message,” she murmured. “You have to see it. There’s a warning about Sunday. And next week. The copy I made is in my purse.”
“I’ll go get it,” Ian said, clearly reluctant to leave her as he slid from the bed.
She banked pillows and sat up against them, absently drawing the covers higher. It was doubtful either of them would sleep before dawn, she knew, if then. And even though the last weeks had left her tired, just being with Ian gave her the energy and stamina she needed.
Besides that, their time together was too precious to waste in sleep, she decided.
While she waited for Ian to return, she thought about the strange dream she’d had, frowning a little over the peculiar things that had been said. Was her subconscious trying to tell her that all the pieces were there, right in front of her to see? She supposed that was the only explanation, but it still puzzled her that her subconscious had taken the form of an odd old man she had seen only once, weeks ago, outside a fortune-teller’s tent on Martinique.
Fortune-teller…I am Fortune.
Well, maybe it made sense after all. Of a sort. She closed her eyes and tried to remember the predictions once again, but all she got were disjointed phrases. Two paths…neither way without tragedy…seeds sown…bitter fruit…cannot change what must be…the truth you feel…
Opening her eyes and frowning across Ian’s bedroom, she told herself yet again that it was absurd to look for answers in the meaningless words of a self-proclaimed psychic. She’d have better odds rolling dice.
A roll of the dice, a turn of the card, a fork in the road.
Twenty-six relatively blameless years, Michele thought with a surge of rebellion, and now she was surrounded by a great deal too much cryptic nonsense. Fortune-tellers and faceless enemies and mysterious messages.
“Why are you frowning?” Ian asked as he came in.
“Because nothing makes sense.” She looked at him, and couldn’t help but grin. “Although I must admit, being served a snack in bed by a naked man at three A.M. is certainly nothing to frown at. I could get used to this.”
Chuckling, he placed the heavily laden tray on the bed and crawled in beside her. The tray held an assortment of cheese, crackers, fresh fruit, and various other snacks, as well as two tall glasses of milk. Ian handed her one of the glasses and clinked his against it very gravely.
“I was starving, and I noticed you didn’t eat much at the party. Besides that, you can’t tell me your doctor didn’t scold you for losing weight.”
“He just mentioned it in passing,” Michele murmured.
“I’ll bet.”
Michele took refuge in her milk and wrinkled her nose after the first sip. “I never did like this stuff.”
“Drink it,” Ian said, and fed her a cracker before she could protest.
She laughed at him but felt warmed by his concern. Conscious of an appetite for the first time in days, she ate enough to satisfy him, and then they both continued to snack while he frowned over her copy of the odd message.
“As paranoid as it sounds,” she offered after a few minutes, “do you think this could possibly be a ruse of some kind, a trick from the very man we’re after? Or am I hearing the wrong kind of hoofbeats?”
Ian blinked, then nodded as he understood the reference. “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras?”
“Right.”
“The most likely explanation is usually the correct one,” he noted thoughtfully. “It’s a little hard to believe that whoever’s against us would go to all the trouble of warning us, and putting us on guard. At the same time, I’m having a problem believing that the shady character who sold the timers would send a message like this one—apparently aimed directly at you.”
“That’s one of the things I can’t figure out,” she muttered, nibbling on an apple that Ian had cored and sliced. “Steve swears he never mentioned a woman, never even said he was trying to get information for someone else.”
Ian studied the message. “ ‘The buyer is no stranger,’ ” he read slowly. “No stranger to the seller? Or to us? ‘Sunday is dangerous, next days critical. Only they can stop him.’ ”
“Weird, isn’t it?” Something else about the message was bothering her, something she couldn’t make come clear in her mind. The sentences themselves were wrong, she thought, misleading in a way she couldn’t put her finger on, as if there was a pattern that she was missing.
“What does Jon think?”
“That we can’t afford to ignore any warning, no matter how enigmatic it is, or whom it comes from.”
“He’s right. We’ll all have to be especially careful tomorrow, and somehow figure out why next week is critical.”
Michele looked at him worriedly. “How can we be more careful than we have been? How do we guard against a lunatic with a habit of hiring middlemen to plant explosives? Whether we believe the message or not we have to assume there’s another timer—or some kind of device—that hasn’t been used yet. Being on guard and having good security hasn’t stopped him so far; he could booby-trap anything.”
“About all we can do is take cabs and stay out of elevators.” Ian shook his head. “Why elevators? First the one in your family’s building, and then ours last night. If he just wanted to stall completion of the buildings—or make it look that way—then why choose elevators as his targets?”
Michele had been around the construction business long enough to see what he was getting at. “It is strange,” she agreed slowly. “There are a hundred other things he could have done. Sabotage the electrical systems, the air conditioning, the plumbing—any of those would have taken a lot more time and money to repair, and the damage would have been more widespread.”
“We’re missing something,” Ian said. “I don’t know what it is, but there’s a key somewhere. I asked Dad last night if he and your father had an enemy in common—”
A sudden chill shot through Michele, and she stiffened. “That’s it,” she breathed unsteadily as the words surfaced vividly in her mind. “ ‘Even now, the seeds sown decades ago grow twisted to bear a dark and bitter fruit.’ Decades ago.”
“One of the fortune-teller’s predictions?” Ian asked, guessing from the phrasing.
“Yes. And now it makes sense. Ian, you know the history of our families as well as I do.”
“Probably. The point being?”
“For every generation, the hatred was an inherited thing, a family matter rather than a personal grudge. But somehow, it always became personal. And so the feud was maintained, each generation hating for their own reasons. Right?”
“As far as I can remember, that sounds right. Until we came along, that is.”
Still marveling at the quirk of fate that had prompted her meeting with Ian on an island so far away, she leaned over to kiss him. “I’m so glad we came along.”
“So am I,” he murmured, touching her cheek gently.
Michele forced herself to think of less pleasant things. “But before we did—thirty-five years ago, to be exact—something happened between our fathers. I’m willing to bet that until then, they didn’t feel much personal animosity, but after that they hated each other.”
“Do you know what happened?”
“I got part of the story from Jon, but I don’t think he knows all of it. You were right, it was a woman. Apparently, both our fathers fell in love with her. From that point, I’m not sure of the facts. She was with Dad for a while, then told him she loved your father more and went to him. But something happened; Jon said there was a confrontation of some kind, and she ended up without either of them.”
Ian leaned back against the pillows and frowned. “You think this woman could be behind the sabotage?”
Michele drew a breath. “I think we’d better find out what happened to her. Maybe our fathers gave her a reason to hate. Maybe the why of all this…is revenge.”
After a long moment, Ian said, “I’ll get the story out of Dad. I have a feeling he’ll be more willing to talk about it than your father. Besides that, Dad knows about us.”
“He does?” A bit warily, she added, “How did he take it?”
“On the whole, fairly well.” He smiled at her. “Not delighted—but resigned.”
Ruefully, Michele said, “Then we’ve done better than I ever expected. Your father and my brother have survived the shock. If Jon gets through to Dad in the morning…”
Ian glanced at the clock on his nightstand. “It’s already morning.” He leaned forward to get the tray and set it on the floor by the bed. “You need to rest.”
Michele cuddled up to his side, but as he reached out to turn off the lamp, she said thoughtfully, “I’m not all that tired.”
Enough light filtered through the drapes for Ian to see the catlike gleam of her haunting eyes. “No?”
“Well, no. Maybe it was the milk.”
He realized that his hands were stroking her delicate body, the soft flesh of her throat drawing his lips as if to a lodestar. Half groaning, he said against her warm skin, “I’ve said it from the first; you make me so crazy I can’t even remember my own good intentions.”
“What good intentions?” she murmured, but not as if the subject interested her.
“Letting you rest, baby.” He lifted his head, looking down at her with burning eyes.
Michele wound her arms around his neck and kissed him. “I’ll sleep late,” she promised softly.
—
It was late when she woke up, Michele knew that even before she opened her eyes. She also knew that she woke reluctantly, and it took her several moments to realize that a ringing telephone was the culprit. She lay with her head on Ian’s shoulder and listened drowsily as he talked, not really trying to figure out what was said until he moved slightly to replace the receiver in its cradle on the nightstand.
“Oedipus,” she murmured. Her pillow shifted as Ian chuckled.
“What?”
“Or Electra. It’s a complex. Psychology.” She lifted her head and stared at him owlishly. “No. That’s between parents and children. What is it between siblings?”
“I have no idea,” Ian said politely. “No idea what you’re talking about, and no idea what ‘it’ is between siblings since I don’t have any.”
Michele’s drifting thoughts finally settled, and she made the connection. “Ah. My brother calling my lover while I’m in my lover’s bed. It must have started a train of thought.” She considered that, then added bemusedly, “I think the train derailed.�
��
Ian was laughing. He raised his head from the pillow and kissed her. “You’re very interesting to wake up with, you know that? I remember on Martinique you woke up once saying, ‘When I haven’t any blue, I use red.’ When I asked you what you were talking about, you said Picasso.”
She frowned. “I wonder what brought that on. There’s usually a germ of an idea in there somewhere.”
“As in Oedipus?”
“I guess. That was Jon on the phone, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. And if he was feeling any brotherly jealousies, he didn’t let on. I told him about your idea that this whole thing may have started thirty-five years ago, and that I was going to call my father and get the facts. He said once you had a name, you could probably trace the woman. Apparently his morning confrontation was less than successful, since your father hardly listened before storming out of the house in a rage. He also said your absence hadn’t been noticed, and that we all needed to talk about the situation. I certainly agreed. He’ll be here in about an hour.”
Michele peered past Ian at the clock on the nightstand. “Eleven. Even after all that food in the wee hours, I’m starving. Can we eat while we talk?”
They could, although Ian was still preparing the meal when Michele went to let Jon in. She was staving off hunger with a slice of hot French bread, and at her brother’s surprised look said lightly, “It’s all Ian’s fault; he primed the pump.”
“Should I ask what you’re talking about?” Jon wanted to know, looking around the apartment with wary interest.
“My appetite. Ian fed me at three o’clock this morning, and it seems to have triggered my appetite. For the first time in weeks, I’m hungry. Come on into the kitchen; lunch is almost ready. Have you eaten?” She kept her voice casual deliberately, aware that her brother was a little uncomfortable and trying to make it easier on him.
“Not since breakfast.” Jon followed her into the spacious and well-equipped kitchen, and his faint amusement grew as he saw Ian skillfully at work preparing spaghetti. Nearby on the counter was an assortment of greens for salad, which Michele returned to as she finished her slice of bread.
