High Tide

by Jude Deveraux

  “Two,” he said. “We’ll probably be charged with two murders.” He picked up the TV remote control. “You want to watch a movie? Or we can have my cousin bring us any video we want.”

  “No!” she shouted. “I don’t want to watch any movie. I want to—”

  “I think you should calm down,” Ace said patiently; then he went to the table and poured her another glass of champagne. “Here, drink this. Eat some chocolate. And there’s cheesecake topped with fresh raspberries. You have to calm down. There’s no other way than to give it up,” he said softly. “You’ve seen it out there. Someone tried to kill you. He, or she, was shooting at you, not at me, at you. At least in jail you might be safe from murder.”

  She downed the champagne in one drink, and Ace refilled her glass. And when she had the third glassful in her, she began to relax. At least her feeling of panic was subsiding.

  “Come on,” he said, as he held out a plate full of luscious desserts. “Let’s go lie down and relax. We’re going to need rest for tomorrow.”

  “Are you trying to seduce me?” she asked; then, to her horror, she giggled.

  “Do you want me to?” he asked seriously.

  “I just bet you’re the life of the party, Ace Montgomery. Tell me, why are you called Ace if your real name is Paul?” she said as she followed him into the bedroom.

  “I was first in my class—Ace,” he said without smiling as he put the plate on the single, huge bed that took up a good portion of the room. “I should have asked for two beds,” he said.

  “Why? We’ve slept together before and in a much smaller bed than this one.”

  “Maybe you slept,” Ace muttered, then picked up the remote control. He stretched out on the bed, but he was so far away from Fiona that they might as well have been in separate rooms.

  She was eating cheesecake, and all the champagne seemed to quiet something inside her. And seemed to clarify her mind.

  “The public seems to have judged me and found me guilty, so even if I do stand trial for a crime I didn’t commit, I’ll still be found guilty,” she said quietly. “Maybe I should try to fight this thing.”

  Ace changed channels on the TV. “And maybe you could be shot. Did you forget the person who’s pursuing you?”

  She took a deep breath. “I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but I’d rather die than spend the rest of my life in jail.”

  Ace made no answer to that, and if he hadn’t been so still, she would have thought he wasn’t listening.

  “Don’t you see? Unless I clear my name, I’ll never have a life. Even if I beat the charges through a trial, I’ll still be tainted and I’ll never get another job in the toy industry.”

  She waited for him to respond, but he kept his eyes straight ahead. But she could see that his shirt was moving quickly over his heart. He’s working to stay calm, she thought. He’s trying to keep himself still so I can say what’s on my mind.

  “But if I clear my name, that’s a different story,” she said softly, leaning toward him.

  “And how do you do that?” Ace asked just as softly. The volume on the TV was so low that she could barely hear it. “The police and the lawyers plus half a dozen detectives haven’t been able to find out anything that could come close to clearing us.”

  “That’s because you and I have to find out what we know.” She took another breath. “Separate us and we’ll never find out the truth.”

  Ace turned to face her, and his eyes were intense. “What if we find out really horrible things about your father?”

  “What if we find out really horrible things about your uncle?” she shot back at him. “I think he’s involved in this too.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Or what if I find out some of the secrets you’re so carefully hiding from me?”

  “You mean like your secret that Kimberly is a doll?”

  Fiona threw up her hands and lay back on the bed. “Is that supposed to be a revelation? It’s shocking that you didn’t know who she was. Do you know about anything at all except birds? I guess if I’d ever made Kimberly an ornithologist, you’d know all about her. Or maybe I should just put wings on Kimberly herself.”

  “Not a bad idea. You could make a bird doll to replace the alligator you destroyed. A sort of crocodoll.”

  Fiona’s growing anger immediately left her, and she laughed. “You can’t imagine how much it would cost to manufacture a top quality fashion doll, then launch her. You’d have to be as rich as Bill Gates to do something like that.”

  He took time to reply to that, as though he was thinking about her statement. “You mean like Disney drawing a few cartoons, then franchising replicas of the characters?”

  “Disney, Star Wars …” She looked at him. “And Raphael.”

  “And we’re back to the beginning. It’s what got us into all this in the first place.”

  “But what’s going to get us out?” Fiona asked quietly. “That’s the real question, isn’t it?”

  “The lawyers will. They’ll investigate, and there are detectives trying to solve this thing. And my cousin—”

  Fiona could no longer stay still. She got off the bed and walked to the foot, to stand between him and the TV. “Why do you trust those people so much? It’s your life involved too. For all that the papers seem to have disregarded you in this—after all, you’re not famous, you didn’t create a doll like Kimberly—but you are involved in this.”

  “What choice is there?” Ace said, moving his head to try to look around her, as though he was much more interested in the TV than in what she was saying. “We can’t continue as we are. You can’t stand living in cabins that don’t have hot-and-cold running water, and you break down at every little revelation. You’re too soft to stand it on the outside.”

  So many words went through Fiona’s head that she couldn’t get them all out. “Soft?” she said, and her quiet tone was louder than a shout. “I am soft? I raised myself, you … you … Everything I am I did myself, without any help from anybody.”

  She put her hands on her hips and began to pace back and forth at the end of the bed. “Do you know how I got started with Kimberly? I created her, that’s how. When I got out of college, I had no connections, nothing; I might as well have been an orphan. And I was not going to use my friends as ladder rungs. ‘That poor little Burkenhalter girl,’ is what I was called. But I wasn’t going to let anything stop me.”

  Turning, she glared at him as he was stretched out on the bed, his ankles crossed, one arm behind his head, the remote in his other hand, and gazing up at her, a bland expression on his face. Soft! she thought.

  She resumed her pacing. “After a couple of years of dead-end jobs, I got a job as a personal assistant to an executive at Davidson Toys. I thought I was going to help create, but she just wanted me to fetch her coffee and pick up her dry cleaning. I was little more than a maid, and paid about as much as one.”

  Turning, she raised her arm and pointed at him. “But I didn’t let that get me down. I kept my mouth shut and my ears open, and one day I heard—” Fiona had to take a deep breath before she could say the man’s name.

  Her voice lowered and she calmed down. “I heard James Tonbridge Garrett say that he’d give the earth for a B clone.” Fiona glared at Ace. “I do hope you know who that is.”

  Ace nodded, his face still showing no emotion.

  “I didn’t sleep for three days and nights,” she said, over her anger now. Turning, she looked toward the curtained window. “I thought about nothing but making … not just a new toy but a whole new concept in the doll world. I created a doll with a story, a story that changed twice a year as she learned and grew as a person.”

  She looked back at Ace. “I hired an artist to draw my ideas, then pushed my way into Garrett’s office one Monday morning and presented the whole concept to him.”

  Ace didn’t say anything for a while, just lay there looking at her.“I see. You’re great in the business world. As long as the surroundings are clea
n and you have a flush toilet, you’re fine.”

  “Damn you!” she said, her hands made into fists at her sides. “You don’t see anything at all. Nothing. New York is a jungle too, just like the one here that contains crocodiles.”

  “Alligators. Not too many crocs.”

  “Whatever. My point is that …”

  “Yes? Exactly what is your point? You want to go back to New York and play with your doll? You can’t do that. What’s happened isn’t your fault, but it’s happened and you can’t change it. So what is it that you’re saying?”

  Fiona sat down on the foot of the bed. “I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “Neither do I, but right now that’s our only choice. Someone or maybe a whole gang of people are out to get us. We have no idea why they want us, but we have to leave that up to the lawyers and detectives and the police to find out. They—”

  “They know nothing.” She gestured toward the newspapers and magazines stacked on the chair. “Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? No one is trying to find out the truth. They’re just trying to find us. We’re the killers at large, the—”

  “The Teddy Bear Killers.”

  “Right. We’ve been judged and found guilty of killing a teddy bear of a man.” She stood up again. “But, you know, Roy Hudson wasn’t a teddy bear to me. I thought he was a slimy old man who kept putting his hands all over me.”

  Ace rolled over a bit, opened the bedside table drawer, and withdrew a pencil and notepad. “That’s good. We’ll get the detectives to check that out.”

  “Fat lot of good that’s going to do. The woman who was quoted in the paper has now made a name for herself. She isn’t going to go back on her word and be made a laughingstock.”

  “Right,” Ace said, then put the pencil and paper back in the drawer and closed it.

  Fiona took two steps around the bed and opened the drawer again; then she tossed the pencil and pad onto Ace’s chest. “There are other things we could check out.”

  He held the pencil, ready to write. “Such as?”

  “I don’t know. If the connection between you and me is my father, then maybe the connection between us and Roy is my father.”

  “But again they may be separate. The reason Roy chose you could have nothing to do with the reason he chose me.”

  “True,” she said, turning away again. “But it would make more sense that my father is the link between all of us. When did my father and Roy meet? Did my father help Roy in some way?”

  “Or did Roy hurt your father in some way?” Ace said quietly. “Maybe Roy hurt your father and my uncle and he felt he owed them.”

  At that Fiona turned toward Ace and blinked at him; then she sat down on the bed beside him. “You’ve been thinking about this, haven’t you?”

  “Quite a lot actually.”

  “If we turn ourselves in, we’ll never find out anything, will we?”

  “I doubt it,” he said softly.

  Fiona looked into his eyes, and for all his seemingly relaxed position, his eyes were burning. “You don’t want us to turn ourselves in, do you?”

  “You went berserk when you found out your father wasn’t what you thought, and you nearly lost your mind when you were fired from your job,” he stated flatly.

  Fiona looked away from him. “True,” she said.

  “And you hated the cabin. People on the run can’t stay in five-star hotels, not if they’re digging for information.”

  “True, I hated that cabin.”

  “And someone seems to be trying to kill you.”

  She looked back at him. “And he’s succeeded, hasn’t he? What am I now except dead? My work, my life, everything has been taken from me. One night I went to bed and when I woke up, there was a dead man on top of me, and since then …” She trailed off.

  “Since then you’ve been in the company of a man you heartily dislike and you’ve had to do without even basic comforts.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Don’t what?” he asked. “Don’t mind doing without a shower? Doing without a deli? Doing without—”

  “I don’t dislike you,” she snapped. “You’re … That is, you’ve become … I mean, that you …”

  As Fiona looked down at him, she saw a tiny glint in his eyes; then, suddenly, her head came up and her eyes widened. “You bastard!” she said under her breath. “You’ve planned this, haven’t you? You never meant for us to turn ourselves in, did you? You’ve manipulated me so that I’ve been trying to make you want to continue.”

  “I want you to make decisions of your own free will,” he said, trying to keep a straight face, but there was a bit of a smile playing around the corners of his mouth.

  “I more than dislike you,” she said, standing up, hands on hips and glaring down at him. “I hate you, hate and despise you, and I hope you’re found guilty and that they bring back the guillotine and that you—”

  Ace started laughing. “Come on, you don’t mean that. Why, just two seconds ago you were saying that you didn’t dislike me.”

  “I was lying.” She started to turn away, but he caught the edge of her robe.

  “I don’t think you hate me,” he said softly.

  “I do!” She was pulling at her robe, trying to get it out of his grasp. “You are the coldest, most unfeeling man I’ve ever met. And boring. All you do is watch TV about birds. Listen to birds. Look at birds. Write about birds. Think about birds.” She must have hit home, because she had the satisfaction of seeing that at last she’d wiped that smug look off his face.

  Smiling sweetly, she continued. “You seem to think that every woman wants you. Well, maybe your blue-haired old ladies want you to beg them for money, but I don’t want anything from you. You share nothing! You keep everything secret and hide inside yourself. I pity any woman fool enough to agree to spend her life with you. She’ll freeze to death being in the same bed with you.”

  “Is that so?” Ace said, and the next moment he gave such a hard yank on her robe that she fell down on top of him. Instantly, his arms went around her and pulled her close.

  Maybe it was all they’d been through, all the danger and excitement, or maybe it was their lengthy no-touch proximity, but when they did touch, it was flammable.

  Ace’s hands seemed to be over her everywhere at the same time. Fiona wrapped her legs about his and held on as her mouth opened under his and she felt his tongue in her mouth.

  Passion did not describe what she felt. Had she been thinking about him all these days? Wanting him? Or was she just desperate for any human contact?

  They rolled about on the bed, hands and mouths moving. Ace’s mouth moved to her neck; her legs moved up to his hips. The top of his robe came open, and she could feel his chest against her skin, just the thin layer of cotton of her gown separating them.

  In their rolling, they moved on top of the TV remote, and a body part hit the volume control. In an instant the television sound blared to a deafening level.

  “Ace, my darling,” came from the TV. “If you hear me, I want you to know that I’m doing everything to help you.”

  Ace, on the bottom, his arms around Fiona, his legs now around Fiona, took his mouth off Fiona to look at the screen to see his fiancée, Lisa Rene Honeycutt, staring back at him. He froze.

  As the voice was unfamiliar to Fiona, she didn’t react instantly, but she was aware that something had turned Ace off. Turned him off completely. “What?” she mumbled.

  But in the next moment she, too, froze when she heard Jeremy’s voice. “Fiona, dearest, please give yourself up to the police.”

  Slowly, she turned her head to look at the TV. The screen was so large Jeremy’s face was almost life-size, and the picture was so clear that he might have been standing at the foot of the bed.

  “Fiona, please, I beg you, turn yourself in,” Jeremy was saying into the camera. “If you hear this, if you’ve ever cared anything for me, please call the police and let them bring you in. I know you couldn’t
have killed anyone, and I’m staking my career on that belief. I’m working night and day to find out the truth of this matter, but you aren’t helping me by being a fugitive. Please call—”

  “And there we have it,” the announcer said as his image replaced Jeremy’s. “The betrotheds of both of the alleged Teddy Bear Killers have flown here to Florida to help in this statewide manhunt. And we must say that they have both been a great help to the news media and to the police. Miss Honeycutt has undergone such extensive grilling that she’s now under a doctor’s care. And someone here said that Jeremy Winthrop hasn’t slept in days.

  “That’s true love for you,” the announcer said, smirking. “Not even cold-blooded murder can stay the course of true love.”

  Turning in his swivel chair, he looked back at the camera. “So now let’s get an update on the whereabouts of the socalled Teddy Bear Killers. It’s believed that they have left the state of Florida and are now in Louisiana. The police there have—”

  Ace removed the remote control from under his hip and turned off the TV.

  “Don’t fall apart on me again!” Ace snapped when he saw Fiona’s face.

  She rolled away from him. “You are a bastard,” she said quietly but with great feeling.

  “Look, I have personal commitments,” he said, nodding toward the bed where they had almost made love. “I can’t do this kind of thing. I have—”

  Turning, she glared at the back of him as he was sitting on the opposite side of the bed. “And what is that supposed to mean? That I don’t?”

  “I just mean that I’m a man and I’m susceptible to long legs being shaved in front of me and—”

  Fiona was sure that never in her life before had she ever been so angry. “In front of you?” she said, and her voice was little more than a hiss. “In front of you? You were in the bathroom with me,” she said. “I was taking a bath and you came in, took your shirt off, and … and … what was that all about? Were you trying to turn me on? Is that what you were doing? You think—”

  “I don’t think anything,” he said, standing and glaring at her across the bed. “So maybe I was in the bathroom with you, but I was afraid you might try to drown yourself. If you recall you were pretty much suicidal today.”