by Terese Ramin
The buildings were clustered together around and off of a cobbled central drive about a half mile from the main house on a parcel of land that faced the highway, then climbed the Green Mountains on one side and bordered federal land on two others. It was an incredible place, full of possibilities and imagination. Even the air gleamed. There was an otherworldliness about the atmosphere, an innocence reminiscent of times past and a sophistication more indicative of future possibilities.
Acasia found it nearly impossible to identify with any of it. She didn’t belong here. Her own world was too bounded by the seamy and the cynical, a world where innocence, if it existed, was shattered quickly and lost irretrievably.
In the last two days she’d explored the estate with the automatically appraising eye of a jewel thief’s daughter, the skepticism of a security expert, and a woman’s desire to discover who the man she loved had become. Everywhere she looked there was a mix of old money and new ideas: the dark wood, overstuffed leather chairs and Oriental carpets of yesterday’s opulence paired with glass and chrome; wood and tweed; slashes of color; the eye–catching optics of today.
She’d also found seven hidden passageways and a number of unused—and unmonitored—stairways within the main house itself that even Cameron hadn’t realized existed. With a few notable exceptions, the rooms were small and dark—practical in the days of no central heating—and, to Acasia’s Spartan tastes, cluttered.
She’d been right in thinking that Cameron could hide easily here, even from his closest staff, but so could anyone else. Cameron’s home made her nervous. She preferred open house plans, with large rooms and few furnishings, where you could see everything at a glance and where no one could sneak up on you. Here she felt like looking over her shoulder and checking behind doors every two seconds.
Her sensitivity to the place was heightened, she knew, by not knowing where she stood with Cameron—or where he stood with her. They watched one another constantly, handling the moments when they were alone with care. Since the first night on the road he’d seemed wary of dumping too much on her. She recognized the symptoms. He’d been quiet when she’d suggested he call a therapist, but she could see him holding back, hanging onto his control by his fingernails. She didn’t go near that part of him. Even if he’d wanted to let her, she couldn’t have. There was something too personal about it, too redolent with similar memories of her own that she didn’t want to bring back.
Instead, she played with the estate’s security, letting go of the things she wasn’t good at to handle the things she was.
She took a few steps to the right, keeping shadows between herself and the surveillance camera she was out here to try and outsmart. Head canted in concentration, she stuck out her left hand, moved it slowly up and down, watching to see if the camera detected and tracked the movement. It didn’t move, meaning that either the heat and motion sensor it was attached to thought she was something that belonged on the estate or that it wasn’t sensitive enough to pick her up. She sucked a nearly soundless breath through her teeth. She’d have to get the sensor switched out and try it again.
Since the talk she’d had with Paolo only a couple of hours ago, she’d been on nervous alert. Byrd’s killers had not yet surfaced, although there were plenty of rumors about who they were. The grapevine also carried rumors of a private force conducting a none–too–gentle search for the same terrorists, employed by an anonymous and excessively wealthy interested party.
She hunkered in the shadow of the house’s side entryway, alternately eyeing the dog watering lampposts along the drive and the camera that panned the area. She was on her way to surprise the pants off that anonymous and excessively wealthy interested party right now, damn Cam anyway for not leaving his search and destroy to the professionals. Or at least the proper kind of professionals. Like her. Demonstrating his vulnerability to his guards would give her the upper hand in the conversation she intended to have with him regarding his personal interference in the course of Futures and Securities’ investigation.
Her conscience didn’t even trip over the double standard she was espousing. She’d been down this road more times than she wanted to count. It was nothing new to her. Also, she could freaking well take care of herself.
When the camera she’d been watching finally triggered and focused on the dog, she grinned. "Good boy," she murmured, and scrambled between shadows, crouching at the door to pick the lock. It opened easily, and with a last glance at the dog she slipped into the kitchen. The alarm box was hidden behind a spring–locked panel in the tiled wall on the room’s far side. She had fifteen seconds to get to it, break the new code she’d had Cameron program into it and reset it before the alarm went off. Since she wasn’t running this game blind, she gave Security a three–second sporting chance before she approached the box. Then she probed the wall with expert fingers, found the slight depression and pressed the panel open.
"Seven one thousand, eight one thousand…" she counted silently as she clipped the wires to the panel that would allow her to bypass the alarms electronically. "Eleven one thousand, twelve one thousand…" The tiny light on the box in her hand glowed red to let her know all was well, and Acasia smiled grimly. "Gotcha." She slipped out of the kitchen and up the back stairs to the second floor.
Moonlight greeted her on the landing, trickling through triple panes of glass to seep into the gloom. She ignored it, her eyes focused up the dark hall on spots of deeper blackness, objects she sought not to identify but to avoid. Quietly she moved forward, stopping outside Cameron’s door, listening. The knob turned noiselessly under her touch, and excitement nudged the pit of her belly, accompanying her as she slipped into the room. Now, now she had him.
The door shut abruptly behind her, and she jerked around.
"What took you so long?" Cameron asked, flipping on the light.
She’d let him get behind her. Acasia blinked in the glare of the light, curbing the knee–jerk instinct to turn and run. She was definitely getting too old for this business. "How?" she asked, her voice cracking. "Did I trail a ball of string?"
Cameron’s grin fell only slightly short of gloating. "Some string. A dog…."
She winced. "You recognized that, did you?" She swept him a quick once–over with her eyes. She’d hoped to find him sleeping, but she’d known he wouldn’t be. She doubted he’d slept much at all since they’d arrived. "I thought the dog was a nice touch."
Cameron nodded. "Oh, it was," he said. "But this is me. I know you. The dog was a little too cute to be coincidence." He took the gloves Acasia passed him and tossed them violently onto a low dresser. "I’ll give you this," he went on, a touch of brittleness creeping into his voice, "Your crew didn’t go out to investigate until after it tripped the sensors a few times."
"They let you come up here alone?"
Cameron slouched against the dresser, and the appearance of brittleness increased. "Not even when I gave them a direct order." He jerked a thumb toward her, and Acasia turned around. Two men in gray uniforms stood behind her, hands resting on their gun belts. The security chief stood between them.
She nodded at him. "Good thing you came up here with him. You’ll check everything now, right?"
"If it so much as twitches."
"Thank you." She turned away dismissively. "I’ll be down at about nine. There’s a sensor out there that’s not reacting the way I want it to. It needs to be changed before we start on the north grid and work backward."
"Do you want anything special done tonight?"
Acasia shook her head. "No. Just tell the night crew what’ll happen if they miss another dog."
"They won’t." He motioned his men out of the room.
"They’re good people, Casie. Let them do their jobs. Quit making them crazy," Cameron said when the door had closed.
"Good people. Like your driver, right? Good didn’t cut it there, and it won’t cut it here. It’s part of my job to make them crazy. They get careless and people get killed. It o
nly takes once."
Cameron’s features grew hooded, and his jaw worked. "You’re one hell of a preacher. Do it often?"
"About as often as you hire a private army to find someone for you."
He didn’t bother to deny it. "I want those people."
The statement was soft, threaded with violence, and Acasia stiffened. "Those people are dangerous to someone like you. Let it go, Cam."
"Like you will if Mansour’s involved?" Acasia jerked, and he nodded. "My debriefing covered quite a bit of ground."
"How much?" The question was flat.
"More than you’d like, not as much as I would. Enough so I know that if he’s involved and an opportunity presents itself—or you see a way to manufacture one—you’ll go after him. Alone."
Acasia turned her back on him. "I’m not that stupid."
"Thank you."
She swung around at the savagery in his tone and saw what she’d forced herself to ignore for the past two days: the abrasions on his face, now scabbed over and healing, the fading bruises. While the body healed itself, the emotions festered. Her wishful thinking hadn’t helped him escape the it should have been me chorus, or the dreams that haunted the survivor, whether awake or in repose. He hurt, and she felt the pain.
She didn’t want to feel his pain. Didn’t want him to hurt the way she had.
The way she still did.
"It wasn’t your fault," she said, brushing her fingertips across his face. "He was careless. You had nothing to do with his death."
"Nice try, Casie." Grief and guilt were kin, burrowing into him, blinding him to facts. She watched him straighten and turn as though in search of something he couldn’t find. "If I hadn’t—" Acasia’s gloves disrupted the neatness of his dresser, and he backhanded them onto the floor. "I’m responsible," he said savagely. "No matter who hired him, he died because he was working for me."
She couldn’t watch him do this to himself. She caught his chin and forced him to face her. "Quit wallowing in it, Cam," she said brutally. "It wasn’t your fault. He was careless. He died. You didn’t. That’s all. I’m glad."
Cameron jerked his chin out of her fingers. He was glad to be alive, too, and he was ashamed of his gladness. "He was killed protecting me. I won’t have people die for me, Casie."
"He didn’t die for you, Cam, he died for his own stupidity. I won’t feel sorry for a man who chooses to do—and is trained to do—a job, then dies because he didn’t protect himself by doing it right. I’m angry because he might have killed you or someone else who’s innocent by doing a shoddy job. I’m ecstatic because he didn’t."
He hated this part of her. Hated understanding that when it came to his own business interests, he could be—and was—exactly the same: ruthless.
"You’re a cold bitch."
"When there’s a need, you’re damn right."
The impassioned statement brought Cameron up short and out of his self–inflicted state of purgatory. His own best advice to Acasia had always been a modified version of the Serenity Prayer: to shake off the things over which she had no control, control what she could and ignore the rest. Without mercy she was throwing his advice back at him and urging him to follow it.
He stared at her, then held his hands out, palms up, looking at the rough, peeling skin. His eyes moved slowly up to meet Acasia’s.
"Your company psychologist tells me I’m experiencing ‘survivor’s guilt,’ and that it’s a normal reaction to the circumstances. Normal!" He laughed without humor. "I’ve never been accused of that particular crime before. Everything I’ve ever done is ‘above average,’ ‘genius.’" His features twisted with savage self–loathing. "A genius ought to be able to handle these things, separate reality from fact."
"Cam…"
A wave of his hand accompanied another sharp bark of laughter, ended with a single virulent expletive. "Fuck it." With a brutality and need he’d never realized he was capable of, Cameron turned his pain full force on Acasia. "The ability to intellectually understand what happened doesn’t amount to much right now. I keep seeing it… hearing it. It’s as if I could just… rearrange a moment here or there." He didn’t want to talk to her about this, but she was the only person it made any sense to talk to, the only person capable of comprehending what went on inside his head. Just like always.
"You think there’s nothing you can’t take back, that you’ll turn around and it’ll all be an aberration, or some ridiculous segment of film you can stop by yelling ‘Cut!’" He looked at her, and Byrd’s ghost haunted his features. "I’ve lived with it–might–happens all my life, but it never happened before. Is this what you’ve lived with all this time?"
She hated to see him hurt. And making this kind of hurt better wasn’t what she was good at, so she answered the question instead. "To a degree. If you cultivate it, it grows. That’s what I live with."
"For God’s sake, Casie, why?"
She understood all the variances behind the short question: why live with it, why keep doing it, why not stop, why not do something that makes it—makes you—better….
Understood, better than she wanted to, what he needed from her. Truth with equivocation. The one thing she’d been afraid of admitting to herself—ever.
"I don’t know why, Cam." She started to turn evasively away, forced herself to turn back and look at him straight on. "Maybe I do it because it’s familiar, and I can deal with the familiar. Maybe because remembering makes me care about what I do, because it gives me focus. I need focus, Cam, or I’ll lose everything."
He stepped closer. "Haven’t you done that already?"
She shook her head, glanced away. "No. Maybe."
"Casie, please."
She couldn’t stand the pain in his voice. He wanted the unembellished truth. Something maybe she owed to him. She turned her back so he couldn’t see her face and gave it up. "I’m afraid if I let it go of the work, the past… there won’t be any me left." She glanced back at him. "Some days pain is better than no feeling at all."
Cameron looked at her, looked at his hands—at the remaining bandages—and folded his fingers into his palms. "Is it?"
Acasia reached for him, then pulled back. Sometimes compassion was what you didn’t do, not what you did. "I know where you are, Cam. I’ve been there a few times. I can tell you what it’s like for me, but I can’t tell you how to get rid of it. I’m not too good at letting go myself. The calendar will make a dent if you let it. And…" She hesitated, then shut her ears to Lisetta’s voice and made the offer anyway. "If I can… if you need… if… You can have my ears and my arms and my tears and anything else I have that will help cut the pain in the meantime… If you want…."
"I don’t know what I want from either of us today, Casie, but I need—" He stopped and swallowed.
The hardest thing she ever did was go to him then and let him hold her.
* * *
"This isn’t working."
"It’s okay. You’re under a lot of strain. This isn’t why I stayed—It doesn’t matter." Lines, damn it, lines! Where was the one that would make this better?
"Don’t coddle me, Casie. I know not being able to… get it up… I know this isn’t the end of the world. Ah, hell." He rolled away from Acasia and dropped his feet to the floor. "I’m going downstairs for a drink. You want one?"
"It won’t help."
Cameron jerked on the sweatshirt and pants he’d shed earlier. "Maybe not, but it’ll give me something to do that I can handle."
"Don’t be such a jerk." Furiously Acasia scrambled across the bed after him. "So somebody dirtied up your pretty little life. Shake it off. Don’t let it bury you."
He snorted. "What do you do, Casie—buy your lines wholesale? That’s got to be one of the stupidest things you’ve ever said to me. What has it taken you—fifteen, sixteen years? And you haven’t managed to shake it yet."
"I told you not to act like me," Acasia said evenly.
"You told me not—right." Cameron drew
out the word with a laugh. "Stuff it, Casie," he said, and slammed out of the room.
"Cam! Cam! Don’t do this." In frustration, she kicked at the stand beside his bed. Bare toes connected with solid oak. "Ow!" She grabbed her foot, held it for a second, then let go and hobbled around the bed to find her clothes. Wonderful. She’d handled things badly ever since she’d first set foot in this room. What had made her think that just because she’d told him what he might experience, what he might feel, what he shouldn’t dwell on… what had made her assume that her personal experiences made her an expert on his?
Arrogance, pure and simple.
Acasia glared at herself in the mirror over Cameron’s dresser. "All right, Jones," she told herself. "He says he needs you, he asks you to stay, you messed it up—now fix it."
And before she could let the question of how damage her resolve, she slammed after Cameron.
* * *
He kept his booze in the library and his anger in the garden beyond the library’s French doors where solace and solitude were meant to go hand–in–hand.
Usually.
Now he stood in the garden in that odd darkness somewhere between night and morning, watching dawn chase down the moon, nursing half a bottle of rye, pacing like a caged beast fiercely seeking a way to escape. For the first time Acasia watched him without first thinking about what she hoped might happen between them, or what they wanted–needed–expected from each other.
"You don’t have to do this alone." She heard herself make the statement as if from a distance, softly, so that it blended with the air.
"What? Drink?" Cameron kept his back to her but waggled the bottle at his side. "You’re welcome to join me. If you want a glass, they’re inside, or you can belt it straight from the bottle. Somehow that seems the most fitting way."
"I don’t want a drink. That’s not what I meant. I meant you don’t have to do this, go through this… nightmare, daymare, whatever the hell it is, alone."
