by Gayle Wilson
Perhaps she couldn’t make the leap of logic it would require to recognize his voice if she still believed he was dead. Dead and buried for more than a year. It should be inconceivable to her then that he could be sitting in the gazebo of his own rose garden.
He had lied to people on occasion. Everyone had, he supposed, but especially in the position he had once occupied. It went with the constraints and requirements of his job. But he had never lied to Claire.
Sometimes, after it was over between them, he’d wished that he had. At least lied about what he did. What the team did. And especially what he believed about the necessity of those actions. Instead, he had finally told her the truth, because he’d thought he could do no less. Because he’d thought he owed her that truth.
Eventually he would have to do that now. No matter how difficult that might be. For her. And for him.
“Do you know something about Gardner’s disappearance?” she asked.
A logical question. He wished to hell he did. But the truth was... The truth was that until tonight he hadn’t known of the existence of Claire’s child. That knowledge had hurt, making him burn with a jealousy he had no right to feel. Burn even after all this time.
“I’m sorry. That’s not why I asked you to come,” he said.
“Then...why? How did you know about the rose? Are you the one who sent it?”
In the darkness, Griff Cabot’s lips moved, tilting into the slight, enigmatic smile Claire would certainly have recognized. If she had been able to see it.
“I sent you the rose,” he said.
“Because of what I did for Hawk and Jordan?”
“Partly.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“It was intended to be...a message as well.”
A single bloodred rose, like those which grew here. That one had been a hothouse variety because of the season. He had chosen it himself that same evening, and then he had sent it to her, the dew still beading its silken petals.
Because he had wanted her to know he was alive. And because of what he had felt when he’d found out she had been helping his men. Men who carried out the missions she had once professed to despise. If Claire’s feelings had changed enough to allow her to do that—
“What kind of message?” she asked, interrupting that thought.
She took another step, the wooden boards creaking under her weight. Coming here tonight had taken courage. That was something Claire had in abundance.
Of course, what she had done before had taken courage as well. Almost eighteen months ago, at the same time she had made him promise that he would never try to see her again, she had openly confessed how she felt. She had told him how much she loved him. And needed him.
She herself had broken the agreement they’d made. Only once. As he had broken it in sending her the rose.
Broken it only once. Before tonight.
“Who are you?” she asked again.
Before he could answer, however, she raised her hand, bringing up the flashlight she had carried from her car. She turned it on, directing it toward the darkness where he was hidden. And unerringly, its beam found his face.
Chapter Four
For an endless moment Claire couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t have done any of those things had her very life depended on it.
Griff’s eyes had narrowed against the intensity of the light, and he lifted his hand, placing it protectively, palm outward, before his face. At the same time he lowered his head, effectively hiding the features she had once known as well as she knew her own. More intimately than her own, perhaps, because they had appeared so often in her mind’s eye.
As they did now. They had been captured like an image on film, burned on her retinas, frozen to stillness by the cold, piercing finger of the flashlight’s beam. That first image played over and over in her head, blocking questions. Blocking reaction. Blocking thought.
“Turn it off, Claire,” Griff said quietly.
How had she not recognized his voice? she wondered, hearing it now. Knowing it. Knowing it instantly.
Because he’s dead, of course. Griff Cabot was dead. She had grieved for him. Every day of this endless year, she had grieved for him. Grieved for the all the foolish, meaningless things she had once said to him. And now...
“Turn it off,” he said again, this time in a tone of command. The voice of a man accustomed to being obeyed.
Why shouldn’t it be? Everyone obeyed him. They always had. Just as they listened to his opinions and respected them. Everyone, it seemed, except Claire Heywood.
Now, however, her finger pushed the switch in unthinking obedience. The powerful light blinked out, disappearing as suddenly as it had appeared.
As suddenly as he had once disappeared, she thought. Dead. They had told her he was dead.
“I’m sorry,” Griff said softly. “I did try to warn you.”
I’m sorry. She couldn’t fit the understated simplicity of that apology into the scope of her pain. I’m sorry?
Sorry they had told her he was dead? she wondered. Sorry he had brought her here to find out in this brutal way that he was not? Or sorry he had done this whole despicable... thing to her? Or had let the agency—
The thought was so sudden, she gasped a little with its impact. Almost too great a shock after the last.
The CIA had given Jordan Cross a new face after the incident at the airport in Mississippi, because his picture—his face—bad been spread out under the banners of a thousand newspapers. Had they done it again after Kathleen Sorrel had turned over the Mafia’s money? That had been only a couple of weeks ago. But maybe...
“Jordan?” she asked, pushing the question past the hard constriction of her throat. “Is that you?”
The man in the shadows laughed, the sound deep and soft, but known. Familiar. So familiar.
“You seem to have some sort of fixation with Jordan Cross. I think I might be jealous, Claire. If things were...different.”
His voice. Griff’s voice. And despite her shock, its sound flowed through all the places in her mind and body that had once known his touch. Known him so intimately that there could be no longer any doubt about who was sitting in the darkness of the old gazebo. No longer any room at all in her heart for doubt.
Tears stung her eyes, still widened with the shock of what the flashlight had revealed. They had now adjusted to the moon-touched darkness enough to be able to watch as he slowly lowered the hand he had raised.
Griff Cabot was alive. This was not someone pretending to be Griff. Not a figment of her imagination, brought on by the incredible stresses of this day. And not a phantom.
“Why?” she whispered, trying to understand. “Why did they tell me you were dead?”
And then, before he could possibly have answered the first, even if he had wanted to, the more important questions followed.
“How could you let them tell me that, Griff? How could you let me believe you were dead?”
“I wasn’t in any condition to stop them,” he said softly.
Condition? Because he really had been a victim of that massacre? she wondered. But if that part was true—
“And besides...” His words had interrupted that thought, but then he hesitated before he completed the sentence. “You and I had already made our agreement.”
She knew at once what he meant, although she didn’t know why he would bring that promise, his promise, into this discussion. Why he would think that had any bearing on what he had done.
“Our agreement never included lying to each other,” she accused.
Her knees were weak, her palm clammy as her shaking hand clenched the heavy flashlight Reaction to finding out that the man she loved, the man she believed had been killed more than a year ago, the man she had grieved for every day and every night of that year, was still alive. Still alive.
“Didn’t it?” he asked calmly. “Somehow, I thought that was exactly what our agreement was about W
e pretend that how we felt about each other wasn’t as important as...” Again he hesitated, maybe reluctant to dredge up the old arguments. “As the other things in our lives,” he finished. “Or wasn’t that a lie as well, Claire?”
He was right, of course. It had taken her only a few days after his death to reach that conclusion. And for the rest of the time, from that day to this, she had been forced to live with the reality of what a falsehood it had been.
They had disagreed about politics. About their view of the world. About which solutions to its problems they valued. About what he and his team did.
Senseless arguments. Intellectual. Cerebral. But without any merit at all, without value, when she had lost him. When she thought she had lost him, she amended, because all along that, too, had been a lie. She still found it hard to believe Griff would let her think he was dead. That was larger and far more hurtful than whatever sin he was accusing her of.
Moral arrogance, she remembered. That had been one of the phrases he had thrown at her in their last, most bitter argument. Morally arrogant because she thought there were other ways to protect this country. Other ways to settle the problems of the world than those he had chosen, which were both violent and clandestine. And abhorrent to everything she just as vehemently believed in.
“What do you want?” she asked finally, almost numb from the battery of shock, pain and grief she had endured today. “Why did you bring me here?”
She had been forced to accept the fact that Griff Cabot was alive, but she didn’t know what that meant. Or why he had, after all these months, decided to tell her the truth. To show her the truth in this way. At this particular time.
“I want to help you find your daughter,” Griff said.
Your daughter. He had given the words no special emphasis, but they impacted in her mind. Not our daughter. And of course, Griff had had no hand in her upbringing. He had been alive, and yet he had never once acknowledged his daughter’s existence. He hadn’t done that even now.
“Why?” she asked.
She had no idea what answer she expected. Because she’s my daughter as well. Because I want her to be safe. Because I love you. All the answers she thought he might give her echoed inside her head as she waited, not breathing, wondering which one of them he would say.
“Because I have the skills,” he said.
None of the things she had been prepared to hear. I have the skills. The most mundane and rational of reasons. He did, of course. Resources she couldn’t possibly match anywhere else in the world. His team. His contacts. His knowledge.
Which it seemed he was willing to use on his daughter’s behalf. As long as she was safe, Griff had apparently been content to stay out of their lives. Content to live out the lie the CIA had created. But now...
Despite the way she felt about the things Griff Cabot had once done for the CIA, she had always known that inside him was a solid core of decency and honor. That unshakeable belief was one of the things that had made the decision she had ultimately come to so difficult. And one reason she had never understood how he could do the jobs he did.
How could he issue orders for someone to be assassinated and close his mind to the reality of the human suffering that caused? How could he order a commando raid? How could he argue the virtue of the taking of one life to protect another?
To her that always sounded like the twisted statement someone had made during the Vietnam War—that the U.S. must bomb a particular village in order to save it. That was both senseless and destructive, as if violence could ever be defeated with more violence.
The old questions and arguments beat at her, as if she and Griff had made them only yesterday. Just as they had beat at her eighteen months ago when she had finally told Griff she couldn’t see him anymore. That she didn’t ever want to see him again.
That, too, had been a lie, of course, but at least she had known it was when she said it. She had even admitted to him the enormity of its untruth.
And that was the reason for the promise she had elicited from him. She knew how weak her will was when confronted with the reality of this man. Because she also knew how much she loved him.
So she had made him swear that he would never seek her out again. That he would never call or write her. Or come to her. Or ask her to come to him. Because if he did, she had known she wouldn’t be able to resist—or deny him.
Griff had kept his word, of course. But he hadn’t refused her the night she had come to him. The one night when the seemingly endless longing for the caress of his hand and the heated touch of his mouth against her body had drawn her here, unable to bear the loneliness and deprivation of living without him any longer.
Here to this house, she remembered, her gaze lifting, searching for and finding through the wooden filigree of the old gazebo the dark, familiar shape of the mansion. She had come to him.
And when he had opened the door and found her standing there, he had taken her cold, trembling fingers into his warm ones and drawn her inside. He had not released her hand, leading her through the silent house like a child. Or a blind man. Leading her up the wide curving staircase to his bedroom. So familiar, even in the sheltering night.
They hadn’t spoken a word. The ghosts of the old arguments had not been released to haunt those hours. They had met almost as strangers, coming together physically in a deliberate denial of all the intellectual barriers that had kept them apart.
That night Gardner had been conceived. And Claire had not yet had a chance to tell Griff that before she had been informed of his death. She would have told him, of course. Eventually. At least it had comforted her through these long months to believe that she would have. Comforted her through those bleak, lonely months when she had believed he was dead. And now...
“Why would you do that?” she asked again, unable to move beyond the agony of what he had done. Unable to forgive him. “Why would you let them tell me that?”
He drew a breath, so deep the sound was audible in the stillness. And it was obvious when he answered that he understood what she was asking.
“It had already been done. And long before they did, what had been between us was over. Because you decided it should be. You decreed it was over, Claire. Because of who I am.”
She shook her head slowly, trying to understand that reasoning. What had been between us was already over.
“That’s not the same as death,” she whispered.
It wasn’t. Not the same as letting someone that you knew loved you believe you were dead. Nowhere near the same cruelty.
“It was to me,” Griff said simply, his voice as low as hers, without any emotion she could read.
She examined the claim, trying to understand. And when she thought she did, she shook her head again. This time in denial.
“No,” she said.
“No?” he questioned.
“I didn’t tell you I was dead,” she said.
“What was the difference in what you did, Claire? You wanted me out of your life. So what was the difference in the distance you created between us? In the separation?”
“You know the difference,” she said, her anger that he would try to deny responsibility for what he had done building. “You have to understand the difference.”
“What I knew was that you weren’t here,” he said simply.
“That’s not dead,” she accused, furious with what he was saying. With equating his supposed death with what she had done. She closed her eyes, hearing the growing stridency in her voice. No one but Griff could make her so angry. Or so confused.
Confused because as much as she wanted to deny it, there was some grain of logic in what he was saying. If they were never to see one another again, as she had demanded, then what did the cause of that separation matter? How could it matter what he had let them tell her?
“I’d like to help you find your baby,” he said again, but only after he had let the painful silence lengthen unbearably. “What have they asked you for?”
“Nothing,” she said truthfully.
And with that word, the remembered despair of the long day broke through her anger. His question reminded her of why she was here. She couldn’t believe that devastating reality had left her mind even for a moment. For a second.
Even now, Gardner might be frightened or cold or alone. And unless Claire found her soon... Her mind shied away from that word unless. She couldn’t bear it, just as she couldn’t bear the thought of what Gardner might be going through. She had fought those images all day, pushing them into a tightly locked corner of her mind. Fighting panic and despondency because they would cripple her at a time when she needed all her strength.
But she didn’t feel strong right now. There had been too much to deal with. Her emotions were shredded. Griff, whom she had thought was lost forever, was alive. And their baby... Their baby.
“There was no note. No phone call. No demand for ransom.”
She made herself enumerate the list of negatives, feeling despair well up as she realized that she knew nothing more than she had known this morning when this had all begun. This morning when someone had destroyed her world.
“I thought when the phone rang tonight...” She stopped, wondering again who had called her. She had been certain it wasn’t either of the agents she’d met. And it wasn’t Griff. “Who called me?” she asked.
“Jake Holt,” Griff said. “I contacted him because I thought he could help. Then I asked him to arrange for you to meet me here.”
“You thought he could help how?” Claire asked carefully.
“He finds people,” Griff said simply.
For the agency, Claire realized. Or for the team. Jake Holt was another member of Griff’s External Security Team, she realized. Like the man they called Hawk, and Jordan Cross.
“And you think he can find Gardner?” she asked.
“It would help if she were using a credit card,” Griff said softly.
His voice had been touched with the familiar sardonic amusement she had heard there so often before. She knew he used humor as a defense against the painful realities of his world, but of course this time those realities were too personal for this cool detachment. Or they should be. There should be nothing amusing about someone taking your child, even a child you didn’t know.
