by Betty Neels
‘It took me a week to find you, Sarah,’ he said at last. ‘You see, this was the last place I thought of. You said—do you remember?—that only the direst circumstance would force you to drive up here alone. I didn’t remember that at once. I wasted precious days looking for you at your mother’s and the hospital and Rose Road. I even went to see Mr Ives … and a dozen other people. You have so many friends. I tried Kate and Dick Coles and the bank, even old Simms …’
Sarah sucked her pricked finger. She said quietly, ‘I’m sorry, you see, I didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t think you’d want to know.’
He said on a sigh, ‘Sarah, my dearest Sarah! I’ve been half out of my mind.’ He stopped. ‘I love you,’ he said suddenly and fiercely. ‘I fell in love with you years ago … you were staffing on Men’s Medical. It wasn’t too difficult persuading Matron that you were just the type I wanted in OPD.’
She dropped her embroidery at that, and stared at him, open-mouthed.
‘Oh, yes,’ he went on, still fiercely. ‘Only to discover that you and young Steven … I waited three years. And then I married you, knowing that I would still have to wait while you recovered from Steven; knowing that you weren’t ready for my love. That’s why I allowed you to go on believing in that hoary legend about Janet and me.’
Womanlike, she fastened on that. ‘But you loved her!’
He smiled at her, with such tenderness and understanding that she caught her breath. He said quietly, ‘Perhaps, for a year—two years.’ And she nodded, remembering how she had felt about Steven. Her heart was thudding violently now; she picked up her embroidery again and began stitching as though her very life depended upon it, pushing the needle in and out of all the wrong holes with a complete disregard for the design. Hugo got up and took the maltreated canvas from her shaking hand, plucked her out of her chair and pulled her close so that her voice was muffled against his shoulder.
‘Hugo!’ she wailed. ‘I’ve loved you for—months and months—long before I knew about it!’
Apparently this muddled remark made sense to Hugo, for he put a finger under her chin and stared down at her and kissed with slow gentleness and then, while she was catching her breath, kissed her again, not gently at all. When at length he loosed her a little she put her hands against his chest so that she could look up into his face.
‘Janet—’ she uttered. ‘Why did you bring her home after you had been so—so nice when you telephoned? And why did you go away and leave me?’
‘I thought that if I went away you might miss me—and you did, my darling, did you not? And as for Janet—my sweet Sarah, you gave me no chance to explain.’
‘You didn’t come back until after three o’clock,’ she interposed pettishly.
He kissed her again before he answered. ‘I parked the car and sat wondering how I could make you love me. You see, I had come home thinking … and you were quite waspish with me, dear love, and I began to think that you would never care for me.’
Sarah said in a rush of words that ended in a sob, ‘Kate said you went to St Kit’s to see Janet and you telephoned her, and you were in Fortnum’s …’ She was kissed into silence.
‘Dear Sarah,’ said Hugo. ‘Listen. If you had shown me just once that I was more than just a good friend, I would have told you everything, but all you did was to fling Janet at my head. I would have told you that she’s married and unhappy and had left her husband. That’s why we were at Fortnum’s—I persuaded her to meet him.’
‘The man on the stairs who knocked me over,’ observed Sarah, well pleased that the jigsaw of their conversation was making sense at last. Hugo lifted an enquiring eyebrow but forbore from questioning her; instead he said firmly, ‘And now you will talk no more nonsense, dear heart, nor will you leave me again.’
He drew her close, but just for a minute she held back.
‘Hugo, dear Hugo, there’s something I must tell you.’ She lifted a woebegone face. ‘I—I found a ring in your pocket and I lied to you about it and I never will again; and there was a letter and I—’ She gulped. ‘I read it—not all of it, just the first line or two, and I thought it was for Janet.’
She sniffed to hold back the tears, because if she cried it would look as though she was trying to get his sympathy.
Hugo crushed her so tightly to him that her ribs ached. ‘You addlepated woman! Why didn’t you read the whole letter while you were about it, then you would have known that it was for you. I wrote it in America and then decided that I would give you the ring myself. Of course, I didn’t know that Janet was going to be there, or that you would ask her to stay to dinner.’
Sarah wriggled in his embrace. ‘I told you I should be silly,’ she murmured, and reached up and kissed him, to be kissed, most satisfactorily, breathless.
Outside the cottage the snow fell, unhurried and unheeded, and in the little kitchen, the stew, forgotten, bubbled fragrantly on.
Dante Raintree stood with his arms crossed as he watched the woman on the monitor. The image was in black and white to better show details; color distracted the brain. He focused on her hands, watching every move she made, but what struck him most was how uncommonly still she was. She didn’t fidget or play with her chips, or look around at the other players. She peeked once at her down card, then didn’t touch it again, signaling for another hit by tapping a fingernail on the table. Just because she didn’t seem to be paying attention to the other players, though, didn’t mean she was as unaware as she seemed.
“What’s her name?” Dante asked.
“Lorna Clay,” replied his chief of security, Al Rayburn.
“At first I thought she was counting, but she doesn’t pay enough attention.”
“She’s paying attention, all right,” Dante murmured. “You just don’t see her doing it.” A card counter had to remember every card played. Supposedly counting cards was impossible with the number of decks used by the casinos, but there were those rare individuals who could calculate the odds even with multiple decks.
“I thought that, too,” said Al. “But look at this piece of tape coming up. Someone she knows comes up to her and speaks, she looks around and starts chatting, completely misses the play of the people to her left—and doesn’t look around even when the deal comes back to her, just taps that finger. And damn if she didn’t win. Again.”
Dante watched the tape, rewound it, watched it again. Then he watched it a third time. There had to be something he was missing, because he couldn’t pick out a single giveaway.
“If she’s cheating,” Al said with something like respect, “she’s the best I’ve ever seen.”
“What does your gut say?”
Al scratched the side of his jaw, considering. Finally, he said, “If she isn’t cheating, she’s the luckiest person walking. She wins. Week in, week out, she wins. Never a huge amount, but I ran the numbers and she’s into us for about five grand a week. Hell, boss, on her way out of the casino she’ll stop by a slot machine, feed a dollar in and walk away with at least fifty. It’s never the same machine, either. I’ve had her watched, I’ve had her followed, I’ve even looked for the same faces in the casino every time she’s in here, and I can’t find a common denominator.”
“Is she here now?”
“She came in about half an hour ago. She’s playing blackjack, as usual.
“Bring her to my office,” Dante said, making a swift decision. “Don’t make a scene.”
“Got it,” said Al, turning on his heel and leaving the security center.
Dante left, too, going up to his office. His face was calm. Normally he would leave it to Al to deal with a cheater, but he was curious. How was she doing it? There were a lot of bad cheaters, a few good ones, and every so often one would come along who was the stuff of which legends were made: the cheater who didn’t get caught, even when people were alert and the camera was on him—or, in this case, her.
It was possible to simply be lucky, as most people understood luck. Chance cou
ld turn a habitual loser into a big-time winner. Casinos, in fact, thrived on that hope. But luck itself wasn’t habitual, and he knew that what passed for luck was often something else: cheating. And there was the other kind of luck, the kind he himself possessed, but it depended not on chance but on who and what he was. He knew it was an innate power and not Dame Fortune’s erratic smile. Since power like his was rare, the odds made it likely the woman he’d been watching was merely a very clever cheat.
Her skill could provide her with a very good living, he thought, doing some swift calculations in his head. Five grand a week equaled $260,000 a year, and that was just from his casino. She probably hit them all, careful to keep the numbers relatively low so she stayed under the radar.
He wondered how long she’d been taking him, how long she’d been winning a little here, a little there, before Al noticed.
The curtains were open on the wall-to-wall window in his office, giving the impression, when one first opened the door, of stepping out onto a covered balcony. The glazed window faced west, so he could catch the sunsets. The sun was low now, the sky painted in purple and gold. At his home in the mountains, most of the windows faced east, affording him views of the sunrise. Something in him needed both the greeting and the goodbye of the sun. He’d always been drawn to sunlight, maybe because fire was his element to call, to control.
He checked his internal time: four minutes until sundown. Without checking the sunrise tables every day, he knew exactly when the sun would slide behind the mountains. He didn’t own an alarm clock. He didn’t need one. He was so acutely attuned to the sun’s position that he had only to check within himself to know the time. As for waking at a particular time, he was one of those people who could tell himself to wake at a certain time, and he did. That talent had nothing to do with being Raintree, so he didn’t have to hide it; a lot of perfectly ordinary people had the same ability.
He had other talents and abilities, however, that did require careful shielding. The long days of summer instilled in him an almost sexual high, when he could feel contained power buzzing just beneath his skin. He had to be doubly careful not to cause candles to leap into flame just by his presence, or to start wildfires with a glance in the dry-as-tinder brush. He loved Reno; he didn’t want to burn it down. He just felt so damn alive with all the sunshine pouring down that he wanted to let the energy pour through him instead of holding it inside.
This must be how his brother Gideon felt while pulling lightning, all that hot power searing through his muscles, his veins. They had this in common, the connection with raw power. All the members of the far-flung Raintree clan had some power, some heightened ability, but only members of the royal family could channel and control the earth’s natural energies.
Dante wasn’t just of the royal family, he was the Dranir, the leader of the entire clan. “Dranir” was synonymous with king, but the position he held wasn’t ceremonial, it was one of sheer power. He was the oldest son of the previous Dranir, but he would have been passed over for the position if he hadn’t also inherited the power to hold it.
Behind him came Al’s distinctive knock on the door. The outer office was empty, Dante’s secretary having gone home hours before. “Come in,” he called, not turning from his view of the sunset.
The door opened, and Al said, “Mr. Raintree, this is Lorna Clay.”
Dante turned and looked at the woman, all his senses on alert. The first thing he noticed was the vibrant color of her hair, a rich, dark red that encompassed a multitude of shades from copper to burgundy. The warm amber light danced along the iridescent strands, and he felt a hard tug of sheer lust in his gut. Looking at her hair was almost like looking at fire, and he had the same reaction.
The second thing he noticed was that she was spitting mad.
ISBN: 9781408982099
Fate Is Remarkable
© Betty Neels 2012
First Published in Great Britain in 2012
Harlequin (UK) Limited
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