Pink Topaz

by Jennifer Greene

  He knew that. Ignoring all his arguments, Regan had telephoned the partners last night. All three had leaped faster than hungry wolves to accept her invitation for dinner.

  “The apartment is filthy. I have to shop for food. The furniture has to be moved around before I can set up the table. I don’t know what I’m going to wear. I don’t know what I’m going to cook. I don’t know what I’m going to say about the gems, and I have my mother’s china but it’s six months dusty—”

  “Whoa.” Cole swiped a hand over his eyes. How did you get involved with her, Shepherd? How? The woman is looking Armageddon in the face, and she’s worried about the mechanics of putting on a dinner party. “Just take it easy, princess—”

  “I can't take it easy.”

  “Sure, you can. Just relax. It’ll all get done.”

  He moved her furniture around. He pushed the vacuum. He put the leaves in her table. He shopped for the food, once the menu was finally settled on—chicken divan, because it was the only dish Regan claimed she'd never screwed up, coupled with wild rice, a spinach salad and chocolate cheesecake.

  The apartment reeked of lemon wax and fresh vanilla by 5:45. Embroidered tea towels hung in the bathroom. Before this afternoon, Cole had never seen a tea towel in his life. The antique table was set with white linen, three silver candlesticks and her mother’s crystal. The moment he saw the white linen going on the table, he felt relieved he’d picked up a suitcase of clothes.

  As he poured the wine into four glasses—Regan was having milk—his hair was brushed, his gray dress slacks belted, his chin shaved closer than a baby’s bottom and a striped tie was knotted at his throat. Cole didn’t want to disgrace her, but he wasn’t putting on the suit coat unless threatened at gunpoint. Enough was enough. It was her illogical idea to feed the enemy, not his, and at the moment he felt more beat than a whipped dog. Until Regan walked out of the bedroom.

  A half hour ago she’d been a barefoot, disheveled, unstrung, frantically nervous waif with her hair in a pigtail. She’d transformed. Her dress was an elegant ivory, a simple long-sleeved sheath that showed off the rose topaz dangling from a gold chain at her throat. She wore no other jewelry, although her hair was swept back and up with two ivory combs. Her makeup was subtle, her choice of scent demure and feminine. She belonged on the arm of a prince.

  “You look just plain stunning.” He reached for his suit coat.

  “Heavens, you’re the one.” She circled around him. “You never told me you shaped up like this. If I’d had any idea what a starched white shirt and shave would do for you—”

  “Behave.” It wasn’t what she said. It was the test-a-tiger look in her eyes.

  “That’s hard. I never seem to feel like behaving around you, slugger. Do you suppose there’s any chance it’s partly your fault?” She leaned up and kissed him, softly, swiftly.

  He could have stopped her. Maybe he could have stopped the sun coming up in the morning, too. Without meaning to, he let his hand linger on her cheek. She’d always been sassy, but that kiss was a fraud. Her slim shoulders were brittle with tension. “You wore the topaz.”

  “I wanted all the luck I could get tonight.”

  He had the oddest feeling that she wasn’t referring to the three partners—when she had to be. “They don’t show,” he murmured.

  “What doesn’t show?”

  “The nerves, princess. You’re going to make it through this evening okay.”

  She took a breath. “I have to do this. I know you don’t agree—” The doorbell rang. Regan froze, then sprang to answer it.

  Trafer arrived first, bearing a handful of violets. His suit was Italian tailored, his shoes shined to a mirror gloss, his tie fastened with a small diamond horseshoe. Through owlishly round spectacles, he focused instantly on the topaz at Regan’s neck and halted his effusive greeting at the sight of Cole. “You didn’t mention Mr. Shepherd would be joining us,” he scolded her, and then bussed Regan affectionately before stepping back to look at her. They were both of a height. “I’m astounded. Absolutely astounded. You look...wonderful! So completely different than when I saw you last! What happened?”

  “A rest in the desert did wonders,” Regan responded cheerfully.

  The other two arrived minutes later. Within a half hour, they’d finished a glass of wine and were seated at the table in the living room. Any other time, Cole would have been amused watching the trio eat. Dorinsky wolfed down anything he could reach, his manners one step away from a napkin at his neck. Reed never unstiffened, aiming the fork precisely at his mouth. Little wizened Trafer picked like a bird.

  The only thing they had in common was an unfailing courtesy and affection for Regan. None of them could get over how good she looked, how relieved they were that she was herself again. Cole felt as if he were sitting on the front seat of a roller coaster that had a dead motor. None of the men exhibited any stress or strain. None of them expressed anything but natural surprise—and sincere pleasure—that Regan was looking so well. If there was any hint of danger or menace in the air, he couldn’t sense it.

  Regan stood to gather plates before serving brandy and coffee. He caught up with her in the kitchen. At the dinner table, she’d been chattering and laughing and warmly attentive to all of them. Her frayed nerves didn’t show until their eyes met. “Cole, this is going terribly.”

  “I think it’s going smooth as silk.” He plucked the brandy bottle out of her hand before she mistakenly poured the liquid into the coffee cups.

  “But they’re all acting toward me the way they always do. Nothing’s any different. That’s not what I expected at all.” She touched her taut stomach as if she could control the sick welling of anxiety. “I think I need a drink.” She opened the refrigerator and, totally unlike Regan, gulped a good slug straight from the carton. “It has to be one of them. They were here, in the apartment, all the time after Jake died. And because I travel so much with my work, I gave them all keys years ago. They know about my habits, like the vitamins, and they had access any time. Them. No one else. Oh, God, I’m afraid I’m going to spill the coffee. Would you bring it in?”

  He didn’t want to bring the old coots coffee; he wanted to call this whole thing off and spirit Regan away to someplace nice and safe and obscure, like Siberia.

  Unfortunately, she’d already flown back into the living room.

  Within minutes he followed with the tray. That quickly, Regan had turned back into a calmly relaxed hostess again, her smile unshakable as she dropped a small ribbon-wrapped box in each of her guests’ laps. “It’s a gift, but I don’t want you to open it yet,” she admonished them as she perched on the arm of the peach couch. “I confess that I had a special reason for asking you all to dinner. There was something that I wanted—and needed—to tell you.”

  Her fingers tugged on the topaz at her throat, making the jewel glitter in the lamplight. Cole put down the tray, figured they could serve their own damn coffee and stepped back where he had a facial view of all three of her Dutch uncles. He knew she was counting on the gems to work like a touchstone test. He knew how much she wanted to uncover the truth.

  What he hadn’t known, until that moment, was that fear tasted like gunmetal. His heart was slamming in his chest, his stomach queasy, every muscle in his body braced to the point of shaking. My God, if one of them made a move toward her...

  “Jake left me something I never told you three about. I thought it was something private between the two of us—until I went to the desert. I assume you all knew that Gramps kept diaries over the years. He never made any secret about it, but you may not have known that he kept those journals all this time, in a safe, in Arizona. Anyway... the point is that I had the chance to read them while I was there.”

  Cole watched them all. Dorinsky fingered the bit of a box in his beefy palm. Reed sat stiff as a vicar, and Trafer was trying to make himself comfortable in the Queen Anne chair. They all looked curious and interested, but no one obligingly had a hear
t attack at the mention of the diaries.

  The only one who seemed threatened with an incipient heart attack was him.

  “Jake never raised me to believe that truth would ever fit in a neat little black-and-white compartment. Reality is always more complex than that. Yet it never occurred to me there was another side to my grandfather until I read through his journals. I learned things about him. And I learned things about you three. And it was hard for me to face that he’d done some things that must have hurt each of you.”

  She motioned for them to open their packages. “I honestly believe that Jake regretted those mistakes...and that he wanted you to have what’s in those boxes.”

  All three pulled off a box lid. All three saw what was inside...and reacted with stunned silence. The three gems winked with innocent brilliance in the quiet room. Each man clearly recognized the individual stone in his box. None of them seemed to know what to do with it—or with Regan.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “So what went wrong? What, what, what?” Regan’s pumps went sailing across the living room. Once the guests left, so did the last of her nerves. Pushing her ivory dress sleeves to the elbows, she carried the rattling tray of glasses to the kitchen. “What else should I have done? What else should I have said? They were all startled enough when they saw the gems. So why didn’t any of them talk? If one of them was guilty, don’t you think he would have done something?”

  Cole put his hands on her shoulders and steered her away from the fragile crystal. “I want you to have a brandy.”

  “I don’t want a brandy. I want this over with, and what if I’ve been wrong all along? If you put the stories and circumstances together, it looks like one of them. But no one has to tell me that what something looks like isn’t always the truth—”

  “We’re going to talk this all out, princess. But not right now.” Cole put a snifter of brandy in front of her nose. When she failed to pick it up, he framed her hands around it. “Right now you’re going to let me finish the cleanup, and you’re going to take that brandy into the bathroom, and you’re going to indulge in a long, hot, soaking bath. Then if you want to talk, we’ll talk.”

  “Shepherd, I truly hate brandy and I’m certainly not leaving you with this gargantuan mess—”

  But it seemed she was. Cole shadow-walked her down the hall and left her on the other side of the bathroom door with dour, dire threats not to show her face for a minimum of thirty minutes at the risk of her life.

  The dire threats didn’t impress her, but she took a glance at her frazzled reflection in the mirror and was appalled. Possibly a half hour of quiet wasn’t the worst idea in town. Setting the brandy on the porcelain ledge, she opened the faucets, liberally poured in jasmine bath salts, and stripped down.

  Leaving on the pink topaz—water was never going to hurt it—she stepped into the fragrant, steaming bath. The water level slowly rose, covering her stomach, then her breasts. She didn’t flick off the taps until she was immersed to the neck. Leaning back, she closed her eyes.

  The water felt silky and warm and soothing, yet the clench of anxiety around her heart refused to ease. Jake, you just couldn't have known how many dragons you unleashed with this legacy of mine ….

  For the hundredth time in the past few weeks, she thought about her grandfather. If the younger Jake had been ruthlessly ambitious, the older Jake had clearly never forgotten his earlier mistakes, or been able to let them go. Even at the end, Gramps had never learned how to back down.

  And she thought about Cole. He was unlike Jake in a thousand ways, except for that one dimension. Cole, too, never backed down. With his back to the wall, cornered on all sides, he’d still protect a woman in trouble. He’d spend a twenty-four-hour vigil at her bedside. He’d fly her across the country. He’d make love to her so ardently that she couldn’t escape the memories. He’d push a vacuum. He’d shred spinach. And he’d even put on a starched white shirt. But slugger held a position about love. He wasn’t going to let it happen to him. And Cole was holding on to that position as stubbornly, as blindly and wrongly, as Gramps had held on to those gems.

  And maybe you’re the blind one, Regan. She opened her eyes and stared bleakly at the ceiling. The situation with her grandfather, the gems, the partners—it wasn’t her fault. Yet the reality was that she’d done nothing but cause Cole trouble and raise old ghosts that hurt him. Even dismissing the extraneous circumstances, slugger was never going to risk his heart without enormous trust. He trusted common sense. He trusted practicality and realism. Maybe there was just no way on earth he could ever trust a dreamer….

  Her thoughts scattered. She was just leaning forward to flip open the drain when she saw the doorknob turn. She froze.

  The stranger who ambled in was carrying two towels. A pair of dark eyes magneted to her glistening bare shoulders and breasts, then jerked to the towel racks. “I thought you might have forgotten there was nothing more than tea towels hanging in here.”

  Somehow she doubted that bringing her a towel was the sole reason he was here. For one thing, he had two towels. For another he’d just, very quietly, closed the door with him on the inside. And although she’d seen Cole in a hundred different moods...she’d never once seen this stranger with the raw, unguarded emotion in his eyes.

  He’d worked up the courage to come in. But he wasn’t moving away from that door. Possibly he needed a little help from a dreamer, after all. “Would you...um...like to join me?”

  “I think that jasmine scent was really meant for you. When you’ve finished your brandy, though—not before—I could maybe help you dry off.”

  She reached for the forgotten brandy glass resting on the tub edge and upended it. Thankfully there were only a few swallows to endure. In no time at all, the flames in her throat died down. “All done,” she croaked, and swished to her feet, spraying water in every direction. There was a time to be a lady and a time to be a brazen hussy. Regan had been a lady for twenty-seven years and still was. Around anyone but slugger.

  He started to grin—his lips twitched at her enthusiasm—but something went wrong with the smile. “I need to talk to you, princess.”

  “Okay.”

  He dropped both towels on the vanity, about five miles out of her reach although he didn’t seem to realize it. “You kept me busy as a slave today.”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you were pretty ditsy to be so concerned with dust and dishes when you knew what you were facing with those three tonight. Only it was me you were keeping busy, wasn’t it? You didn’t need help shredding spinach for your damned salad. You were trying to keep me from thinking. And worrying.”

  “Possibly,” she said cautiously. She stepped, dripping, out of the tub to claim one of the towels. His eyes never left her face.

  “I’ve lost people before,” he said quietly.

  “I know, slugger.”

  “It isn’t something I handle well. My brother would tell you it isn’t something I handle at all. And dammit, Regan, I hate talking about emotional stuff like this, but I need you...to understand some things.”

  “Okay.” He leaned against the wall to give her space. Regan didn’t want space. She wanted to throw her arms around him and make him forget every hurt he’d ever suffered in this lifetime. But it was the first time he’d talked, openly and honestly. It was the first time he’d tried.

  “My gran died a few years ago. She went to sleep one night and never woke up. It hurt—I loved her—but hell, that kind of loss you just have to face. It’s the other kind that I can’t handle. When there’s no reason in hell for the person to die. When they’re part of you. When they matter so much they’re inseparable from your life, and you take that for granted because you’re too damned stupid to believe that could change, and when you lose them it feels like someone lashed you with a whip.”

  “Cole—” Tears shimmered in her eyes. Whether he knew it or not, he was talking about love.

  “I understand why you stag
ed your touchstone test tonight. I understand. And I didn’t figure any of those boys would pull anything with a stranger around as a witness, so your dinner tonight was a reasonable risk. But my brother was real sure you’d be out of danger if you gave away the gems. I don’t see it that way. Anyone who would drug you has a loose screw.”

  “Cole—” She shoved the towel on the rack.

  “You can’t outthink someone with a loose screw, princess. I know, because my father couldn’t, my brother couldn’t. And I’m not losing you. I can’t lose you, Regan—”

  Regan had heard all she needed to. She vaulted toward him. He rocked back against the bathroom door, conceivably unprepared for the attack of a 108-pound missile, but she noticed his mouth was already angling for hers. Their lips connected like fever and fire.

  His hand groped blindly for the doorknob. A blast of cool air raised goose bumps on her skin, but she wasn’t cold long. Slugger was giving off more heat than an erupting volcano. She was sure they were going to bump into walls, because he never looked up, never once took his eyes off her, never severed the kiss. When they reached her bedroom, he kicked the door closed. He knew there was no one else in the apartment. He just clearly wanted the rest of the world shut out. This was between him and her. No one else.

  In time her eyes would adjust to the darkness, but in those first moments it was pitch-black. He backed her into the bed edge. She unfastened three buttons on his shirt and popped the rest in frustration. It was difficult to do midair. She landed with a whoomph on the peach-and-ivory comforter. He landed on top of her, his welcomed full weight, and he was branding a fire of kisses on her throat when he started pitching her pillows onto the floor.

  Slugger didn’t like pillows, she’d discovered before. He liked her flat, and he liked a hard mattress, and before, he’d subdued the earthy side of himself as if she were an innocent, crushable princess who needed protecting.