Blush

by Suzanne Forster

  "Your wife told me you might be here."

  "My wife?" Rage. It flared so violently Jack felt as if he were lunging forward, though he hadn't moved. He knew men like Calderon. They baited and switched until they'd tricked you into something stupid. "What the fuck does that mean?"

  "I spoke with her, Culhane. I didn't sleep with her... and if I had, I wouldn't have been so careless as to get her pregnant. "

  The gun jerked in Jack's grip. He yanked his hand still and took deadly aim, imagining the blood that would gush from Calderon's shattered skull, relishing it.

  "I'm not the enemy." Webb stepped back as if to prove that. "I had something your wife wanted, so she gave me something I wanted. Information. It was all very civilized. "

  "Killing you quickly is about as civilized as I'm going to get tonight. " Jack imagined squeezing one off and feeling the wild satisfaction of the gun's kick in the back of his neck. He vividly imagined it. And then he did it. He pulled the trigger.

  To Calderon's credit he never moved, not even when the bullet dug into the mud wall behind him with a liquid whommp.

  The soft, profane word he uttered sounded more like a prayer of thanks than a curse. "What's the rush, Jack?" he wanted to know. "I came here with news about Gus. You may want to hear it. "

  Jack moved in, gripping the gun in both hands. He wanted to be sure he was close enough to blow the bastard's head off if he said the wrong thing. "What about her?"

  "She's in trouble."

  "What kind of trouble?"

  "You're not going to like this, Jack."

  The rage was still simmering, and Jack knew it would take very little to push it to flashpoint. For five years it had been the demon driving him, but more often than not, he'd managed to keep it leashed. Now it was going to snap the rein. He could feel it. He wanted it to. He wanted the violence. He wanted the blood. He wanted the justice.

  "You better hope I like it, Calderon," he warned.

  They stared at each other, the two of them, deadlocked.

  Jack remained silent and finally Calderon spoke. "She lost the baby... and she's taking it badly."

  Jack felt a cold fist in his gut. He nearly dropped to his knees, and then he was swept with a sense of disbelief. "Lost the baby? She just found out she was pregnant. "

  "A woman can lose a baby at any time. That's not the point. Apparently Gus wanted this baby badly. She's devastated by the loss. She hasn't been out of her room. She won't see a doctor."

  If Jack had had any doubt how much Gus meant to him, he didn't now. His other losses had cut him to ribbons. He'd thought there was nothing left of him alive, but some tiny spark of hope was still there, a starving ember in need of oxygen. The agony he felt told him that.

  Calderon kept talking, his voice oddly soothing, yet at the same time, disturbing. "She's not going to make it without you, Jack, " he said. "She's in danger, both she and Bridget are, but they don't know it. "

  The scars on Jack's body burned, as if he'd just been shot, just that second, as if the wounds were bleeding. "What kind of danger?"

  The art dealer lifted his head. "I've said all I can."

  "You sick bastard!"

  "Pull the trigger if you think that will help anything. Go ahead, all you can do is kill me." The cold smile surfaced again, turning Calderon's eyes to icy pools. "It wouldn't be anything new. "

  Jack had no idea what the man was talking about. He could hardly believe the pain that had gripped him. She'd lost the baby? Christ, he wanted to tear the place apart. He wanted to drop to his knees and sob.

  The impulse that shook through him was as powerful as anything he'd ever felt. He had to get the hell out of the shack and go to her. He had to help her get through this.

  He could take Calderon's car. Leave the bastard in the pit for snake food, and go. But something was holding him back. It wasn't that easy, he realized. Beneath the pain, he sensed the desperation again, felt it rising up like a flood. This could be a trap and Gus could be the bait. Calderon might be setting him up for whoever was waiting for him back at the Featherstone mansion.

  "Why are you telling me this?" he asked the art dealer. "What's in it for you?"

  "Let's just say I have a stake in the outcome and leave it at that."

  Jack hesitated, wanting to voice the questions he'd been waiting five years to ask. Were you the one behind the theft of the Van Gogh? Did you have my child kidnapped and brutally murdered? Were you the monster, Calderon? Are you still?

  Rage flared, a cauterizing white laser. Jack could feel it burning through his heart and out his eyes, etching the questions in flames on the other man's soul.

  Calderon went quiet, but his eyes were piercingly focused.

  There was a moment, a connection, and though Jack didn't believe in such things, had ceased to believe in anything years ago, his breath stung in his nostrils. He felt as if he knew Webb Calderon from somewhere, as if they'd shared something. Christ, he did know this man. He was this man. He also knew that Calderon had given him an answer, but the meaning wasn't available to him.

  "We humans do what we have to," Calderon said. "The rest we leave to the gods. Go do what you have to do, Jack, " he urged. "It will eat you alive if you don't. "

  "I don't know what the fuck you're talking about."

  "I'm talking about you, a man who lost everything. Energy lives only to destroy itself. That's its sole purpose, and you're overflowing with it. Virtu spirituale. Use the energy. Don't let it destroy you. "

  Jack found it painful to breathe. "What do you know about the theft of the Van Gogh still life? The one that was stolen from the warehouse vault in El Segundo five years ago? What do you know about it, Calderon?"

  Webb shook his head. "Nothing that will help you now. You couldn't save Maggie, but you can save Gus. Go to her. Save your wife, Jack. Save yourself."

  "Calderon!"

  "You'll have to kill me. I've told you everything I can."

  "You fucking bastard!"

  "Pull the trigger," he challenged. "Blow my head off. Do it! I'd welcome it." Jack stepped away from the pit. "If you're lying—" The art dealer cut him off. "If I'm sending you into a trap, the odds are you won't come out alive. And even if you beat the odds, don't bother making the trip back. I won't be here. "

  Jack took Webb Calderon's car and sped south on highway 395, heading back to Los Angeles, barely aware of what he was doing or where he was going until he hit the sinuous curves of the 14 freeway and began to ascend into the hills of the Angeles National Forest. His emotions had been locked up in solitary for so long there were times when he couldn't remember what it was like to feel anything but a kind of deadened self-hatred, and even that barely felt real. He was the man without a heart who carved hearts on trees.

  Only now he was a man with so much pain he couldn't breathe without feeling it. Emotion made you sloppy? He wanted to laugh. The thundering claw-hammer in his chest had taken over his will. It was ripping his heart from its bearings. It was taking him home and to hell with the consequences, to hell with anything but getting to Gus.

  Calderon's black Jaguar XJS clung to the road as Jack roared through the eerie hills, blue with moonlight. The curves rushed at him at ninety miles an hour, and the image that exploded in his mind was an incendiary car crash, a woman dead, and a baby murdered.

  He began to shake and his hands closed on the wheel.

  Emotion made you sloppy. Emotion killed.

  He couldn't do this. He had to stop. He had to think it through.

  He had no idea how long he sat parked on the shoulder of an isolated access road, contemplating his next step, the one that would plunge him off the cliff. It felt like hours. It felt like days he was so cold. Something had locked off inside him, some instinct that was so fundamentally indoctrinated in guerrilla survival, nothing could block it. The risk in going after Gus was incalculable. He'd already realized that, but it wasn't a question of his own safety. It wasn't about redemption, either. There was so
little left of him to save it was laughable.

  This was about lost hope and shattered lives. It was his chance to give meaning to mindless destruction and make the tragedies count for something. He'd been waiting five long years, his whole life it seemed, and now he was about to forfeit everything on a reckless attempt to rescue a woman who'd wanted him dead from the first moment she saw him and a little girl he barely knew. The fact that the rescue attempt was almost surely a setup didn't concern him nearly as much as the possibility that Gus was in on it. Enveloped in the strange blue glow of the moon, he had even begun to question her claim of pregnancy. What a perfect way to ensnare him. What a sublime trap.

  He glanced into the rearview mirror, saw the cold heat burning in his eyes. Was she capable of betraying him that way? He didn't know. He didn't want to know, but he wasn't sure he had a choice. Gus was his wife, Bridget the child of her heart. They were virtual strangers to him compared to the memories he carried, but both had become a part of his life, and undeniably, his heart....

  The first golden light of dawn was coming over the hills when he made his decision. He keyed the XJS to life, pulled it around, and floored the gas pedal, leaving a flying wake of sand and dirt behind him. It took him another forty minutes to get back to the Featherstone estate, and when he did, he spotted the stakeout car immediately.

  He had to assume the back driveway that led to the guest cottages was under surveillance as well, so he put the luxury car to the test on a rugged horse trail that took him behind the property. He abandoned the Jaguar in a dry creek bed, hoping it wasn't one of the riding paths Lily normally took, and headed for the house on foot. He'd already accessed and disabled the external security with his software, and he'd assembled the equipment he would need once he got inside the mansion. The one trick that was beyond even The Magician was invisibility. Somehow he had to get into the house unseen. Fortunately, he had a distraction planned.

  Chapter 27

  The back stairway took him up to the third floor and Gus's bedroom. He'd half expected someone to be watching her room, but the hallway was deserted, and what he saw when he eased the door open was a magnificently flounced canopy bed and a silent, supine form, covered only by a sheet.

  Sleeping Beauty, he thought. She was straight out of one of Bridget's ballets. The claw-hammer twisted in his chest, defying his attempt to keep the pain at bay. He'd bought some time. The guards and the cops would be busy with the horses he'd let loose from the stables and stampeded toward the guard gate. What he had to do next might be the hardest thing of all. He had to wake Gus and talk to her. He would know if she was lying the moment he looked in her eyes.

  As he approached the bed and got a closer look at her, his heart wrenched. She was frighteningly still and gaunt. Her breasts swelled against the ribbed tank top that had driven him crazy a time or two, and his eyes flicked there in- voluntarily, but the thought that struck him was that she was barely breathing.

  He wanted to gather her up in his arms and get her out of there. Instead, he sat down beside her and touched her pale face. She felt feverish and cold at the same time, clearly in need of medical attention. She began to stir under his touch, and as her lashes fluttered and lifted, he shushed her gently and told her that everything was all right. But it wasn't.

  Her grief-stricken expression answered all his questions, even the ones he'd barely allowed himself to ask. If this was a setup, she had nothing to do with it.

  "The baby," she said, her voice breaking. "I'm sorry."

  Tears welled in her eyes and something closed off in Jack's throat, a constriction he knew would be with him as long as he lived. Part of the price of loving her would be remembering this moment. "It's all right, " he promised. "There will be lots of babies if that's what you want, Gus, as many as you want. "

  She reached out to him, and he gathered her into his arms, needing to hold her, afraid he would hurt her. He would wait to let her tell him how it had happened. This wasn't the time. She was still grieving, and his heart felt as if it were cracking open, rupturing from its center, as he rocked her in his arms. He was sure he was dying, and yet somehow he knew that this was the opposite of dying. He was coming alive, perhaps for the first time ever.

  "Those agents from the Treasury Department—" She struggled to explain. "They were going to take me in for questioning, but I couldn't go, I was too ill... and then the bleeding started."

  "Shhh," he said quickly, wishing he could stop her. "Don't talk now, rest."

  "I thought you'd run away." She buried her face in his fleece jacket. "When I woke up, and you were gone, I wasn't even surprised. Everyone I love runs away. I know it's my fault. I push people away, I won't let them love me, but you—" Her voice caught on a heartbroken sob, and her body shook. "You, I wanted to stay."

  There was nothing he could do to ease her misery. It was too close to the surface. It was a thorn in her flesh, and she had to get it out. But she wasn't lashing out as she'd always done before. Instead she seemed driven by the impulse to reach out to another human heart, to heal herself, the way blood rushes to a new wound. And God, he wanted desperately to help her heal.

  "Look at me, " she said, clinging fast to his shoulders. "Look at what you've done to me. "

  His heart went cold and still. Did she hold him responsible for losing the baby? What was she saying? That this was the second child he'd caused to be sacrificed through some well-intentioned blunder?

  "You made me believe, " she croaked.

  "Made you believe?"

  "In Cinderella, in that stupid fairy tale. You made me believe in love when I knew—when I've always known—that love hurts, it destroys. "

  "No—" Much as he wanted to deny her assertion, he knew that love did hurt, it could destroy.

  "Yes, " she insisted, "you pried me open like a shell and forced me to feel everything I was terrified of. I felt it all, Jack. I felt it all with you, even the pain. I thought I was going to break in two when I found you gone. "

  "I came back, Gus. I'm here."

  She shuddered and clung to him. "You made me believe, " she whispered. "You made me believe in love. "

  He didn't know if holding her tight would stave off the agony that was welling in his chest, but he couldn't help himself. Gently he kissed her temple. "Don't stop believing now, " he said. "You have to believe, Gus... because I do love you. "

  Her chin trembled and the lips that had so much trouble forming words failed her. She looked up at him, tears glittering like stars. Their brightness ripped through him.

  Nothing she said could have touched him the way her forlorn, searching gaze did. The physical beauty people talked about was insignificant compared to this. There was real beauty in her now, the kind that came from courage and burned bright and hot. She was risking everything to trust him. She did believe. And he couldn't let her down. He would die first.

  Her mouth worked to speak, or perhaps to smile, but she couldn't manage either. He felt as if he were watching her be born, a brittle shell crumbling away, a naked, wondrous thing emerging. Her face was suffused with color. Her eyes quivered with life. But a moment later those beautiful violet eyes had clouded over with fear.

  "What is it?" he asked.

  The energy seemed to drain out of her. "I went to Webb Calderon for money."

  "I know, Gus. It's all right."

  "No, it isn't. He knew about the kidnapping, and he asked me questions about you. He wanted to know where you took me, where your hideout was. He said you were someone called The Magician—"

  Her voice cracked and gave out. Jack tried to quiet her, but her agitation was too great.

  "It's not safe here," she told him. "There are police everywhere. They're looking for you—"

  Jack's senses picked up a soft but deadly click. It had come from behind, from the doorway. "Quiet, " he whispered to Gus. "Don't move or scream. Don't do anything. "

  The sense of separation was almost a physical thing as he settled her in the ruffled
chintz pillows. It was like ripping off an arm, but he had no choice. If he was right, their lives were at stake. In order to protect her, he had to cut himself off from her, from the tenderness he felt for her.

  He touched her mouth, signaling her to be silent, and then he rose from the bed and turned. "What took you so long?" he asked the woman who had entered the room.

  Lily Featherstone was standing in the bedroom doorway, a small revolver in her hand. Jack recognized it as a. 38 Special, a gun made especially for women. He wasn't in any way surprised to see it. Or her. During their one brief encounter in the stairway, he'd sensed an explosive quality to Lily, something roiling beneath the surface ice. She'd impressed him as the type who would be capable of almost anything under the right circumstances, including this.

  "She was waiting for me. "

  Ward McHenry materialized in the doorway, and Jack found himself searching the man's craggy features and lofty demeanor in mild disbelief. This time he was surprised. He'd been expecting Lake, not the Featherstone chairman. Perhaps this family drama was not going to play out quite the way he'd anticipated.

  Jack raised his hands in the traditional gesture of surrender and prayed Gus wouldn't do anything foolish. She'd seemed too emotionally and physically spent for heroics. He hoped that was true. "Just for the record, " he said, asking the question of Lily. "Who framed me for the theft of the Picasso? Because if it was the two of you, I'd like to extend my compliments. "

  Lily smiled faintly. "Frame you? Why would we do that? It's Gus we intend to frame, for your murder. "

  The bed creaked softly behind him, and Jack realized that Gus was reacting to Lily's pronouncement. It had rocked him, too, particularly the eerie calm with which she'd said it. "So it was you who rigged the weight room? And the hit-and-run?"

  Neither Lily nor McHenry answered him, but the glittery quiver of triumph in Lily's eyes told him that she was instrumental in all of it, perhaps even the instigator. The woman was anything but calm. She was dangerously wired, probably from the rush of her newfound power. Jack realized. It might as well have been a drug she was so high.