by Nancy Morse
In a voice low to keep it from cracking, he asked, “When will you leave?”
She lifted her slender shoulder. “In the morning, I guess.”
He bit back his disappointment. “I’ll take you to Big Cypress. From there you can call a cab to take you back home to Palm Beach.”
Home, yes. But exactly where that was, Rennie no longer knew. “Thank you. That would be fine. There’s just one other thing you can do for me.”
John’s muscles tensed. He knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to lay her back against the cypress planks, push up her T-shirt so that she was naked beneath him, and make love to her—the crazy kind of love you make when it’s goodbye. With no questions, no answers, no promises of keeping in touch. The kind of lovemaking that’s heated and quick and fills a desperate momentary need.
Despite his arousal, however, he made no move toward her. Tonight he decided. He would wait until the moon was high. After he returned from his nocturnal hunt, he would lie down next to her and awaken her with his caresses. That was invariably the time when he needed her the most, and when she would be most receptive to his advances. He liked the thought of waking her up that way. Her body would be warm with sleep and open easily to him, and he could lose himself in her and remember what it was like to be an ordinary man again, when the thing that mattered most was no further away than the woman beneath him. And he wanted this woman beneath him, not for a night, but for more, so much more that it scared him. He got to his feet and stood towering over her, trying to maintain a hold on his emotions.
Rennie looked up at him. Never had his six-foot frame seemed as ominous as it did at this very moment. His dark eyes moved over her with the intensity of a man with something on his mind. The bulge in his jeans made his intention clear. He had the look about him of a creature that was about to pounce.
Her heart fluttered wildly with anticipation, then sank with disappointment when he made no move to take her. Instead, he just stood there devouring her with his eyes for what seemed like an eternity. In reality it was only seconds, but there was something about him that sent a shiver down her spine. He looked so hungry and lonely, as if he were rebelling within himself and yet resigned at the same time.
Rebelling against what? Rennie wondered as she looked back at him, her gaze locked tight in the grip of his. It could only be against the terrible secret he carried. But what about that look of resignation? Since she had known him she’d heard many things in his voice—anger when he spoke of the destruction of his beloved Everglades; remorse and regret, which she hadn’t understood at the time and thought she did now; the despair of loneliness; repentance for what sins she could not know. But she had never once heard resignation. Seeing it now stamped on his handsome face didn’t make him anything less in her eyes. If anything, it only made him more human.
“Would you take me for a canoe ride today?” she asked.
Her voice snapped the tension in the air like a dried twig.
“Sure. I’ll go get dressed. You’d better do that, too.” He gave a self-deprecating laugh and added, almost menacingly, “I’m only a man, you know.”
Forcing his eyes away from the tantalizing sight of her dressed only in one of his T-shirts, he walked to the door. Tonight, he repeated to himself. He could wait. He was, after all, a patient man. Hadn’t he been waiting what seemed like a lifetime to settle the score with the damned cat?
Chapter 11
It was an elegantly appointed room. A mahogany bookcase engulfed one entire wall from floor to ceiling, holding a leather-bound law library. A studded burgundy leather chesterfield flanked by matching leather wing chairs sat atop an antique Aubusson carpet. The lower half of the walls was paneled in teak from East India, above was painted a deep crimson. A large glass-and-chrome desk stood before the arched windows with the scores of leaded panes, looking stark and powerful against the warm, deep tones of the room, much the way the senator exerted his own stark and powerful persona on those around him.
Rennie had been in this room countless times and it never ceased to chill her. No matter how many fires the servants lit in the stone fireplace on cold February nights, they could not quite chase away the frosty atmosphere that pervaded.
She had grown up in this house. It was big and cavernous, with high cathedral ceilings and marble floors that echoed every footstep. Not the warmest of houses, but until the day she left for college, this had been home. Except for this room, the senator’s private study. This room had always felt like someplace else, like a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language and held no currency. Even now, as an adult, the feeling of being out of place and unwelcome lingered.
Her gaze swept the room with benign disinterest. She went to the fireplace and stood before it looking at the photographs that were neatly arranged on the mantel in expensive gold frames. Family photographs.
As a little girl, unable to see the top of the mantel, she had just always assumed that her father’s picture was among the others. Then she grew tall enough to see for herself and was crushed to find out that it wasn’t. With the exception of one faded photograph she kept for years beneath her pillow, all trace of the man she adored had been erased.
A breath caught in Rennie’s throat at the woman who peered out at her from one of the photographs. She was a smartly dressed woman whose gray hair was hidden beneath a dark-champagne tint. Her face still bore traces of its youthful beauty, although the eyes were vacant, the mouth unsmiling. Rennie felt a pang of love and regret as she looked at the picture of her mother. Despite all the things that money could buy, her mother had been the unhappy, unfulfilled wife of Senator Trevor Hollander, a role she despised but which she played with Academy Award-winning persuasiveness. With a sigh Rennie looked away, wondering how it was possible to love someone she had never really liked.
Instead of the usual childhood photograph of a child sitting on a pony at the zoo, there was Rennie at age nine astride her own Arabian mare at an equestrian event. The funny thing was, she’d been afraid of horses as a child. But the senator, knowing her fear, was determined that she get over it by enrolling her in every junior equestrian event his country club sponsored. She eventually did get over her fear of horses, but only because she discovered that the barn was a safe place to hide from the senator’s overbearing influence and her mother’s obsequious behavior, and that the horses, who made no demands on her and didn’t judge her, were her real family.
The photograph looked foreign to her, the face of the little girl who had been her like the face of a stranger, the memories of that part of her life distant. But it wasn’t just the passage of years or the growing up that made her feel different. Everything was different. She was different.
The weeks she’d been away felt like years. There were no bridges left to the past, nothing to connect her to a life and to feelings that must surely have belonged to somebody else, for they bore no resemblance to the woman she had become.
Would the senator notice the changes as keenly as she felt them? How could she explain to him that for the first time in her life she felt a connection to a place she hadn’t even known existed until only a few short weeks ago? Or that she had fallen in love with a man whose face she hadn’t been able to see, a man who wasn’t rich and might not even be fully human, a man whose strength and fierce intelligence gave her the courage to see herself for the first time. She doubted he would even understand the concept. It simply wasn’t in his nature.
The door to the study opened noiselessly and a voice spoke from behind her.
“So, the prodigal daughter returns.”
The photographs on the mantel were forgotten and the memories of the past shoved into a deep corner as a familiar chill coursed down her spine. Forcing a smile, she turned around.
“When did you get back?” she asked.
“Last night,” he answered as he closed the door behind him and stepped into the room. “We had a few last-minute issues to deal with on the Hill. And you?”
Helen was the senator’s long-time trusted assistant who guarded his affairs like a junkyard dog and who, Rennie had learned many years go, had an ongoing affair with him. It was her mother who told her about it, confiding her relief that at least the senator had someone who could take care of those things for him so that she didn’t have to.
He sat down on the leather couch. Others looked lost in the expanse of top-grain leather, but not him. Like everything else in his life, he dominated it.
“So, Renata, where did that job of yours take you these past few weeks?”
“Profession,” she corrected without answering. “It’s a profession.”
He crossed one leg casually over the other, although Rennie knew there was nothing casual about him. Every movement, every gesture was carefully orchestrated to convey an impression of superiority and impatience, as evidenced now by the drumming of his fingers on the rolled arm of the sofa.
“Did you do something different with your hair?” he inquired.
So, he did notice something different about her. She was glad that he could only make a lame guess as to what it was, and experienced a momentary private triumph knowing that it was her secret and he had no control over it.
“No,” she answered.
“So are you going to finally explain to me why I got a call one day informing me that your plane went off radar and couldn’t be accounted for?”
“There was a slight accident with the plane. It’s lost, I’m afraid. But as you can see, I’m all right. I called and left you a message on your answering machine.”
“I hope you don’t expect me to replace the Cessna for you.”
Wasn’t it just like him to get immediately to the bottom line? She was grateful for that flaw in his nature, however, even counting on it so that she wouldn’t have to answer questions about where she’d been and what she’d been doing the past few weeks.
“You didn’t buy me the first Cessna,” she reminded him. “I bought it for myself. So why would I expect you to buy me another one?”
The trust fund her father left for her had become available when she turned twenty-one. It was a sizable sum, which the senator no doubt would have loved to get his hands on. Her mother had even hinted how much it would have meant to have the funds available for the family’s use, but Rennie knew that the “family” meant the senator, and she wasn’t about to let the money fall into his hands, not when it was all she had left of her father.
“You might spend your money a little more wisely next time,” he advised.
She could tell from his tone that even now he resented her for not turning the money over to him. “How’s the campaign going?” she asked.
“We had a fund-raiser last week at the Hilton. I think we brought in something like two hundred and fifty thousand.”
“That must be small change compared to what the insurance lobby contributes,” she said. “I heard that a patients’ bill of rights was on the floor. Did you vote it down again?”
“You’re damn right I did. You give people the right to sue their HMOs and medical malpractice will skyrocket.”
Rennie put her hand up before he went off on one of his tangents. “I didn’t come here to debate political issues with you.”
“I thought not. So, are you going to tell me why you did come, or must I pull it out of you?”
She bristled at the disdainful tone of his voice. “It’s about Craig.”
“Ah, yes, the jilted fiancé. I was wondering when you would get around to that.”
“You heard?” It was more of a statement than a question.
“Of course I heard. Did you think he was going to just go away quietly?”
“I don’t care what he does. He doesn’t want me. He wants—”
“What any ambitious man wants,” the senator interrupted. “And what right have you to deny him?”
“I’m not denying Craig Wolfson anything. He can have whatever he wants. He just can’t have me.”
“And what, may I ask, brought about this sudden change of heart? The two of you seemed so perfectly suited.”
She laughed caustically. “Right. Like a prisoner and warden.”
“Oh, Renata, spare me the dramatics.” He rose from the sofa and went to his desk, where he took a cigar from the humidor and went about the ritual of lighting it. She recognized the paper band he slid off the cigar and tossed onto the glass. It was the same brand of Cuban cigar that Craig smoked. “It’s simply a fact of life that the man must be in control of certain situations if he’s going to provide for his family.”
“This is the twenty-first century,” Rennie objected. “I don’t want a husband who controls my every motion and tells me what work I can and cannot do.”
“Can you blame the man? A schoolteacher is hardly the sort of person a man like him would want for a wife.”
“Schoolteacher!” Rennie nearly choked on her words. “I’m a professor of anthropology at a prestigious university. I worked hard to get where I am, and I’m not about to give it up to marry a man who insists that I do.”
He puffed on the cigar, sending clouds of pewter smoke into the room. “Well, if that’s all there is to it, surely something can be worked out. I’m sure he would allow you to do some sort of work.”
She turned away from the distasteful smell of the cigar. It wasn’t so much that he found countless ways to excuse Craig’s controlling behavior that annoyed her. Both men were, after all, cut from the same cloth of unscrupulous ambition. It was just that he seemed too eager to pin the blame on her.
“Charity work at the ladies’ guild?” she said sarcastically. “I don’t think so.”
“Perhaps if you spoke to him and explained your position.”
If bullying tactics didn’t work, he generally resorted to calm persuasion. She’d seen his act a hundred times and knew it well.
“It’s not only me he manipulated,” she told him. “It was you, also.”
“Oh? How so?”
“Craig was only going to marry me to get that piece of real estate you promised him as a wedding gift. He never loved me. I heard him say so.”
“You must have misunderstood.”
Behind the thin veil of smoke he looked detached and remote, the way Craig had looked that night as he had stood at his desk smoking the same brand of cigar.
Rennie waved away the smoke that drifted to where she was standing. “Where’d you get those things? And don’t tell me from Castro.”
“They were a gift from Craig,” he replied.
It wasn’t surprising. A gift of expensive Cuban cigars was but one way Craig curried the senator’s favor. Marrying the senator’s stepdaughter was another.
“I didn’t misunderstand,” she said. “He was going to marry me and take your land under false pretenses.”
The senator laughed. “My dear Renata, do I look like some kind of fool to you?”
She edged a little closer, the better to see him through the smoke and gauge his intentions. Her gaze narrowed. “What do you mean?”
In a bored tone he replied, “Would I allow anything of mine to be taken under false pretenses unless it was I who set those false pretenses in motion? Come now, child, you know me better than that.”
She had expected outrage or indignation upon learning of Craig’s duplicity. Anything but the icy stare he gave her now.
“You don’t care that he intended to build a high-rise condominium on that parcel of land and make tons of money at your expense?”
“Not if I make tons of money on it, also,” he coolly informed her.
The senator and Craig, partners in the condominium project? This time Rennie was surprised. “All right then, at my expense.”
“Good God, Renata, you make it sound as if you were going to be hauled off to some third-world country. You could have anything you want if you marry him. Play your cards right and you’ll have
him eating out of your hand. I wouldn’t be surprised if he even let you keep your position at the university. Money is what makes a good marriage, not love. Frankly, Renata, after having been used to fine things your whole life, I don’t see you living in a shack somewhere with some brooding hulk of a man who in his whole life will never earn what Craig Wolfson earns in a single year. Tell me, dear, where’s the love when the money runs out?”
His unwitting mockery of the very situation she’d spent the past several weeks in rendered Renata speechless. Even as only part human, John Panther was more of a man than Craig Wolfson could ever hope to be. But she couldn’t tell the senator that. John Panther was a secret she’d never share with anyone, least of all him.
In the same tone he used with assistants and servants, he continued, “Now, this is what you’re going to do. You will telephone Craig and tell him you’re sorry for breaking the engagement. You’ve thought it over and you’ve realized you were wrong. Don’t worry about him taking you back. I’ve spoken to him and he’s perfectly amenable, provided, of course, that you understand the, shall we say, terms of the arrangement.”
“Which are?”
He replied with terse simplicity, “You marry Craig. Craig gets the land.”
“But—”
His voice overrode her accusingly. “You were always idealistic and naïve. Not only in your chosen profession, but in your view of the world. What’s a little piece of real estate when there are more important things at stake?”
It was a gradual dawning of the truth, yet when she realized what he was saying, it felt like an implosion, as if she’d swallowed a stick of dynamite. She tried to speak, but her voice scratched painfully at the back of her throat. “You mean like a generous contribution to your reelection campaign?”
He smiled, but it was the smile of a seasoned politician, a tight, thin line that did not reach his eyes.
Rennie took a faltering step backward, away from him, away from the sickening truth. Her voice echoed her shock at the sudden comprehension. “My God, it was you!”
