The Novels of Nora Roberts Volume 1

by Nora Roberts

  “I’ve no intention of getting out here.”

  “Fine, that’s fine. You’d better understand I have no intention of letting you go, not here. Not anywhere. I gave you your chance to run.”

  She’d never seen him so completely unnerved. “No, you didn’t.”

  He snatched her lapels and jerked her around in her seat. “It’s all the chance you’re getting. Fuck your right and wrong, Kelsey, and your country club upbringing and anything else that’s in my way. You’re not walking out on me without a fight.”

  Her own temper began to rumble. “Fine. Since you’re going to take that insulting, Neanderthal attitude, it hardly seems appropriate for me to tell you I’m in love with you.”

  His hands went limp. For an instant every muscle in his body went numb. Her eyes were on his, sulky, signaling fight in progress. But he was already down for the count.

  “You don’t know what you are.”

  She hit him. Both gasped in surprise when her fist jabbed just under his heart.

  “I’m not tolerating that.” She smacked his hands aside. “I’m not tolerating that attitude. I’m sick to death of people I care about assuming I don’t know my own mind or heart. I know it very well. And though at this particular moment it galls me, I’m in love with you. Now start this damn car and let’s get this over with.”

  He couldn’t have driven a tricycle. “Give me a minute.”

  She huffed out a breath, crossed her legs, and folded her arms. “Fine. Take your time. It’ll give me the opportunity to plan several ways to make you suffer.”

  “Come here.”

  She jabbed out, and connected with her elbow when he reached for her. “Hands off.”

  “Okay. I just imagined I’d be touching you when I told you I love you.”

  Not particularly mollified, but thoughtful, she turned her head a fraction. “Have you been imagining it for long?”

  “A while. I thought it would pass. Like a virus.” He held up both hands when she jerked around. “Are you going to hit me again?”

  “I might.” Damned if she was going to laugh, no matter how much his eyes tempted her. “A virus?”

  “Yeah. Only there’s this thing about viruses I’d forgotten. They don’t go away. They just sneak into some corner of your system and kick back in when your defenses are down.” He took her hand, fisted it in his, and brought it to his lips. “I’ve been trying to get used to this one.”

  “And how are you doing?”

  “Better now.” He lowered his brow to hers. “Christ, what timing. We should be home, alone.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She tilted her head so that her lips brushed his. “We’ll make up for it when we are.” When he deepened the kiss, she sank into it. “How can everything be such a mess, and this be so right?”

  “Luck of the draw.” He eased back, and looked into her eyes. “We’ll make sure it stays right.”

  “This is enough for now.” Gently, she lifted a hand to his cheek. “This is better than enough.”

  The first thing Tipton noticed when the couple climbed out of the fancy foreign car in his driveway was that they were lovers. The man did no more than lay a hand on the woman’s shoulder. She did no more than glance up, smile. But Tipton pegged it.

  The second thing he noticed was that the woman was almost a dead ringer for Naomi. Or the Naomi he had put behind bars.

  Oh, there were subtle differences, and his trained eye nailed them as well. The daughter’s mouth was softer, a tad more generous. The cheekbones were slightly less prominent, the walk more fluid. Naomi’s gait had been an energetic, even a nervous scissoring of legs. One that had drawn the eye of every male within a mile of her.

  But all in all, he was glad Kelsey Byden had called first. It would have been a shock to have glanced up and seen her strolling up his walk like the ghost of the woman he’d never forgotten.

  “Captain Tipton.” Her smile was fleeting as her gaze shifted. “Lieutenant Rossi. I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”

  “Small world, isn’t it?” Irritating her only amused him, and he helped himself to another beer. He wasn’t on duty, after all. “Why don’t I make the introductions. Kelsey Byden and Gabriel Slater, my former commanding officer, Captain James Tipton.”

  “Roscoe here was always one for procedure.” Tipton grinned as Kelsey lifted a brow at the nickname. “Sit down, have a beer?”

  “Mr. Slater doesn’t drink,” Rossi put in.

  “Oh, well. I think the wife brewed up some iced tea. Why don’t you go on in, Roscoe, and pour our company a couple of glasses?”

  “That would be nice.” Pleased to put Rossi in the position of serving, Kelsey made herself comfortable on the top step. “I appreciate your taking the time to see us, Captain.”

  “No problem. I got nothing but time. How’s your mother getting on?”

  “Very well. You remember her, then?”

  “I’m not likely to forget.” But he shifted tactics, preferring to get a lay of the land. “Roscoe tells me congratulations are in order, Mr. Slater. You’ve got a horse that might cop the Triple Crown. Not that I know a lot about it. Baseball’s my game.”

  Gabe knew something about tactics as well. “My money’s on the Birds this year. They’ve got a solid pitching rotation, and an infield so tight you can barely squeeze a mosquito through it.”

  “They do.” Delighted, Tipton slapped his knee. “By sweet Jesus, they do. You see them tromp the Jays last night? Goddamned Canadians.”

  Gabe grinned, slipped out a cigar. “I caught the last couple of innings.” He offered one to Tipton, lit it for him. “That last triple took fifty out of my assistant trainer’s pocket and put it into mine.”

  Tipton puffed. “I’m not a betting man myself.”

  Gabe flicked on his lighter at the tip of his own cigar, watched Tipton over the flame. “I am.” He blew out smoke, nodded when Rossi came back with two tall glasses. “Thanks.”

  “Roscoe’s a football fan. I never could educate him into the thinking-man’s sport.”

  “I’m beginning to develop an interest in the sport of kings.” Rossi took his seat again. “I’ll have my eye on the Belmont, Mr. Slater.”

  “A lot of us will.”

  “Now, the lady didn’t come out here to talk sports.” Tipton offered Kelsey a friendly smile. “You’re here about murder.”

  “What can you tell me about Alec Bradley, Captain?”

  He pursed his lips. She’d surprised him. He’d been sure she would focus on her mother. Intrigued, he shifted gears and turned back the clock. “Alec Bradley, thirty-two, formerly of Palm Beach. He’d been married once to a woman, oh, fifteen years his senior. She paid him off with a nice settlement in the divorce. Apparently he’d worked his way through most of it by the time he met your mother.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Charmed the ladies.” Tipton shrugged. “Sponged off acquaintances. Played the horses when he could. He owned his own tuxedo.” Tipton paused for a sip of beer. “He was killed in it.”

  “You didn’t like him,” Kelsey commented.

  To amuse himself, and to help align his thoughts with his words, Tipton blew three smoke rings. “He was dead when I met him, but no. From what the investigation turned up on him, he wasn’t the kind of man I’d ask home for dinner. He made dallying with married women—rich married women—a profession. They’d pay him off with money and presents, introductions to other restless married women. If they didn’t pay him enough, he’d use blackmail. In my day we called them gigolos. I don’t know what you call them now.”

  “Slime,” Gabe said pleasantly, and earned an approving nod from the captain.

  Slater had taste, he decided. In women and cigars. “That says it well enough. The man had a way about him. Fancy manners, fancy education, a family line that went back to some puffed-up English earl. And he had that way with women, married women who couldn’t afford scandal.”

  “My mother was separ
ated, Captain.”

  “And in the middle of a custody suit. She couldn’t afford the carryings-on with Bradley to come out if she wanted to win it.”

  “But she saw him publicly.”

  “Socially,” Tipton agreed. “It didn’t seem to bother her that people assumed they were lovers. No one could prove it.” He tapped cigar ashes into the crushed can of Bud. “There were rumors about Bradley sniffing expensive white powder up his nose. No one proved that either. Until he was dead.”

  “Drugs.” Kelsey paled but continued. “My mother said nothing about drugs. I didn’t read anything about them in the newspaper reports.”

  “No drugs at Three Willows.” Tipton sighed. Her eyes, so much like her mother’s, were taking him back. “The place was clean. Your mother was clean. Bradley had a mixture of alcohol and cocaine in his system when he died.”

  “If that’s true, he could have been irrational, violent, just as my mother said.”

  “There weren’t any signs of struggle. The lace of your mother’s nightgown was torn.” He touched a hand to his chest. “She had a couple of bruises. Nothing she couldn’t have done herself.”

  “If she did that herself, why didn’t she knock over a few tables, break some lamps?”

  Smart girl, he thought. “I asked myself, and her, that same question.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “The first time, we were sitting downstairs. They were still taking pictures in the bedroom. She’d put on a big robe over her nightgown.” As if she’d been cold, Tipton remembered. As if she’d been shivering under that heavy quilted material. “When I asked her, she snapped right back, ‘Maybe I didn’t think of it.’ ”

  He smiled, shook his head. “Pissed at me is what she was. Those were the kind of answers she gave until her lawyers shut her up. The second time I asked her was in the interrogation room. She was smoking, one cigarette after the other. Practically eating them whole. When I asked her again, she said she wished she had thought of it. She wished she had because then someone might believe her.”

  He set his beer aside and sighed deeply. “And you know, Ms. Byden, the thing was—just like I told Roscoe here before you drove up—I did believe her.”

  Kelsey unfolded legs she could no longer feel, and forced herself to stand. “You believed her? You believed she was telling the truth, but you sent her to prison.”

  “I believed her,” Tipton repeated, and his eyes narrowed, focused. Cop’s eyes. “But the evidence was against her. I spent a lot of sleepless nights looking for something to weigh on the other side. All I had was my gut. I did my job, Ms. Byden. I arrested her. I booked her. I presented the evidence at her trial. That’s what I had to do.”

  “Is that how you live with it?” Kelsey held her fists at her sides. “You knew she was telling the truth.”

  “I believed,” Tipton corrected. “That’s a long way from knowing.”

  “Well, Roscoe, that took me back a few.” Tipton watched the Jaguar back out of the drive, then set his chair to creaking again. “How many times do you see real gray eyes? No green in them, no blue, just smoke. You don’t forget eyes like that.”

  “Naomi Chadwick got to you, Captain. That doesn’t mean she was telling the truth.”

  “Oh, she got to me. I was a happily married man, Roscoe, never once caught any action on the side. But I thought about Naomi Chadwick. Did I believe her because she played some elemental tune on my libido?” He sighed, shrugged, and crushed his second can of beer. “I don’t know. I was never sure. The D.A. was pushing for an arrest. He wanted that trial. And the evidence was there, so I did my job.”

  Rossi studied his second Bud. “What did you think of Charles Rooney?”

  “The P.I. ? He was a hotdogger. There were plenty of fancy names on his client list back then. Mostly divorce cases. I leaned on him, and he stuck to his story. He had the film, he had his reports, and the Bydens’ lawyers backed him up.”

  “He witnessed a murder and didn’t report it.”

  “We pressed that button. Claimed he was shaken up. A guy thinks he’s going to snap pictures of a bout of hot sex, gets murder instead. Allegedly he was still sitting in his car when the black-and-whites arrived. He logged the time down to the minute.”

  “Then waited three days to bring in the film.”

  Tipton wiggled his wiry eyebrows. “How deep are you digging here, Roscoe?”

  “As deep as it takes.” He set the half-full beer on the porch between his feet and leaned forward, hands on knees. “Twenty-three years ago, you’ve got a dead horse in a race, drugs, a suicide, and a murder. Now we’ve got a murder, a suspicious death with the earmarks of suicide, a dead horse in a race, and drugs. Does the pendulum swing like that, Captain? Or does it get a shove?”

  “You’re a good cop, Roscoe.” Like a veteran firehorse, Tipton quivered at the sound of the bell. “How many of the players are around on this swing?”

  “That’s what we need to find out. Maybe you could take some time out from your workshop and give me a hand with the research.”

  Tipton’s smile was slow, and settled comfortably on his round face. “I could probably work it into my schedule.”

  “That’s what I’d hoped you’d say. The jockey who hanged himself? Benedict Morales. Benny. Maybe you could flesh him out for me.”

  Kelsey straightened in her seat when Gabe drove through the gates at Longshot. “Gabe, I should just go home. I’m not good company.”

  “No, you’re not.” He braked, turned off the ignition. “And I figure you might as well have your explosion here rather than at Three Willows where you’d have to explain it to Naomi.”

  “I’m just so angry.” She bounded out of the car and slammed the door. “He believed her, but he sent her to prison.”

  “Cops don’t send you to prison, darling, juries do. Believe me, I’ve been there.”

  “The point is she spent ten years behind bars. Isn’t that the point?”

  “The point,” he said, taking her arm and steering her into the house, “is that that part’s done. You can’t change it. How much are you willing to risk to turn back the clock and prove it was a mistake?”

  Stunned, she stared at him. “Risk? What’s the matter with you? The risk doesn’t count—it doesn’t matter! What happened to her was wrong. It has to be put right.”

  “Black and white?”

  There was a twist in her gut, one quick churn. “And if it is?”

  “Then it is,” he said simply. “But don’t overlook the gray areas, Kelsey. Not everything you find out if you go on with this is going to fit neatly into one column or the other.”

  She stepped back from him, and the distance was much wider than the simple movement. “You want me to stop.”

  “I want you to be prepared.”

  “For?”

  Deliberately he closed the distance, cupping her stiff shoulders in his hands. “Not everyone you care about is perfect. And not everyone who matters to you is going to thank you for sweeping away two decades’ worth of dust.”

  She shrugged irritably in a fruitless attempt to dislodge his hands. “I’m aware that Naomi wasn’t—isn’t—a saint. I don’t expect perfection, Slater, or look for it. But I want the truth.”

  “Fine. As long as you can handle it when you get it. No use trying to shake me off,” he said, and smiled when she shoved at his hands. “The first truth you’re going to have to swallow is that you’re stuck with the cards you’ve been dealt. You and I are going to play out this hand.”

  “I’m not trying to shake you off. I just need to think about what to do next.”

  “I can help you with that.” He urged her closer, those clever hands slipping down her back, cruising up again. “You’re going to relax, take a swim.”

  “I don’t have a suit with me.”

  “Darling, I’m counting on that.” He was kissing her now in a way that always turned her mind to fluff. “After, I’m going to talk you into trying out
some of those culinary skills you once bragged about.”

  Relaxing seemed like an excellent idea. With a little murmur of pleasure, she turned her head to ease his access to her neck. “You want me to cook for you?”

  “I do. Then I want to take you upstairs and seduce you.”

  “What are you doing now?”

  “This is just a preview. Tomorrow, when you’re relaxed and your mind’s clear, we’ll start thinking again.”

  “It sounds sensible.”

  He nipped his way back up to her mouth. It wasn’t particularly fair, he knew, to keep certain ideas to himself. But he wanted to clear the tension out of her face. And to celebrate the fact that they’d found each other. For one night, he wanted them both to concentrate on only that.

  “Let’s be sensible.” He stepped back, sliding his hands down her arms until they were linked with hers. “I love you.”

  Her heart took one long, slow turn in her breast. “How can I argue with that?”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  IN THE ROSY LIGHT OF DAWN, MOSES WATCHED THE MARES LEAD THEIR babies to water. He knew the pecking order as well as they. Big Bess, with an arrogant swish of her tail, was first, always. Then Carmen, the hardheaded red, followed by Trueheart, and so on down the line until shy, self-effacing Sunny.

  The foals scampered with them, frisky and secure. Unaware, Moses thought, that in a few short weeks they would be weaned and separated from Mama in the next step toward their destinies.

  Some would be trained for the track, some would be sold at yearling auctions. One might show a different promise and be culled out as a jumper, or for the show ring. Moses wasn’t much on show horses himself. It seemed as shallow to his mind as beauty pageants. Some would be gelded, others bred.

  And one, maybe one, would show the mark of a true champion. There was always another Derby, he told himself. Always another chance for that win.

  Maybe that one, the little chestnut with the blaze. The one with the cocky tilt to his head. Naomi had named him Tomorrow’s Arrogance because of it. He had the lines, the breeding, and time would tell if he had the heart.