Velvet Lightning

by Kay Hooper

  No one seemed to notice her reappearance. Or even to have noticed she had been gone. The talk and laughter was still loud and cheerful. Smoothly she merged with the crowd and searched until she found her father. He was talking to George Symington, as cheerful as the rest. His eyes were clear, and there was no flush on his face. Catherine relaxed and moved away. All right, then. Everything was all right.

  She found her abandoned drink just where she’d left it, and stood sipping it. She was glancing toward the doorway a few moments later and saw Tyrone stroll in lazily, looking as if he’d just stepped out for a breath of air.

  With veiled eyes she studied him. A big man, powerful and graceful. His face was handsome in a somewhat cold manner; a smile made his face warm and charming. There was no sign in him now of urgent passion in a locked room, of questions, of intensity. He moved with deliberation, with muscles under unthinking control. He was, somehow, innately dangerous.

  And she loved him.

  Catherine felt the shock as the realization dropped gently into her mind. No. Oh, dear God, no. She tore her gaze away to stare down at her glass, breathing fast, shaken to her soul.

  The noise of the room faded away, distant and unimportant. She felt cold, hot, terrified. No! When had it happened? Ten minutes ago? Yesterday? Or nearly two years ago? When had he gotten inside the walls she had built, and done it so effortlessly that she hadn't even noticed? Her mind flashed back unexpectedly almost two years, to a sudden encounter by the tiny inland stream.

  Cool gray eyes abruptly warming, going intent. “You're beautiful, you know,” he had said, and she had shaken her head, queerly disturbed. “No. I'm not.” He had smiled, nodded with certainty. “You hide it behind a mask. I know all about masks.” She had been silent, and melting inside, because it had taken no more than that. He had walked steadily to her as if he saw, as if he knew. He had taken her into his arms and kissed her as a lover would, with hunger. He had removed her clothing and his own because she had been too shaken to help. And beside a stream of quiet water he had become her first lover. With tenderness. With care. With passion.

  Catherine half heard a sigh escape her. Then. She had loved him even then. That was why she had risked so much to lie in his arms when she could. Because she loved him, helplessly, against all reason. Because she loved him.

  “Catherine?” His voice, low and concerned.

  She didn’t dare meet his eyes. She had, with determination, convinced him that an affair suited her. No ties, no sentiment. That couldn’t be allowed to change.

  "I hate these parties,” she said, amazed at her own calm tone.

  He was reassured by her tone, and his laugh was no more than a breath of sound. “Even this one?” he asked softly.

  She never got the chance to respond.

  “Kate . . .”

  Shock rippled through her, and she jerked around so suddenly that part of her drink spilled over her fingers. Her father stood a couple of feet away from her. He was smiling faintly. His brilliant blue eyes were oddly glazed, and a flush mottled his cheeks.

  "Kate, my dear, we must go," he said softly. His gaze flickered from her face to that of the man beside her. He looked back at her again. His smile widened. "We must go.”

  “Yes.” She felt numb. She set her glass aside and stepped away from Tyrone without a glance. "Of course.” Mechanically she took the arm her father held for her and walked away with him.

  What the hell?

  It wasn't the first time Tyrone had asked himself that question. He had been asking himself that since the party. Or, more specifically, since Catherine had been summoned by her father to leave. Even before then, when he had spoken to her in the drawing room, when her face had been so still, her lips trembling with a vulnerability he’d never seen in her before. But her voice, calm and dry, had reassured him.

  Then . . . her father had called her. He had called her Kate, something Tyrone had never before heard him do. And she had, in a single instant, gone dead white. The veiling lashes and lifted, revealing eyes darkened with shock, with—fear? And her voice had been oddly hollow when she had spoken to her father.

  Frowning as he drove back toward his own house, Tyrone tried to understand what it might mean. It was difficult, almost impossible, because Catherine was a puzzle. He didn’t know, not really, the woman she was inside herself—only pieces of her, glimpses he caught from time to time.

  Warm and willing. Cold and forbidding. Humorless, frosty blue eyes. Eyes bright with laughter, dark with fire. Stiff, precise posture. Sinuous, elegant grace. Self-mocking coolness. A look of sheer agony in her eyes. Calm. Panic. Fear.

  Who was she?

  And why, suddenly, did that matter to him? Why did her insistence on secrecy, amusing to him in the past, anger him now? Why had he tried recklessly to catch her eye at the very public party, and then discarded all reason to deliberately arouse her so that they ended up making love on a chair in a locked room in their host's crowded house? Why did he abruptly resent, on her behalf, the treatment she received from the townspeople? And why had the possibility she could have been carrying his child filled him with a riot of emotions he didn’t even understand?

  Tyrone pushed the baffling questions away. When they would meet the next day he would try again to understand her, try to discover what lay beneath Catherine’s various masks.

  He knew all about masks.

  The buggy passed the harbor just then and he automatically looked to see that his ship was safe. And she was, floating dark and still on the calm water. A symbol, he sometimes fancifully thought, of all he had become. A symbol of struggle and danger, of outrageous risks, of dark nights and peril.

  He wondered, suddenly, if one of these perils, a nemesis out of his past, would follow The Raven to Port Elizabeth. It was likely. No, he thought, it was certain. Falcon Delaney would follow the trail that would bring him there.

  Only death would stop him.

  4

  Washington

  Leon Hamilton had waited until Falcon and his new wife left the party before moving quietly through the crowd and asking several men along his way to meet him in the gentlemen’s smoking lounge. He was cheerful, casual, teasing wives who rolled their eyes in resignation at being deserted by husbands. Still, this was the nation’s capital, and most of the wives had grown accustomed to the demands of public office.

  No one was overly surprised by Leon’s summons.

  They gathered in the small lounge down the hall from the ballroom. These men knew one another well; they were still casual and smiling. But they didn’t smile long when Leon spoke one word flatly.

  “Camelot.”

  There was a moment’s suspended silence while four men stared at Leon in varying degrees of shock.

  “That was years ago,” Senator Ryan Stewart said. He was a nondescript man of middle years, middle height, middle weight, and average coloring; only shrewd gray eyes hinted at the exceptional intelli gence beneath that ordinary-looking exterior. “Why are you bringing it up now, Leon?”

  “Because it’s . . . it’s come up again.”

  “It can’t have,” Judge Steven Franks said firmly, sitting down in a wing chair in a decisive way as if he could ignore the very notion. Elderly, silver-haired, and nervous, he had grown forgetful in recent years and tended to disregard problems that might threaten his comfort.

  “I’m afraid it has.”

  “Look,” Senator James Sheridan said, “we took care of everything, every detail. There’s no danger at all now. Everyone’s put the war behind him, and no one wants to remember. We’re safe.”

  Slowly the fourth man, Paul Anderson, spoke in his deep, thoughtful voice. He was a cabinet member known for his organizational abilities. Middle-aged, he was slim and handsome and, a bachelor, had a distinct eye for the ladies. “There was one thread left dangling,” he reminded the rest. “It didn’t seem dangerous—at the time.”

  Senator Sheridan turned to Leon with a frown. “Tyrone? Is that
what you’re talking about?”

  “Yes. Captain Tyrone.”

  Sheridan’s frown grew. He was a short, thin man with the aggressive charm of a born politician, and also, unfortunately, an impatience that often got away from him. “Tyrone’s kept his mouth shut all this time; why would he talk now? He’d have nothing to gain by it. If it comes down to it, he’s as much to blame as we are.”

  “Is he?” Leon asked quietly. “He agreed with us at the time that ours was the only possible solution; he understood there was no choice. Everything was fine up to that point. But then it went wrong.”

  “That wasn’t our fault,” Sheridan said instantly. “We couldn’t have anticipated such an accident.”

  Broodingly, Leon asked, “But was it an accident?”

  In a sharp tone Senator Stewart asked, “Do you think it wasn’t? Christ, Leon, who would have planned such a thing?”

  “Any of us,” Leon said flatly. “Any of us could have. You remember what Tyrone said when he came back to tell us what had happened? It was a clumsy, brutal attack, and succeeded only by the sheer unexpectedness of it.”

  “What would any of us have had to gain by planning such a thing?” Sheridan demanded.

  “Everything. Remember, we had our own man standing by in the wings and ready to step in. Once that attack succeeded, our man was safe for good. The whole thing was so impossible that no one would ever have suspected the truth.”

  Uneasily, Judge Franks said, “We hired Tyrone to get him out of the way, that’s all. To take him up to New England. The rest was an accident. It had to be!”

  “I hope so,” Leon added gravely. “I really hope so.”

  There was a moment of silence, and then Anderson asked, “But you said it had come up again? What did you mean?”

  “One of my own men,” Leon said in a grim tone, “has stumbled onto it. Falcon Delaney has been looking for that stolen shipment of Union gold, and it looks as if Tyrone is the man who ended up with it somehow.”

  Impatiently Sheridan said, “If he did, it’s got nothing to do with Camelot.”

  “Falcon thinks it has. And you all have me to thank that he didn’t question you about it tonight.” Another shocked pause.

  Subdued, Sheridan asked, “Us? But—why?”

  “Because Tyrone, damn his black heart, left a few sweet little notes in a ledger before he set off for God only knows where. And Falcon saw them. The word Camelot, underlined, and a list with all our names on it.”

  “Call your man off,” Anderson suggested quietly.

  “I can’t. Hell, that’s one of the reasons I put him onto the gold in the first place. He’s one of the Arizona Delaneys, and you don’t call those men off. You just don’t. He’s been tracking the gold for eight years, and now he’s convinced that Camelot is somehow connected to the gold. Maybe it's because Tyrone’s involved in both. God knows. I don’t doubt he’ll head for New York at dawn to pick up Tyrone’s trail.”

  There was a moment of silence, and then Anderson spoke again. “Would Tyrone tell Delaney?”

  Leon bit the inside of his cheek, then shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s always been a peculiar kind of understanding between those two, or at least it seemed so to me. Not quite enemies; not quite friends. Mutual respect between them, I’d say, and a high degree of wariness. Tyrone might tell him the entire story. He might tell him nothing at all. I just don’t know. But I do know one thing.” He looked at the other men steadily. “If Falcon Delaney finds out about Camelot, he could jump either way. He could keep it to himself and take it to his grave; or he could take it public.”

  “We’d be crucified politically,” Anderson murmured.

  “Crucified?” Sheridan exclaimed, and then hastily lowered his voice. “Jesus Christ, Paul, we’d be lucky to escape being hung! There’s only our word for it, the way things were then; his doctor’s been dead and buried for five years. Tyrone could call us all liars, say that accident was meant from the start, all our idea. Our word against his, or course, but we’re not exactly on the side of the angels in this case.”

  In a quavering voice Judge Franks said, “Surely your man could see the necessity of what we did, Leon? And why would he stir it all up now? There’s no reason!”

  Leon sighed. “I just don’t know, I tell you. But Falcon’s got a strong sense of right and wrong. He’s not puritanical, but if he decides the public should know what we did, he’ll damn well tell them.”

  “You have to stop him,” Sheridan said numbly. “We have too much to lose and—God, you have to stop him!”

  “I can t.”

  “Then what do we do?”

  “Wait.” Leon shrugged. “Hope that Tyrone keeps his mouth shut about Camelot. Or, at least, that if he talks, he makes Falcon understand how it was then. That we had no choice. What else can we do?”

  There was no answer.

  New York

  It was actually three days later that Falcon and Victoria arrived in New York and made their way to the waterfront. Falcon had felt no particular urgency and, truth to tell, was reluctant to ask his new brother- in-law questions that would be rightly viewed as an intrusion and possibly as a personal insult. Still, he had no choice.

  They entered Marc Tyrone's waterfront office early that morning to find Jesse Beaumont at the desk and coping with paperwork, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his fair hair mussed as if he had been clutching it in despair, and his green eyes a little wild.

  He looked up as they came in, and instantly groaned.

  “No. Tory, it’s always nice to see you, but take that husband of yours away. He’s got a determined look on his face, and I don’t want to hear whatever he’s going to say.”

  “Hello, Jesse,” Victoria said, smiling.

  “Hello. You look beautiful today,” Jesse told her in a polite tone, while keeping a wary eye on Falcon.

  “Thank you. You look upset.”

  “Upset?” He gave the word an incredulous emphasis. “Why would I be upset? Marc dumps his business in my lap and sails off into the wild blue, leaving me to cope with paperwork when I haven’t even gotten over being saddlesore yet— Stop laughing!” he ordered Falcon in a fierce tone.

  “Sorry.” Falcon cleared his throat and made his face grave. “About Tyrone—”

  “No,” Jesse interrupted, a certain mulishness settling into his handsome, sunburned features. “I’ve told you before, brother-in-law or not, there's no way I’m going to help you put Marc’s head in a noose!”

  “You won’t. I just need to talk to him.”

  “Then wait until he’s back in New York.”

  “How long will he be away?”

  “I don’t know,” Jesse said flatly.

  “Jesse, it’s important.”

  “If it’s your damned gold you’re talking about— and I know it is!—you’ve been after it for eight years. A few more months won’t make that much difference.”

  “Months!” Falcon exclaimed.

  Jesse gritted his teeth and fought back a sheepish expression. “Damn you, I wasn’t going to say that. Tory, if you love your brother, take your husband away.”

  Quietly Victoria said, “I can’t, Jesse. I'm sorry, we’re both sorry, but Falcon needs to talk to Captain Tyrone. He’ll find out where the captain's gone eventually, you know. He’s very good at things like that. Why not tell us?”

  Jesse sat back in the chair and raked long brown fingers through his hair. “Damn,” he said miserably. “Damn you, Marc. Why you had to go away when everyone wants you—”

  “Everyone?” Falcon’s voice was sharp. “What do you mean by that?”

  Jesse looked at him and shrugged. “Only that one of Marc’s business friends had to get in touch with him. He came rushing in here a couple of days ago, wild to find Marc. Something about papers that had to be signed right away. I couldn’t help him; I’ve got Marc’s power of attorney, but only for current business.”

  “What was his name?” Falcon asked slowly.
r />   “Well, he was a senator, actually. Senator Sheridan.” Victoria gasped softly. “Isn’t that—”

  “One of the names on the list. Yes.” Falcon looked at her, frowning, his green eyes remote. “Now, I find that to be just too damned coincidental.”

  Blankly Jesse said, “What are you talking about? What list?”

  Falcon looked back at him, still frowning. “Jesse, you said the senator was wild to find Tyrone. Wild in what way?”

  “Nervous, jumpy. Very intense and insistent.” Jesse began to look worried. “What the hell’s going on?”

  Victoria spoke first, perhaps answering her brother's question but looking at her husband. “Leon was . . . afraid, you said. He didn’t want you looking into this Camelot. The other men on that list might be just as afraid. Maybe even more so. Afraid of what you might be able to uncover. Afraid of what Captain Tyrone might tell you.”

  “And if they are,” Falcon said, picking up her train of thought, “one of them might well attempt to get to Tyrone before I do. But for what? To try and bribe him to keep quiet? Or to shut him up permanently?”

  “God,” Jesse whispered, staring at them. He might not have understood fully what they were talking about, but it was clear there was danger to Marc Tyrone. Jesse went white. “I told him. It seemed more than reasonable. Important, really. So of course I told him where Marc was.”

  “We have to warn him,” Victoria said.

  Falcon looked at Jesse. “A telegram?”

  “No. No, there's no— It's an island, and there's no way to reach it except by ship!”

  “What about Sheridan? Has he gone yet?”

  Jesse sucked in breath. “Christ, I helped him. I booked passage for him that day, even persuaded the captain to detour by Port Elizabeth and drop him off. He’s had two days; he must be halfway there by now.”

  Falcon swore bitterly. Then, grim, he said, “We’ll just have to take the fastest ship we can find. Jesse, where, exactly, is this Port Elizabeth?”