Velvet Lightning

by Kay Hooper

  Secrets . . . dear God.

  She rose finally, and went with him out of the bedroom. She didn’t realize she was crying until he pulled her into his arms with a soft sound. And she clung to him, thinking of a strong man holding answers that were secrets, quietly caring for a sick, broken man whose very presence must have haunted him unbearably . . . especially because Marc Tyrone may have helped break the man.

  They made love that night in his house for the first time, and it had never been so sweet between them. Desire welled slowly, a yearning that escaped in soft words and murmurs that were like the slow shattering of glass. They were utterly close now, tied to-gether in love, the bond between them tested in pain and fear—and fire. Two separate, lonely, secret beings had found each other and had clung with unacknowledged need, wary and prickly, pretending to be strangers.

  Neither was alone any longer.

  Catherine woke sometime near dawn, conscious that Marc wasn’t in bed beside her. She sat up, her searching eyes finding him easily in the dimness of the room. He was standing by the window, gazing out at what she knew was a perfect view of the ocean.

  She wondered if the sea was whispering to him.

  “Marc?”

  He turned immediately, returning to the bed, and her. Gathering her into his arms, he said, “Did I wake you? I’m sorry.”

  “You weren’t here,” she answered simply, cuddling close to him. “What woke you?”

  “I don’t know.” His voice was low. After a moment he went on in a musing tone. “During the war I sometimes felt an impulse to change whatever plan I’d made. To alter the destination of the ship, or just to change course. Always, I found that by doing that I avoided some danger I couldn’t have known about.”

  “Is that what you’re feeling now?” she asked softly, respecting the instincts his life had given him.

  “I think so. I looked out now, and I felt as if ... as if something dark were moving toward me.”

  Catherine felt a chill. “That man with the questions?” She knew the whole story now, knew what a threat to them those questions could prove to be.

  “No,” Tyrone said slowly. “Not him. Not Delaney. This is something else.”

  “What could it be?”

  “Something ... I didn't see. Something I missed.” He shook his head slightly. “I don’t know.”

  “If I lost you now, I couldn’t bear it,” she whispered.

  His arms tightened around her. “You won’t lose me, love. A man with as much to live for as I have isn’t an easy man to kill. I plan to grow old with you.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  Lulled by the steady beat of his heart, by the comfort of his arms, she drifted back into sleep. And if nameless fears crept through her dreams on cat feet, they were silent shadows and left only faint tracks behind.

  In the morning Mrs. Tully told them that the man had slipped away just before dawn, without waking.

  Catherine and Tyrone stood together behind the house late that morning. They were near the edge of the cliffs that bordered that end of the island, and stood gazing out to sea.

  “I thought I caught a glimpse of sails a little while ago,” Tyrone said absently, looking toward the harbor that wasn’t visible from the clifftop path behind his house.

  “Another packet?” she asked, having seen nothing herself but trusting his captain’s gaze.

  “No. A clipper, perhaps. Too far away to know for sure.”

  They could both hear the distant thuds of a hammer in the stables, where Reuben was building a coffin, and Tyrone’s mouth twisted as he listened to it. “I think I hate this more than anything. Putting him in an unmarked grave.”

  “It isn’t that,” Catherine said quietly. “Not really. He’s buried far away, we both know.”

  “His name is. And his memory.”

  “Aren’t those the important things? His name and his memory. In the end that’s all that matters for any of us.”

  Tyrone lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it, smiling down at her. “You’re right.”

  “Stop blaming yourself, Marc. I can see now why you said the war wasn’t over for you, why it couldn’t be. You’ve lived with it every day since. But you can’t go back and change anything.”

  “I don’t even know if I would, given the chance.” He sighed a little roughly. “And it isn’t just my own part in the war. There’s the rest. I keep asking myself if I could have prevented some of what happened later. So many died for that damned gold, suffered because of it.”

  “You did what you thought best. No one could have asked more than that of you.”

  Tyrone slipped her hand through his arm and they resumed their walk along the cliff top path, moving more swiftly away from the house and stables, away from the sounds of a coffin being made.

  “You’re throwing my own words back at me,” he said.

  Catherine laughed, remembering that he had said much the same thing to her about her own guilts. “Well, it was good advice. We can't change anything, Marc. We don’t have the luxury or even the right. And what if things had been different? If you hadn’t been a blockade runner, you wouldn’t have been in a position to take care of a sick man who had no one else. You certainly couldn’t have brought him here, kept him safe and as happy as possible all these years.”

  Accepting what she said, Tyrone spoke in a deliberately light tone. “I knew there was a reason I loved you.”

  “Yes, why don’t you tell me about that?” she prompted him smiling. “I’ve been wondering.”

  “Blue eyes,” he said quickly, a gleam in his own eyes. “I’ve always had a weakness for them.”

  “And dark hair, no doubt.”

  “That too. Of course, a neatly turned ankle always did catch my eye.”

  “Oh, of course. Perfectly natural.”

  “And you were wearing a hat with feathers that day I first saw you.”

  “I was not!”

  “I remember it distinctly. A little blue hat with feathers. You were wearing blue gloves, too, and a blue gingham dress.”

  Catherine started to laugh. “I bowled you over, in fact?”

  He stopped them and turned her to face him. His hands were holding her shoulders, and though he was smiling, there was a serious look in his gray eyes. “You did that. I didn’t recognize it for far too long, but that’s what happened. I never felt the slightest interest in another woman after I met you.”

  Catherine, looking up at him, felt her heart lurch. But before she could say anything, a vicious, ringing shout came from several feet behind Marc.

  “Tyrone!”

  He stiffened, his face tightening and gray eyes going hard with a silver glitter. “Of course,” he murmured

  to himself in a slow voice of realization. ‘‘I should have known.”

  “Tyrone, you bastard, turn around!”

  “Marc?” She whispered the question.

  “Don’t move, Catherine.” His voice was low, calm. He lifted one hand, touched her cheek lightly. “Don't move.”

  She wanted to cry out suddenly in an instinctive protest against something she saw in his eyes. But her throat had closed up, and she stood stiff and silent when he slowly turned and took two steps away from her. Then she saw the other man.

  He didn’t seem much of a threat at first glance. A man of late middle age, short and thin. Dressed in clothing that looked as if he had worn it for days. His thinning brown hair stood up like spikes in the breeze. With his aggressive stance and mussed appearance, he could have cut a comical figure.

  Except that he didn’t.

  In his eye was the wild gleam of panic and rage, his pale face twitching nervously. But the hand holding the gun that was aimed squarely at Tyrone was very, very steady.

  “Sheridan,” Tyrone said in a flat, dry voice. He had deliberately moved away from Catherine to keep Sheridan’s attention fixed on himself, hoping desperately to safeguard her. But when he saw the other man’s
eyes, a sick feeling grew in his chest. Sheridan was in a blind panic, and was all too obviously in no state to think things through.

  “You wrote down our names, you son of a bitch,” Sheridan said thickly. “Left them for Delaney to find. And he’s hot on your trail, determined to get his damned answers.”

  Tyrone wasn’t armed, and he was one step too far from Sheridan; he couldn’t hope to disarm the other man without taking at least one bullet for his effort. Still, he felt his body tensing, felt muscles gathering. Holding his voice calm and steady, he said, “I should have known it was you.”

  Sheridan twitched. “You’re wrong. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, yes. You were impatient even then, always apt to act without thinking it through. I should have realized.” He was intent only on getting Sheridan off guard somehow to give himself the seconds he needed.

  “No! It was the others—”

  Tyrone shook his head slowly, never taking his eyes from Sheridan’s face. “Not them. I wasn’t sure at the time, but I am now. Of those five men you were the only one who could have planned such a clumsy attempt.”

  Sheridan’s mouth dropped open suddenly. “Attempt?”

  Knowing he might well be making a terrible mistake, Tyrone nonetheless followed his instincts. “That’s right—attempt. It failed, Sheridan. I lied to you and the others when I returned and told you he was dead.”

  The senator gasped. “He was! He died!”

  “No. But I knew at least one of you had planned the attack, and I couldn’t risk another attempt on his life. So I lied. I kept him safely on my ship, hid him, and then I brought him here.”

  “You wouldn't have,” Sheridan protested numbly. “You didn’t give a damn about any of it.”

  “He was my friend.” Tyrone heard his own harsh voice, and fought to keep calm, steady. “He was a sick, pitiful man who was no threat to your grand plans.”

  “He was a threat. As long as he was alive.” Sheridan had stopped denying. “And so are you. I can’t allow you to tell Delaney about it. I can’t! Leon says that Delaney could go either way, could take it public. I can’t let that happen. I have too much to lose, too much I’ve built. My life will be destroyed if the world knows what happened!”

  “You aren’t thinking, Sheridan,” Tyrone said softly. “Do you really believe I kept him alone in my house all these years? That others don’t know about him?”

  “Years?” Sheridan whispered. “He lived years? I don’t believe it! You would have tried to blackmail us if that were true; you would have held it over us!” “Why?” Tyrone made his voice flat. “None of you had anything I wanted, Sheridan.”

  Sheridan’s eyes were darting about, his face twitching more violently. But the gun hand was steady. “He’s dead, isn’t he? He’s dead now?”

  “Yes. He’s dead now. You can’t hurt him.”

  “But you can hurt me,” Sheridan said thickly. “You’ll tell Delaney the whole story. And then he’ll tell the world.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “I can’t take the risk, don’t you see?” Sheridan laughed wildly. “I can’t! If we’d all done it—if all of them had planned to kill him—then we’d stand together. But they weren’t part of that. And they won't hang, not them. They’ll say it was my doing, and you’d back them up. I’d be the one swinging, just me!”

  Catherine, standing in frozen fear behind and to one side of Tyrone, felt rather than saw him gather himself. Sheridan was so dangerously close to the edge of the cliff. Catherine knew then with an awful, tearing certainty that he would leap at the man with the gun, that he meant to carry the man with him over the cliff.

  “No . . .” But it was a whisper, barely escaping her lips. From the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of movement, but all her attention was fixed on what was happening before her.

  “I won’t let my life be ruined,” Sheridan was saying hoarsely. “I can’t. I have to stop you from telling Delaney.”

  “What about the others in the house?’’ Tyrone asked. “What about the doctor here that I brought him to? What about his nurse and the housekeeper and her husband? Will you kill them all, too, Sheridan?”

  But Senator James Sheridan was beyond considering the futility of what he meant to do. He saw only a mortal threat to his safety before him, and reacted, as always, without thinking it through. With a grimace contorting his face, he cocked the pistol in his hand.

  Tyrone began to leap toward him, but a shot rang out from the right, knocking Sheridan’s gun from his hand before he could fire it. The impact swung him around—and he was too close to the cliff.

  With a shriek he toppled over the edge.

  “Marc!”

  He caught Catherine in his arms and held her shaking body close, even as he half turned to see who had fired the shot. And, somehow, he wasn’t surprised to see Jesse Beaumont, his sister, Victoria—and Falcon Delaney.

  Delaney had fired the shot.

  Conscious of relief, of easing muscles, Tyrone held Catherine tight as they approached. Conscious that at long last it was almost over. He looked particularly at Delaney, and felt a sudden amusement. Saved by his nemesis. There was, he decided, an appropriate irony in that.

  “Thanks,” he told Delaney in a dry tone.

  The other man holstered his gun. “You're welcome.” If there was any irony in his voice, it wasn’t obvious. “Not that I intended to kill him. I didn’t realize he was so close to the edge of the cliff.”

  “It’s a fifty-foot drop here,” Tyrone said. “And rocks below. He’s gone.”

  Jesse, who had taken a quick look over the edge and then swiftly retreated, nodded agreement. “I’ll say. The tide’s about to get him.” He looked at Tyrone, remembering suddenly. “And that’s not all the tide’s getting. The Raven's mast is sticking up out of the harbor, and the rest of her’s charred driftwood. What the hell happened, Marc?”

  “She burned, obviously.” Tyrone released Catherine but held her hand firmly as she looked at the others in bewildered interest. “I’ll tell you the story later, Jesse.” He looked back at Delaney, saying briefly, “You’ve come to hear another story.”

  “I think I heard part of it.” Delaney glanced toward the cliff, then back. “I'd like to know it all though.”

  Catherine gazed at them, puzzlement gradually disappearing. The blond man was one of Marc’s captains; he had mentioned Jesse Beaumont to her before. The dark man with the hawklike looks and cool green eyes had to be Falcon Delaney and, judging by the way she had slipped her arm through his and by their wedding bands, the lovely blond woman was obviously his wife.

  His new wife, she realized, because Marc had also noticed their closeness and commented with some amusement to Jesse.

  “I see, Jesse, that you weren’t the only one who found her.”

  Calmly, Victoria Delaney told him, “If I’d had about three more minutes to talk to you in New York, we might both have saved poor Jesse from Apaches and saddlesores.”

  “You were called away,” he reminded her, smiling, then looked at Jesse with a lifted brow. “Apaches?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Jesse seemed disgusted at the memory. “Give me a ship and the sea any day, and you can forget about dry land and Apaches.”

  Catherine looked between them all, feeling an absurd impulse to laugh. She’d expected Falcon Delaney to be a threat to Marc and to herself, and yet . . . There was something more here, something that was almost—and very curiously—friendly. When Tyrone introduced her, which he did then, it began to make a bit more sense to her. At least the introductions explained how Marc’s supposed enemy arrived at the island aboard Jesse’s ship, The Robyn; Falcon Delaney, it seemed, was Jesse’s new brother-in-law.

  It also developed that Jesse had, having unknowingly sent the senator off to try to kill Marc and then been told about the situation by Delaney, pushed his ship to her straining limits in order to get there as soon as possible. />
  “Almost tore the heart out of her,” he said to Tyrone as they began moving toward the house. “But Falcon was convinced the senator meant to kill you, so there was no time to waste.”

  Tyrone looked at Delaney. “What set the senator off?”

  “I did,” Falcon told him dryly. “And it’s your own damned fault, leaving cryptic lists in ledgers.”

  “Safely locked in my office,” Tyrone murmured.

  “You ought to get a better lock.”

  “It was easy?”

  “Too easy. A dangerous temptation to thieves.” Catherine found herself smiling, and noticed that Victoria, too, was smiling. Jesse was indignant.

  “Dammit, Falcon, you didn't tell me you’d broken into Marc’s office!”

  “You didn’t ask,” his brother-in-law reminded him calmly.

  “I was responsible for that office,” Jesse said irritably, then looked at Tyrone, wearing an aggrieved expression. “Which reminds me. All your business affairs are in your lawyer’s lap, and I hope he robs you blind. If you want to go junketing off again, Marc, you can damn well hire yourself a manager. I’ll sail your ships for you, but I absolutely will not ever again sit behind your desk. It’s too damned wearing on the nerves. Fire me!” he finished irately.

  “All right, Jesse,” Tyrone said softly, smiling.

  Encouraged by the mild response, Jesse finished airing his grievances. “You can also tell me—finally— what the hell’s been going on. One day Falcon’s tracking that damned gold, which wasn’t where it was supposed to be, and the next day he’s saying something about lists and rabid senators and something called Camelot—”

  “I’ll tell you, Jesse.” Tyrone looked at them all and smiled crookedly. “I’ll tell all of you. But first I have something to show you.”

  They followed him into the house.

  12