by Kay Hooper
“Does he know?”
“Of course he does.” Kelsey smiled just a little, but his eyes were steady. “He’s very protective of those he cares about—and uncommonly gallant about ladies. He’ll spare you the harsh realities whenever possible.”
He didn’t before, she thought. Or had he? She just didn’t know anymore. Tightly she said, “I don’t need protection or chivalry.”
“No, I didn’t think you did.” His voice was quite cool and calm. “Unlike Luc, I’ve had the great good fortune to work with a number of women in dangerous situations over the years, and I’ve learned that toughness comes in all shapes and sizes. You see, I happen to believe you’ll be a greater help to him if you know just what he’s involved in.”
“So now I know.”
“Now you know. You don’t entirely believe me about Rome, of course, but you’ll be more alert than you would otherwise have been, and that always counts for something.”
She looked at him, a little puzzled. “And you don’t think—because of what I may believe now—that I’ll alert Martin that something’s wrong by behaving differently toward him?”
“Hell, no.” Very dryly he explained, “It didn’t take me five minutes to realize you don’t give away anything.”
Kyle couldn’t protest that, as much as she wanted to. And though she didn’t ask Kelsey, she had to wonder if she appeared as frozen as she felt. It wasn’t a nice thought. It wasn’t a nice feeling.
“I like your friends,” she told Lucas late that afternoon when the other two had gone. She sat watching him as he knelt at the hearth building up the fire.
“Do you?” He remained where he was, brushing his hands together and gazing at the flames.
“They seem as though they’re very unusual men.”
Lucas rose but continued to gaze into the fire. He seemed far away.
“So do you,” she added.
He turned his head to look at her and his mouth twisted. “We both know what you think of me.”
“No, we don’t, not really. Why didn’t you tell me that Martin was dangerous, Luc?”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, just continued to look at her. “Kelsey,” he muttered finally.
“You wouldn’t have told me. He knew that. He thought I should be prepared, and he was right.”
“There was no need for you to know.” Lucas returned his gaze to the fire, frowning.
Abruptly she asked, “Why did you have my father send me to Europe, Luc?”
“What makes you think I did? I don’t know your father.”
“And Josh Long doesn’t know me. He’s something of a humanitarian, I hear, but ten years ago he was also a playboy. So why did he concern himself then with a seventeen-year-old girl he’d never met? Unless someone asked him to.”
After a moment Lucas said, “Josh is a good friend. He didn’t know me very well at that time, but he didn’t ask questions.”
She heard the tacit admission and sighed. “Did you want an ocean between us, Luc, was that it?”
He closed his eyes briefly. “I wanted you off that campus, away from the drugs.”
Kyle thought about that for a moment. He had left her to preserve an illusion between them, and yet he had done his best to protect her. He had destroyed evidence that would have taken her to court, if not to jail, had had her sent far away to a school where drugs were more rare than dinosaurs. It seemed a contradiction in character, and yet she felt it wasn’t.
“I don’t understand you,” she said.
“Do you want to?”
“I already—”
“I know what you said.”
She met his steady gaze, her own unwavering. “I meant it. I do want to understand you. I have to, Luc, or the past will never be—well, just the past.”
He nodded, but she couldn’t tell from his expression what he was thinking or feeling. He smiled suddenly, that faintly crooked, charming smile she remembered so well. “Then we go on from there, don’t we?”
“I guess we do.”
It was two days before she began to feel more natural around Lucas. She knew he was aware of her guardedness, just as she was aware that he watched her often. But gradually she began to feel less tense. It would have been too much to say that she forgot her wounds, but the past seemed to be retreating in importance, day by day.
The situation was helped in part by her preoccupation with discovering just who Lucas Kendrick really was. Instinct told her he was a good man, whatever had motivated him in the past, but she found it difficult to trust her instincts where he was concerned. So she watched him, asked questions, and listened.
Her one legacy from her father, given to her in the childhood days when she had tried to win his affection, was an ability to understand and play chess, and she recalled that her father had often said a man’s chess game spoke much about the kind of man he really was. So she played chess with Lucas, unsurprised to find that he did play, and played well.
He had a strong instinctive grasp of tactics, she discovered, and the ability to make seemingly reckless intuitive leaps virtually guaranteed to take his opponent off guard. He was a gracious winner, a cheerful loser.
In the following days she found out other things about him. He didn’t mind silence. He enjoyed walking in the light covering of snow, chopping wood, listening to music. He could cook, and did, and he did more than his share to help keep the cabin neat. He could stand so still sometimes that a wild bird would alight and eat bread crumbs from his hand with perfect trust.
He had nightmares.
Kyle awoke twice that first week, hearing mutters and muffled groans from downstairs, hearing him toss and turn on the couch. The sounds haunted her, disturbed her deeply. But she didn’t go to him then and said nothing about what she had heard.
The third time, halfway through their second week together, she did go to him.
The first rasping groan woke her, and she was out of her bed and moving lightly down the stairs before she had time to think or question her action. She hesitated for just a moment at the bottom of the stairs, wondering why she had to do this.
The room was dim, lighted only by the dying flames in the hearth, and outside the wind whined with a lonely, fretful sound. Kyle bit her lip, undecided, and would have returned to her bed but for the soft, unsteady groan that reached her ears then. She crossed the room on quick, bare feet, and knelt on the rug beside the couch.
A half-burned log broke apart in the hearth just then with a shower of sparks, and the flames jumped higher. She could see Lucas more clearly. The covers had fallen to his waist, leaving his muscled chest bare, and his body was so tense, it trembled slightly. A fine sheen of sweat beaded his face. One forearm was thrown across his eyes, fist clenched; his other arm lay at his side, and his fingers held the covers in a white-knuckled grip. His throat worked as if sounds or words or some darkness inside him struggled to escape, but only the low groans were released from his sleeping prison.
Kyle looked at the strong hand gripping the blankets, then hesitantly covered it with one of her own. It felt like iron, she thought, burning iron, and feeling that made her hurt oddly. She bent closer, uncertain but driven, unwilling to allow him to go through whatever this was all alone.
“Luc? Luc, wake up,” she said softly.
“Behind the building,” he muttered suddenly, urgently. “He ran behind—Oh, dear Lord! The dumpster. He just threw her in there. Why can’t I stop this? Why can’t I—”
“Luc, wake up!”
He jerked suddenly, and his hand turned beneath hers, long fingers closing tightly around hers. He was still for a moment, and then the arm over his eyes lowered. He looked at her, disoriented. “You aren’t a part of that,” he said thickly.
“Luc, it’s just a dream,” she whispered.
His eyes cleared slowly but continued to move over her face almost searchingly. “No. No, it happened. It happened and I couldn’t change it.”
“Then tell me about i
t.”
He tore his gaze from her face, staring at the beamed ceiling. After a moment he said, “It was the first time. I suppose after that—God help me—I got used to it. There was a woman—a kid, really—busted for possession. The D.A. promised to go easy on her if she’d give us her supplier. She agreed. But he found the wire, and we were too far back to help her. We … found her in a garbage dumpster. He had stabbed her.”
Kyle’s surface recklessness had taken her into some wild places these last years, but what he was telling her about was a part of life she had no experience of, except in fiction and coolly reported news stories. She felt a little helpless, overwhelmed by the pain she heard. “Luc, it was your job.”
“It was a war of attrition,” he said bitterly. “But the problem was, the other side kept on growing. Fourteen-year-old pushers, twelve-year-old prostitutes, pimps who’d kill one of their girls without a second thought because there were always more so easily found.”
Kyle was silent.
“There was no way to make a difference,” he went on quietly. He pulled her hand over to rest on his flat stomach, holding it with both his own and looking at it. “Maybe I could have kept on trying, I don’t know. But too often I’d be told to stop nosing around a certain party. Somebody rich enough, or powerful enough, to have friends in the department. Too many people playing too many games. I couldn’t take that.”
“No one could blame you,” she ventured hesitantly.
He was toying with her fingers, stroking her skin as if the texture drew him irresistibly. “Feet of clay,” he murmured. “I couldn’t be the white knight, so I just quit.”
“Don’t do this to yourself.”
His mouth twisted a little. “It never bothered me so much before. Then I saw you again and had to face up to why I left you. And now I’m dreaming of things I saw all those years ago and wondering how I can live with myself.”
Kyle searched for something to say to him and found it. “Luc, you told me about the work you do for Long Enterprises. You’re helping people now where you can make a difference. You help keep all those companies running by investigating problems. You and your friends helped destroy a white slavery ring, brought information against terrorists out of a hostile country, and stopped that gun shipment before it could be used to hurt people. And now you’re about to go into a house and find stolen artwork. You are helping. There are over half a million police officers in this country; you’re doing things they can’t do.”
After a moment he turned his head to look at her and smiled a little, a smile that made him vulnerable. “You gave me a wonderful illusion ten years ago when I really needed one,” he said huskily. “But I don’t think I could stand it if you gave me another one now, Kyle.”
“I don’t do that anymore,” she said, her own voice unsteady. “All I can give you now is a picture of a real live man. One I’ve talked to and watched these past days. An extremely bright, intricate man, with more facets than a diamond.” She drew a deep breath and met his shimmering gaze squarely. “I don’t know how I feel about what’s behind us. But there is something I know now about you, Luc.”
One of his hands moved to brush a strand of dark hair away from her face, his fingers lingering on her cheek. “What’s that?”
“There isn’t a selfish or dishonest bone in your body,” she said with certain knowledge. “When you realized yourself why you’d left me, you didn’t have to tell me. But you did. And I see now that you couldn’t be honest with me then, first because you were undercover and later because of the way I was. The way we were. You were in a terrible position. And I believe I understand why you left.”
“You do?” he asked gently.
Her laugh was shaky, almost inaudible. “I’m not painting you noble again, I promise. And I still don’t know how I feel about you now. But we were both escaping into illusion, I think. We’d both felt things we didn’t want to feel anymore. You in your job and me …”
“Your family?”
“Poor little rich girl,” she said wryly, mocking herself.
“Don’t do that.” His hand slid beneath her hair to lie warmly against her neck. “Don’t think it’s your fault in any way, that you should have been happy just because you had all the so-called advantages. Material things are never enough.”
He pulled her toward him and kissed her, a gentle kiss with no passionate demand. Then he held her there, against him, watching the firelight shimmer off her silk pajamas and awaken the red tint in her dark hair.
Kyle could feel tremors deep inside her, circling outward slowly, like ripples in a pool. She didn’t know what had caused them and didn’t care. The wind whined outside, moaning around the eaves, stirring the porch swing so that the chains creaked. She heard every sound more clearly than ever before.
And she could see awareness flickering in his eyes. It was as if something were moving with hushed force inside both of them, slowly and inexorably. Fascinated, she watched his face change subtly, become leaner, tauter. She felt that gentle hand on her neck tighten a little, and underneath her own hand his stomach tensed.
Very softly he said, “Kyle, go back upstairs.”
“Why?” she asked huskily.
He seemed to be having trouble breathing, but his voice was steady. “Because I love you.”
Kyle slowly rose to her feet, compelled by something in his eyes or his voice, or both. She turned away and went silently back up the stairs, sliding into her bed and drawing the covers up. She lay there for a long time with her eyes fixed on the dark ceiling, listening to the wind outside. And thinking.
What would they have lost if they had become lovers again tonight? Kyle wasn’t sure, but she knew Lucas thought he was, and that was why he had sent her back to bed alone. What was it? A new and fragile thread of trust between them? A delicate bond forged in the quiet, soul-baring moments after a nightmare?
Kyle turned over on her side and closed her eyes, hardly aware that she was smiling.
FOUR
“I DON’T TRUST you,” Kelsey told his boss roundly. “You’re just acting too damned straightforward.”
Hagen, sitting behind a desk that held nothing but a thin sheaf of papers and a telephone with several lines, looked up to smile angelically. “You have a suspicious mind, my boy.”
Kelsey saluted him mockingly. “Learned at the master’s knee.” He leaned back in the single visitor’s chair in the room and stared broodingly at Hagen. “As far as I can tell, you’ve been completely straight with Lucas. So what gives?”
“Nothing at all, I assure you.” Hagen feigned humility—something he didn’t do too well. “Kendrick deserves all the facts; I merely supplied them.”
“Uh-huh.” Kelsey pointed at the sheaf of papers on the desk. “Just out of curiosity, whose idea was it that Josh innocently call Rome to inquire about the possibility of buying that Rubens and subsequently try to get himself invited to the party?”
“His. And sound strategy, I must admit. His interest in the painting is quite real; he’s known to acquire anything by Rubens that becomes available. And, of course, it was a good thing he got invited to the party. Should Rome be suspicious, he will keep a sharp eye on Long.”
“Leaving Luc free to search for the stolen art?” Kelsey kept his gaze fixed thoughtfully on the revised guest list for Martin Rome’s party.
“That is the plan,” Hagen told him.
“And you don’t think Rome will panic and move the stuff because he knows Josh is coming?”
“Not enough time. And if he does attempt to move the artwork, we’ll have him dead to rights.”
Kelsey lifted his eyes to Hagen’s cherubic face. “A nice, simple plan. I must be asleep and dreaming.”
“Why don’t you go and call Kendrick,” Hagen suggested. “He should be told that Long and Raven will attend the party. Also, you must arrange your nightly rendezvous with the lady and him. All those little details to work out, my boy.”
Rising slowly, Ke
lsey frowned at his boss. “You missed the human element again,” he reminded him with a certain satisfaction. “Whatever happened between Luc and Kyle years ago, I’d say they’re busy mending fences now.”
Coolly Hagen said, “An entirely anticipated development.”
Kelsey blinked. “You mean this time you deliberately set the scene for a romance?”
“Certainly.”
After a moment Kelsey asked, “You decided to stop matchmaking by accident and do it on purpose?”
Maddeningly impervious to his agent’s surprise, Hagen merely nodded.
“Why?”
“To find out if I could.”
Kelsey blinked again. “Oh.” He turned and went to the door, then swung around to frown at his boss. “Are you feeling all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine. Go call Kendrick.”
When his baffled agent had finally vanished, Hagen leaned back in his chair and laughed softly. Every general knew how effective the element of surprise could be, after all. Let them wonder and look over their shoulders for his customary surprise. They would look in vain, he thought happily. And that would be the surprise. It would keep them all on their toes.
Hagen enjoyed keeping his agents on their toes.
Kyle unpacked in the luxurious room she had been given in Martin Rome’s palatial house just outside Philadelphia, having politely refused the assistance of a maid; there were some things she preferred to do for herself. She moved around the room briskly, speculating on various things, and wasn’t surprised when Lucas spoke from the connecting door to his room.
“Is this arrangement supposed to be discreet?”
She smiled a little as she stood before the dressing table, watching him in the mirror as she removed the pins from her hair. “More discreet, I suppose, than giving us a single room or letting us sneak into each other’s through the hall in the dead of night. Martin obviously assumes we wouldn’t have shown up together if we didn’t want to be together.”
Lucas leaned against the doorjamb, watching her dark hair tumble down around her shoulders. Absently he said, “Well, Rome didn’t seem too upset when you arrived with me. Think this mysterious Zamara has captured his heart as well as his mind?”
