Aces High

by Kay Hooper

  Both his arms were around her now, locking her body to his, and his mouth was hard and rough. She shut out the sight of his handsome, implacable face, accepting his driven passion and returning it because she couldn’t do anything else. She remembered a storm, and a tender, passionate man who had loved her.

  Skye lifted his head at last, his eyes violent for a moment before they were shuttered closed. “All the ifs don’t seem to matter, do they, sweet? I can still make you want me.”

  Katrina couldn’t have spoken if her life had depended on it; she could only stare up at him mutely.

  He laughed and suddenly released her, stepping back. His face seemed a bit pale, but the mocking smile remained to taunt her. “Still don’t know if you hate me?”

  She found her voice at last, though it was little more than a whisper. “Don’t do this.”

  “Why not, sweet? You want me. I’ll be back when your shift ends. And don’t bother running away. I’d only find you.”

  Katrina was barely aware of the door closing behind him. She stood staring blindly at the spot where he had been, her body still hot and throbbing, her mind numb. And the sound of her own voice in the silent room startled her.

  “I won’t let you destroy me. I won’t.”

  —

  He had to put out a hand to the wall to steady himself once as he went down the hall to the elevator. It should have surprised him, but didn’t. He felt dizzy and sick. He couldn’t quite catch his breath, as if he’d run some dreadful marathon. There was an awful pressure in his chest. The instant the elevator doors slid quietly shut, Skye leaned against the wall and thrust shaking hands into his pockets, staring at the indicator that told him he was descending.

  “Oh, God,” he whispered raggedly.

  —

  Across the park aboard a fully detailed riverboat, the gambler looked up from his cards, the tranquility of his expression vanishing for a brief moment as he went pale. Neither his fellow gamblers nor the crowd of fascinated visitors noticed, but the blonde sitting demurely on the arm of his chair saw it.

  She said nothing, partly because of the crowd around them and partly because she knew what was wrong. It was, he’d told her wryly, both the curse and blessing of identical twins, at least where he and his brother were concerned.

  Skye was in trouble.

  But not, she realized, in danger, because the gambler’s handsome face almost instantly regained its tranquil control, and his free hand lifted hers to his lips briefly as he smiled up at her. She accepted the reassurance and tried to be patient until he could tell her what was going on.

  Chapter 2

  “Balloons, sir? Balloons for your children?”

  Affronted, Hagen barely paused in his quick stride to send the happy clown a cold glare. And even though the clown’s wide smile was painted on so brightly that she could hardly help but look delighted no matter what, her startled wince was visible.

  “Sorry, sir!” She retreated hastily, and stood holding her balloons and watching the man stride on while admitting to herself he didn’t look the sort of man to have children, much less buy balloons. He had a great leonine head with a cherub’s face, a decidedly portly figure confined by a badly fitting three-piece suit, and wore both wing-tip shoes and a fedora that had seen better days. A seemingly comical man, but there had been nothing comical in his frosty glare.

  A second clown, this one tall with a woebegone expression painted on his lean face, appeared suddenly beside the happy clown and spoke dispassionately. “You’d throw dynamite on a bonfire, darling.”

  A rich chuckle escaped the happy clown. “I thought I might as well put it to the test. He’s early.”

  “Yes, we’d better alert the others. Good thing we decided to play our roles from the start. And we should find out from Gigi if he means to stay here for two weeks.”

  The happy clown looked up at her companion with a smile that wasn’t painted on. “Regretting the costume so soon?”

  “No.” He glanced up as a group of children hurried toward them, his rather hard blue eyes taking on a rare uncertain expression. “I suppose it’s practice of a kind.”

  She giggled and turned toward the approaching children. “A very odd kind.”

  “Don’t laugh at me!” he ordered, sounding both harassed and amused.

  She threw him a laughing, tender glance over her shoulder, violet eyes bright, then turned her attention to the children clamoring for balloons.

  The woebegone clown stood watching her, a smile playing about his firm lips. He had protested the costume, of course, and had very much enjoyed being persuaded by her to accept it. Still, he was conscious of the absurdity; neither of them fit their assigned roles. Several of the others did, though. But she had been right in believing that Hagen stood a greater chance of recognizing the two of them unless they were totally out of character.

  Hence the clown suits.

  He would have borne a great deal for her sake; this was certainly little enough. And he had his own ax to grind, of course, since he strongly disliked Hagen’s Byzantine hand thrusting into his life without so much as a by-your-leave.

  “You didn’t practice,” she observed severely when the children, balloons in hand, raced off.

  “I didn’t want you to laugh at me,” he retorted.

  She smiled up at him, the merry smile he had instantly fallen in love with. “I wouldn’t. You’re going to make a wonderful father, darling.”

  His blue eyes softened amazingly as they rested on her face. “I love you, you know,” he said.

  Some moments later a small, childish voice said indignantly, “Clowns don’t kiss! And you’ve let go of the balloons!”

  —

  “I am a great man,” Hagen said simply.

  Gigi, who was the sole audience to this grand statement, accepted it with a solemnity belied by the laughter that had leaped quickly to her eyes. “Oh, of course. I have often said so.”

  Comfortably seated on the couch in the living room of her suite, he sent her an approving look. But his voice was a bit dry when he said, “No, you haven’t, my dear.”

  “Well, not often, perhaps,” she admitted, still solemn. “But I do recognize it, I promise you. It is very obvious to me. You’re like Charlemagne.” She paused for reflection, then added musingly, “Or Hitler.”

  He ignored that. Splendidly. “Has Prescott discovered anything yet?”

  “He hadn’t this morning,” she replied. “I haven’t seen him in hours, however. Hagen, why are you here now? The governor isn’t due to come for two weeks.”

  “Why, I wanted to see you, my dear.”

  She eyed him with a great deal of understanding and not a little annoyance. “You may have none of my agents,” she said.

  Hagen looked innocent. “My dear Gigi—”

  “None!”

  He wore the expression of a man sadly misunderstood. “I hadn’t seen you in months, and—”

  “You saw me two weeks ago in New York,” she said tartly, even more annoyed by this base attempt to disarm her.

  “Well, but that was business, my dear.”

  “Had you something other than business in mind for this trip?” Her voice was wonderfully polite.

  He began to look a bit uneasy. “Gigi, if you’re still angry with me because of that little argument of ours—”

  “Little argument? Little argument?”

  Hagen cleared his throat but said strongly, “We’re both of us past the age for these stupid quarrels, my dear.”

  In an unyielding tone she said, “Your bags have been taken to the suite at the end of the hall. I have much to do; was there anything further you wished to discuss with me?”

  “Gigi!” He saw that her expression was as fierce as her voice had been, and realized somewhat unhappily that she hadn’t changed her mind. He had thought she would have by now; in fact, he had been sure of it. But she was a difficult woman, and in twenty years of knowing her he hadn’t managed a single time t
o sway her once she had made up her mind.

  She was his only personal failure. She laughed at him and mocked him and more than once in the past had grossly deceived him in matters of business. She went her own way with a fine disregard for his advice or wishes, and he uneasily suspected she always would.

  “Good afternoon, Hagen,” she said coolly, and rose to go over and seat herself behind the big desk by the window. Without another word or glance she became absorbed in paperwork.

  Finding himself ignored—which wasn’t an experience he was at all familiar with—Hagen heaved himself up from the couch and went gloomily toward the door. “Dinner?” he asked with a hopeful expression that would have been effective if he’d looked more like a spaniel and less like a sulky Henry VIII.

  She didn’t look up. “You’ll find a menu in your suite.”

  He snorted and left, slamming the door.

  Gigi’s lips twitched.

  —

  Katrina didn’t run away. Given a choice, at least during the early part of the day, she might have run, but it happened that she was to meet a man for dinner that night. He was an agent, and the information he was to give her was too important to be missed. Since Katrina served as a conduit to Gigi, she could hardly escape the responsibility.

  It wasn’t only that, however, which kept Katrina at the hotel and made her endure the passing hours with a surface appearance, at least, of her normal calm. Her instant recognition of the very real power Skye had over her had hardened somewhat as she had thought about the situation. She was too honest with herself to pretend she could fight him once she was in his arms, but the twenty-two-year-old girl who had loved so heedlessly had become a woman who had learned to survive, and that hard-won ability was not one she would willingly give up.

  He had told her that he had left Germany in pieces; she had said little about her own torment. But Katrina would fight him with every weapon she could find to avoid the pain he had left her with before. She both understood his actions when he had left her so abruptly in Germany and had long ago forgiven him for them, but that was something she had no intention of making clear to him.

  He was a different man now, just as she was a different woman, and she thought that this man would turn any knowledge about her suffering into a weapon. It was obvious he was out for revenge now, or at the very least determined to purge himself of the desire he still felt for her.

  But it wasn’t in Katrina, innately proud and too aware of both the fragile peace she had found and the wild emotions he could still make her feel, to submit tamely to any man. In her was the certainty that he could seduce reason, that she would not be able to fight him physically, and that she would fight him on every other level.

  And so she spent the day in her usual calm way, while her mind worked with the sharpness of desperation behind her tranquil expression. Refusing to accept either the full blame for what had happened to them or his implicit demands, she reached deeply into herself to tap the core of implacable determination that had been born inside a cell in East Germany.

  “Trina, do you have the guest list?”

  She looked up from paperwork she was going over automatically, and immediately picked up a computer printout at her elbow. “Here it is, Gigi.”

  Her friend leaned a hip against the desk and began scanning the printout, saying dryly, “Hagen has arrived, and I wanted to check the list before it occurred to him to do so. Ah, good! They are all on the sixth floor, then?”

  Katrina nodded. “And all under assumed names. They’ll take the freight elevator up and down so as to avoid the lobby.” She studied her friend curiously. “Why is Hagen early?”

  With a grimace that was both amused and exasperated, Gigi replied, “He wants to mend fences.”

  “Between you two?” Katrina asked, aware of a long and decidedly stormy relationship that few others knew about.

  “Yes.” Her fine eyes sparkled in sudden temper. “Do you know that when he arrived he left word at the desk to send his bags up to my suite when they arrived? Fortunately I had the forethought to leave other instructions. That man.”

  Katrina fought back a smile. Both fascinated and appalled by Hagen—a common reaction, Gigi had told her—she had observed the relationship between him and Gigi these last years with something like wonder. In one sense it was heartening to watch so many tempestuous emotions flourishing between a man and woman who were both fast approaching sixty; in another sense, with two such contrasting personalities it was a small miracle that one of them hadn’t killed the other by now.

  “He’s assuming too much?” Katrina said.

  The sound that escaped Gigi might have been a snort in anyone less ladylike in appearance. “Entirely too much. If he thinks he can manipulate me now as he does everyone else he encounters, he will soon learn his mistake!” She reflected for a moment, then added in a much calmer tone and very dryly, “He won’t, however. The wretched man has a blind spot where people are concerned, particularly women.”

  “Why—” Katrina broke off abruptly.

  Gigi grinned, and answered the question her young friend had so obviously decided was a nosy one. “Well, you must admit he isn’t boring. If I don’t kill him, I may marry him.”

  Katrina blinked and looked at Gigi somewhat warily. In a mild tone she said, “Don’t do anything rash.”

  Handing the printout back across the desk, Gigi laughed softly. “Child, I made up my mind about him twenty years ago.”

  Katrina didn’t know what to make of that, and decided to change the subject. “Do you have a message for Matt? I’m meeting him for dinner in a couple of hours.”

  “No, no message.” Gigi eyed her for a moment, then asked calmly, “Does Skye know?”

  “Know what?” Katrina was concentrating blindly on the papers lying before her on the desk.

  “That you are having dinner with Matthew?”

  After a moment, fully aware that Gigi had no compunction about asking nosy questions, Katrina sighed and leaned back in her chair. Lifting her gaze to that grave face, she said, “Not unless you tell him about it.”

  “Shall I?”

  Katrina hesitated, but she was too good an agent to take the chance of ruining an important rendezvous. “Perhaps you’d better.” She managed a small laugh.

  Gigi wasn’t deceived, and said quietly, “He is the man from Germany.”

  “Yes.” She had never found it easy to confide in anyone, even her best friend, so her response stopped with that.

  With a searching look, Gigi murmured, “Already he has changed you, chérie. There is a look in your eyes I have never seen before. This will be painful for you.”

  Katrina shrugged slightly and felt her lips curve in a smile. She wondered what her expression looked like to make Gigi’s gaze even more intent. “I’ll survive it,” she said flatly.

  After a moment Gigi straightened from the desk, her face troubled. “It is never wise to interfere. But if you need me, Trina…”

  “Yes. Thank you, Gigi.”

  “I will warn Skye about your meeting with Matthew.” She left the office without saying anything more.

  Katrina worked steadily for another hour until one of the assistant managers came on duty for the second shift. Then she went up and got ready for dinner.

  —

  “Dance with me.”

  Katrina halted to face the tall man standing squarely before her, a man who looked almost unbearably handsome in a stark black dinner jacket. His face was masklike, his eyes so completely veiled that she could read nothing in them. His command was an abrupt one, but she had the odd feeling he hadn’t meant it to be.

  Matthew had gone almost an hour before; she had been summoned to deal with a minor crisis in the kitchen, and was only now making her way from one of the hotel’s fine restaurants.

  This one, unfortunately for her peace of mind, provided music and a dance floor.

  When she didn’t answer, Skye took her hand and led her toward the clear
ed space where several other couples swayed together in time to the slow, romantic music. Katrina didn’t resist, nor did she avoid his shuttered gaze when he took her into his arms and held her far too close.

  For several minutes they danced without speaking. Then, in that same taut voice, he said, “So silent?”

  “Did you expect a scene?” she returned, her own voice as cold as she could make it.

  “No, I suppose not.” His laugh was hardly a breath of sound. “You haven’t changed.”

  Katrina felt uncertain, and searched his face with an unconscious intensity. He was different, she realized, and she mistrusted the change in him because it seemed so sudden. He had left her only hours before, his implicit demands and remote voice ringing in her ears, having as good as told her they would be lovers again; yet now he was guarded, and she could feel his strain.

  “Haven’t I?” she managed to say at last.

  “You were always so reserved, so calm. I never knew how much you felt.”

  “You knew,” she said before she could stop herself, and wished she had left the words unsaid.

  His face tightened. “No. You were loving. Passionate. But always elusive.”

  Wondering what he could mean, Katrina was silent, unable to say anything between her surprise and the uneasy suspicion of his motives.

  “The way you are now,” he said abruptly. “Is this going to be your defense, Trina?”

  She couldn’t misunderstand that. “I’m afraid you’re jumping to conclusions—again,” she said deliberately. “I’m defending nothing.” She thought that he might have winced, but if he did, the expression was so fleeting she couldn’t be sure.

  His arms tightened around her, and with the fluid grace that was so compelling about him, he began turning the dance into a subtle seduction. His body was hard against hers, his movements so sensuous that her own body responded immediately.

  “No?” he muttered.

  The sound of the music receded as she felt heat flow through her, and her own heartbeat sounded like a drum in her ears. Only her knowledge of his motives enabled her to keep her expression placid. Her body was his for the taking, and she knew it, but there was more bitter than sweet in that certainty.