by Amanda Quick
“They see an illusion,” Matthias said. “Things will be different for you now that you’re an innkeeper.”
“No,” she said. “Things won’t be different. When Hazel and I moved to Burning Cove, I had hoped to put my past behind me. But there’s no chance of that now. There probably never was. I will always be the former trapeze artist who may or may not have murdered her lover by pushing him off the platform.”
“Not everyone will have issues with your past.”
“Who is going to trust a woman who may or may not have murdered her lover?”
“Me.”
She froze, hardly daring to breathe. “Is that right?”
“Yes. Your turn. Does my talent scare you?”
“A madman with a knife and a wire necklace once tried to murder me. Knowing that you may be able to tell if I’m lying to you doesn’t even make the list of the top ten things that make me nervous.”
A slow smile edged Matthias’s mouth.
“Thanks,” he said.
The explosion was as loud as a small bomb. It shuddered through the vehicle. The Packard swerved to the right. Like some wild creature, it clawed at the pavement, heading for the edge of the cliffs.
Chapter 23
The part of Amalie’s brain that was still capable of rational thought registered the source of the blast. Blowout. There was nothing she could do. Whether she and Matthias lived or died in the next thirty seconds depended entirely on Matthias’s driving skills and luck.
She was keenly aware that Matthias did not do the instinctive thing, he did not slam on the brakes. Instead he concentrated on controlling the steering. For a few seconds the right fender of the convertible hovered perilously close to the edge of the pavement. Car and driver fought for control.
In the next heartbeat they were safely on the far side of the curve.
Matthias allowed the car to decelerate gradually. The turnoff to a side road came up in the headlights. He drove the limping speedster into the rutted dirt path that led to a shuttered farm stand and shut down the big engine.
For a few seconds neither of them spoke.
“Sorry for the scare,” Matthias said.
She swallowed hard. “I’ve had worse.”
He shot her a quick, assessing look. “Yes, you have.” He opened his door, stood, and peeled off his evening jacket. “Shouldn’t take too long to change the tire.”
The moonlight revealed the holstered gun that had been concealed by the expert tailoring of his drape cut jacket.
“Out of curiosity,” Amalie said, “do you wear that particular accessory when you go out on a real date?”
“It’s been so long since I was on a real date, I can’t recall.”
She smiled. “Liar.”
“My last date did not end well, so I prefer not to think of it as a real date.”
“Is that right? What happened? Did you tell her about your talent?”
“No. There was no point. I knew things were over between us so I gave her an easy out.”
“What constitutes an easy out?” Amalie asked.
“I informed her that I would not be joining my family’s engineering firm. She was horrified. Dropped me and took up with a man I considered a friend.”
“Okay, that is a bad ending.”
“It certainly struck me that way,” he said.
He unfastened his cuff links, dropped them into the pocket of his trousers, and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He went to the rear of the convertible and opened the trunk.
She climbed out of the front seat.
“I can help,” she said. “You learn a lot of things when you work in a circus. I’ve changed a few tires in my time.”
He leaned inside the trunk. “Thanks, but there’s no reason for both of us to get dirty. I’d lose whatever claim I’ve got to being a gentleman if I let you change the tire.”
“You worry about that sort of thing?”
“In my family we do.”
“You come from an old family?”
“Seems to me that if you’re alive today, it’s proof positive that you come from an old family. It’s not like you just appeared under a cabbage leaf. Everyone’s got ancestors.”
“I take your point. But you know as well as I do that there are very particular definitions of the term old when it comes to families.”
“Let’s just say I come from a very tightly knit family, as in the kind that puts a lot of pressure on the offspring to join the family firm.” Matthias walked toward the front of the convertible. “Here, you can hold the flashlight. Wonder what made that tire blow. The tread was good.”
“Tires blow,” she said. She switched on the flashlight. “Fact of life.”
“True. This one blew at a particularly bad time, though.”
Amalie shuddered. “That’s for sure. For a few seconds there I thought we were going over the edge of the cliffs. Your driving was brilliant.”
“I’ve got pretty good reflexes.”
She smiled. “Like me?”
He flashed her a quick grin. “Something else in common.”
She watched Matthias crouch next to the ruined tire and start loosening the lug nuts. She discovered that she liked watching him work. There was something very masculine and very interesting about the way he handled tools.
Halfway through the project he stopped, listening. Amalie heard it then, the faint rumble of an approaching vehicle. She turned her head and caught the flash of headlights just before they disappeared into a curve. A few seconds later the twin beams once again lanced the darkness.
Instead of ignoring the oncoming car, Matthias got to his feet, gripping the wrench in one hand.
“Switch off the flashlight,” he said quietly.
She obeyed and followed his gaze. The oncoming car was moving fast.
“I don’t like this,” Matthias said.
“Now you are making me nervous. What, exactly, don’t you like?”
“We just left the Carousel after picking up our first solid lead and we just happen to have a blowout on a deserted stretch of road. We could have gone over the cliffs. Instead we just happen to be stuck here, out in the open. And now another vehicle just happens to come along.”
“I assume this goes back to your problem with coincidence?”
“It does.” Matthias closed the trunk but he kept the wrench in his hand. “Let’s go.”
She looked around. “Where?”
“Behind that farm stand. With luck, whoever is in that car will assume that we decided to hitchhike into town to get some assistance.”
They made their way to the boarded-up stand and moved behind it. Amalie listened to the approaching vehicle. She heard it pause briefly at the turnoff onto the farm road, and then it drove onto the unpaved lane. Tires crunched on gravel and dirt. Headlights blazed.
She looked at Matthias. There was enough moonlight to let her see that he was listening intently. He had his gun out now.
A car door opened. Footsteps sounded.
“Anybody around? Looks like you blew a tire. Be glad to give you a hand.”
A man, Amalie thought, but not one she knew.
Matthias was very still but Amalie was almost certain that he was radiating an icy-hot fever. She knew that he was ready to do battle.
There were more footsteps. A moment later a car door slammed shut with far more force than necessary. An engine rumbled back to life. The vehicle roared off down the road, spitting gravel.
Matthias moved out from behind the back wall of the farm stand.
“Damn.” He said it very quietly and with feeling.
Amalie walked around the corner. She was just in time to see the headlights of the other car vanish on the twisty road above the sea.
“What?” she asked.
“I didn’
t get a look at the driver,” Matthias said.
“What about the car?”
“A late-model sedan.” Matthias holstered his gun. “Ford, I think.”
“There are probably a lot of Ford sedans in Burning Cove at the moment.”
“Probably.”
Matthias walked back to the Packard and crouched beside the tire.
Amalie switched on the flashlight. “I couldn’t help noticing that you did not respond to that man when he offered to help us.”
Matthias concentrated on loosening a lug nut. “No.”
“Why not?” she said.
“He lied.”
“You could hear that in his voice?”
“Yes.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that.”
Chapter 24
Was Matthias paranoid, possibly even delusional? The only thing she knew for certain was that he was convinced of his ability to detect lies.
Amalie was still trying to decide how she felt about that when the two of them walked into the lobby of the Hidden Beach Inn some forty minutes later. Willa was lounging on the sofa reading a copy of Hollywood Whispers. She tossed the paper aside and got to her feet, yawning. She gave Matthias a head-to-toe survey, taking in the jacket slung over one arm, the rolled-up shirtsleeves, and the shoulder pistol. Then she winked at Amalie.
“How was the action at the Carousel?” she asked. “Did you two have a good time?”
“Blew a tire on the way back here,” Amalie said.
“Too bad. Well, you didn’t miss much around here. Mr. Hyde is still out partying. I gave him a key so that he could let himself in when he decides to come back. Now that you two are home, I’m going upstairs to bed.”
“Thanks for keeping an eye on things,” Amalie said.
“Sure.” Stifling another yawn, Willa headed for the stairs. “See you in the morning.”
Matthias waited until she reached the landing on the third floor and vanished down a hallway before he turned to Amalie.
“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I want to clean up and then have a nightcap.”
His expression was hard to read. He had said very little after changing the tire. She had not been in a chatty mood, either. She had been too preoccupied with the possibility that his suspicions about the driver of the car that had stopped to offer assistance were correct.
“A nightcap sounds like a very good idea,” she said.
When he came back downstairs, she had two glasses of brandy poured. She handed one to him and led the way into the conservatory.
From dawn until dusk, the plants that crowded the two-story, glass-walled room created a lush, green retreat. After dark, the glow of the moon and the low lighting along the tiled path transformed the space into a seductive garden of intimate, inviting shadows.
“It was this room that made the villa irresistible to me,” Amalie confided. “I fell in love with it at first sight. I never had a garden when I was growing up. My mother kept some herbs in pots in our train car but we were never in one place long enough to plant flowers or vegetables. My parents used to talk about how they would have a garden when they retired.”
Matthias looked around. “I understand.”
Amalie stopped at one of the cushioned wrought iron benches, put her glass on the small table, and sat down.
Matthias put his glass beside hers and sat down next to her. His thigh was very close to hers but he did not quite touch her.
“You’re wondering if I’m delusional, aren’t you?” he said.
He spoke in a neutral tone, as if making a simple observation. As if he was accustomed to people thinking that he was mentally unbalanced.
“It did cross my mind that you might have been wrong about the driver of that car that stopped,” she said. “But under the circumstances you were right to be cautious.”
“In other words, maybe I’m just paranoid? Not delusional?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She picked up her glass. “I don’t really care.”
For the first time, he seemed surprised. He paused the brandy glass halfway to his mouth and turned his head to look at her.
“You don’t care if I’m paranoid or delusional?”
“Maybe once upon a time I might have worried about it. But what happened in Abbotsville changed me in some ways. I’ve developed a fear of heights. I know I’ll probably never have the nerve to fly again, even if I could get other artists to trust me. These days I sleep with a gun in my bedside drawer. Sometimes I wake up with nightmares. So, no, I don’t have a problem with you being very, very cautious.”
“Because deep down you wonder if there really was someone watching the night Harding tried to murder you. You wonder if he’s still out there.”
“Yes. And that, in turn, makes me wonder if I’m paranoid or even delusional. Nope, I don’t care if you have similar problems.”
“You shouldn’t doubt your memories of that night,” Matthias said.
“I can’t trust them. I was blinded by fear. I wasn’t thinking clearly at the time.”
“No, you would have been thinking very clearly. But you were focused on survival. You would have tuned out everything else that was going on around you except the source of the threat. If you heard laughter, then it was because your intuition was telling you that it was part of the threat.”
“You sound as if you know how it feels.”
“I told you that I almost always know when someone is lying. The problem is usually determining the intent of the lie. But there’s another factor. Strong emotion can effectively blind my senses.”
“Are you talking about your own emotions or the emotions of other people?”
“My own. If I let my personal feelings get control, they skew the analysis. That’s what happened with Margaret Dover.”
“The woman who decided she didn’t want to marry you after she found out that you would not be joining the family firm?”
“Yes.”
She smiled. “You have a very complicated life, Matthias.”
Matthias’s mouth kicked up a little at the corner in a wry smile. “Everyone’s life is complicated. My life just has a few unusual twists.”
“Did you love her?”
“Margaret? I wanted to love her. She was beautiful, smart, charming. Her parents were friends of my parents. My family thought she was perfect for me. Everyone thought we were an ideal couple. For a time I told myself that I was in love with her. But in the end I couldn’t take the final step.”
“What is the final step?”
“I couldn’t trust her.”
“Ah.”
“Things like love and friendship involve trust,” Matthias said. “I have a hard time with trust.”
“Because sooner or later, everybody lies.”
“Sooner or later.”
“Including you?”
“I am a very, very good liar, Amalie. It’s a side effect of my talent.” He waited a beat, never taking his eyes off her. “Now you know the full truth about me.”
“Talk about complicated.”
“Don’t you care?”
“I used to fly for a living,” Amalie said. “I know how to take calculated risks.”
He watched her sip her brandy.
“I don’t usually tell people about my talent,” he said. “And until tonight, I’ve never told any woman that I’m an excellent liar.”
“A wise policy.” Amalie finished her brandy and set the glass aside. “It would probably make a lot of people nervous.”
“But not you?”
“Not me. Not tonight.”
“How do you feel about taking the calculated risk of kissing a man who has just told you that he is an accomplished liar?”
She stopped breathing for a few seconds. The entire co
nservatory seemed to go still. She was standing on an invisible platform, waiting to catch the bar. Waiting to fly. She probably should have been frightened but she wasn’t. Not tonight.
“Funny you should bring up the subject of kissing,” she said. She touched her fingertips to the side of his face. “I’ve been curious about what it would be like to kiss you.”
Matthias leaned over her and into her, giving her plenty of time to change her mind. When she did not retreat, his mouth came down on hers.
The kiss started out slowly, deliberately. She could feel him holding back, wielding control over his own response while he sought to seduce her.
But the compelling heat in the atmosphere called to all of her senses, summoning her with the power of a sorcerer’s spell. An exhilarating rush of energy swept through her. She did not want him to hold back. She wanted to grab the bar and fly.
She put her arms around him and launched herself into the unknown.
Chapter 25
Amalie’s response struck his senses with the force of an oncoming thunderstorm. He could have sworn that lightning flashed in the conservatory. So much for a cautious, exploratory kiss. They were standing too close to the edge of the cliff tonight. The fierce winds of desire caught them both by surprise and swept them straight over the edge.
He hauled her across his thighs, wrapped one arm around her, and deepened the kiss. He was hungry, ravenous; desperate. A hot, thrilling exultation rolled through him. He had told her the truth about himself and his talent, and she did not care. She was in his arms, returning his kisses with a fervor that matched his own.
He covered one apple-shaped breast with the palm of his hand. Through the thin fabric of her dress and the delicate bra she wore underneath, he could feel the tight ridge of a nipple. She took a sharp breath and tightened her arms around his neck.
“Matthias,” she said.
His name was a husky whisper. There was urgency, passion, and a dazed excitement in her voice. He realized he was not the only one who had been unprepared for the heat they were generating together.
When she twisted against him, trying to get closer, he thought the soft weight of her thigh against his erection would steal what little was left of his control. He gathered her to him and moved his mouth to her warm, silky throat. Her head fell back against his shoulder. Her scent intoxicated him.