by Kay Hooper
"No answer?" she asked dryly.
"I happen to be good at it," he said finally. "I have a great memory and excellent concentration, and I've been playing cards since I was a kid. I'm a professional gambler. Jenny. Not a compulsive one."
"Is there a difference?"
He studied her delicate, serious profile, aware suddenly of a jumble of emotions. He didn't want her to believe the worst of him, but he had little choice other than to continue telling her the variety of half-truths he had lived with and protected for more than ten years.
No choice.
"There's a difference," he told her. "I never believe bad luck will turn with the next card; I never believe good luck will last; and I never bet everything. Never."
Three
"Are you lucky?" she asked without looking at him.
"Usually."
"Do you cheat?"
The question didn't offend him, not when he knew her own story as well as he did. "I know how," he said steadily. "And I know how to spot others cheating."
"You didn't answer the question."
He couldn't answer with a lie. "I never have. But I suppose I would, if the stakes were high enough."
"What price honor," she murmured.
That did bother Dane, and though there was no sound, he could almost feel Skye move restlessly in the next room as he, too, heard the cut that went deeper than the protective armor of a masquerade. " 'His honor rooted in dishonor,' " Dane said a bit roughly.
Her fingers stilled over the developing sketch, and Jennifer turned her head to look at him. "Tennyson."
Dane half laughed, though it wasn't a sound of amusement. "Yes. If I remember, the next line is, 'And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.' Paradox."
"Is that what you are?" she asked curiously. "A paradox?"
"I'm a gambler," he said in a flat voice.
After a moment, Jennifer went back to her sketching. She was disturbed. Not by what he had said, but by the way he had looked when he said it. Grim. She got the feeling somehow that he didn't like labeling himself a gambler.
When she finished sketching the house a little later, it had taken a sheet of paper for each floor, and Jennifer handed him the three sheets. "There's a cellar. I've marked the stairs, but it's cluttered wall to wall with two hundred years of storage. The attic's the same way, filled with trunks and boxes."
Dane was studying the floor plans intently. "Well save those for last, then. Thank you, Jenny. This'll be a great help."
She nodded. "When should I confront Kelly? You'll need time to replace the plate."
"He's invited several other men and myself to dinner tonight before the game; we'll be there by six for drinks. If you could come around six-thirty, that should give me enough time."
Jennifer's slightly puzzled frown cleared. "Oh, I see. You'll slip out while I'm there and put the plate in the guard's room."
"Right," Dane said, though he knew that Skye would most likely do the actual skulking.
She nodded and got to her feet, looking at him a bit warily as he too rose. "All right, then. Will you – is there some way you can let me know what Kelly's reaction is? Later, I mean?"
"Of course. In fact, why don't you meet me on the grounds before you leave."
"But won't Kelly notice you're missing?"
"Not If you rattle him enough. Besides, if he asks. I'll tell him I went out into the garden for some air."
"All right. Where should we meet?"
"You know the place better than I do. You'll have to move your car as if you've left. Anyplace between the house and the road where we aren't likely to be seen."
Jennifer thought briefly. "As you start down the lane toward the road, there's an old, rutted track that leads off to the left. It winds up to the main road. I can pull the car off there, and meet you just inside the woods. You'll be about a hundred yards from the house."
"Good enough." He walked with her to the door, and opened it for her. "We'll get Kelly," he told her.
She looked at him, half puzzled and quite uncertain, then shrugged almost helplessly and left. Dane closed the door behind her and slowly returned to the sitting room.
"A friend in Treasury?" Skye asked in a pained tone.
"Well, I'm bound to have at least one," Dane told him.
"And what was that about promising to get her plantation back for her? Dane, are you out of your mind?"
"Probably. Don't rub it in."
Skye half closed his eyes. "Great."
"There has to be a way to do it," Dane said.
"And you did promise," Skye murmured. "I hate it when you do that. I always end up getting shot at."
"Very funny."
"It's true. You're hidebound about promises; once you make them, you have this uncomfortable habit of doing whatever is necessary to keep them."
"Oh, shut up. I have an idea."
"I was afraid of that."
* * *
Jennifer had a restless afternoon. With several hours to kill before her visit to Garrett Kelly. she returned to the house she shared with her mother and went back to work. Or tried to. She couldn't seem to keep her mind off Dane Prescott.
She was Intuitive, a trait strengthened by her artistic work. yet she had never felt such a jumble of puzzling, conflicting impressions of a person. Even at that first meeting last night, an interlude she had carefully blocked out of her mind while with him today, Dane had baffled her. Startlingly handsome, with a heartbreaking smile and the most alive eyes she'd ever seen, he had been smoothly charming, humorous, and remarkably offhand about her theft of the bracelet and his own larcenous activities. He had held and kissed her, obviously as a ploy to fool the person opening the study door; yet his action, begun in an almost comically polite manner, had changed in those few seconds to something a great deal more personal.
That had been last night. Today there had been a subtle difference in him. Jennifer found it hard to pin down, except to feel certain that she had seen more of him, as if some protective layer of himself had been discarded. He had been more serious, even grave at times, treating her as an intelligent woman rather than taking advantage of her bewilderment as he had last night. He had been obviously disturbed that she and her mother had been blamed for the rifled safe, and quick to suggest a way of repairing that damage.
And after her dig at his honor, Jennifer had seen as well as sensed a reaction she hadn't expected from him. He had felt that cut, and felt it deeply. His quote from Tennyson had held bitterness, and when she looked at him, the light behind his eyes was absent for the first time.
A professional gambler, a thief – and honorable? It seemed impossible, and yet ... Would a man with no honor give a sweet damn if he were accused of having none? Jennifer didn't think so. But a man who was highly conscious of his personal integrity and who, perhaps, lived a life that all too often tested that integrity might well be sensitive about accusations.
Jennifer had been raised by such a man. Rufus Chantry had been, in many ways, a man out of his time. His instincts had harked back to the days when gentleman was more than a word; it was a way of life. Yet his increasing addiction to gambling, stronger every year, had first bent and then finally broken his honor. That was why he signed over his family's home without protest, and why he made both his wife and daughter promise not to try to disturb that "gentlemen's agreement" in open court.
He had staked his home in a card game; he had lost it. Like a gentleman, he paid the debt. It never occurred to him that Kelly might have cheated to win, and the stain he felt on his honor had come, not from having lost the plantation, but from having staked it In the first place.
Jennifer, having been raised by a man with that old-fashioned, almost extinct kind of Integrity, was far more sensitive and understanding of it than most modem women. And she was appreciative of it. It had been her father's strength, just as gambling had been his weakness.
And she was bothered now, because she sensed that same rock-solid core of
integrity in Dane. Whether or not he was conscious of it, she believed it existed. It could be something as focused as a personal code of honor, a set of rules and limitations defined by him for his own reasons and having little to do with law or accepted morality. Or it could be something broader and looser, a set of lines he would cross only reluctantly – and, as he had said, if the stakes were high enough.
What price honor, indeed.
Until she discovered Dane's answer to that riddle, she couldn't trust him fully.
"Jennifer! You'll strain your eyes." Francesca came into the room and turned on the lamp over Jennifer's drafting table.
After a hasty glance at her watch, Jennifer relaxed. It was only a little after five. She had forgotten to open the blinds in the room, and since the late afternoon sun was partially blocked by the trees outside it had gotten steadily darker without her noticing.
"You've done no work since you came back," her mother noted, casting a practiced eye over the sheets Jennifer had pinned to the table. "What troubles you?"
Jennifer hesitated, reminding herself of her decision not to tell her mother about the attempt to get evidence against Kelly. It was best not to raise her hopes, and besides, Francesca was all too likely to jump into the situation herself with gleeful recklessness. But she had to say something, so Jennifer again played to her mother's maternal and feminine instincts.
"I was just thinking about that man," she said lightly. "The one I met last night."
Francesca's bright dark eyes became even brighter. She had been trying to get her daughter matched up with a suitable man since her late teens, and had refused to give up hope despite Jennifer's independent nature. "Who is he, my baby? Is he handsome? Can he take care of you properly?"
Jennifer almost laughed, but wondered uneasily if she was creating a monster here. "Mother, I just met him – "
"He is unmarried, is he not?" Francesca demanded suspiciously, her accent thickening as she became more Italian. "You would not become the lover of a married man! Unless he were very rich, of course," she added.
Long accustomed to her mother's slightly nontraditional views of male-female relationships, Jennifer said patiently, "I'm not going to be anybody's lover, rich or not. I told you. Mother, I hardly know the man. All I know is that he doesn't wear a wedding ring."
"Ah! That means nothing; some wives are stupid to allow such nonsense. We must discover if there is a wife."
"And then poison her?" Jennifer murmured.
"Divorce is easier," Francesca said, unmindful of irony.
Jennifer looked at her in amusement. "I thought marriage was forever?" she said, curious to see how her mother would rationalize her rapid dismissal of an Inconvenient wife when her oft-stated view was that a wedding ring never came off.
Francesca gave her an intent look. "Well, of course, my baby. When it is right. But, obviously, this woman interferes with your destiny. She must be made to release your man. It will all be arranged – you will see."
Feeling a kind of fascinated horror creep over her, Jennifer hastily closed her mouth and then said a bit desperately, "I don't even know if there ts a wife! And he isn't my man. Mother. I just think he's . . . interesting, that's all."
"Interesting?" Francesca gave the word four distinct and appalled syllables. "You would use such a pale word to describe this man? He does not cause your blood to run hot through your body? Your heart -does not pound at the sound of his voice? You do not melt when he touches you?"
Jennifer closed her mouth again and said rather weakly, "Well, I've hardly been with him long enough to know."
Francesca threw up her hands in a purely Latin gesture of disgust. "I lose all patience with these modern men! There is not a real man to be found. Not since your father. Not one knows how to make love to a woman, how to fill her senses with the very essence of himself!"
"Mother ..." Torn between laughter and astonishment, Jennifer was also coping with the innate shock of an adult daughter confronted by a whole new Insight into her parents' relationship.
"And you!" Francesca's eyes were snapping. "I cannot believe I have raised you to be so tame, so – timid. In-ter-es-ting! Is that a feeling of passion, of love? No! Is that a feeling of desperation? No!"
"But, Mother, I – "
"You must feel this for your man! He must fill your senses, your heart, and your soul. He must be everything for you, or he is not for you."
"I'm sorry I started this," Jennifer said rather blankly.
Her mother ignored the statement. She reached out suddenly, her nimble fingers plucking the elastic band from Jennifer's ponytail so that her hair fell loosely around her face. "Why do you wear your lovely hair this way? Such a forbidding style! And those horrible trousers – "
"Jeans. Mother, I'm working."
"This man must see the woman you are, my baby. Go and put on a skirt: he must see your legs."
Jennifer suppressed a wild desire to blurt. He's seen them, and thinks they're great. "I'm not going to chase after a man to show him my legs. Mother."
But her mother had already nudged her out of the chair and was leading her firmly toward her bedroom. "You must see him, of course, as soon as possible. You must know If he is the one. Discover if there is a wife, for if there is we must remove her at once. Unless he is not the one. She may keep him if that is the case."
"Generous of us," Jennifer murmured. She would have continued to protest her mother's determination, but she had seen that steely persistence too often in her life not to know the uselessness of holding back floodwaters with a paper dam. So she obediently changed into a prettier blouse – pale blue with a deep V neckline – and a silky print skirt. She flatly refused to wear hose, compelled by a sudden memory of fingers on garters, and her mother accepted that cheerfully.
Fifteen minutes later, dressed, hair brushed, and filled with a rueful sense of great-oaks-from-little-acorns-grow, Jennifer found herself being almost literally pushed out the front door. She had to leave anyway, since it was time for her confrontation with Garrett Kelly, but she paused a moment to direct a stern command at her mother.
"Don't send out wedding invitations, dammit!"
Unperturbed, Francesca smiled widely and said, "Of course not, my baby. We must first discover if he is the right man for you."
Jennifer sighed. "I'll probably be back in an hour or so."
"That is not enough time," her mother said critically.
Wanting to reply to that, but finding no words to do justice to her thoughts. Jennifer shook her head and went out to her small car. She headed toward Belle Retour, trying to work up a good head of steam for Kelly's sake, but having a difficult time.
Her mother. If there was another woman in the world like Francesca, Jennifer thought, it would be a miracle. Her words might not have been pearls of wisdom, but they were eccentric enough to be marked indelibly on the memory of anyone who heard them. Generally leaning toward the traditional view that marriage, between the right people, of course, was forever, she was still perfectly capable of seeing her beloved daughter as the mistress of a wealthy man. She was firmly convinced that no woman was complete without the adoring attention of a man, whether in or out of wedlock.
Jennifer could have argued that point, having come of age in a world considerably different from that of her mother's generation, and being very American in her attitudes. She had made no attempt to air her own views because of her love for Francesca – and the rueful knowledge that her mother would never accept them, perhaps not even understand.
Jennifer pushed the last of those thoughts out of her mind as she turned the car into the oak-shadowed lane leading to Belle Retour. Angry. She was supposed to be angry. She filled her mind with thoughts of what Kelly had done to her father, to her mother and herself. And she got angry.
She got furious.
In fact, in her zeal to play the role assigned her, Jennifer quite unconsciously abandoned the restraints placed on her since childhood in a variety of expen
sive private schools. Those schools had Imposed their very definite ideas of what a lady should be, and Jennifer had accepted them partly because the discipline needed for control had Interested her. She had also cultivated a calm surface because the memories of childhood temper tantrums had convinced her she needed that control.
Now, in a fury, she stopped her car before the house and stormed up to the front door, ignoring the bell because the brass knocker made a more satisfying noise. When the door swung open, she pushed past the surprised butler who had sneaked candy to her as a child, demanding loudly, "Where is he?"
"Miss Jennifer, you shouldn't – "
"I want to see him, Mathews! Where is he?"
"In the parlor, Miss Jennifer, but – "
She didn't wait to be announced. Before Mathews could stop her, she went directly to the closed parlor doors and shoved them open, glaring around the room.
It wasn't a room worthy of a glare, since it was beautiful and spacious; but that didn't placate Jennifer because her own mother had decorated it. She saw men standing and sitting, their heads turned toward the door and their eyes startled. There were six or eight men present, some dressed more casually than others. Various ages, from the early thirties to the mid-sixties. All held drinks in their hands, and she knew most of them if only by name.
Dane was standing by the fireplace with two other men, dressed in a three-piece white suit that made him look peculiarly devilish. His brows were raised in an expression of polite surprise, but his eyes were laughing.
Jennifer's glare didn't pause on him, but swept the room and settled on another man. "I want to talk to you!" she snapped.
Garrett Kelly was a fair man in his fifties, with the profile of a hawk and oddly colorless eyes. He had either been born a gentleman or else cultivated that facade; Jennifer had long ago made up her mind it was the latter. He enjoyed parties and the company of other men with a like taste in gambling, and as far as anyone in these parts could tell, his past was obscure.