That tantalizing thought was interrupted as Hugh Davis sauntered into her office. Warily, Alyssa put away her dreams and focused her whole attention on her arch rival. Since the night of the party, she had trusted him even less than she had in the past.
“Have a pleasant weekend, Alyssa?” he drawled smoothly, sitting down without waiting to be asked.
“Yes, thank you. And yourself?” She leaned back in her swivel chair, tapping the end of a pencil on the polished desk top in a small, almost concealed gesture of impatience.
“An interesting weekend. Very interesting.” He laced his fingers together and smiled at her the way a predator smiles at a victim. “My wife cried a lot after your party.”
More uneasy than ever, Alyssa frowned. “I’d say that was your own fault. You shouldn’t have made it look as if you were flirting with me.”
“Ah, yes. Well, you see it wasn’t just what she thought she saw at the party,” he murmured. “She had a lot of other evidence to go on, too.”
Alyssa stared at him. “What the devil are you talking about?” she gasped.
“I’m talking about the way I’ve been letting her think I’m having an affair with you,” Hugh said indifferently.
“My God! Hugh, why would you do such a thing?”
“To protect the woman with whom I actually am having an affair, naturally.” He shrugged as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “I deliberately established a few false trails. You were very helpful, by the way, being gone almost every weekend for a couple of months. Very often you would casually mention you were going to be ‘out of town’ whenever I asked you what you had planned for the weekends, remember?”
Appalled, she stared at him. She had usually mentioned leaving town because she didn’t want him thinking of an excuse to drop by. She’d been trying to protect herself, and all the while he’d been using her!
“Don’t look so stunned, Alyssa. You would have been relatively safe if my wife hadn’t gone to unexpected lengths to find out what the two of us were up to on the weekends. You see, I’ve been gone a lot, also.”
“Hugh, so help me, if you don’t explain what the hell you think you’re trying to do…!”
“My wife is a very possessive woman, but she has an interesting characteristic. She tends to blame the ‘other woman’ whenever I have an affair. Some nonsense about how I was lured away from hearth and home. Some psychological twist, I expect. By not blaming me, she hasn’t had to deal with me, if you see what I mean. She only has to deal with the other woman. Naturally, I didn’t want her dealing with the real woman, so I made use of your frequent absences to cover my own. It’s been extremely convenient for protecting my, er, friend.”
“I can imagine,” she said furiously. “So every weekend I’ve been gone, your poor wife has assumed you were with me, is that it?”
“That’s it. You don’t have to worry. I’ve told her it’s all over between us.”
Alyssa remembered the phone calls during the previous week, the ones when there had only been silence on the other end of the line after she’d answered. Cari Davis checking up on her? Probably.
“Why are you telling me this now, Hugh?” she demanded stonily.
“Because my wife went above and beyond her usual efforts this time, as I discovered the night of your party. You, my dear, were such a threat to her that she actually employed a private detective to follow you on a couple of recent weekends. The private eye informed her that you were definitely not with me. In the course of his report, he mentioned where you had been spending your time. You apparently have developed a fatal compulsion of late, Alyssa, haven’t you?”
She didn’t move, every nerve and fiber of her being rock still as the full impact of what was happening came home to her. Alyssa waited.
“When I found out Friday night exactly what my wife had discovered in the course of her latest ‘research,’ I made her tell me the name of the investigator she had employed, and yesterday morning I tracked him down and told him he was now working for me.”
“And your wife?” Alyssa could hardly breathe.
“Up until Friday night,” he mocked, “she refused to believe she’d gotten her money’s worth from the investigator. She was still convinced I must be having an affair with you. The only thing that saved you from one of her screaming confrontations with the ‘other woman’ was Kyle’s presence. She couldn’t quite figure out where he fit in and was confused enough to avoid accusing you outright at your own party. She often does things like that after she’s had a few drinks. But that’s really not our problem at the moment. Cari eventually will believe whatever I tell her because she doesn’t want to lose me. No, you and I have no need to concern ourselves with her rather muddled thinking processes. If she’d been thinking straight, after all, she would have had the detective follow me these past couple of weekends,” he said with a chuckle.
“But she didn’t,” Alyssa whispered.
“No, she didn’t. And when I had interviewed the investigator, I knew I had learned some very rewarding information for which I must thank my dear wife someday. He just phoned an hour ago to tell me he’d tracked your Jordan Kyle to one of the biggest casino hotels in Vegas and had seen him check in. Kyle didn’t report to any research firm in the middle of the desert, did he Alyssa? He spent Sunday night in a casino and slept late this morning. Furthermore, he showed no signs of preparing to go back to a real job. Not the kind of job he said he’d be returning to when he spoke of it Saturday night. Kyle’s just some gambler you picked up on your last trip to Vegas, isn’t he, Alyssa?”
“You’re out of your mind!” she hissed.
“How many weekends have you spent there during the past few months? How much money have you lost? No one wins in Vegas, not in the long run. What’s the matter, Alyssa, can’t you stop? I hear it’s like that. A compulsion that grows on you.”
“You haven’t got the faintest idea of what you’re talking about!”
“No? I think David McGregor might appreciate my ideas.”
“I see,” she said tightly, understanding now exactly what was coming.
“However, I’m willing to keep the information I’ve uncovered to myself under certain circumstances,” Hugh went on blandly.
“And what exactly would those circumstances be?” she inquired almost curiously.
“That you tell McGregor you no longer wish to be considered for the managerial slot he’s got open.” Hugh was abruptly on his feet, smiling evilly as he headed for the door. “I know, I know. It’s blackmail. But we all do what we have to in this world. I’ll stop by your house later this evening for your answer. This time my wife really will have cause to believe it’s you I’m visiting, won’t she?”
Numb with shock and a mounting horror, Alyssa watched him walk out her door. The end of her short-lived attempt to conduct both a fantasy life and a normal one had come with totally unexpected suddenness. Everything she had been working for had just collapsed around her. And all because she hadn’t made herself resist the fun and excitement of her make-believe world.
Jordan’s words came back to her: “Folks in your world play rough, don’t they?” Somehow his world seemed much more honest and reliable than her own.
With an unnatural calm, Alyssa drove home a little early from the office. What did it matter if she broke the rules today? She was still feeling abnormally calm when she let herself in the front door of her beach-front home and dropped her purse on the nearest chair. Then she went to pour herself a stiff drink. If ever a woman needed one, it was she tonight.
Very carefully, moving as if she were walking on eggs, she crossed the living room to sink down on the chair beside the phone. For a long time, she simply stared at the instrument. What were the odds of finding Jordan in his room at this hour? Possibly rather high, she told herself coolly. He might be dressing for dinner.
But what would she say to him? How did you tell your lover you were being blackmailed? No, that wasn’t the hard
part. The hard part would be trying to describe the fact that she wasn’t at all sure she cared.
Alyssa licked her lips and took a delicate swallow of the drink she had fixed. She wasn’t sure she cared. In some ways, it was almost a relief. The inevitable ending had arrived. She was free. Free!
Good lord! What was she saying? Her world was collapsing around her. How could she think of herself as being freed? She shook her head uncomprehendingly, knowing she needed to talk to someone, and that someone had to be Jordan. He was the one she now turned to instinctively. In his magic hands, she would be safe.
Her nerveless fingers dialed the telephone with careful precision. She was fully prepared to have the instrument ring endlessly in an empty hotel room, so when Jordan’s voice came on the other end of the line, she was startled.
“Jordan?” she whispered.
“Alyssa? What’s wrong? Honey, what’s happening?” The dark, rich voice was heavy with immediate concern, and Alyssa found herself responding to it unthinkingly.
“I had an interesting visit from Hugh Davis this afternoon, Jordan,” she began quietly. “Did I ever tell you the man’s a bastard?”
“I figured it out for myself the first time I met him,” Jordan replied impatiently. “What the hell is going on?”
So she told him, slowly and distinctly, exactly what had transpired that day in her office, but he interrupted her before she got to the final part, the part about not really caring that everything was over and that she was free. Alyssa never got the chance to tell him that because he was already giving her instructions.
“It’s only four-thirty,” he rasped into the phone when he’d heard her tale. “I’ll catch the late-afternoon flight back to L.A. It will take me about an hour and a half to drive to Ventura. If Davis gets there before I do, I want you to stall him, do you understand? Keep him talking until I arrive. Don’t worry, Alyssa, I’ll undo the damage I’ve done.”
He hung up the phone before she could tell him she wasn’t at all sure she wanted the damage undone and that, in any case, it wasn’t his fault. He had just gotten entangled in her fantasy.
In the end, the two men arrived almost simultaneously. Hugh Davis had just knocked on Alyssa’s door shortly before eight-thirty that night when there was the sound of another car crunching in the drive.
“He’s not going to be any help, Alyssa,” Hugh informed her, glancing back over his shoulder. “He’s nothing but a professional gambler.”
Jordan was so much more than that, Alyssa thought, relief flooding through her as her lover climbed out of the car and started toward the steps to her front door. He was the man she loved.
“Jordan!” Unhesitatingly, she flew down the steps and threw herself into his arms. He took the shock of her impact without flinching, strong arms going around her and sensitive fingers instantly finding the soothing places along her spine. “Oh, Jordan, you didn’t have to come all this way for me.”
She felt him drop the lightest of kisses into her auburn hair as she buried her face against his solid chest. “ Of course, I did, sweetheart. You belong to me, remember? I have the right to take care of you.”
“Well, well, this is really a touching little scene. Who would have thought Alyssa would have been so silly as to fall for someone like you, Kyle? But I suppose there’s no accounting for taste.”
Slowly, Jordan freed himself from Alyssa’s clinging embrace, tucking her against his side as he started toward the man waiting on the doorstep. Alyssa could feel the cool rage in him and wondered at it. All that emotion on her behalf? He must feel something very strong for her. Surely he did!
But his voice was remote and dangerous, soft with a menace that was totally controlled and all the more frightening because of it. “Let’s go inside, Davis. I think we can get this little fiasco cleared up rather quickly.”
Alyssa slanted Jordan a questioning glance as they mounted the steps and walked past the other man into her living room. But she could read nothing on his impassive face. Only the golden eyes were alive with a fire that threatened to consume. In that moment, she was eternally grateful that his anger was aimed at Hugh and not herself. The intensity of that anger would live in her memory for the rest of her life. What had she unleashed by dragging Jordan into this mess?
When she looked across at Hugh Davis, who stood facing them, she realized the effect was not lost on her tormentor. For the first time since she had met him, there was something besides derision in his expression. Confronting the devil with the golden eyes, Davis was learning the meaning of having taken on more than he could handle.
“This needn’t concern you, Kyle,” he tried, apparently having decided to take the offensive. “This is a little business matter between myself and Alyssa.”
“Everything that affects Alyssa concerns me, Davis. It’s too bad you didn’t realize that earlier.”
“All I’m offering to do is keep quiet about her new, uh, problem. She’s obviously unqualified for the promotion, and if she’ll take herself out of the running, I’ll keep silent about the true facts. That’s simple enough.”
“Blackmail usually is,” Jordan observed, gently releasing Alyssa and pushing her tenderly in the direction of the nearest chair. “Getting rid of blackmailers, however, is even simpler.”
Davis narrowed his eyes, and his tone became blustering. “Going to threaten me, Kyle? If you do, I’ll go to the cops, and then this whole thing really will be out in the open. Alyssa not only won’t stand a chance of promotion, she won’t even be able to keep the job she has!”
“I’m not threatening you,” Jordan murmured, sitting down on one of the stools in front of the small eating bar. He hooked one booted heel over a rung. Dressed in a pair of charcoal slacks and an open-throated black silk shirt, he seemed very dark and dangerous. A golden-eyed devil, Alyssa thought once again as she watched him intently. “I’ll save the threats until after we see whether or not you’re capable of a bit of reason.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Davis demanded. It was becoming increasingly clear that he was out of his depth. Threatening Alyssa in her office had been one thing. Dealing with Jordan Kyle was proving to be quite another.
“So you were using my woman to shield one of your own, is that it?” Jordan pursued mildly. When Davis said nothing, he nodded. “Very commendable, in a way. I approve of a man trying to protect his woman even if I don’t approve of the way he does it.”
“So help me, Kyle, if you don’t shut up and get out of here, I’ll make sure Alyssa loses her job! Who the hell are you to interfere? You’re nothing but a two-bit gambler!”
“Exactly.” Jordan smiled grimly as Alyssa stirred angrily in her chair. “No, he’s quite right, honey. I am a gambler. But there seems to be something our noble blackmailer has overlooked about the members of my profession.”
“Such as?” Davis challenged with a sneer.
“Such as the fact that we know how to take calculated risks. We depend for survival on a lot of talents, Davis. Among those is the ability to size up a man very quickly. When I met you Saturday night, I knew almost immediately what kind of bastard you really are. One of these days, I suppose your wife will finally realize it, too. But in the meantime, suffice it to say that you, Hugh Davis, are no gentleman.”
Davis gave a crack of nervous laugher at the mild observation. “I don’t see how that’s any handicap!”
“Perhaps, perhaps not. Having accepted that basic tenet, however, we are led to a further observation. Only a true gentleman would go out of his way to protect his woman.” There was a pause while Jordan let the implication sink in. “You, not being a gentleman, couldn’t be expected to really take pains to protect a woman, any woman, could you? You would only be concerned about protecting yourself in any given circumstance.”
Alyssa swallowed as it dawned on her exactly where Jordan was going with his strange comments. Of course, she thought belatedly, she should have seen the flaw in Davis’s strategy from t
he first. Why would he have used her to protect another woman? It wasn’t his style to worry about someone else getting into trouble. Apparently, his wife had hounded several of his previous lovers, and it hadn’t seemed to bother him. Davis was not a gentleman in any sense of the word.
“I don’t know what you’re getting at, Kyle,” the other man snapped forcefully.
“No? I thought it was obvious.” Jordan held up the well-shaped fingers of his left hand and carefully ticked off facts. “One, we have all agreed you’re a bastard who wouldn’t worry unduly about any woman with whom he was having an affair unless—”
“Unless?” Alyssa prompted expectantly.
“Unless,” Jordan continued obligingly, holding up a second finger, “discovery of the real identity of the other woman could do Davis, here, a great deal of harm.”
And then it seemed to Alyssa that all hell broke loose in her living room. Jordan suddenly flew into motion, catching an astonished Hugh by the collar of his shirt and slamming him up against the wall. “What am I going to find out about this mystery woman whose identity you’ve been protecting?” he growled, his face inches from the other man’s now. “What will I get back in the report I’m going to request from the private investigator I’ll hire tonight, Davis? Who is she?”
Apparently, Hugh Davis had the sense to realize when the odds were overwhelmingly against him. “It’s none of your business,” he said hoarsely. “For God’s sake, let me go! I won’t tell McGregor about you or Alyssa; just let me go!”
“The problem in dealing with a man who is definitely not a gentleman,” Jordan grated, “is that one just can’t trust the bastard.”
“I give you my word! I won’t tell McGregor!”
“I think I’ll go ahead and hire my own investigator this evening. I know a very good man in L.A. He’s played cards with me on occasion, in fact. I can trust him.”
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