by Kay Hooper
Only the chief was out in front, sitting at a desk and staring at a cassette tape lying in the middle of the blotter.
“Where’s Maggie, Chief?” Gideon asked as he approached the desk.
“You know,” the chief said absently, “I’ve met just two truly unique people in my life. The first was a friend of my grandfather’s. He was something. Charm spilling out over his ears, and he could talk the hind leg off a donkey. Never said much about himself, though. I didn’t know till after he died that he was a war hero. At his funeral there were people from six states, four foreign countries—and the president.”
After a moment Gideon said, thinking that he knew what the answer would be, “Who’s the other person?”
“Her. Never met anybody like her. She’s…sort of fascinating, isn’t she?”
“She is that,” Gideon said.
The chief’s abstracted air vanished, and he scowled at Gideon fiercely. “None of you told me you had a tape. Why the hell not? It all makes perfect sense if you listen to the tape.”
“Sorry. To tell you the truth, I forgot all about it. Chief, where’s Maggie?”
“Gone.”
Gideon stared at him. “Gone? Gone where?”
The chief sighed. “Colonel Sanders showed up and said he was taking her home. To tell you the truth I couldn’t think of a damned reason why I should try to stop him. She left her address with us. Oh, and”—he reached into his shirt pocket and produced a folded note—“this for you.”
The note was quite simple, and unsigned. In her curiously elegant script Maggie had written: I think you should bring Leo along, don’t you?
“Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the Unicorn, “if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?”
Chapter 9
Two days later, Gideon pulled his rental car into a curving driveway before a large house in an elegant old section of Richmond, Virginia. The house was imposing, to say the least, built of weathered gray stone that looked as if it might date from colonial days and sitting in the midst of perfectly manicured acreage that sloped back, eventually, to the James River.
“Wooo,” Leo commented in an awed tone.
“I’ll say,” Gideon responded.
They stood there at the bottom of the flagged steps for a moment, the man and the cat, both just looking, and then Gideon led the way up to the massive front door and plied the gleaming brass knocker firmly.
The door opened almost immediately, revealing a severe-looking elderly man dressed in the formal and Old World attire of a butler. He didn’t look surprised. He didn’t look as if he’d ever been surprised by anything at all. “Good evening, Mr. Hughes,” he said politely with a slight half-bow. “Miss Durant is expecting you. Come in, please.” He stepped back, opening the door wider, and didn’t even blink when the large and rather unusual-looking cat came in as well.
Gideon had changed quite a bit during the last week. So much so that his strongest emotion as he stood in the refined foyer was sheer amusement. The gleaming chandelier above his head, the polished floor, curving staircase, huge paintings of people dressed in silk, satins, and stiff lace—all of it spoke of a family with a line so far back it had helped to repel redcoats as well as Damn Yankees.
No wonder Maggie had so many colorful stories to tell, he thought wryly. Her family had probably landed here when there was nothing more than wilderness and savages.
“What kept you?”
He looked up, watching as she came down the curving staircase toward him. As an entrance, it was rather magnificent. The chameleon was wearing exquisite and dignified colors now. Her silvery hair wound about her head in a regal coronet, diamonds graced her throat and ears, a green silk dress wrapped her slender body in alluring yet sophisticated style, and matching pumps added both height and poise to her petite form.
She fit into this setting with absolute perfection, and Gideon thought that any woman who could belong both here and in a ragtag carnival in the middle of a Kansas field could indeed make herself at home wherever she chose.
In the same chiding tone she had used, he said, “I had to go back to the camp for Leo, you know. And naturally everybody wanted to know what was going on, so I had to explain. One thing led to another. In your world, it usually does. I told them we’d stop by to visit on our way to San Francisco.”
“Oh, good. Gideon, this is Luther. Luther, will you see to Gideon’s luggage, please?”
“Yes, Miss Maggie,” the butler said, bowing slightly in acknowledgment to Gideon. “And shall I take the cat into the kitchen?”
“Yes, you shall. Hello, Leo.”
“Wooo.”
“Go with Luther, now, and mind your manners. They’ll feed you in the kitchen.” She watched the cat obediently follow the butler from the room, then took Gideon’s arm companionably and guided him into a very gracious living room. “Since you’ve been in transit,” she said, “I couldn’t very well send you flowers, but the menu for tonight is very romantic, and we can go to the theater of your choice afterward.”
“My preferred methods of courtship?” he asked politely, remembering what he had told her.
“Well, I thought it was only fair. Since you temporarily abandoned your job and preferred lifestyle—and with such good grace—the least I can do is to show you a little gracious living in return.”
Gideon pulled her into his arms in front of a massive fireplace, above which hung a large portrait of a dark young man with laughing dark eyes dressed in the fashion of the 1890s. Ignoring the onlooker, Gideon kissed her thoroughly. “Hello,” he murmured when he could.
“Hello,” she answered blissfully. “Uncle Cyrus is alerting the family.”
“Why didn’t I get to meet him in Kansas?” Gideon demanded, detouring willingly. “Just because you wanted me to chase you halfway across the country so you could flaunt all this elegance in my face?”
“No, because he was in a hurry. He said something was starting up in Florida and he had to check on progress. He sent me home in the jet. But now he’s busy disrupting airline schedules so everyone can get here quickly.”
Gideon didn’t even blink. “Is your mother here?”
“No, she spends most of her time in New York whenever I take a summer—um—job. She has a business there. Cosmetics. Elise Durant?”
That did surprise him. “Good Lord, she’s one of the top three names in cosmetics.”
“That’s Mother.”
“And your father was…?”
“A college professor.”
After a moment of considering the information, Gideon found a comfortable chair, sat down, and pulled Maggie into his lap. “I have to hear more about your family if I’m going to be facing them soon,” he decided. “Do we have time before dinner to go over a few particulars?”
“Of course. What do you want to know?”
“Let’s stick with immediate family for the time being. I gather you have no brothers or sisters?”
“No. How about you? I don’t know very much about your family.”
Gideon grinned at her. “My family is simple. Two parents, who are going to adore you once they recover from the shock, and a younger sister who falls in love once a month. I have a few aunts, uncles, and cousins scattered about, but the family isn’t an especially close one.”
“That’s a shame,” Maggie said, then added thoughtfully, “maybe we should do something about changing that.”
“Maybe we should. In fact, Mom says the same, so you two can put your heads together and work on it. Now, how about grandparents?”
“Daddy’s parents are still alive. Very much so. They live on a ranch in Montana. And their parents live in Charleston, so I have great-grandparents. After that, it gets a little fuzzy, and I’m not sure.”
“I’m not surprised.” Gideon thought about it. “Whose side of the family does this house belong to?” he asked curiously.
“Daddy’s. It’s sort of complicated. This
is what I suppose you’d call the family seat. Uncle Cyrus says he kept it because it had so much room, and everybody could visit. If it belongs to any one person, I suppose it’s him, but I don’t really know. By the time Daddy got married, Uncle Cyrus and Aunt Julia were traveling a lot, so we stayed here. This is where I grew up.”
“Are you going to mind living in San Francisco?”
“Of course not.”
“Are you sure, honey? If all your roots are here—”
She leaned over and kissed him. “My roots are anywhere I plant them, you know that. Besides, some of my ancestors probably ran around with water buckets back when San Francisco was burning down once a week.”
Gideon thought about that, then said, “Do you have a family tree down on paper?”
“If one exists, I’ve never seen it. I know most of the stories going all the way back to the Revolution, but the connections between people are a little vague. I think Uncle Cyrus wants it that way.”
“Why?”
With a gleam of amusement in her eyes Maggie said, “That’s him above the fireplace.”
Gideon took another look at the painting, at the handsome, dark young man with laughing eyes. “Isn’t that the style of the eighteen nineties he’s wearing?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But that would mean he was…”
“Yes. Interesting, isn’t it? For all I know, he might be my great-great-grandfather.”
Gideon stopped trying to do arithmetic in his head; he decided he didn’t want to find a total. In a firm voice he said, “If there’s one thing you’ve taught me, sweetheart, it’s that there should always be room for possibilities.”
—
Since Gideon was feeling a bit travel-worn and wanted to shower and change before dinner, Maggie showed him to the room where his bags had been unpacked and then left him to it, saying she had to make certain all was going well in the kitchen.
He knew at a glance that the room was hers. This was Maggie—from the heavily laden shelves holding books on every conceivable subject from fiction to textbooks to the beautiful old rolltop desk in the sitting area that concealed a very modern computer. The huge, four-poster bed certainly looked more than satisfactory, and the bathroom had been modernized with comfort in mind.
He showered and dressed in more formal clothing to match Maggie’s elegance, thinking for perhaps the thousandth time how much he was going to enjoy being married to her. He’d never be bored, that was for sure.
Like this, for instance. This house, this side of her. She had very deliberately given herself a head start out of Kansas, wanting to change her colors so that he could see her in a setting totally opposite to the one he’d known her in. He was glad she had, because he was thoroughly enjoying the contrast.
But it didn’t really matter. Her varied colors no longer shook him off balance; he saw and understood all the shades of her, appreciating the parts, because he could see the whole.
It was an enchanting whole.
Smiling to himself, Gideon left the bedroom and went downstairs, encountering his love in the foyer where she was looking at a package that had just been delivered.
“Good, it’s here,” he said, joining her.
“What is it?”
“Let’s go into the living room, and you’ll find out when you open it.”
“The last time you brought me a present,” she said as they went into the other room, “it was a box of clown noses.”
Sitting down beside her on the couch, he laughed. “Not this time. Go ahead, open it.”
She did, removing the paper and lifting the lid of the box. Inside, cushioned carefully in tissue paper, was a very old and delicate hand mirror. Despite its obvious age, the mirror had been polished to a perfect finish with no distortions, as bright as a diamond.
“Gideon, it’s beautiful,” she murmured.
He lifted the mirror from the box and held it up, then slowly turned it so that she could see the other side. “Something else you taught me,” he said softly. “What you find on the back side of a mirror depends on how you reached it.”
What he had found was an enchanted place hand-painted in pastel colors, the brushstrokes so airy and delicate that the scene seemed dreamlike. There were unicorns and dragons, elves and rainbows, lions and lambs.
Maggie stared at it for a long moment, then turned and looked up at him, her eyes lit from inside, from the very bottom, as if a star burned there eternally. “It used to hurt when I felt too much,” she whispered, “and I had to turn away, because I was afraid it would disappear if I stared at it. But I don’t have to look away from us, do I?”
“No, you don’t have to look away,” he murmured, laying the mirror aside and gathering her into his arms. “We’re forever. I love you, Maggie.”
“I love you, too, darling…so very much.”
Epilogue
He stood at the balcony door of the hotel room, gazing down on the white strip of sand that was Miami Beach, a very old man with wise dark eyes whose elegant hands were folded over a gold-headed cane.
There was a rare furrow between his snowy brows, an unusual sign of disturbance, and the lovely woman watching him from a nearby chair duly took note.
“Trouble?” she asked quietly.
His voice, rich, low, curiously powerful, was more grave than usual. “I think so. It’s a dangerous thing he’s into.”
“You’ll be there,” she said.
“Yes. Yes, I will.” Somber, he turned to look at her. “But this time I don’t hold all the cards.”
BY KAY HOOPER
The Bishop Trilogies
Stealing Shadows
Hiding in the Shadows
Out of the Shadows
Touching Evil
Whisper of Evil
Sense of Evil
Hunting Fear
Chill of Fear
Sleeping with Fear
Blood Dreams
Blood Sins
Blood Ties
The Quinn Novels
Once a Thief
Always a Thief
Romantic Suspense
The Haunting of Josie
Amanda
After Caroline
Finding Laura
Haunting Rachel
Classic Fantasy and Romance
On Wings of Magic
C.J.’s Fate
Something Different
Pepper’s Way
If There Be Dragons
Illegal Possession
Rebel Waltz
Larger than Life
Time after Time
In Serena’s Web
Raven on the Wing
Rafferty’s Wife
Zach’s Law
The Fall of Lucas Kendrick
Unmasking Kelsey
Outlaw Derek
Shades of Gray
Captain’s Paradise
It Takes a Thief
Aces High
Golden Threads
The Glass Shoe
What Dreams May Come
Through the Looking Glass
The Lady and the Lion
Star-Crossed Lovers
The Wizard of Seattle
The Delaney Christmas Carol
PHOTO: © SIGRID ESTRADA
KAY HOOPER is the award-winning author of Sleeping with Fear, Hunting Fear, Chill of Fear, Touching Evil, Whisper of Evil, Sense of Evil, Once a Thief, Always a Thief, the Shadows trilogy, and other novels. She lives in North Carolina, where she is at work on her next book.
Kayhooper.com
Facebook.com/BishopPage
Read on for an excerpt from
The Lady and the Lion
by Kay Hooper
Available from Loveswept
Prologue
“Who is he?”
“Says his name’s Duncan. Claims to represent a cartel operating out of Colombia.”
“What do you think?”
“His boat’s Colombian registry; so’s the jet.
He spends money like water and throws parties almost every night. He has the locals eating out of his hand.”
“Drug money?”
“Looks that way.”
Guy Wellman drummed his fingers against the desk, frowning. He was a middle-aged man, in good shape, with distinguished gray hair and a self-satisfied expression stamped into his heavy features. That smug expression had eroded over the past months, so that now he seemed more petulant than impressive.
His assistant, a quiet man with a hard face and shuttered eyes, watched his boss unemotionally.
“And he wants to meet me?” Wellman asked finally.
“Says he has a business proposition for you.”
“I don’t touch drugs,” Wellman said emphatically.
“I gather he knows that. My bet is that he wants to smooth the way for his cartel. He said he needed a man of influence and respectability to deal ‘properly’ with officials.”
Wellman scowled. “That bastard Arturo’s already using me—why should I ask this one to do the same?”
After an almost imperceptible hesitation, his assistant said, “If his cartel is as powerful as he says, it wouldn’t hurt to listen to the proposition.”
“All right, all right. Arrange a meeting.”
Chapter 1
The clock on her nightstand softly chimed the hour as Erin Prentice hung up the phone, but she didn’t need to glance at it. Five A.M., ten A.M. in London. It was the best time to catch her father—just after breakfast and before his full schedule of morning meetings. After so many years, she knew his schedule, often to the minute. And though he hadn’t asked it of her, she had automatically suited her schedule to his.
Ironic, she thought. She wasn’t supposed to be on a schedule; that was the point of this vacation. One of them, anyway. But habit died hard. By placing the call at this hour on her first morning in Miami Beach, she had tacitly agreed to call him every morning at the same time, and he would expect her to continue to do so.