Masquerade

by Janet Dailey

  Another imaginary handkerchief had been dropped. Cole had the feeling he'd been following a trail of them all day. Each time he picked one up and returned it to her, he discovered that he'd gone a little further than he'd planned. The hell of it was that he wanted to be led like this.

  "I could arrange to go that way," he heard himself say.

  "I know you could, but will you?"

  He answered that a few minutes later when he helped her into his car. During the short ride to the Jardin family home in the Garden district, the fragrance of her drifted through the car, accompanied by the whisper of silk that came with her slightest movement. The intermittent glow from the street lamps along St. Charles Avenue, their light broken by the heavy branches of the old oaks on either side of the esplanade, kept her constantly in his side vision, occasionally highlighting a refined cheekbone or shadowing the delicate cut of her jaw. He had the feeling that from now on the ghost of her would always ride with him.

  Following her directions, he turned off St. Charles onto a side street, then turned again and parked the car in front of one of the many old mansions that graced the district. He got out and walked around to open her door. His mother was old-fashioned in many ways, and she'd raised him to always walk a girl to her door, not to let her out at the curb and drive off. It was too deeply ingrained in him to be ignored, even though he knew it would be a mistake to walk Remy to her front door.

  Beyond the delicate lacework of the iron fence and the dark shadows of the lush foliage, the white Doric columns of the mansion's pillared front gleamed wanly in the moonlight. He lightly kept a hand on her elbow as they walked up the banquette to the yard's black iron gate. She pushed it open. The hinges were too well oiled to creak —like the family that owned the property, Cole reminded himself.

  The lights inside the main foyer spilled softly through the leaded glass windows that flanked the big oak door, forming pools on the hard cypress flooring of the front gallery. When they reached the door, with its gleaming brass knocker, she turned to him and held out a key. He stared at it, aware that if he reached for it, he was picking up another lace hankie.

  He willed his expression to remain bland as he took the key from her outstretched hand and inserted it in the lock, silently cursing his mother for the first time in his life. He gave the key a quick turn, telling himself all the while that this was not a date. He didn't have to kiss her goodnight. He didn't have to kiss her at all. Hearing the slide of the bolt, he turned the doorknob and pushed the door inward. As he swung back to give her back the key, she held out her hand, palm up. He hesitated, then dropped the key in the center of it.

  Her fingers immediately closed around it, the polished sheen of her nails flashing in the foyer light. "I enjoyed the show—and your company tonight, Cole." The golden gleam in her eyes challenged him, dared him. "Thanks for the ride."

  "You're welcome," he replied automatically.

  "Good-night," she said, then—to his surprise —she stepped past him into the foyer and made a graceful turn to shut the door on him. When it was half closed, she paused and said, as if only then remembering, "By the way, I met your mother this afternoon. I liked her."

  Stunned, he shot out a hand, blocking the door from swinging the rest of the way shut. As he shoved it back open, she calmly turned and advanced into the foyer. He charged after her.

  "You saw my mother? Where?"

  "I went by her shop on Magazine after I left you at Galatoire's," she said without so much as a backward glance, and she gave her evening bag a toss onto a side table, then crossed to a set of French doors that led onto an expansive courtyard.

  "Why did you go there?" He demanded to know the reason, pushed by a half-formed annoyance that rippled through him at this invasion of his private life.

  She looked over her shoulder, her dimpled smile faintly mocking. "Can't you guess?" she said, and she pulled both doors open wide, then walked through them into the night-darkened courtyard.

  "I don't want to guess, Remy. I want an answer." He followed her outside and immediately felt the liquid heat of the summer night wash over him.

  "Very well." She stopped on a wisteria-covered walkway flanked by white columns, and turned, leaning her shoulders against one of them. "I wanted to meet the woman who gave birth to a man like you."

  Facing her, he couldn't hold on to his anger. He still felt heat, but now it was part of the voluptuous ease of the night. "Why? What difference could it make?"

  "Because I gambled that you'd come when I gave you that ticket this afternoon. I hoped that by seeing your mother I might get some sense of whether or not you'd show up." She paused for a fraction of a second. "When I gave you that ticket, I never once said I wasn't going. You had to know, in the back of your mind, that there was a good chance I'd be there. So ... if you came tonight, I knew it had to mean you were interested in me, despite what you said."

  "And if I hadn't come?"

  There was a tiny lift of her shoulders in a shrug. "Then I would have had to accept that you meant exactly what you said. Not that it matters. You came."

  "Yes—I did." And he was regretting it, too— especially now, alone with her, with this sultriness in the air.

  "I know what I want, Cole. And I want to know you better." She tilted her head to one side. "Am I too aggressive for you? In a man, I know that's a trait to be admired. But some men find it off-putting in a woman. Do you?"

  "No." There was a tightening in his chest—in his whole body. He couldn't get his legs to move, not backward or forward. "What exactly do you want from me? Have you become bored with your proper world and decided to find someone improper to liven things up for you?"

  "Could you liven things up, Cole?" In a single, fluidly graceful move, she straightened up from the column, and he discovered how close to each other they were standing. She lifted her face to him. "Can you liven me up?"

  She was waiting for his kiss, and he knew it. Just as he knew he was going to kiss even before he framed her upturned face in his hands, his thumbs stroking the slender curve of her throat and feeling the heavy thud of her pulse. She looked small and delicate to him, like a porcelain figurine in a glass cabinet at his mother's shop—so very fragile, despite the directness of her eyes. Slowly he lowered his mouth onto her lips. They were soft and incredibly warm. He rubbed his mouth over them, holding himself in tight restraint. But it wasn't easy—it wasn't easy when what he really wanted was to plunder their softness, taste their heat, and make them part with his name. A second later that desire became action.

  Suddenly his hands weren't steady—nothing about him was steady. He pulled back, shaken by how completely she had broken through his will. When she swayed toward him, he slid his hands onto her silk-clad shoulders, keeping her at a safe distance.

  There was a radiance to her face that he didn't remember seeing before as she lifted her hand and traced the shape of his mouth with her fingertips. "Do you always kiss like that?"

  "Not always." His voice sounded too husky, too thick, revealing too much of the way she disturbed him.

  She released a breath of soundless laughter. "I don't think there can be any doubt: you do liven me up—in every way."

  Watching him, listening to him tell of that night, Remy felt the strong pull of attraction. She could easily visualize her persistence and his resistance. "What did you say to that?" she asked when he paused in his telling.

  "I didn't say anything. As I recall, we didn't need words."

  The air seemed to hum between them, vibrating with a sexual tension, as it must have that night. "Did we make love?" Remy wondered.

  "No. It was too soon—too sudden for both of us."

  "I suppose it was." She noticed the guarded way he was studying her, the hint of wariness in his gray eyes, a wariness that suggested that he'd been hurt before. She thought back over his description of their first meeting and the remarks he'd made about the so-called Uptown crowd. "Cole, what happened to make you so distrust someone w
ith my background—my family?"

  A grim, almost bitter smile twisted his mouth. "Which time, Remy?" He turned back to the galley counter. "More coffee?"

  "I—" Suddenly the plane started to shudder and buck violently, throwing Remy sideways against the counter and knocking the cup from her hand.

  In the next second she was grabbed roughly by the waist and hauled against the opposite bulkhead wall, pinned there by the heavy crush of Cole's body. She found herself engulfed in the feel of him, the smell of him. The wild buffeting of the plane continued for several more interminable minutes before it settled into a mild shaking.

  As Cole drew back, his hands continued to grip the hold he'd found. "Are you all right?"

  "Yes." She had room enough to nod, though, like him, she wasn't sure it was over. Unsteady, shaken, she was conscious of a throbbing pain in her hip. No doubt she'd bruised it when she was thrown against the counter. But she was growing more conscious of the pressure of his hips as they held her against the wall, the hard, unmistakably male outline of him making itself felt.

  "It looks like we encountered some turbulence."

  Looking at him, Remy knew that the outside turbulence had moved within. "We certainly did," she said. And it increased further as the gray of his eyes darkened on her.

  "Remy, are you all right back there?" Gabe called, his voice followed by the sound of his footsteps coming up the aisle to the galley.

  His approach chased away the moment of awareness between them, and Cole pushed away from her, his hands moving to lightly grip her shoulders before falling away entirely.

  "I'm fine," she repeated the assurance she'd earlier given Cole. But by then Gabe was already in the galley opening, his gaze immediately fastening on her in concern. Feeling the need to say more, she added, smiling, "A little shaken, but unharmed. I came to get a cup of coffee. Which now happens to be all over the floor," she noticed. "Hand me some towels or something, Cole. We'd better get it wiped up before one of us slips on it." The plane shuddered again, and Remy immediately grabbed hold of the edge of the partition to steady herself.

  "I'll clean it up," Cole said. "Go back to your seat and buckle up. Get some sleep if you can. It's going to be a long flight."

  She went back to her seat, not to sleep but to mull over some of the things Cole had told her. It was obvious that she'd been the pursuer. And it was equally obvious that he hadn't found it easy to trust her because of previous encounters with "her kind." He seemed so strong, so hard, that vulnerable certainly wasn't a word she would have used to describe him—until now. What had happened to make him so leery of her? Had he told her? And did it matter? Without trust, no relationship could survive. Was that what had ultimately caused her to break it off with him? Had she become tired of constantly being forced to prove to him that she cared—tired of defending her family's actions?

  And that brought up another thing: according to Cole, the company was in serious financial shape. In fact, he'd blatantly accused her family of draining it of funds. Earlier Gabe had admitted that the company had been losing money, yet he'd been very definite that it was nothing serious. Which was the truth? And what could either of them gain by lying?

  9

  Somewhere over the Atlantic, Remy managed to doze off. When the plane began its descent to the New Orleans airport, Cole touched her shoulder. "We'll be landing in about ten minutes," he said. "Check your seat belt. There's rain and fog in the area, so it might get a little bumpy."

  Groggily she acknowledged his advice and tried to wipe the sleep from her face as Cole passed the same message on to Gabe, then sat down in his own seat and buckled up.

  With the dimness of the cabin lights, there was little glare on the plane's windows. Turning, Remy gazed out the window at the stars glittering before the rising moon. Below, a blanket of dark clouds hid the city. She felt oddly uneasy, unable to summon any excitement at the prospect of being reunited with her family—of returning home.

  After a fairly smooth descent, the plane broke through the clouds roughly four hundred feet up. All looked black beneath them. Belatedly she remembered that the airport was located on the edge of the swamp and Lake Pontchartrain. From out of the black, the runway approach lights gleamed, twin trails of light pointing the way through the darkness and the wispy fog.

  A cool, light rain fell as Remy stepped off the plane at New Orleans' Moisant International Airport. One of the ground crew ushered her to the building, sheltering her from the pattering drops with an umbrella.

  After a minor delay as they went through immigration and customs, Remy walked into the terminal building itself, flanked by Gabe and Cole and trailed by a porter with their luggage. Cole tipped his head toward her, his gaze fixed on some point ahead of them as he murmured, sotto voce, "It seems the whole family turned out to welcome you home."

  Following the direction of his gaze, Remy located a group of people waiting to greet them. She faltered for a moment. Strangers. They looked like total strangers, all of them. Until that moment she hadn't realized how much she'd hoped that seeing them would spark a memory, if only a long-ago one—as seeing Gabe had done. But there was nothing.

  Refusing to give up, Remy focused on them individually instead of viewing them as a whole, starting first with the woman with the anxious look on her face. A soft-brimmed hat, the same teal-blue color as her raincoat, covered short blond hair that had been artfully faded to a flattering shade of platinum. Her gloved hands held a clutch purse that she gripped tightly.

  When the woman saw Remy approaching, her anxious look disappeared, replaced by a glowing smile that gave a soft, Renoirish radiance to her delicate features. "Remy, my darling." Her voice caught on a happy sob as she glided forward and embraced Remy, hugging her close for a moment, then drawing back to look at her. "It's so good to have you home. You gave us such a scare, vanishing like that. What are we ever going to do with you?" She ran a gloved hand tenderly over her cheek and smoothed the side of her hair in a soothing, motherly gesture. "How are you? Are you all right? They told us you have amnesia. Gracious!" She blinked in sudden surprise. "Do you remember me? I'm your mother."

  "You grow roses." She had a fleeting image of this same woman in a wide straw sun hat, with a basket of freshly cut roses on her arm and a pair of garden shears in her white-gloved hand. That was it. That was all. But it was something, a tiny piece of memory that allowed Remy to truthfully say, "I can remember that."

  "Gracious, yes, I grow roses. Prize roses."

  "How about me? Do you remember your kindly old father?" asked a low, jesting voice.

  Less certainly, Remy turned to the man who was obviously her father, her searching glance taking in the bright twinkle in his brown eyes, the almost total absence of gray in his dark hair, and the tanned, healthy vigor of his face. "I wish I could say I do remember you, but ... I can't." She saw the flash of stark hurt in his eyes and regretted her candor. Smiling, she reached for his hand. "Right now, it's enough to know I have a father who loves me."

  She could tell that her words had pleased him as he gave her hand a squeeze. "What father could not love a daughter like you?" Then his gaze centered on the faint discoloration near her lips, his expression taking on a look of shared pain. "Remy, do you remember anything at all about what happened that night?"

  "No. Nothing. And the specialist at the hospital told me the odds were I would never remember the events directly leading up to my injury. That part of my memory will probably be lost forever."

  "I ... I see," he murmured, his glance dropping to her hand.

  "Now, Frazier." Her mother slipped a gloved hand under the crook of his arm. "That awful incident isn't something we should be dwelling on.

  "Of course not," he agreed, somewhat hesitantly.

  "Well, it doesn't matter whether you remember me or not, Remy," another voice broke in, its heartiness a contrast to her father's quietly serious tone. "I insist on having a hug from my favorite niece."

  Remy turned to her
uncle, a slim version of her more robust father, impeccably groomed in an Italian suit, his handsome features beaming with a smile. "You must be Uncle Marc," she managed to say before she was smoothly drawn into his arms, a dry kiss planted on her left cheek.

  Then he stepped back, holding on to both her hands. "Let me have a look at you," he said, giving her the once-over, then winking. "I must say, you look none the worse for your adventure." He paused to sigh in contentment. "Ahh, Remy, you can't know how worried all of us have been about you."

  "And you can't know how much I needed to hear that a few days ago, when I felt totally lost and forgotten." She smiled.

  "Never forgotten, Remy," he insisted firmly. "Never for one minute."

  She laughed. "Do you always know the right thing to say?"

  "I try," he said, lifting his shoulders in a shrug of modesty.

  "I can't imagine you could have forgotten me, Remy—your dear cousin Lance," a low voice challenged, silken with mockery. "Especially when you consider I'm your least favorite."

  Turning, she forced herself to calmly meet the lazy, taunting regard of his dark, nearly black eyes. "In that case, maybe I shouldn't say it's good to see you, Lance."

  He stood before her, one hand idly thrust in the side pocket of his pleated trousers, in a pose of negligent ease that smacked of arrogance. His hair was the same near-black shade as his eyes, its thickness skillfully and smoothly combed away from his face. His lips had a woman's fullness to them, yet on him it looked sexy instead of effeminate. And when he smiled—as he was doing now—there was a faintly sarcastic curl to his upper lip. Gabe was right—Lance was "handsome as the devil."

  "I don't know why anyone worried about you," he said. "Your memory may be impaired, but your tongue is as sharp as ever."

  Before she could show him precisely how sharp it could be, three women converged on her with effusive welcomes, hugging her and kissing the air near her cheek.