“For anything you want.” He took her hands in his. “I can’t begin to tell you what it did to me when I thought something had happened to you.” It was time to stop playing it safe, he told himself. Time for admission because life could be very short and what he had with Natalie was rare. He’d been a fool to walk away from it, even for the best of reasons. “I never stopped loving you, Natalie.”
“Then why did you disappear like that?” she wanted to know. “An occasional card on Christmas would have been nice.”
The only defense he had was the truth. “I left for your own good. It wasn’t for mine.” However, that was in the past, and he was going to find a way to make this work, no matter what. “But I realized that I really can’t make it without you.”
He watched her face, afraid of what her answer might be. Matt was incredibly relieved to see her smile. “Took you long enough.”
Thank you, God. I owe you one, he thought. “Some of us are slow learners.”
She bit her tongue to keep from making a comment. Instead, she asked, “Now what?”
This was where his agenda came in. He’d already made plans. “Now I’m going to take a few weeks off and show you a good time. And then, after we get back, you can decide if you want to marry me.”
It took everything she had not to let her mouth drop open. But she managed. “I already made that decision,” she told him. “Eight years ago.”
Oh damn, how did one man get to be so lucky, he wondered. There was another side to the legend of the ring, he recalled. That in the right hands, it brought true love almost immediately. Neither one of them had laid their hands on the ring, but it was as if it was still working its magic.
“And you haven’t changed your mind?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “Not even when I wanted to fillet you. Idiot,” she declared, lacing her arms around his neck. “I gave my heart away once—and it never came back.” She sighed, as if resigned. “You still have it.”
His arms closed around her. “Nice to know,” he told her.
He was watching the Rothchild woman from across the casino floor. She had a lot more class than her twin’d had, but that wasn’t going to save her. Class or breeding, or whatever the hell they wanted to call it, wasn’t going to save any of them.
They were all living on borrowed time.
He was going to bide his time and take them out, one by one, the way he’d promised he would in his note to the old man.
Sins of the fathers, he thought, feeling righteous. They couldn’t avoid their fate.
But for now, Patrick Moore was going to enjoy himself by getting under her skin like the media reporter he was pretending to be. Unlike Candace, he knew that Natalie Rothchild hated publicity and shunned it. She just wanted to live her life like an ordinary woman.
But she wasn’t an ordinary woman. She was a Rothchild, and all the Rothchilds had to pay for what they’d done to his father. To his mother. And thus, to him.
Coming to life just as he saw the Rothchild woman kiss her companion, Patrick elbowed and pushed his way through the crowd. As he did, he raised his voice, calling out her name, doing his best to ruin her moment and get people to look in her direction.
“Hey, Natalie! Detective Rothchild! Word’s out that they caught your sister’s killer. What do you have to say about that? Think they’ve got the right person, or is he or she still out there, waiting to get another one of you?”
He got a kick out of asking, out of taunting her. It was doubly delicious because he knew the deranged old woman hadn’t killed Candace.
He had.
Not on purpose, but by accident. But hell, that accident felt damn good when he realized she was dead. One look at her face had told him Candace Rothchild had posed for her last picture.
As he drew closer to his target, Patrick held a press card over his head to identify himself. It was like a brazen shield that indicated he had every right to bombard her with invasive questions. He knew it infuriated her.
Shoving people out of the way, he was intent on getting right up into Natalie’s face, and the crowd was making that almost impossible. Getting into her face was part of his plan. He’d already done it twice to her father. He intended to do it to all of them, to make all their lives as miserable as possible—just before he ended them.
“Damn it, get out of my way,” he cursed, punching the heavyset man in front of him in the kidneys.
Rather than doubling up, the man swung around and punched him in the face. Ten feet short of Natalie, Patrick Moore found himself entangled in a fistfight with a beefy stranger who was growling curses at him.
Patrick had always had a short fuse, and it had only gotten shorter with time. It took very little to unleash his maniacal side. He swung back, trading blows with the stranger. The man clearly outweighed him, but Patrick had been raised on the street. As a street fighter, he knew every dirty move there was.
Blessed with antennae when it came to his own survival, above the stranger’s cursing and the crowd cheering them on, Patrick heard the man with Rothchild calling for security. The next second, the guy came running over to break up the fight himself.
Security would call the police!
The thought telegraphed itself through his brain, ushering in a sense of panic. He wasn’t afraid of the police, or being in jail. Hell, he could do time standing on his head. But he couldn’t afford to have the police frisk him. They’d find the ring in his pocket.
Damn it, what was he going to do now?
Out of the corner of his eye, as Patrick ducked out of the way of another punch and gauged that his opponent’s arms were getting too heavy for him to keep swinging them like that, he saw a tall, willowy blonde in a body-clinging red minidress. She was almost tottering from side to side in her stiletto heels. The blonde looked a little spooked and definitely out of her element.
An out-of-towner, he thought. Even so, there was something about her that set her apart. Patrick was confident that he’d be able to pick her out of a crowd if he had to.
Besides, he didn’t have much of a choice.
Swinging around, he deliberately brought the fight into her area, knocking the other guy into her. The oversized purse she was hanging on to as if her very life depended on it went crashing to the ground. Its contents came flying out.
In the middle of the fight, Patrick flung an apology her way, grabbing up the purse and holding it out to her before the other man hit him again. What neither she, his flagging opponent nor the crowd that had gathered around them seemed to notice was that Patrick Moore swiftly transferred the Tears of the Quetzal from his pocket into the depths of the cavernous purse.
“Break it up!” Matt shouted, ramming his shoulder between the two men. “You boys want to go down to the precinct to cool off?”
“Hell, he started it,” the offended stranger complained, gasping for breath. “I was just trying to get back to the slot machines.”
“Sorry, man. Lost my head,” Patrick mumbled, nursing his cut lip. “If I don’t get in a good story by the end of the day, my editor’s going to fire me. I got a family to feed.”
The other man looked instantly sympathetic. But Matt didn’t.
“Well, you’re not getting a story here,” Matt informed him, moving so that his body actually blocked the man’s access to Natalie.
Patrick held up his hands, as if surrendering. Right now, it was important to just be able to slip away. There was time enough to get back to the Rothchild bitch. She wasn’t going anywhere.
“Okay, okay, sorry. Won’t happen again,” he promised, backpedaling.
“See that it doesn’t.” Matt turned back to Natalie, already forgetting the incident. Having the pair arrested would mean more paperwork, and he had something better to do. He had a date with a beautiful lady and a lot of lost time to make up for.
Seeming to rub his cut lip, Patrick hid his smile behind his hand and then looked around.
The smile vanished.
> As had the woman with the oversized purse.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-3153-9
THE HEIRESS’S 2-WEEK AFFAIR
Copyright © 2009 by Harlequin Books S.A.
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The Heiress’s 2-Week Affair Page 17