by Kay Hooper
This time, however, he sensed no threat.
The man continued to watch them unobtrusively, moving within the general area so that he didn’t remain in any one place too long. From the shadowy interior of a barn hall, he saw Spencer ride the black stallion into one of the training rings, his gaze straying to Drew, who stood at the fence watching her. He studied Drew for long minutes, then checked his watch and eased away toward the parking area.
He used the phone in his car to place a call, and as soon as the connection was made said, “There may be a problem.”
“What is it?”
“She has a visitor today—and I don’t think he came here to see the horses.”
“So? With her looks, it’d be a little strange if she didn’t have men coming to see her.”
The man in the car grimaced slightly. “There’s no love lost between these two, believe me. I’ve seen blood enemies that were friendlier.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is that her visitor is Drew Haviland.”
There was a long silence, then a soft oath.
The man in the car nodded to himself. “Yeah. From what I’ve heard, he isn’t a man to make a fool of himself over a woman, but he’s gone a hell of a lot farther than Austria to pick up a nice new bauble for his collection.”
“You think he knows about the cross?”
“Look, all I can tell you is what I’ve seen. He showed up late last night at the Wyatt house, and when he left I wouldn’t have wanted to get in his way. Something had him ticked off plenty. He’s been here for hours. He and the girl aren’t saying much to each other, but he’s watching her like a hawk. So you tell me.”
“I don’t know—but I don’t think we can take any chances. It would have been easier and safer to let her find the cross for us and bring it back here, but if Haviland knows she’s going after it he could complicate things.”
“That’s an understatement,” the man in the car muttered. “You know his rep as well as I do—if he gets a good look at Wyatt’s papers, you might as well kiss the cross good-bye. Even worse, if she won’t let him see them and he decides to tag along after her, we won’t be able to get close enough to grab the cross.”
“You sound a bit intimidated, Clay.”
The mockery had no effect on Clay, who merely said, “I count myself handy in a fight, but you aren’t paying me enough to take on Haviland. I had it from somebody who knows—the man can handle himself and gets a bit touchy when you try to take things away from him.”
“That’s assuming he gets his hands on the cross before we do.”
“You changing the plan?”
“I don’t want to take any chances. We need Wyatt’s papers. Can you get in and get them?”
“Piece of cake, I told you that before. But even if we can figure out where the cross is, getting it out of Europe is going to be hell. The girl has permission to bring it back here, but we certainly don’t.”
“You worry too much, Clay. We’ll get the cross out. It’ll take more time and effort, but we’ll get it.”
“What about the girl? When the papers come up missing, she’ll know someone else is interested in the cross.”
“Spencer Wyatt,” his employer said contemptuously, “is no threat to us no matter what she knows. And Haviland won’t be as long as we get to Austria ahead of him. Just get the papers, Clay. Tonight.”
“Yeah, all right,” Clay responded, then added, “but I think I’ll make it look like a common robbery just to be a little safer.”
“Suit yourself. Can you watch those two the rest of the afternoon?”
Clay frowned a little as he stared through the windshield. “Depends. The way Haviland’s watching her, I doubt he’s even seen me—but I could get real visible if he took a look around. I’ll have to play it by ear.”
“Stay there if you can. If not, come back here. She’ll go straight home after she’s finished for the day, won’t she?”
“Always does. And she doesn’t go out at night. Crying shame, if you ask me.”
“I didn’t ask you.”
“Right.”
“Check in later.”
“Right,” Clay repeated, and broke the connection. He sat in his car a few minutes longer, frowning, feeling a growing uneasiness. He didn’t like wild cards, and from all he’d heard Drew Haviland was definitely that. And though his boss might have a poor opinion of Spencer Wyatt, Clay had his doubts about that, too. He’d watched the lady handle people and horses over the past weeks, and he thought there just might be both smarts and steel underneath her delicate exterior.
He was beginning to wish he’d never hired on for this job.
“ IT’S PAST TWO, ” Drew said when Spencer had finally stabled a much more relaxed Devil. “Don’t you eat lunch?”
Spencer automatically glanced at her watch, but she was already heading toward another stall when she answered. “I’m not hungry.”
Drew took two long strides and caught her arm, pulling her around to face him. “According to Bartlet you’ve been here since seven this morning, and I haven’t seen you take a break during the past five hours.”
Very conscious of his grip on her arm, of the way he towered over her despite the high heels of her riding boots, and of her own weariness, Spencer found it very difficult to keep her voice steady and calm. But she tried. She did try. “I haven’t taken a break because I haven’t needed one.”
“Are you lying out of habit, or do you just want me to feel sorry for you?” he snapped.
She jerked free of his grasp, wanting to back away from him but holding her ground. Ignoring the taunt, she said, “I have one more horse to ride today. Will you please let me do my job?”
“Answer my question,” he ordered flatly, both his hands catching and holding her shoulders with a force that stopped just short of pain.
She could feel her control slipping. All during the hours he’d been there she had felt it diminish, seeping away from her relentlessly, until now it was not more than a thin veneer. He’d said very little, but she had felt his eyes on her, heard in her mind all the unspoken mockery and had waited with a kind of numb apprehension for him to start cutting at her.
Waiting for it had been worse, she thought, than coping with it would have been. The tension of being certain that he was going to start needling her any moment had destroyed her tenuous peace. She’d found no comfort in working with the horses today, no sense of achievement or triumph. She just felt sore all over from her fall earlier, unusually tired, and her nerves were so raw she was very afraid she’d burst into tears any moment.
But not in front of him. Please, God, not in front of him.
In a carefully steady voice that betrayed more than she knew, she said, “I’m not lying, Drew. I’m not hungry, and I don’t want to take a break. I just want to get Corsair out of his stall and saddle him up and take him over the jumps. Please let go of me so I can do that.”
A frown drew his brows together, and his eyes probed her face so sharply that she almost felt them cut her. “The horse can wait,” he said, his tone a little rough. “You may not want to admit it, but you’d have a hard time lifting a saddle right now.”
Spencer didn’t hear concern in that statement; she heard criticism, and it easily pierced what was left of her self-control. “Don’t,” she murmured, hating the thready sound of her voice but unable to steady it. “You’re entitled to your revenge—at least from your point of view—but not this, please.”
“What are you talking about?” Drew demanded, his frown deepening.
“I need this. The horses, the people here . . . Don’t ruin it for me.” Spencer had the most peculiar feeling of distance, as if she were floating away from him. Light-headed. That was it, she decided vaguely. It had come over her all of a sudden and she was puzzled by the sensation. She also didn’t understand why she couldn’t stop talking, but her mouth seemed to have a mind of its own. “I have to have this, or I couldn’t do
the rest. It isn’t much, you can let me have this, can’t you? You don’t have to destroy everything, I didn’t do that to you . . .”
“Spencer, did you eat breakfast?”
She frowned up at him. “I wasn’t hungry. Let go of me now. I have to get Corsair—”
Drew said something extremely violent under his breath, then put a hard arm around her and led her out of the barn. He was moving her along so rapidly that Spencer felt even more dizzy, and it wasn’t until he put her in the passenger seat of a racy-looking sports car that she managed to protest.
“I can’t leave now. I have to—”
“Be quiet,” Drew said roughly, folding his length easily behind the wheel and starting the engine with a roar.
She thought maybe she’d better be quiet, because he looked very angry. For twelve years she had thought him an utterly calm, even unemotional man, and she wondered now how she could have believed that. Surely there’d been signs, indications that his unruffled surface was misleading? Why hadn’t she seen that? Had Reece’s bright, temperamental glitter blinded her to everything?
She was still thinking about that, her mind locked methodically in a single puzzling track, when Drew parked the car in the lot of a small restaurant. He got out and came around to open her door, then took her arm firmly when she rather carefully got out.
“I’m not dressed,” she protested as he led her toward the entrance.
“Of course you’re dressed.” His voice was calm again, but curiously controlled, as if the composure was deceptive.
“I mean I’m not dressed right,” she tried to explain. “You have to dress right, so people think you belong. I’m wearing riding clothes, not—” She broke off abruptly, finally hearing the little voice in her head that was telling her to shut up before she made a total fool of herself.
She didn’t say another word while an attentive hostess conducted them to a booth in the back of the nearly deserted restaurant, and she didn’t realize that Drew had ordered for both of them until a glass of milk was placed in front of her. She frowned at it.
“Drink it,” he said quietly.
Spencer had never been very good at following autocratic orders—probably because of her father’s indulgence—but every instinct now told her it would be safer to do as Drew ordered. She picked up the glass and began sipping the milk, watching him steadily. The light-headedness she’d been aware of faded by the time she finished the milk, and she slowly realized that skipping meals had finally caught up with her. No breakfast this morning, and she’d only picked at her dinner last night—no wonder she’d felt so peculiar.
He probably thought she was making a ploy for his sympathy. The way he was watching her, she couldn’t be sure. Her gaze skittered away from his and fixed itself on the polished tabletop as she tried to fight the hot surge of embarrassment.
“Better?” he asked, still quiet.
She nodded. “Thanks. Sorry I made a fool of myself.”
“You didn’t. But you did say a few things you’re going to have to explain.”
Spencer glanced up at him fleetingly, then looked away again. “I don’t think—”
“Not now,” he interrupted. “After we’ve eaten.”
She didn’t have the energy to protest. Instead, she sat silently until the food arrived, then began eating. She couldn’t have said later what she ate, and she still didn’t feel at all hungry, but ate simply because her body and Drew thought she needed food. And she did feel better for it. He ate as well, watching her from time to time, but said nothing until they finished the meal.
Their waitress came to take the plates and offer dessert—which both Spencer and Drew refused—and coffee. They accepted the coffee, and Spencer was once more conscious of her worn and somewhat dusty riding clothes as she watched the pretty blond waitress smile at Drew. To be tall and blond like him, that’s what she had wanted all those years ago. To have blue eyes instead of her indeterminate gray—
She cut the thoughts off sharply, determined to teach herself to stop thinking like that. Especially around Drew. “Now,” he said as the waitress reluctantly went away with her coffeepot, “I think we have a few things to discuss.”
Spencer shook her head a little. “Whatever I said back there at the farm isn’t important. You were right. I needed a break and something to eat. I didn’t know what I was saying.”
He ignored that. “You said that you had to have this—meaning your work at the farm—or you couldn’t do the rest. What did you mean by that, Spencer?”
She’d promised herself she wouldn’t lie to him, wouldn’t pretend to be anything she wasn’t, but she didn’t want him to know how bad things were. “Just—coping. Dad’s illness. Having to take care of things. That’s all.”
“Financial problems?”
“Nothing I can’t handle,” she said stubbornly.
His eyes narrowed slightly, but instead of persisting he said, “You said you supposed I was entitled to my revenge. And the bit about me ruining your work, destroying everything? What did you mean?”
Spencer managed a shrug. “You made it pretty plain last night that you’re out to . . . even the score. I just—I’m asking you not to mock me or belittle my work.” Her gaze dropped to her coffee cup. “I know you probably think it’s hilarious, to say nothing of trivial, but I—I enjoy working with horses, and I’m good at it. It’s the only time I feel . . . Well, never mind.”
“I never said it was hilarious or trivial.”
She shrugged again. “When you showed up this morning, I expected you to say something like that.”
“Because I want revenge?”
“It wasn’t difficult to figure out. I can’t—I can’t fight you with words, Drew, you use them too well. I found that out last night.”
chapter four
“SOISTRUCK a nerve or two,” he said.
“Weren’t you trying to do just that?” When he remained silent, she looked up at him suddenly. “Maybe I deserved it, maybe I deserved everything you said to me.”
“Don’t you know if you deserved it?” he asked with a trace of mockery in his voice.
Spencer wondered what she really thought about that, but shook her head a little and said, “It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters to me right now is finding the cross, and if you intend to interfere with that—”
“Wait a minute,” he interrupted, frowning. “You aren’t seriously planning to try to find the cross?”
“I know you thought it was a terrific joke,” she said evenly, “but I wasn’t kidding. My father believed the cross existed when no one else did, and I am not going to let him die without knowing he was right.”
“You don’t know that he was right about it. And even granting its existence, experts have looked for the thing without luck. For God’s sake, Spencer, think a minute. Even if you had a hope in hell of finding the cross—which you don’t—just how do you propose to get it out of Austria? In case you don’t know, it would be considered a national treasure.”
She laughed softly, but it wasn’t a sound of amusement. “I guess I’m not as stupid as you think I am. I have permission from the authorities in Austria to bring the cross back here for Dad to see. They’ll arrange transport as soon as I can find the cross, and provide a courier to keep me honest. No matter what you believe, I don’t intend to try to keep the thing for myself.”
If anything, Drew’s frown had deepened, and his gaze was very sharp. “What did you tell the authorities?”
Spencer wondered why it mattered, but shrugged and answered anyway. “I told them I’d gone over Dad’s papers, and I thought I had a good chance of finding the cross. An old friend of Dad’s works for the government over there, and he vouched for me. Like you, they don’t believe I can do it, but they’re willing to stand ready just in case.”
After a moment Drew said, “According to your itinerary, you leave Monday morning.”
She remembered then that the itinerary had been jotted down
on the topmost sheet of the legal pad on her father’s desk, and remembered Drew studying it when she’d come into the study last night. From what he’d said then, she had decided that he hadn’t seen anything important, but she wondered now if he’d seen all he needed to. He would know where she was going.
She tried to concentrate. Did he hate her enough that he would go after the cross himself, or somehow take it away from her if she found it, just for spite? If he found the cross it would certainly gild his already world-renowned reputation, and that success might appeal even more to him than the cross itself. And besting her would be revenge of a sort.
“Spencer?”
She didn’t know what kind of game he was intent on playing. He had voiced a promise to take her, to make her surrender to him completely, yet today he seemed—what? Less forceful somehow, less definite in his intentions. He had even been kind in a sense, bringing her here and making certain she ate something. But had his motives changed, or was he simply playing a more subtle and ultimately more destructive game of cat and mouse?
“Yes,” she said finally. “I leave Monday.”
“And your contact in Austria knows that?”
What was he getting at? “Of course he knows.”
“That may not have been a smart move, Spencer.” For once, he seemed totally serious and not at all mocking. “The experts might have laughed at Allan, but I know a dozen collectors who’ve just been waiting for someone to find the cross, and more than one of them wouldn’t hesitate to kill in order to get it.”
It was a new idea to her, and she wondered if he was just trying to scare her enough that she wouldn’t search for the cross. Still . . . this was far more his area of expertise, and perhaps it was a sincere warning. She just didn’t know.