by Kay Hooper
It was a long speech for Tucker, and it left Spencer without very much she could say. So she merely nodded and said, “I know that, believe me. Don’t worry—I’ll be careful.” Since his face was expressionless as usual, she wasn’t sure if he had any faith in that promise, but he half nodded before speaking again.
“I haven’t called the police yet.”
“Don’t. Not until I’ve gone. I can’t afford to be tied up here answering questions all day. And don’t mention the papers to them, just the other stuff. I doubt they’ll be much interested anyway, since we didn’t lose anything of value.”
Characteristically, Tucker picked up on the important part of what she’d said. “You’ll leave today, then?”
“If I can get a flight to Paris.” More money, she was thinking worriedly, and no guarantee that she wouldn’t have to wait until Monday for the train to Austria. But what choice did she have? Even though the papers had been stolen, she still had an advantage—she hoped—if she moved quickly enough. It had taken her two months to piece the clues together, and even someone with expert knowledge would have to study all the papers carefully in order to figure it out. Her father had been too close, too familiar with his own work, to see the pattern. With luck it would take anyone else at least a little time to figure it out.
“What about Mr. Haviland?” Tucker asked.
“He isn’t a part of this, I told you that.”
After a moment Tucker said, “Can you afford pride?”
The quiet question was too pointed to ignore, and Spencer managed a twisted smile. “No. But it isn’t just pride. What I did to him was unforgivable, and he has no reason to want to help me now. He has plenty of reason to want to hurt me—I won’t let him use the cross as a weapon.”
“Would he do that?”
Spencer shrugged a little, because she just wasn’t sure, then said, “I’d better go start making phone calls and finish packing. If Dad asks for me, tell him I’ll be up later to see him.”
“Very well.”
Luck was with Spencer, though by this point she wasn’t sure if it was good luck or bad. In any case, she was able to book a seat on an early-afternoon flight to Paris. It meant a scramble to finish packing and take care of the other last-minute details that always accompany a trip, but at least the haste had kept her mind occupied and distracted her from thoughts of Drew and worries about who else was after the cross.
It was a little after noon when she went into her father’s bedroom. There was less time to say good-bye than she would have liked, especially since his health was so precarious, and the guilt of leaving him for days at least and possibly weeks ate at her.
She slipped into the wingback chair by his bed, nodding to the nurse, who took the opportunity to slip out and take a break. Spencer sat silently for a few moments, looking at her father as he dozed, her heart wrung as always because of the change in him since the stroke.
Physically, Spencer had inherited more from her small-boned and delicate mother than from her father, but she had gotten his black hair and gray eyes. Allan Wyatt had been a big, bluff, hearty man, the strength of his very active youth remaining with him well into his sixties, but now he was a gaunt shadow of the man he had been. His thick hair, only lightly graying before the stroke, was now almost pure white, and flesh had melted from his big frame. The stroke had completely paralyzed his right side, dragging down the corners of his mouth and eye, slurring his speech, and both his concentration and memory were erratic from moment to moment.
He had been more alert during the past weeks, seemingly because Spencer had been making her plans to go after the cross, but his doctors had warned her that there was little chance of a recovery.
His eyes opened suddenly, fixing on her and gradually clearing of most of the fog. “Hi, Princess,” he murmured, his deep voice so distorted that only Spencer, Tucker and the nurse would have understood him.
“Hi, Daddy.” She smiled at him, reaching for his left hand as his fingers uncurled invitingly. “Did Tucker tell you? I’m leaving for Paris in just a little while.”
The gray eyes brightened. “That’s what he said. You’re—going after the cross.”
She nodded. “It’s all arranged. A flight to Paris and then a train to Austria.”
“Should fly—all the way,” he muttered, a slight frown creasing his brow. “Into Vienna. Why train?”
Not wanting him to know that money was one of her biggest problems, she said soothingly, “I’ll be able to see more from a train, you know. I’ve never been to Austria, and it’s supposed to be so beautiful. But I promise not to spend too much time sightseeing.”
A ghost of a laugh escaped him. “See it while you’re there. Never know when—there’ll be another chance. Always—take advantage of your—opportunities, Princess. I remember—the first time I was there. . . .”
Spencer listened with a smile as he talked about a long-ago visit on the eve of a war, just before the borders had been closed. She knew the story well and was short on time, but wouldn’t have interrupted him for anything, cherishing every moment she could spend with him now. But when his voice finally trailed off nearly ten minutes later, she knew she had to go.
“Daddy?” She lifted his wasted hand and cradled it against her cheek. “You be good, all right? Listen to Tucker and Mrs. Perry. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”
His gaze, very foggy now, drifted around the room briefly and then found her face. “Yes,” he murmured. “Yes. You—be careful. The cross—isn’t what you think. What you see. Something else. Didn’t write it down. Tell Drew—they hid it inside. Like the clock . . .” His eyes closed heavily, and his breathing deepened in sleep.
Spencer held his hand for a moment longer, then gently tucked it beneath the blankets. His mind had drifted again, assuming Drew would be with her, but she didn’t think he’d been rambling completely. Still, she didn’t understand what he’d meant, and couldn’t spare the time to think it through. She bent over to kiss her father’s gaunt cheek gently, then left the room.
And it wasn’t until she was sitting on the uncomfortable airplane seat and staring out the window at a grayish Atlantic far below that she wondered if her father had tried to tell her something that would turn out to be terribly important. It was just a feeling she had, vague and uneasy, a niggling sense of having missed something somewhere along the way.
What? What was it?
She was too tired to grapple with it just now. She was very conscious of the growing distance between her and her father. And between her and Drew. What would he think when he found out she’d gone? What would he do? She didn’t know. But she wished he was with her now. She hated herself for that, but wished it all the same. She felt very much alone.
DREW SPENT ALL of Saturday morning on the phone. It wasn’t an ideal day in which to seek the kind of information he was after, but that hardly deterred him. He called in favors, bribed, wheedled and badgered. Some might have said that what he was doing was wrong—some, in fact, did say it—but that didn’t stop him, either, and he didn’t take no for an answer. He had found out long ago that with enough nerve, connections, persistence and money, it was possible to get almost any kind of information at any hour of the day or night.
Discretion went by the board. This time he wasn’t probing carefully for hints, but digging for facts. And he got them. By noon he knew that Allan Wyatt had made a series of bad investments just before his stroke, had sold real estate at bargain prices and heavily mortgaged his house in an effort to recoup his losses, and had spent that money just as unwisely. He owed a staggering amount in back taxes, uninsured medical bills and various credit accounts.
And it had all fallen on Spencer’s shoulders.
She had sold her car—buying a cheap rattletrap for transportation to and from the farm—her horses and her jewelry. The family silver was gone and she’d tried every means possible to break her trust fund, without success. Allan’s car and collectibles had gone more slowly,
the reluctance to sell them obvious. Much of the antique furnishings of the house had been sold piece by piece, quietly to private dealers. And there were other economies.
Drew got the whole story, more grim as each fact was revealed, and he knew his instinct hadn’t been at fault. The woman he had believed her to be existed only in his bitter imagination.
That woman would not have accepted the burden of her father’s debts with such quiet, uncomplaining grace. She wouldn’t have negotiated fairly but shrewdly with creditors, earmarked her own trust fund income for debts, or sought a physically demanding job to pay household expenses. And she certainly wouldn’t have withdrawn from the social scene in which she’d been brought up, particularly if marrying a rich man was something she considered an acceptable solution to her financial worries.
Drew had asked her how bad it was, and she had turned the question aside. Wyatt pride? Maybe. But perhaps, Drew realized, that chin-in-the-air Wyatt pride that so angered him wasn’t so much haughtiness as it was sheer bravado. Who was she really? What lay underneath that defiant show of courage? And how could he find the truth when his own words and actions had convinced her that he meant nothing but harm?
chapter five
THE PRIVATE SCHOOLS Spencer had attended had offered a wide range of foreign languages to their students. She had taken Spanish. Unfortunately, she was in France rather than Spain, and the taxi driver she had finally snagged at Orly understood neither English, Spanish, nor sign language.
The communication barrier was heightened by the fact that Spencer wasn’t sure where she wanted to go. Practically any eastbound train would have satisfied her, but according to the schedule she had, nothing was heading east until morning, and she’d made no provisions for an overnight stay in Paris. It was late, and even though her system was still functioning on East Coast time, she was worn out from the travel and the hectic day behind her. All she wanted—and all she could afford—was some place with a bed and plain food, and she tried to communicate that to the taxi driver.
She was beginning to wonder if she’d ever be able to leave the airport tonight when a deep male voice spoke a couple of sentences sharply in flawless French. The taxi driver looked past her left shoulder, instantly bent to pick up the bags from the pavement at her feet and trotted around to put them in his trunk.
Spencer turned, conscious of feeling absurdly guilty.
“Running away from me again, Spencer?” Drew asked mildly.
Standing no more than two feet away from her and dressed almost as casually as she in dark slacks, a black leather jacket and a white shirt open at the throat, he seemed to her, even more than usual, larger than life. Appearing suddenly, and here, almost as if some supernatural force had spirited him across an ocean ahead of her. He shouldn’t have been here; he was supposed to be thousands of miles away, and she wasn’t prepared to face him. Not now. Not yet. He had the unnerving trick of knocking her off balance, and she spoke without thinking with far more emotion in her voice than she liked.
“No, I didn’t run away from you. I won’t do that again.” His eyes narrowed swiftly, but Spencer managed to get hold of herself and added, “What did you do, leave D.C. last night?”
“I left just after you did.”
“Then how—” Spencer realized even before she could finish the question, and answered it herself. “The Concorde.”
Drew nodded, then stepped toward her as the driver came around to open the car door. “Get in, Spencer.”
She found herself doing just that, which appalled her so much that she didn’t trust her voice until Drew was sitting beside her and the taxi was fighting its way through the crush of traffic. God, was she going to meekly do anything the man ordered her to do? It was a terrifying thought.
“Where,” she said at last, “are you taking me?”
“A hotel.” He was half turned toward her, looking at her steadily in the erratic illumination of passing cars and streetlights. “We’re booked on a flight to Salzburg early tomorrow afternoon, with a connection to Innsbruck. There were no direct flights available.”
Silently realizing that he’d apparently had enough time to memorize her itinerary—at least her ultimate destination—no matter how briefly he’d studied it, Spencer took a deep breath and tried to hold her voice steady. “Are you after the gold or the glory?”
It was his turn to take a breath, and his voice sounded as if patience was an effort. “Neither. Look, Spencer, whether you want to admit it or not, you’re in over your head—and that’s no insult to you. The black market for antiquities is a seller’s market all the way, and antiquities are getting scarcer by the day. The players in this game break necks as easily as they break laws. The stakes are very high.”
With the memory of a thief in the night fresh in her memory, Spencer found it hard to protest. But she didn’t want to tell him that she was reasonably sure someone else was after the cross, so she had to at least try to protest. “You talk as if I took out a front-page ad in half the world’s newspapers claiming I could find the cross. I haven’t been that careless, Drew, or that stupid. And Dad’s friend wouldn’t have told anyone, I know he wouldn’t have.”
“What about the government officials who had to be consulted? What about their friends and coworkers? The secretaries who typed the paperwork and their friends? Spencer, the chances of someone saying the right thing to the wrong person may not be high, but they exist. And since I know for a fact that antiquities have been lost in the past because unscrupulous collectors had people on their payrolls inside government houses, I don’t think it’s paranoid to assume at least one wrong person knows you’re going after the cross.”
Spencer stared at him for a moment, then turned her head and gazed out past the driver at scenery she wouldn’t have noticed even if it hadn’t been dark. “All right,” she said finally. “I’ll grant that. You’re probably right. I guess it would be naive of me to think otherwise. But it isn’t your problem. I haven’t asked for your help, or your protection, or—anything else.”
“Why not?” He actually sounded a little amused. “I am considered to be pretty good at the game.”
She sent him one disbelieving glance, then said stiffly, “That’s a stupid question. I may not be terribly bright, but I have sense enough not to ask a shark for help while I’m treading water.”
“Ouch,” Drew murmured. “I suppose I deserved that.” The words were uttered lightly, but there was something else underneath, something a little grim.
This time the look she gave him was a steady one, slightly puzzled and more than a little wary. She wished she could see his expression more clearly, but wasn’t sure that would have helped in any case. “Which game are you playing now, Drew?”
He’d had ample time during the long trip to Paris in which to consider how to convince Spencer that his attitude toward her had changed. After the things he’d said to her, he doubted that she would believe so sudden a transformation, and besides that, he was still uncertain of just what he felt about her. There were still too many questions, and there was too much anger inside him.
As far as he could see, his only course of action lay in helping her to look for the cross. Firstly, because he didn’t like to think of her facing possible danger alone, and secondly, because during that search he might find the answers to his questions. Still, he hadn’t expected it to be easy.
“I’m not playing a game with you, Spencer,” he replied after a moment. “In case you’ve forgotten, Allan and I were very close. I’d like to see his dream in his hands almost as much as you would. Whatever else there is between us—well, that can wait.” He wondered, silently, if it could. Or would.
“You said it was . . . just a matter of time,” she said slowly. “You made me admit that.”
“It is just a matter of time. But you and I have more of that than Allan does. I think I can help you find the cross. I know I can help if there’s trouble.”
“And I’m supposed to trust you?
That’s a lot to ask, don’t you think?”
Drew glanced out of the taxi window, but without much interest, as if he simply needed a moment to gather his thoughts. Then, looking back at her, he said, “Maybe so. Offhand, I can’t think of a good reason why you should trust me—except that you need help and I’m the best.”
Spencer wished she could accuse him of vanity, but she knew that he was the best. Not only knowledgeable enough about art objects and antiquities, he was also quite famous for his instincts and intuition. And if that wasn’t enough, he spoke a dozen languages fluently, was as familiar with most of the world as she was her back-yard and no doubt knew by sight both the collectors and the black market dealers who could pose a threat.
Her instincts told her she could trust him, but she didn’t trust her instincts. Not where he was concerned.
“Don’t fight me on this,” he said softly, watching her so intently that she could feel it.
After a moment Spencer said, “Would it do any good if I did?”
“No. A waste of time and energy.” He reached over suddenly and took one of her hands in his, holding it lightly. She thought he was frowning just a bit as he gazed down at her hand, but wasn’t sure of that. “A dangerous waste. You can’t afford to fight me, Spencer, not while you’re looking for the cross. Right now I’m the best ally you could have.” ’
She knew, only too well, that she didn’t really have a choice. It wasn’t a defeatist thought, it was a logical one. If she said no, he’d only follow her—or get to Innsbruck before her and simply wait. Better to have him close, where she could keep an eye on him. That’s what she told herself.
Besides that, she admitted at least silently that she wanted him here, with her. Not because of the possible danger and not even to help her find the cross, but because . . . She didn’t let herself finish the thought. Wouldn’t let herself. She tried to draw her hand away, but his long fingers tightened around it.