by Kay Hooper
He wanted to carry her into the bedroom and press her back into the softness of the bed, cover her slender body with his. Tortured by the erotic feel of her breasts against his chest, he wanted them naked in his hands, wanted to take her nipples into his mouth and stroke them with his tongue, taste them. He wanted to feel her satiny legs wrap around him as he settled between them, feel her soft heat sheathe his aching flesh.
He wanted her to belong to him.
Suddenly certain that if he didn’t stop now he wouldn’t be able to, Drew tore his mouth from hers. He held her against him, trying not to hold on too hard and hurt her, while he struggled to regain at least a fingertip grasp on his control. He wasn’t at all sure he could do it; his heart was slamming in his chest, every rasping breath was like fire in his aching throat and his muscles were so rigid they quivered from the strain.
It was several long moments before he was able to slide his hands up to her shoulders and ease her trembling body away from him. Her arms fell to her sides as she stared up at him, and her eyes were wide, dazed, her lips a little swollen and reddened from his fervent passion. There was color in her face now, a soft flush of desire, and knowing he’d kindled that heat almost made him forget his good intentions.
But he managed, barely, to stop himself from yanking her back into his arms. “Go to bed, honey,” he said in a thick voice. “I’ll see you in the morning.” He took his hands off her with an effort and moved away, crossing the room to stare once more out into the dark Paris night.
“Drew?” Her voice was husky.
He turned his head, looking at her as she stood hesitantly in the doorway to her bedroom. “Go to bed,” he repeated, his voice more normal now.
She swallowed visibly. “Why? I wouldn’t have said no.” The admission was clearly difficult but honest.
“You wouldn’t have said yes.”
Spencer shook her head a little, bewildered. “I wouldn’t have stopped you.”
“I know. But it isn’t the same thing.” He managed a faint smile. “Get some rest. Tomorrow will probably be a long day.”
After a moment she turned away and went into her bedroom, closing the door softly behind her.
Drew glanced toward his own bedroom, but knew without even thinking about it that he wouldn’t be able to sleep. Luckily, he really didn’t require much sleep, and was able to function quite well for days at a time with very little rest. He looked at the envelope containing copies of Allan Wyatt’s notes. At least he could occupy his mind and possibly distract his thoughts from Spencer’s presence in the next room.
His entire body ached dully, and when he moved toward the phone it was slowly. He’d managed to contain his desire, but it was like a storm trapped under glass, the fury restrained illusively but not in the least diminished. God, he’d waited twelve years for her and he didn’t know how much longer he could stand it. The need he felt intensified by the hour, and his control was wearing away under the force of it.
And he hadn’t yet been able to ask the one question that had haunted him for years, the one question that, more than any other, he needed to have answered. Why? Why had she run away from him to marry another man?
He called room service, requesting that the remains of their meal be removed and ordering a large pot of coffee. He had a long night ahead of him, he knew.
A very long night.
SPENCER HADN’ T EXPECTED to sleep well. The brief, passionate interlude between them had left her feverish, aching and more than a little confused. It didn’t make sense, he didn’t make sense, and she didn’t know what to think.
In the end, she was too exhausted to think at all. She called home to let Tucker know she’d arrived safely in Paris and to check on her father. Her father was fine, Tucker told her, and seemed at ease because, he’d said several times, Drew was with her.
“He is with me,” she reported with more than a little wryness.
“He came to the house,” Tucker said in his usual expressionless voice. “Upset, but not angry, I thought. He guessed you’d gone to Paris.”
“Umm. He got here before me. The Concorde.”
“He can help you,” Tucker said.
“It looks like he’s going to.” Spencer sighed. “Anyway, I’ll call you tomorrow, from Austria.”
She hung up after saying good-bye, wondering if her father was still lost in the past or merely psychic. She climbed into the big, lonely bed, turned out the lamp on the nightstand and was almost instantly asleep. She slept dreamlessly for more than eight hours, waking to a bright, quiet room that was briefly unfamiliar. Then she remembered. A hotel. She was in a hotel in Paris, and Drew was here, too.
Keeping her mind carefully blank on that point, Spencer slid from the bed, relieved to find that her weariness was gone and that she felt better physically than she had in a long time. She took a quick shower to finish waking up, then dressed as casually as she had the day before in white jeans and a pale blue sweater, putting her hair in a single braid to fall down her back and applying only a bare minimum of makeup.
It was only when she was sitting on her bed putting on her comfortable shoes that she caught herself listening intently for some sound of Drew in the next room. Awareness of what she was doing shattered the careful blankness of her mind, and she sighed a bit raggedly.
In the light of the morning it still didn’t make sense. At her house, Drew had been cruel and scathing, promising to take her, to make certain she was in thrall to him. At the farm the next day he’d been cool and calm at first, then a little mocking, then angry, but not like before, not cruelly angry, and he’d talked to her without tearing her to shreds. Then, last night, he had been quiet and watchful, careful, it seemed to her, as if he were trying to guide their relationship in a new direction. He had begun taking care of her. He had even apologized for having misjudged her, and when he’d held her in his arms and kissed her so hungrily, when she’d been totally unable to resist the desire he’d ignited between them, he had pulled away.
Not saying no, he had said, wasn’t the same as saying yes.
Spencer stared at the door leading out into the sitting room, wondering which man was out there. Complicated? The man was baffling. Had his opinion of her really changed? Or was he still bent on revenge? She didn’t know.
And then there was the other matter, the cross. Unless he disagreed with her conclusions and could state flatly that there was no chance of finding it, they’d be searching for the cross together. She had to tell him about the stolen papers. He needed to know that.
Spencer rose to her feet and unconsciously squared her shoulders. There was nothing she could do except just go on, one step at a time, the way she’d learned to these past months. Whatever Drew intended, worrying about it wasn’t going to help her a bit, and fretting over the cross wouldn’t do her much good, either. She had to keep going, that was all. One step at a time.
She opened her door quietly and went out into the sitting room. The television near the window was on, tuned to a news program with the volume down low, and Drew was on the couch. The copies of her father’s papers were spread out on the cushions beside him and on the coffee table, along with a large map of Austria. He was holding several sheets of paper in his hand, and looked up from them when she came in.
“Good morning,” he offered quietly.
“Barely,” she conceded, managing a smile. “I didn’t mean to sleep so late.”
“Do you good.” He nodded toward the dining table. “The coffee’s still hot, and there’s fruit and rolls. If you’d rather have something more substantial—”
“No, that’s fine.” She went over to the table and sat down, reaching for a cup. While she ate breakfast she watched him covertly. She had the feeling he hadn’t gone to bed at all, and a glance into his room showed her a neatly made bed with no signs of having been occupied. His golden hair was still a little damp from a recent shower and he’d changed into jeans and a dark sweater. Like her, he was wearing comfortable ru
nning shoes.
He was intent on studying the papers, going through those in his hands slowly and methodically before setting them aside and reaching for more. He made several notes on a legal pad resting on the arm of the couch, and once leaned forward to study the map with a considering gaze.
Spencer couldn’t guess what he thought. She finished her breakfast and carried her coffee over to the sitting area, taking the chair at right angles to him. Drew looked up to watch her for a moment, still without expression, then gathered the papers into a neat stack on the coffee table.
“Well?” she said finally, unable to stand it a moment longer.
His cool blue eyes warmed slowly, and a crooked smile curved his lips. “You’re your father’s daughter,” he said softly.
chapter six
SHE FELT A jolt of relief, mixed with an unfamiliar feeling of accomplishment. “You think I’m right?”
“I think you did a hell of a fine job.” Drew’s tone was very deliberate. “The only reason I found it was that I knew your destination was Innsbruck. I sorted out the references to that area and backtracked. I never would have seen it otherwise. How did you figure it out, Spencer?”
“I didn’t for a long time,” she said a bit wryly. “I went over those papers every night for more than a month, and all I got was a headache. You’ve studied them. Because so many experts said it didn’t even exist and never had, Dad had done most of his research trying to establish that Maximilian I did have the cross commissioned in 1496 when he arranged the marriage of his son to the daughter of the king of Spain. I decided to assume he was right, and to weed out all the references before 1618, when the cross was supposed to have vanished at the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War.”
He was listening intently, wondering if she had any idea how assured she sounded—and how expert. She may not have been trying to learn from Allan, but she had obviously absorbed much more than she’d realized. “So then you were left with about a quarter of Allan’s original notes.”
“Right. I started from the point where the Protestants in Bohemia revolted in 1618. There was one contemporary reference, a report to Rome written by a priest, that mentioned something about how the Protestants had stolen a cross—the cross, Dad believed—from the Hapsburgs. That didn’t make sense to me. I mean, why would they? They were fighting for their rights, but I didn’t see why they would have stolen a cross. It’s a Protestant symbol, too.
“So I wondered if maybe somebody had had the bright idea to hide the cross—someplace safe—and claim it was stolen, just for personal gain. Or to fan the flames. It did seem to do that—the Protestants made a number of denials that they’d stolen anything, but the Hapsburgs’ vague accusations seemed to carry more weight. Still, the priest was the only one who mentioned what, exactly, was supposed to have been stolen.”
As far as Drew remembered, that theory had never been advanced by any of the so-called experts, and it showed, on Spencer’s part, a direct and coolheaded understanding of human nature that was surprising in a woman who had been very sheltered for most of her life. It also caused his opinion of her intelligence, gaining ground rapidly, to take another leap forward. “And you focused on the priest, because his was the only contemporary reference that was specific.”
“Yes, and because he’d mentioned the theft in a report to Rome—it was like official notification that things were getting out of hand and something had to be done about it quickly. There was almost an air of smugness in the way he worded it, like he knew something, and I wondered if he did.”
Allan Wyatt had never been known for his intuition, but his daughter was showing a definite flair for sensing undercurrents and reading between the lines, Drew thought. He had the feeling that if he commented on it, she’d shrug off any claim to talent and merely say it had been a lucky guess, but Drew knew only too well that inspired guesses came from intuition—and that hers had been inspired.
She went on in a matter-of-fact voice. “I managed to find the rest of the report—Dad didn’t have it with his notes, but he had translated it—and saw that it had been sent from Innsbruck. That was a long way from Bohemia, and a long way from other areas that had been searched for the cross.”
Slowly, Drew said, “Earlier researchers who accepted the existence of the cross also accepted the theft, so they’d searched the areas closer to Bohemia, where the revolt had taken place, and closer to the family seat.” He nodded again. “Very good, Spencer. And then?”
She looked momentarily confused, as if the praise had surprised her, then went on. “Well, I doubted the original idea was the priest’s, or that he had access to the cross even if he’d wanted to steal it, so there had to be at least one of the Hapsburgs who took it to Innsbruck and hid it. By using the date of the priest’s report, and comparing it to the letters and journals that Dad had copied or collected over the years, I found out that one of the Hapsburgs—Kurt—was in Innsbruck visiting his sweetheart during the same time the priest was there. He’d written half a dozen letters to a friend of his, and since the friend was related to at least three royal families his letters turned up around the turn of this century in a Vienna museum, where Dad had found them and made copies. He wanted anything mentioning any of the Hapsburgs, but hadn’t connected those particular letters to the cross. Luckily for me, though, he had translated them verbatim, and that’s how I found the clues.”
Drew glanced at the legal pad beside him and said, “The trips Kurt took into the mountains with a friend.”
Spencer nodded. “They were very chatty letters, weren’t they? Very descriptive of the scenery. On the surface the details seemed almost casual, but when I studied them with the idea that Kurt and his friend—probably the priest—were searching for a place to hide the cross, they really stood out. Kurt had also asked his friend to keep the letters, which struck me as odd until I wondered if he’d used them to record where he’d hidden the cross on the chance that he might forget.”
“If hiding the cross was just meant to be a temporary measure,” Drew said, “then why do you think it never turned up again?” His tone wasn’t disbelieving, just curious, as if he wanted to hear her opinion.
Spencer had given that a lot of thought, and she’d found an answer that had satisfied her. “I think that Kurt never intended to return it to the rest of the family,” she said dryly. “He was from a junior branch of the Hapsburgs, and from his letters I’d say he was awfully ambitious. He’d tried several times to finagle more power within the family, without success. I think he took the cross to Innsbruck, planning to hide it purely for his own future need. He enlisted the priest’s help—both in hiding the cross and in reporting the ‘theft’ to Rome—because it was his idea and because he, not the Hapsburgs, wanted somebody to blame. The family wasn’t likely to admit that one of their own had stolen it even if they knew. And if they knew, it would have been a good reason why they didn’t make more of a fuss about a valuable family heirloom being stolen. Anyway, with so much going on just then, if they did know he’d taken it, they probably decided to deal with Kurt when he returned to Vienna.”
“But the cross never surfaced again, and there’s no mention of it in later letters or journals. Because something happened to him?” Drew said. “It wasn’t in the notes.”
“I was curious about that, and I found the answer in one of Dad’s books about the Hapsburgs. It seems that Kurt’s sweetheart fell ill a month or so after that last letter he wrote, and he nursed her. She survived, but he caught the fever and died. The priest, by the way, never made it back to Rome—notice of his death appears in the town records. It seems he had a bad fall shortly after his report to Rome and broke his neck. I’d like to think Kurt had nothing to do with it, but who knows?”
Drew was smiling slightly, and that look was in his eyes again, the warmth that had unsettled her before. “Allan didn’t research Innsbruck specifically—how did you find the bit about the priest?”
Spencer wondered what he was thin
king. “Well, I was curious, like I said. I called the university in Innsbruck and, luckily, their records were very complete.”
After a moment, and in a very deliberate tone, Drew said, “Spencer, I hope I never again hear you question your own intelligence. I know I won’t question it.”
She had quivered under his insults, and Spencer found that his compliments affected her even more strongly. She didn’t know what to say, and had to look away from the warmth of his eyes. Almost at random, she said, “So . . . you think we have a good chance of finding the cross?”
“I would have gone after it knowing a lot less than you’ve put together,” he said. “Unless someone stumbled over it and moved it in the last three hundred years or so, I think you’ve found it.”
Remembering suddenly, Spencer wondered if he would take back his compliment on her intelligence. She cleared her throat and looked at him. “Somebody else could have found it already, or at least be ahead of us.”
His eyes sharpened. “What makes you think so?”
“The reason I came over here ahead of schedule and in such a hurry was because someone broke into the house Friday night. It was a very professional job—except that he took a lot of worthless things.”
“You believe he was looking for Allan’s papers?”
“Do you remember Dad’s trick safe? I know he showed it to you.”
“I remember. The real safe was behind the clock.”
“The thief ignored the trick safe behind the painting, which was empty, but he got the other one open easily enough. I’d made two sets of copies of Dad’s papers, and one set was in the real safe. It was taken.”
Drew’s face was without expression, almost remote, but his eyes were curiously hard. “An ordinary thief wouldn’t have bothered with handwritten papers. You’re right—he was after the notes.”