“She?”
“Yes, it was a woman. By the way, where are my clothes?”
She felt a little dazed by the abrupt change of subject and the tone of his words. “Your clothes?”
“Yes, clothes, you know, the things made out of cotton, wool, linen and whatnot that we use to cover our bodies. It seems my side of the closet has been restocked in silk.”
Colleen sighed and began backing up, the sheet still clutched against her as she watched him warily.
“Your stuff didn’t fit me, Bret. The colors were all wrong for my complexion.”
“Witty, Colleen, but I’m not in the mood. Where’s my stuff?”
“Try the Salvation Army.”
“The Salvation Army?” He repeated the words with such shock and hurt and disbelief that she felt a momentary softening.
“Bret…”
“You gave away my navy pea jacket?” Now he was beginning to sound angry.
“You mean the ancient green thing with all the holes?”
“You did! You gave away my pea jacket!”
Irritably, but without taking her eyes off him, Colleen fumbled around on her dresser for her cigarettes, found the pack and lit one, denying to herself that he was making her nervous. She inhaled and exhaled quickly, leaning back against the bureau for support.
“Bret, I’m sorry. If I had known you wanted me to keep all your things so you could drop by one night before the divorce, I would have! If I had known, Bret, I would gladly have stared at all your clothes every morning, day after day, knowing that you didn’t live here anymore.” Her voice was rich with sarcasm, but light. Good. She was managing much more savoir faire than she would have expected.
But he didn’t even seem to notice. He sank back on the foot of the bed and stared at her with a startling reproach.
“You really gave away my pea jacket?”
“Bret! It had a thousand holes in it. It was ten years old!”
He sighed, shaking his head, and stood again. He started walking around the bed, and she froze, not at all confident anymore. He could be nerve-racking when he chose.
She exhaled a little shakily. He wasn’t coming near her at all. He was just looking around on the floor for the shirt he had apparently dumped the night before. It turned out to be a pullover sweater. He found it and slipped it over his head, then looked at her strangely, almost as a child who has learned that his parents have given away his cocker spaniel in his absence. A double betrayal because of who had done it.
The hurt look faded quickly; he was all business again. “Up, Mrs. McAllistair. We’re going to start where we left off last night.”
“Bret…”
“I’ve made coffee. I’ll be on the patio, watching all exits. You’ve got five minutes to be outside with me, or I’ll be inside with you.”
Colleen ground her teeth together, drew on her cigarette once again and wondered desperately if there weren’t some way to get away from him as she stared rebelliously into his implacable eyes. But then she started wondering just where they had left off last night and how she had gotten into bed—naked.
And if she had slept there alone.
Her lashes fell as she fumbled slightly for the ashtray at her side and crushed out her cigarette. “I’ll be out in five minutes,” she told him icily.
“Good.”
He turned toward the door, and suddenly, although she didn’t understand why at all, she wanted to call him back.
“Bret?”
“What?” He turned back to her, his tanned fingers curled around the doorframe.
“I, uh, didn’t get rid of everything. There’s a box of your stuff in the attic. The pea jacket might be in it.”
He looked at her for a moment, his silver-gray gaze unfathomable. “Thanks,” he said briefly, then turned to leave again. But he didn’t close the door behind him. She saw him pass through the sitting room, the hallway and into the kitchen. And she could still see his broad back and tawny head as he reached for a cup and poured himself some coffee.
For a moment Colleen sat there, chewing miserably on her lower lip. It just wasn’t right, and more than that, it wasn’t fair! How could he be doing this to her? It hurt so much to have him back here, and yet it was all so ridiculously natural. He had walked back in just as if he belonged. As if he had never left. He was completely at home in the kitchen—and in the bedroom. And as she watched him, she longed for it to be right. Her heart seemed to twist and turn with delicious and agonizing nostalgia. She wanted to jump out of bed, race into the kitchen and slip her arms around him, then hold him tight and pretend that nothing had ever been wrong between them.
God! That was the worst of it all. That she could be such a pathetic fool. He had used her with no compunction, then calmly walked out the door. How could she ever, for even a minute, allow herself to forget that fact? Where on earth was her self-respect?
She winced. Her self-respect was sadly lacking, at least where Bret McAllistair was concerned. But not this time. Not this time! She didn’t care if he thought she was the most wicked witch in the world; she would fight him at every turn.
Colleen didn’t know quite what he’d meant by his threat, but she didn’t feel like taking any chances at letting him get too close. She made sure his back was to her and hopped out of bed. First she raced to close the door; then she dug in a drawer for shorts and a T-shirt before hurrying into the bathroom. She closed the door, then stared around herself, freshly irritated. He had just been in here. The mirrors were steamed, and he had used her razor.
She blinked, feeling the ridiculous urge to cry.
“Couldn’t you have used the other bathroom?” she whispered aloud. But then she dropped her clothing on the floor and turned on the shower spray hard and cold. She wanted to be wide-awake and alert, and her head was still buzzing from having downed so much wine so quickly.
As the water beat forcefully against her, she began to wonder again about the phone call. “Damn!” she told the water. “Damn, damn, damn!” He’d walked back into her life, and already she was forgetting about business.
She closed her eyes, wishing it had all been a nightmare. Rutger Miller…dead. She shivered. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after all to talk to Bret, at least a little bit. He did know what he was doing, and he had an uncanny ability to get to the facts. If Rutger were dead, then someone was after something.
The diamonds. It had to be the diamonds.
Colleen turned off the water, hurriedly dried herself and dressed. When she left the bathroom, she saw that the house had been opened up again. The drapes were drifting in the breeze and seemed to flow out to the patio. The sun was high, higher than she’d expected, and glittering down on the pool.
And Bret was sitting at the table on the patio. A tray with two cups and the whole pot of coffee was on the table as well as a stack of toast.
Colleen walked out and sat down, staring at the pool rather than at Bret. But she could smell the coffee, and she needed it badly so she turned at last to pick up her cup and found his eyes on her.
“Come on, Colleen,” he said, and she could have sworn he had learned that hint of a growl from a Doberman.
“I don’t remember where I left off!” she snapped reproachfully.
To her horror, he laughed. “You were begging me to take off your sweater,” he told her.
“I was not,” she protested heatedly.
“The diamonds,” Bret said, smiling.
Colleen sipped her coffee, watching him over the cup. “Are you after the diamonds for yourself, Bret?”
He made an impatient sound. “The diamonds are the key to the murder, Colleen. You said so yourself last night. If you did care about Rutger Miller, you should be anxious to see his murderer brought to justice. And you should be smart enough not to sneak around trying to do it yourself.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You can’t play investigative reporter on this, Colleen. You could wind up getting hur
t.”
“I see,” she said slowly. “I can’t, but you can.”
“Get off it, Colleen.”
She turned away from him, staring out at the water, blinking. It had happened before so why not now? An assignment that he considered too dangerous for her seemed just perfect for him. Perfect enough for him to walk out on their life together.
She took a deep breath. “Bret, I’m not stupid.”
“I never said you were, Colleen. But you’re very impetuous, and when your eye is on a story, you don’t watch the other things that are going on around you.”
She didn’t want to look at him right then. She knew what she would see. He would be sitting back in his chair, idly sipping his coffee. But though he would appear negligently comfortable, almost lazy, his eyes half closed, he would be acutely aware of everything going on. With his sandy hair, bronze tan and silver eyes, he almost had the look of a California beach boy except that his features were too rugged and hard, and his shoulders were touched here and there with faded scars earned during years of rough living. When he smiled, he looked no more than his thirty-three years, but when his mouth was cast in a grim line, it was easier to place him nearer forty. But now… Right now, she knew, he would be staring at her intently with a look that would both sear her soul and caress it. She had lost her heart, soul and self to that stare once and learned the hell of being his.
She played for a little time, refilling her coffee cup, then decided again that she might as well talk to him.
“On tape Rutger went into depth about the day of the battle. Apparently there was a member of the French underground who had been caught spying and who was about to be executed. He didn’t want to die. He sent a message to Holfer, and Holfer decided that maybe the man might have something worthwhile to say. Anyway, the French partisan told Holfer that there were enough diamonds buried in the tunnel to let them all live anywhere they wanted all their lives in the height of splendor. In the meantime Holfer had agreed to meet with the Allied commanders before the battle started over some kind of an agreement that the town be spared no matter what the outcome. He and MacHowell had never met before, but it seemed they had both come to the same private opinion on warfare: they had all been programmed as killing machines and nothing more. They were sick of the war. In a matter of hours, though they didn’t exactly become friends, the four of them—Rutger and Tyrell were there, too—recognized that same weariness and disgust in one another. Rutger said he thought Holfer must have decided then that the Germans might come to a draw, but that they wouldn’t win. So he allied himself with MacHowell, who had rank over Tyrell. They all agreed to steal the diamonds, with MacHowell and Holfer being the real power behind the decision. You see, though they did mean to be thieves, they didn’t mean to be traitors.”
“Or so Rutger claimed,” Bret interjected.
“I believed him,” Colleen said. “I told you, I liked him. Back to the story. Things started going wrong. A brigade of marines came in long before the original troops had expected any relief. The field was strewn with the dead, and our culprits were busy stealing the French diamonds and trying to hide them for themselves. The four of them split up in the midst of absolute confusion. Rutger and General Holfer—who was about to be transferred to the SS, by the way—escaped the country and were supposed to have gone to South America. MacHowell claimed total innocence and pinned it all on the Germans and Sam Tyrell. Sam was executed, and MacHowell went free. But before the war was over, MacHowell had disappeared, too.”
Bret absently tapped his cup. “Tyrell dies and everyone disappears. The diamonds never reappear. Then, forty-odd years after the fact, Rutger Miller calls a journalist and suddenly he’s murdered. None of it makes sense.”
“Yes, Bret, it does, in a way. Rutger was getting old. I think it was weighing terribly on his conscience. He needed to get it all out. He was a good man, Bret. He was just fighting on the wrong side—in the Allied opinion. He cared very much for his men. And I think it bothered him horribly all those years that Tyrell wound up court-martialed and executed.”
“So why was he killed…?” Bret mused, rubbing his temples in a manner that seemed way too familiar to Colleen. Then he ceased his action and stared directly at her. “Who had the diamonds?”
Colleen hesitated. So far, everything she had told him was already on tape. It was information he could have gotten anyway. If she went any further, she would be getting into a world of secrets.
Her cup jiggled dangerously as he moved suddenly, wrapping his fingers around her wrist. She stared down at his fingers, long and tight and fitting easily around her own flesh and slim bones. She looked into his eyes and saw that they were a smoldering gray with a sharp, glinting shimmer. It was a warning gaze; he was losing his patience. She hadn’t spent two years living with him without learning every nuance of his body language. Not that his rather lethal grip about her wrist could be called subtle.
“Tyrell has the diamonds,” she said.
He frowned, releasing her wrist and leaning back again. “Tyrell has been dead for over forty years.”
“That’s right. And it makes sense, Bret. Ever since, everyone has wanted to know what happened to the diamonds. Tyrell must have had them and then stashed them somewhere. Didn’t you read all the clippings? Tyrell refused to say anything except that he was innocent of the charges of treason. MacHowell somehow managed to get out of the entire thing, and both Rutger Miller and General Holfer disappeared. Tyrell must have been very bitter. He absolutely refused to talk about the diamonds. But Rutger claimed that Sam was the last to actually have the diamonds. And it’s true, Bret. They never reappeared. They were never seen on the black market, never discovered in a cache. There was never a sudden hike in black-market diamonds to indicate that they might have been cut and sold that way. They just disappeared. It makes sense that Sam Tyrell hid them and went to his death at least knowing that the men who had betrayed him wouldn’t receive the rewards of their labors! Sam Tyrell must have stashed them away.”
Bret shrugged and poured himself more coffee. “The diamonds still might have been split, or recut, or even reset before he hid them. They could be almost anywhere. But if Rutger really didn’t have them, why would someone want to murder him?”
Colleen lifted her hands. “I don’t know.” She put her cup down and padded barefoot to the pool, sitting at the shallow end and slipping her feet into the water. It was already warm from the sun overhead. What time was it? she wondered. She must have slept as if she were half dead. The evening was a blank. She had known damned well that he had been determined to loosen her tongue, and she had been equally, stupidly, determined to foil him for the night.
“Well,” she said, staring at the water, “you’ve heard all I know, Bret. Why don’t you crawl up into the attic, find your pea jacket and leave me in peace again?”
“Not on your life, sweetheart.”
She spun around, lifting her feet so suddenly that she sprayed him with water. He started, but merely put down the now-sodden piece of toast he had picked up.
“Bret, I told you what I know! You’re the expert. If you want more, go out and find it. With Rutger dead, I really have no more reason to go on with the story.”
Bret shook his head, grimacing. “Colleen, I wish I could believe that, but it wouldn’t matter anyway. None of your interviews has been published yet, but too many people know about the work that you did with Rutger Miller. There have been hints about the ‘mystery about to come to light’ in all the major newspapers, in this country and others. Let’s go under an intelligent assumption: Rutger was murdered because of the diamonds. And if they weren’t found, whoever went to such drastic lengths will be ready to do so again.”
Colleen shivered, but she didn’t want him to notice so she made an elaborate pretext of shaking off her feet, then stood. “This place is wired for security.”
“So well that I broke in with a file with no difficulty at all.”
“I could
buy a couple of attack dogs….”
“No good, Colleen. Whether it makes you happy or not, you’ve got a husband in the house again until this thing reaches some conclusion.”
“This isn’t fair!” she snapped, her heart sinking steadily as she thought of having him constantly around, constantly playing on her nerves and emotions.
“Whoever said life was fair?” His tone was light.
“How did you get involved in this to begin with?” she asked belligerently.
Bret stood, stretching. He walked around to one of the small ferns along the side of the house and frowned as he twisted off a dying frond.
“Bret?”
He squinted his eyes against the sun and stared up at the high screen and the brilliant blue day above it. “I was called in when they found the body. The homicide detective in charge of the case is a friend of mine. Carly was glad to send me. Seems the police want some good coverage on it to prevent anything else happening.”
Carly—Carlton Fuller—was the managing editor for The World, the magazine for which they both worked. Colleen, however, tended to be assigned the tamer articles; what Bret handled were labeled Specials. Colleen knew that Bret was held in awe, maybe a little too much so: he always got to do any story he wanted to do.
But Carly…Carly was supposedly a friend of both of theirs. Colleen was hurt that she hadn’t been informed that Bret had been called in or even that he was back in the U.S.
“I thought you were still in the Middle East,” Colleen almost whispered.
He shrugged, watching her with his head slightly angled, as if he had asked a question. “I’ve been back almost a month.”
“Where?” she persisted, and he had the good grace to hesitate for a minute.
“At Carly’s.”
Colleen turned around blindly and started walking toward the house.
“Colleen, wait a minute!”
She barely heard him, but even if his words had registered, she wouldn’t have stopped. It felt as if the two men had been conspiring against her, and she couldn’t lay the feeling down to paranoia. It had happened before.
Double Entendre Page 5