Slowly, carefully, he took a mental inventory of his body. Finally he was satisfied. The eye, his ribs, his left leg. The burned hand… Fury gorged his throat as he tore the sleeve from his shirt and tied the cotton around his palm. Raising his head painfully, he looked out the Jaguar’s window.
Off to the south, great gray clouds raced toward the valley.
Very carefully, Dane shifted his body and turned the key in the engine. Pain shot through his fingers as the motor leapt instantly to life. Go easy. He slipped the car into reverse and backed slowly out of the field onto the road.
His foot slammed the brake. Go back for her!
She had told the man she called Colonel to come to the abbey.
Dane stared at the abbey doors, then down at his charred hand. The need to punish her was overwhelming. Take her now. He grasped the door handle. Think, his thoughts hammered. She was in the abbey, surrounded by hundreds of people. He pulled the saturated crimson cloth tighter around his throbbing fingers.
Blood was pooling on the Jag’s leather seat. Magdalena O’Shea would have to wait. But only for a little while.
He eased the car forward, not even glancing at the ravine. The colonel had disappeared over a steep ledge. He was no longer a problem.
* * *
Zachary Law led Maggie through the garden. Clouds rolled toward them like great black ships, driven by the wind. She kept her face turned away. The quickening wind loosened her hair, lifting it in dark ribbons behind her.
Finally he stopped by a small wooden bench and turned to her. “I like your Leonard Bernstein shirt,” he said. “Do you remember the night we—”
“Stop it!”
“Maggie. Look at me.” His left hand lifted her chin, and he stared down into her face. Not the face of the girl he had loved. He was struck again by the change in her, wary and thinner. “You’re even more beautiful now,” he murmured.
“Don’t.” She tried to pull away, but still he held her chin in his strong fingers, forcing her to face him.
“Why, Zach?” Shock shimmered in her voice. “How could this happen? To such a brilliant pianist…” She could not finish.
His fingers traced the lines of her jaw. “Do you have any idea how many nights I’ve tried to recapture the sound of your voice? The nights I’ve heard your laughter in my dreams, imagined this face next to mine?” His fingers moved to her lips. “My beautiful Slim…”
She twisted away from him. “Don’t call me that! You let me think you were dead.” Years of anger and pain trembled in the words as thunder echoed toward them from the blackening hills.
“How could you do that to me?” she cried. “Zach. Look at me. I need to know why.”
Zach kept his eyes on the flickering sky. “My name is Gideon now.”
“Gideon.” She said the name, trying to connect it with the bearded, sunburnt face and the long, curling hair. He’s suffered, she told herself. She could see it in the eyes, just as she’d heard it in his concerto. You really are another person now. I don’t know you.
“I loved you,” she said. “But you never came home to me. The arm wouldn’t have mattered, Zach—”
“I left a lot more than my right arm back in that desert, Maggie.”
“You pretended to be dead. I have a right to know why.” She thought of their son Brian. “Why didn’t you come home?”
Thunder rumbled over them, lightning flashed over the black hillside. “I don’t want to leave you, but I have no choice. The storm.” He looked down at her. “I can’t lose you again, Maggie.”
“Then don’t walk away from me, Zach. I have to know the truth.”
“I know,” he said, “but I have to go.” His voice was filled with urgency. He rushed on recklessly, gesturing toward the south. “Spend the day with me tomorrow, Maggie. I’ve made my life here, just over those hills. A small vineyard in the Luberon. I’ll tell you everything.”
Maggie looked south, beyond the purple rain-swept cliffs.
“I have a family now,” he said. “It’s the storm—I must get back to them.”
Family. I have a family, too, she thought. A son, Zach. Our son. But she was not ready to speak of Brian. Not yet. Maybe not ever. And—he did not ask.
“Please,” he said to her. “Where are you staying?”
“Aix,” she whispered. “But—”
Zach’s next words were swallowed by the wind. “—and I’ve got to leave now! Driving these roads in a storm is hard enough with two arms.” He held out his left hand to her. “I’ll take you to your car.”
She stared at him, wanting desperately to grasp his hand, to go with him. Don’t leave me again, Zach… “Just go,” she told him.
“Maggie! Come to me tomorrow.”
She closed her eyes against the pain. Just do it, damn you. Do it for your godchild.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, I’ll come to you.”
He gave her the sweet smile that was Brian’s, and her heart twisted inside her chest. “Come early,” he told her, turning toward the cars. “Le Refuge, we call the vineyard. Just south of Lourmarin, on the D943. No more than forty-five minutes from Aix.”
She watched him hurry away from her, the limp more pronounced now, as the immense black sky above the valley trembled with thunder. He was leaving her again. And still, she had no answers.
For an instant, a flash of light lit his diminishing figure. She thought her heart would break with the pain.
This stranger was her son’s father. They had been so young when she loved him. But he was no longer that boy. He was a man now. With a new name, a beard, a broken body. A different look in the eyes. He belonged to another country, another life—another woman? No, he was not the man she remembered.
The truth was there all along, she thought. All the unsettling moments—the unfamiliar handwriting on the note to his father, the look in Yvette’s eyes in the Café de la Paix, the incredible left-hand passages in his concerto—all fell into place for her now like notes completing an unfinished symphony.
Maggie raised her face to the wildness of the day. She felt as storm-tossed as the cypress trees around her. You’ve lost so much, Zach. Your arm, your music, your dreams. Your son.
Only then did she remember the morning’s daisies, and the note. But it had not been Zach who asked her to meet him in the garden...
The first drops of rain hit her upturned face.
And then, over the thunder, she heard the distant howling of a dog.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
SÉNANQUE ABBEY. AFTERNOON, JULY 9
Shiloh’s howls brought him back to consciousness.
Rain stabbed his face with icy needles. Beckett groaned and rolled over. Shiloh? Thank God he’d locked the Golden in the car with the windows cracked. No telling what he would have—images of the fight came roaring back. Where is the damned gun? And where in bloody hell is Maggie?
Pain shot through his head, threatening unconsciousness. You’re too mean to die in the rain, he told himself. Slowly, he pulled himself to his feet. Fire ignited in his knee, seared up into his groin. He took a deep breath and squinted up into the driving rain.
A flash of lightning lit the wall of the ravine. Rocks, gorse, trees. And fucking steep. He grasped a tree trunk and hauled his body upward. Pain hammered at him as fear for Maggie drove him on.
Reach. Grasp. Pull.
Reach higher. Drag. Haul. Breathe.
Slip back, lunge upward.
God, he had to get to her!
One final lunge and he rolled onto the field. How long had he been unconscious? His eyes passed over the wildly blowing cypresses, the parked cars, the lights in the abbey. Thunder rumbled overhead, but then, in a beat of sudden silence, he heard the sounds of violins, faintly, in the darkness.
He stood up, swayed, forced his mind to focus. Through the curtain of rain he saw an empty rectangle of grass. The silver Jaguar was gone. Where are you, Maggie?
He fumbled for the small transmitter. She was
close!
He limped to his car, ignoring the pain that seared through his leg, and freed the Golden. Shiloh lunged out into the rain, leaped up, slammed against his chest. Beckett staggered, started running toward the great abbey doors. Be there, Maggie. “Come, Shiloh!” he shouted.
But the Golden held back, barking, his gaze fixed beyond the abbey walls.
Beckett stopped, turned. A flash of lightning turned the ancient stone to silver and for an instant lit the garden beyond the cloister wall. Was someone out there? He stopped, squinting through the pelting rain. Only blackness.
“Find her, Shiloh! Find Maggie.” The Golden loped away into the veil of rain, and Beckett ran blindly after him through the gates. Let it be her…
“Mrs. O’Shea! Maggie!” His voice was drowned out by the wind and the sound of rain pelting the stone.
He felt her before he saw her. Then a shadow shifted, moved. Lightning flashed, illuminating the pale, rain-streaked face framed by her wild and glistening hair. She was on her knees, arms wrapped around the dog while the rain streamed over them.
He ran up to her. Her eyes glittered with profound shock.
“My God,” he said. “Did you find Law?”
“He’s alive, Michael.” Her voice trembled with disbelief.
He bent, put his arm around her, drew her to her feet. “Of all the crazy, dangerous things to do!” He pulled off his jacket and dropped it over her shaking shoulders.
Another roll of thunder as she pulled the jacket around her, the Golden pressing close against her. In the flashing darkness, she did not seem to register his battered face and mud-streaked clothing. “Zach,” she whispered, shivering uncontrollably. “He’s—”
“We’ll talk about Law when you’re warm. Let’s go home now, Maggie.”
“Home?” She turned to him and clutched his sleeve. “There is no turning back for me now!”
A jagged bolt of lightning lit the great dome of black sky. The wind ripped at the green ribbon and her hair blew free, whipping about her face. They faced each other, breathing rapidly, in the hurling rain.
She tried to pull away, but still he held onto her. “What happened to you, Maggie?” he yelled above the howl of the wind.
She broke from his grasp and whirled away from him.
“Tell me,” he demanded.
She raised her face to the rain and threw her arms toward the electric sky. “Zachary Law is alive!” she shouted into the wild dark.
She stood before him in the driving rain, a burning, vibrant figure, defiant and fiercely alive against the immense violent sky, with the Golden pressed against her side.
It was an intensely elemental image. Beckett stared at her, shocked by his primitive response to this woman in the storm. She was so damned…valiant. He reached to push the wet hair from her eyes.
“No,” she said, turning away from his touch and walking away from him through the dark rain.
A woman scarred by death. And a man scarred by life.
He let her go.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
PROVENCE. NIGHT, JULY 9
“What’s the matter with you, Gideon?”
Zachary Law stood at the window of the music room, watching the storm roll over the vineyard in great roaring waves of dark and light.
“Gid?” Celeste’s voice was frightened. “You’ve been so edgy since you got home. So distant. Please…”
He turned to her. “It’s the storm, Celie,” he lied. But it wasn’t the storm, or the long-awaited premiere of his concerto, that gripped him. Tonight his thoughts swirled around Maggie O’Shea.
So many memories crowded his mind. The rehearsal room in Boston. The long walks, the secrets whispered late at night. Her beautiful, giving body. The piano, always the piano.
He hadn’t even asked about his father. All memories from another life, a life when he could still play a keyboard, shake hands, knot a black bow tie, applaud—when he could make love to a woman, balance above her. Maggie, too, was a part of his concerto. He would tell her that tomorrow.
Celeste’s arms slipped around his waist from behind. “Come to bed, Gideon. Let me make you forget.”
“No, Celie.” His left hand dropped to the silent keys of the Bechstein. “You go on. I’ll be along in a while.”
His fingers caressed the piano as she reached to touch the back of his neck. She waited, letting her hand linger on his skin. When he did not respond, she turned and left the room.
* * *
At the inn on the edge of Aix-en-Provence, the tiny old-fashioned lift clanked slowly upward in the shadows. Outside, the rain still fell.
They’d dropped Shiloh off with the concierge and Maggie and Beckett rode pressed together in a silence vibrating with tension.
She had told him about Zachary Law on the drive back to the inn. Only twice did her voice flicker. Once, when she told him that someone—not Zach—had lured her to the abbey with a note in a bouquet of flowers. And once when she told him about the loss of Zachary Law’s arm. And then—
He asked me to come to him tomorrow, to Le Refuge.
No way in hell.
I’m going, Michael. You won’t stop me.
Silence.
The ancient lift trembled to a shuddering halt. She caught Beckett’s wince as he slid the metal gates open. In the dim light of the hallway bulb, the bruises on the side of his face were garish.
“Why won’t you tell me what happened to you today?” she demanded.
He closed the gates with a clang. “Took on a scythe, ma’am. The scythe won.”
“A scythe! At the abbey?” Suddenly, with sickening clarity, she knew. The man from the bird market had been waiting for her at the abbey. And found the colonel instead.
“The man who sent me the flowers—he did this.” Without conscious thought, her fingers brushed Beckett’s face. He smiled grimly, as if trying to hide the impact of her unexpected tenderness.
“I hope you hurt him.” And then, a bare whisper, “Who have I become?”
“Age and treachery overcome youth and skill, ma’am. I hurt him, all right.”
“And what about you?”
“I hurt him, ma’am. That’s what counts.”
“What do you do after a day like this?” she asked him.
“Drink.”
* * *
They walked down the dark, carpeted hallway, past the French policeman on guard by the lift, to her door.
Beckett stood behind her. Somewhere below them, a buzzer sounded. With a clanking motion, the lift began its slow descent.
She found the key and fumbled with the lock nervously. “Fit, damn you.”
“You can’t keep running away from me, Mrs. O’Shea.”
She turned slowly. “Say my name, Michael.”
He stared down at her, his eyes burning.
“Say my name!
“Maggie.”
He caught her hand in his, raised it to his lips. “Maggie,” he said again, his mouth against her skin.
His large hands gripped her shoulders, and she closed her eyes and leaned against him. She’d pinned up her wet hair, and his fingers caressed the bare skin of her neck.
Far below her, she heard the faint click of the lift’s door.
The lift began its slow, grinding ascent.
“Take down your hair,” he murmured into her ear.
“Michael. Please…” Her whole body was quivering with exhaustion and the overwhelming shock of finding Zach. She had no control, no defenses left. Only need. If he touches me again, she thought, I’m lost.
He took the key from her trembling fingers.
She was trapped between his body and the room’s door. She knew he wanted to come in. She was afraid to ask herself what she wanted.
Who have I become?
The ancient machinery of the lift hummed louder.
He looked down at her and pressed her back against the door, then his thumb brushed slowly across her lips.
“You need
to get out of these wet clothes,” he told her.
They were the sexiest, scariest words a man had ever said to her.
He turned the key in the lock. “I’ll check your room.” Swinging the door inward, he turned on the small lamp by the door and stepped inside.
She stood absolutely still, staring after him. Suddenly, sharply, she wanted—
The small elevator whirred to a halt.
A sharp clang as the gate opened. Low voices.
Soft footsteps, coming toward her through the darkness.
In an instant, Beckett was in front of her, shielding her with his body.
A man’s voice in the quiet hallway.
“Mon Colonel, c’est moi.” It was the young concierge. “A message for you, from the States.” He handed Beckett a folded slip of paper. “‘Urgent’, I was told, Monsieur. From Madame Beckett. Your wife.”
Wife… Maggie stood frozen, watching the look of concern leap into Beckett’s eyes.
He read quickly, then looked at her. “Life is a comedy for those who think,” he murmured, “and a tragedy for those who feel.”
“You’re…married?”
A brusque nod. “There’s a problem at home. I’ve got to make a call.” He waved to the policeman standing near the lift. “Stay by her door,” he ordered, and headed toward his room.
Beckett turned once more. She stood motionless in the dark hallway, hugging his jacket to her shivering shoulders. “Get out of those wet clothes,” he repeated. “And promise me you won’t go to Law without me.”
Then his own door closed firmly behind him.
Blindly, she entered her room. Unable to move another step, she leaned her forehead against the oak door and closed her eyes.
Zach is alive. And Michael Beckett is married.
He has a wife…
And yet, when they’d stood alone in the dark hallway, she’d seen the longing in his eyes. And she’d known that he wanted her.
God help her, she’d almost let him stay.
She caught her breath in a harsh sob. The scent of lilacs filled her head.
Her eyes flew open. The light from the small lamp cast wavering shadows across the room. At that moment she sensed, rather than saw, the looming dark shape in front of her. Her heart seemed to shift in her chest. Slowly, disbelievingly, she moved forward.
The Lost Concerto Page 25