Tainted Gold

by Lynn Michaels

  Quillen never took her eyes off his drawn, tight-jawed profile, finally realized the cramp and ache in her thumb and let go of it as she finished. “I told him I’d sell this house if I had to and that the only way he’d get his hands on my land was over my dead body. He said that if I continued to be unreasonable that could become a distinct possibility.”

  Around the handle of the paring knife, Tucker’s fingers made a fist. He studied it for a moment, then opened his hand. The knife clattered onto the counter and he looked up at Quillen.

  “And what did you say to him?”

  “I told him to go to hell and I hung up the phone.”

  One corner of his mouth lifted and he folded his right arm across his naked torso as he backed against the cabinet behind him. He raised his left hand, pushed his glasses onto his forehead, and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger.

  “Oh, Jesus, that was probably the worst thing you could’ve said to him.”

  “Tom thinks,” she went on, her voice unsteady, “that somebody belted my furnace with a sledgehammer. Do you suppose it was the same one and the same person who smashed your seismometer?”

  “He said what?” Tucker’s hand fell away from his face and his glasses landed crookedly on his nose. “I didn’t—oh—yes, I did hear him say that.”

  It wasn’t so much an “oh” as an “oooh,” halfway between a wince and a groan as he bent his elbows, parked the heels of his hands on the edge of the counter, and looked at the floor. “Are you going to Sheriff Blackburn with this?” he asked, his voice as tight as the muscles across his chest and upper arms.

  “With what? I don’t have the sledgehammer, and even if I did, so what? Cassil can prove it was stolen.” She paused and watched the tension ease out of his body. “And what would I tell him? What Cassil said to me on the phone? Do you have any idea what he’d say, Tucker?”

  “Laugh, probably.” He glanced up at her with a thin smile. “Or think that you’d flipped out.”

  “Have I?” she asked, feeling her pulse beat rapidly in her throat. “Or is it really possible that Cassil’s trying to kill me?”

  “I don’t know, Quillen.” He sighed heavily, pushed himself off the cabinet, and stepped between her knees as he gathered her into his arms and hugged her to him. “I honestly don’t know.”

  His heart thudded in her ear and she felt the draw in his back muscles as she looped her arms around his waist. Slowly, almost thoughtfully, his hands rubbed up and down her spine, pressing her gently against the warmth and reassurance of his body.

  “Let’s put this stuff away.” He sighed again and kissed the top of her head. “I’m not hungry anymore.”

  On their way to the bedroom, Tucker replaced her stool at her drawing board. He glanced at the painting of the prince, paused, turned on the Luxo lamp, and smiled.

  “Looks great, love. Is he done?”

  Tilting her head to one side and tugging the inside corner of her mouth between her teeth, Quillen studied the painting. “Yes—I think he is.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I am, but sometimes that just happens. I’ll think I have hours of work left and I’ll be painting diligently along and then all of a sudden realize it’s finished.” She sighed and switched off the lamp. “I’ll mail him in the morning. I can use the money.”

  “I just gave you a gold nugget worth six hundred bucks,” he said, laying his hand on her shoulder as they crossed the studio.

  “I don’t want it, Tucker,” she told him firmly. “Make a paperweight out of it or something.”

  “Quillen—”

  Half-turning in the bedroom doorway, she shot him a warning glare over her shoulder. He pressed his lips together and held up his right palm.

  “Sorry, forget I even opened my mouth.”

  He laid his left arm on her shoulders, took her to bed, and rolled her on her stomach to massage her back. Lying beneath him and between his knees in the darkness, Quillen drifted, dozed, until his hands slid around her rib cage, trailing shivers in their wake, to stroke her breasts. Desire flared like a just-struck match and she rolled over and reached her arms up to him. Very gently and very slowly Tucker made love to her, kissing and caressing her in places that Quillen never realized were erogenous zones until he stroked them with his mouth or hand.

  “That was some lesson.” She sighed, snuggling into his arms afterward as he drew the sheet and comforter over them. “I can hardly wait for the next one.”

  Chuckling, he smoothed her tangled, damp hair out of her face. Nestled against him, Quillen had nearly fallen asleep when his voice, a deep, slow thrum beneath her ear, roused her.

  “I’ve been thinking about what happened today. If the burglary wasn’t a burglary but an attempt on your life, why did the saboteur strike while you weren’t home? Furthermore, Mrs. Sipp told me about her phony call from the post office while you were napping. We had a good laugh about it, but I don’t think it’s funny anymore. I think she was deliberately lured out of the house.”

  Wide awake, Quillen sat up beside him. “You’re right,” she said slowly, gazing thoughtfully into the moonlight-softened darkness streaming into the room from her studio windows. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “It seems more likely to me,” he went on, lifting his hands to her shoulders and massaging them slowly, “and based on your threat to sell this house, if necessary, that Cassil—if he, or someone hired by him, was behind this—was trying to make sure that you had nothing to sell.”

  “That does make more sense,” she admitted, sagging, almost giddy with relief, into his hands. “A lot more sense.”

  “It doesn’t let Cassil off the hook,” he said, qualifying his statement as he pulled her back against his chest, slipped his arms around her, and rested his forearms on her collarbones. “Or make what happened any less suspicious.”

  “But it doesn’t scare me anywhere near as much.”

  Until that moment, Quillen hadn’t been aware of the tension in her body—or his—until she felt a slight increase in the pressure of his arms on her breastbone and the bow in her spine as she relaxed against him. His right hand gently stroked her left arm and she sighed and rested her head on his collarbone.

  “I have to go back out there tomorrow, love,” he told her quietly. “I’d rather stay here with you, but—”

  “I understand,” she told him, idly dragging her fingernails across his forearm, “and I want you to go. I don’t want anyone else hurt or—or killed in that mine. I couldn’t live with it, Tucker, I just couldn’t.”

  “Don’t worry.” He kissed her temple. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  Because she loved him, she believed, and almost instantly fell asleep. Again, there were no dreams.

  Music drifting from the clock radio and the weight of an arm across her abdomen and a leg over her knees wakened Quillen. Yawning, she turned her head toward Tucker and smiled.

  One cheek was burrowed into the pillow half-folded against the headboard, and the eyelet-trimmed hem drooped over his head. He was snoring lightly, his lips parted.

  Pushing herself up on one elbow, Quillen peered over his shoulder. The green digital clock face said six-twenty-five. Carefully, trying not to disturb him and deciding to let him sleep awhile longer, she wiggled out from under him. She yawned again as she rounded the foot of the bed to push the snooze alarm on the radio.

  “Where are you going?” Tucker mumbled groggily.

  Smiling, she bent over him and kissed his whisker-stubbled cheek. “To make you some breakfast.”

  “Stay here and make it,” he said thickly, rolling over and pulling her on top of him.

  Quillen had never been made love to—in the morning or at any other time of day—with such tender ferocity. While a misty mauve dawn seeped through the windows in the studio and filtered through the open bedroom door, the radio came on twice, played for ten minutes, then gave up and shut itself off for good. Later, when the schizophreni
c edge in Tucker’s lovemaking began to haunt her, Quillen recalled that one of the songs played by the soft rock station was an old sixties hit called “Suspicion.”

  One moment he was savoring her, cherishing her, the next claiming her mouth or breast with fierce, love-hard bites that would slacken almost instantly into the long, languorous, almost melancholy caresses. Once sated, they lay together for a long time, his head on her breast, one hand on her hip. There were no afterglow kisses or conversation, just a sad, lonely ache which Quillen, of course, thought was somehow all her fault.

  At seven-forty-five he offered her first shower rights while he shaved. She took them, and looked over her shoulder, puzzled, as he shut the door that separated the single sink from the tub, toilet, and double sink and vanity. Her hopes that he’d join her dashed, Quillen turned around to knock and suggest it—then stepped back, stung, when the lock clicked firmly shut between them.

  Blinking back ridiculously hurt tears, she regulated the shower, stripped off her nightshirt, and stepped into the tub. What, she wondered, could she have done to make him turn so cold so suddenly?

  The adjoining door was still locked and she could hear water sloshing in the sink when she stepped out of the tub with a towel wrapped around her head. She draped another around her body. She had to cut through the back hall past the pantry and basement stairs, through the kitchen and studio to get back into her bedroom. From dread, not cold, she shivered as she quickly dried and dressed in her best pair of designer jeans, a pink blouse, and a lightweight raspberry sweater.

  Looking at the bed hurt even more. Hastily she straightened the riot-torn sheets, fluffed and smoothed the pillows, and replaced the comforter with Grandma Elliot’s crocheted bedspread.

  Once shod in knee socks and loafers, she carried a spare brush with her into the kitchen where she started bacon frying in the electric skillet. While it sizzled, she withdrew to her studio and brushed her wet hair a safe distance from her drawing board as she studied the prince in daylight. No doubt about it—he was finished.

  She was still alone in the kitchen, draining bacon and cracking eggs into a bowl to scramble them, when the doorbell rang. Wiping her hands on a red and white striped dishtowel and flinging it over her shoulder, she crossed the house and opened the front door.

  “Hi, Quill.” Jason looped a quick hug around her neck as he stepped into the living room and eyed her critically. “You look fine; how do you feel?”

  “Fine,” she repeated. “All I needed was a good night’s sleep.”

  “This,” he said, holding out his empty hand, “is my list of the items stolen from my apartment.”

  “Nothing?”

  “That’s right. Bill Taggert found my tape recorder and camera behind the garage with your stuff and everybody else’s. He just dumped ’em there. Mrs. Sipp said Bill told her it looked like he got scared, dropped the stuff, and ran.”

  “Was anything damaged?”

  “Not a thing.” He shook his head as he tugged a necktie, a green and brown silk strip that matched his brown jacket, out of his pocket and grinned at her as he threaded it through his yellow shut collar. “I came down last night to tell you but Mrs. Sipp had herself staked outside your door in a folding chair. No one, she said, is disturbing Miss McCain—”

  Behind her, Quillen heard footsteps and the creak of the floorboards beneath the carpet. Jason’s left eyebrow slid up a notch as he looked over her shoulder.

  “Ah,” he said with a slow smile, “now I see why.”

  It had to be Tucker. Though she cringed inside, Quillen held her chin up and willed herself not to blush.

  “Morning,” Jason said pleasantly. “You must be Ferris.”

  “I am,” Tucker answered quietly. “And who are you?”

  “I was once—though she thinks I don’t know it—the love of this ravishing young woman’s life.” He grinned, winked at her, and laid a brotherly arm on her shoulders as he turned her around. “I’m Jason Lyons.”

  Oh, no. This time Quillen cringed as she looked at Tucker, leaning in the archway between the studio and the living room. He was shaved, dressed in faded jeans and a blue plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up his forearms. He did not look amused.

  “Now, now, don’t glower,” Jason chided cheerfully. “We’ve never been anything but best friends, right, Quill?” He jostled her against him and she shot him a curled-lip grimace. “I knew she was crazy about me, but knowing who I am and what I am”—he pointedly emphasized the pronouns—“and despising duplicity as I do, I decided not to hurt her.”

  “Oh, gag!” Quillen made a face as she wriggled free of his arm and glanced at Tucker.

  “How gallant,” Tucker said simply, his smile an icy crescent that reflected the glint in his eyes. “Too bad, though. Your loss is my gain.”

  Bewildered, Quillen glanced from him to Jason. His grin had vanished and a thin-lipped smile very like Tucker’s hardened his features. Something, she decided, is definitely going on here—

  “Maybe,” Jason replied slowly, giving the word an extra emphasis. “See you, Quill, take care.”

  A light kiss grazed her temple and his arms brushed hers as he stepped behind her and left. Two seconds later the front door closed.

  “Is that the truth?” Tucker asked. “You were nuts about him?”

  His incredulous tone implied that if she had been, she needed glasses worse than he did, and Quillen bristled. Firmly she pushed her apartment door shut and wheeled to face him.

  “Yes, when I was eighteen years old.” She thrust her hands on her hips, then bit her lip at the defensive edge in her voice. “Are you jealous?”

  “My love—” He laughed and his face lit up like a sunburst. “I don’t have a jealous bone in my body—but I think your friend Jason has a few.”

  “No, he’s just overly protective,” she corrected him, tugging the towel off her shoulder as she walked past him. “When Grandma died, he and Cal appointed themselves my official big brothers. They take turns.”

  “Oh, I see.” He chuckled dryly as he trailed behind her. “I haven’t been approved. Should I show them my teeth? My résumé? My diplomas?”

  “How about your pedigree?” Quillen teased, grinning at him over her shoulder as she entered the kitchen and picked up a wire whisk from the counter.

  A sober, guarded look pinched his features and his chin tilted to one side. “Is that important to you?”

  “Oh, Tucker—” She dropped the whisk beside the bowl of eggs and wheeled around. “I didn’t mean—I don’t care that you’re ille—”

  He cupped his hands around her face and silenced her. “Come with me,” he said, a soft, pleading tone in his voice. “Pack your gear. We’ll share my sleeping bag.”

  “I can’t, Tucker.” She curved her fingers around his wrists. “I have a painting to mail, another one to start, tenants—”

  The doorbell rang again and he groaned. Stretching up on her toes, Quillen kissed him lightly.

  “Would you beat the eggs for me while I get that?”

  “Sure.” He sighed, lowering his hands to squeeze her shoulders as she stepped away from him.

  When Quillen opened the door Mrs. Sipp smiled at her radiantly. Pink oven mitts that matched her flowered duster covered her hands and cradled a white Corning Ware bakepan.

  “Oh, Miss McCain!” she gushed. “You look wonderful! I was so afraid you wouldn’t feel like eating or cooking—”

  “Is that your fresh apple coffee cake?”

  “Why, yes.”

  “Then bring it in,” Quillen said, tugging her inside and shutting the door. “You’re just in time for breakfast.”

  “Oh, no, I don’t want to intrude!”

  “You’re not,” Quillen assured her, and with one hand on her elbow, steered her toward the kitchen.

  Tucker glanced up from the scrambled eggs cooking in the skillet as they entered the room. “Rosalie!” He grinned. “Good morning.”

  “Good morning, T
ucker.” Her lashes fluttered, her cheeks flushed, and she hurried the coffee cake toward the table.

  “Rosalie and Tucker?” Quillen asked lowly, raising one eyebrow and resting her right hand on the counter beside him.

  “We’re soulmates,” he whispered back, and winked. True to his claim that he hated K.P., Tucker disappeared once they’d finished breakfast. Quillen could hear him rummaging around in the bedroom while she and Mrs. Sipp cleared the table, loaded the dishwasher, and put the skillet to soak in the sink.

  “Thank you for breakfast, Miss McCain,” she told her as Quillen walked her to the door. “It was just delicious.”

  “You’re welcome, and thank you for the coffee cake”—she paused tentatively—“Rosalie.”

  Her right eyebrow arched stiffly, then smoothed and she blushed. “You’re very welcome—Quillen.”

  They smiled at each other, then Mrs. Sipp fluttered up the stairs. Chuckling, Quillen watched her go, then shut the door and turned around.

  In the archway between the studio and living room, Tucker stood with his duffel in his left hand, his bow in his right, and his quiver slung over his shoulder. Behind his right ear she glimpsed the teal and red fletchings of the arrows, remembered the razor tips, and swallowed quickly.

  “I’ve got to go, love; it takes a while to hook up the seismometer,” he told her, his expression sober. “I wish you’d come with me. I’m afraid to leave you alone.”

  “I’m not afraid, Tucker,” she assured him. “I’ll be fine. Don’t forget—I’ve got Mrs. Sipp, the Iron Marshmallow—remember? Could I be in better hands?”

  “Only if they were mine.”

  Smiling, Quillen walked toward him and slipped her arms around his waist. She laid her head on his chest and his right arm went around her, the bow thumping her gently between the shoulder blades.

  “I wish you’d come,” he said, his voice muffled as he kissed her hair. “It’d give us a chance to talk.”