I'll Be Seeing You

by Beverly Bird

  And oh, yes, she knew the truth now. Sooner or later, when this was over, he would go. She wasn’t enough to hold him.

  She had one last spiraling thought as his mouth crushed down on hers again. Pandora’s box. Somehow, without even realizing it, she had opened it tonight. And now all kinds of hell were going to come flying out. But, she thought as his tongue sought hers, hadn’t there been something left in the bottom when all the evil was gone? Something waiting, she thought.

  She remembered what it was. Hope.

  With a cry, she wrapped her arms around his neck. She felt his hands, deliciously rough, going for the snap of her slacks.

  “You just had to get dressed again,” he complained against her mouth. “Why do you always have to make things difficult?”

  She gave an almost hysterical laugh and drove her fingers into his hair, holding him so he could not move his mouth from hers. She dared his tongue, feeling a little crazed. This was what he had done to her.

  He finally dragged her slacks down her hips. Kate stepped out of them even as she peeled away his. He tore her panties away with a snap of his strong fingers and started that trembling deep inside her again. Then she cried out as he lifted her and drove himself home.

  He felt her whole body shudder, then melt over him, and he eased them both down to the floor. There was nothing sane in his head, no care for their comfort, or protection, or the ramifications of what they were doing, but his knees felt weak and he knew he would drop her.

  What the hell was he doing? He was doing all he could do, he thought, all he was capable of—seeking the heat, the salvation, the sweetness that he’d tasted for the first time just a while ago. This time he could not tell either of them that she’d started it. This time he was claiming her for his own.

  She moved under him, taking him in, deeper, harder, urging him on. Her fingers dug into his shoulders. Her teeth closed over a tender spot at his throat. His hand found her hair, pulling her head back, arching her throat. He started there and slicked his mouth downward to small, firm breasts that were so perfect. Her breath came in ragged bursts that matched his own.

  He’d known she’d take and want more. And somehow, too, he’d known he would end up craving that.

  She cried out, and he felt the tension inside her gathering and let himself go. They crashed over the edge together this time.

  When she could breathe again, Kate spoke, and her voice trembled. “You couldn’t have just left well enough alone?”

  He couldn’t have, Raphael thought three hours later. And he didn’t see how anything was going to make him start now.

  He’d gone over an edge. A steep, slick one. And he knew, somehow, that there would be no scaling the wall again, no going back up to a place where life was easy.

  Somehow, they’d made it upstairs to his bedroom. There’d be no closed doors tonight, either. He glanced at her as she finally slept, all that dark hair spilling crazily over his shoulder and the pillow. One of her legs was hooked over his. Raphael closed his eyes and fell after her into sleep.

  He slept in his own bed. Without a television on. There were no street monsters chasing him down, just her warmth beside him.

  His last thought was that he’d worry about how he was going to make this work in the morning.

  Kate woke up because there was no snoring.

  The low, rhythmic sound that had lulled her in sleep had evaporated and in its place was an incomplete quiet. She rolled onto her back, both arms outstretched. There were small twinges and pulls deep inside her that felt delicious and brought back memories of the long night behind them. The cool sheets touched her skin on both sides, and sunlight speared into her eyes when she opened them.

  She was alone.

  Kate sat up fast, brushing her hair out of her eyes. Raphael was gone. Now what? He’d spent the night with her, had stayed with her. That was good, she thought, and she had cherished it. She’d let herself believe for a while that everything would work out.

  He’d wanted her. Not once, not twice, but so many times that she ached. And he’d stayed beside her. No matter what he had said last night, no matter what he had intimated, it was a place to build from, a place to start.

  She had to believe that. Hope. The alternative was intolerable.

  She heard him downstairs in the kitchen. In fact, she heard a great deal when she listened. There was the clang of metal, then the sound of glass shattering. Kate winced and scrambled out of bed. She found his robe on the back of the bathroom door, pulled it on and hurried down the stairs as she belted it.

  She stopped in the kitchen door and watched him sweeping up whatever it was he’d broken. “Why have you developed a neat gene all of a sudden?”

  He looked at her. His grin made something coil inside her all over again. “I figure it’s less time you’ll spend doing it so it’ll leave us clear for other things.”

  Her heart boomed once, hard, against her chest. Then it steadied. She’d been right when she’d woken. Something was wrong.

  As she watched him, she couldn’t put her finger on it. Outside of the cleaning up business, which was totally out of character, and that intimate grin that couldn’t have happened yesterday before they’d shared everything they’d shared last night, he seemed pretty much his same old self. Kate moved into the kitchen cautiously and nudged him aside, taking the broom from his hand. “What broke?” she murmured, starting to sweep.

  “A wineglass.”

  “Oh, good, not the coffee carafe.”

  “Nope. Feel free to make some.”

  Conversation was normal, too, she thought. So what was the undercurrent that bothered her?

  She started the coffee and then poked into the refrigerator. There was very little there. They had really depleted his larder, and all they’d bought last night for dinner was gone. She turned away from the fridge to look at him again, and her heart stuttered.

  He was leaning against the opposite counter with his arms crossed over his chest, watching her. And this time, she realized, his expression was just too…deliberately bland.

  “What?” she asked cautiously.

  “I’ve figured out how we’re going to handle this.”

  Kate felt her heart slug her ribs again. “This? You mean…us?”

  “We’re both adults here,” he said without answering.

  “Seems like it.”

  “Intelligent.”

  She hugged herself. “I am. Most times, I’m willing to admit that you are, too.” She turned away carefully to pour them coffee.

  “I figure we can, uh, keep on with this, we can still enjoy ourselves here as long as it lasts, if we just stay…casual.”

  Something grabbed her heart and twisted it. “Explain casual.”

  “We both need to see other people.”

  She dropped the carafe. It shattered on the floor with a popping, explosive sound. Glass flew. Black liquid sprayed. Her eyes darted to his.

  “I can’t do…do that…what we did…with anybody else!”

  He didn’t want to feel it, that warm swell of his heart at hearing her say it. So he pushed on. “We have to, so nobody gets the wrong idea.”

  “Nobody who?” Her head was pounding. Her hands shook. Kate felt miserably naive. Inexperienced. Clumsy. She wasn’t enough. He wanted…others. Just as Jeff had. Two men couldn’t be wrong about her. She had her talents…and sex just wasn’t one of them.

  Every breath, every nerve ending inside her shattered like glass. She let out a strangled sound.

  Damn it, Raphael thought, she was standing there staring at him as though he had just turned into a monster.

  But it was the only way he could think of not to let her go. He couldn’t let her go.

  Kate dove for the dishcloth and bent to the floor, wiping furiously, not even mindful of cutting her bare feet.

  “Wait.” He raked a hand through his hair. “Maybe I didn’t say that right.”

  “You said it fine. I’m not enough.”
r />   “No.”

  The vehemence in his tone froze her. Kate looked up. “Then why?”

  “So nobody figures out that you matter. If I see other people, no one will ever know that you mean more than any of the others. It’ll be like…you know, our secret.”

  She didn’t understand. You matter. The echo of his last words rang in her head and tried to wrap around her heart. But if she did, then why?

  “It’s because of Anna.” Another bad choice of words. He knew it the moment they left his mouth. Kate gave another small cry and shot to her feet.

  The problem was, he was pressed for time. Each second that ticked off the clock somehow made matters worse. He had figured out how he could keep her in his life when he had woken before dawn and had finally had some quiet time to think about it. But he hadn’t quite figured out just how to explain it to her. He’d gone into this part of it blind.

  He grabbed pots and the broiler pan from the top of the stove, the remnants of their meal last night. He was buying time. Trying to find the words. He heaved everything into the sink.

  “She died because of me,” he heard himself say. “Because someone thought she mattered.”

  Kate went still. She was afraid to move. “You said that. Something like that.” So very long ago, she thought, back when she’d first met him. A lifetime ago. She hadn’t understood then.

  “Her killer chose her because of her association with me. That’s not going to happen again. It’s damned well not going to happen to you. That’s why we’re not going to let anyone know we’re…you’re…I…” Love you. The words poleaxed him. They jammed in his throat, and they wouldn’t come out.

  “I’m what?” Kate whispered.

  “Uh. Matter. You matter.”

  Matter? That word again. She was no longer sure if it was good or bad. “Anna’s killer is still behind bars. Isn’t he?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Raphael started shoving everything from the sink into the dishwasher. He turned the faucet on, and water sprayed wildly every time it hit metal. “But there are others. There are always others.”

  “You think some other bad guy is going to kill me because I’m involved with you? That it’s going to keep happening again and again? That’s crazy!”

  “Once the first guy does it, it sets a precedent.”

  “There’s been a study?” Kate asked incredulously.

  “No. Not that I know of. But it follows.” The sink was empty. He turned the water off and began hunting up something else he could whisk from the counter to clean. “You know, it was all over the papers why Anna was killed. The next really major slimeball I go after, well, he’s just going to remember what Miller did. And sure as hell, he’s going to grab whoever I’m seeing, whoever…whoever matters. So humor me on this, damn it.”

  He finally turned to her. He wanted to beg her. It was the only way he could see to continue this. And he had to continue it. But when he looked at her, her eyes were wild.

  “That’s the biggest crock I ever heard!” She threw the coffee-laden dishrag at him. It hit him squarely in the chest, spraying thin brown-black over the front of his T-shirt. “Just tell me the truth!” she shouted. “Tell me. I’m flat-chested. I’m skinny. I’m short. I have weird hair! But damn you—damn you!—I know all that! So don’t make up some stupid, convoluted excuse that makes it sound like you’re so noble, like you’re protecting me! At least give me the respect of honesty!”

  He stared at her, dumbfounded. “I am being honest.”

  “It’s all garbage!”

  “You’re not skinny and short. You’re perfect.”

  The air went out of her painfully. Kate stared at him. He meant it. She saw it in his eyes. He meant it.

  “I actually…like your hair.” He turned back for the last piece of cookware on the counter, the baking sheet from last night’s oysters. Now this, he thought, was awkward ground. He had never been any good at pretty words. But it seemed like there should be something else he could say.

  “You like it,” Kate repeated, swiping at it helplessly.

  “Better without the headband.” Somewhere, in some man’s vocabulary, there was a way to say it. Raphael kept busy instead.

  He found the bag she kept her rock salt in and started to pour it from the sheet. “I just don’t want anyone to know that I do.” He didn’t want anyone to know what those wild curls did to him.

  “Because if he’s a slimeball, he’ll kill me to hurt you?”

  “Yeah.” And it wouldn’t just hurt, he realized. It would destroy him. He turned to tell her that, to try somehow to find the right words. And she was shaking her head hard.

  “What now?”

  “Just throw that out. The rock salt. I’ve used it a few times. It doesn’t hold up for more than a few uses.”

  He was trying to bare his soul here, and she was talking about the practicalities of rock salt? Raphael headed angrily for the trash can. Then he froze.

  Midway between the counter and the can, sunlight speared in from the window at the rear of the room where a table should have been. It was the young brightness of the new day, sharp and clear and focused. It fell across the tray, and the rock salt dazzled.

  It really dazzled.

  “What the hell?” he murmured, staring at it.

  “What’s wrong?” Kate asked, moving beside him.

  “What exactly is in this stuff?”

  “I don’t know.” She frowned. “It’s just some kind of mineral.”

  Raphael swore again and turned to the counter. He slid the tray onto it again as delicately as though it were made of the most fragile glass. He reached, his fingers closing over a large piece. “This is a chunk of rock salt?”

  Kate stared at it, crowding behind him to look. And her eyes widened. “No,” she whispered. “No, that’s definitely not rock salt.” Her gaze flew to his disbelievingly.

  “Help me out here,” he said hoarsely.

  She knew what to do without being told. She nudged him aside from the counter. She knew rock salt. How many times had she used rock salt? Not enough, she thought wildly, to realize that what she had been cooking with this past week wasn’t it.

  She’d been cooking with…diamonds!

  She gave a cry of pure amazement and began sifting through the tray. “Here.” She gave him a gem, her fingers trembling so that she almost dropped it. Raphael caught it and put it in a bowl he snagged from the cupboard.

  “Keep going,” he said.

  “I am, I am.”

  She pulled out seven, eight, fifteen, then twenty. Her pulse was pistoning. Every once in a while Kate made another small sound of shock. “How much?” she asked finally, still combing her fingers through the salt.

  “Half a million so far. Easily.”

  She spun to him. “Dollars? Half a million dollars’ worth of diamonds?”

  Raphael nodded. He took her face in his hands. “Honey, it’s not what you knew. It wasn’t what you saw that night.”

  “It’s been what I had.”

  He nodded. She’d been carting around a small fortune.

  At their feet, Belle barked crazily, happily, and began cavorting in circles. Raphael shook his head and looked at the dog. “If you knew, why didn’t you just say so?”

  Chapter 16

  Ten minutes later, Kate’s hands still shook. She’d spent a week baking diamonds. No one had been trying to kill her, exactly. They’d just been trying to get the gems back.

  What had been going on the night McGaffney had been killed? How had the diamonds gotten into her possession? Whatever had occurred, she thought, it had gone down virtually right under her nose.

  Raphael had already been on the telephone when she’d retreated, dazed, to the bathroom, knowing that this development probably meant they would be going out somewhere soon. She showered and dried off frantically, afraid she would miss something. She was still zipping her slacks when she raced down the stairs. Raphael raised a brow at her, his gaze roving from her tummy
to her eyes. He was still on the phone.

  “I had the rock salt with me at McGaffney’s!” Kate blurted. “That’s where all this started.”

  He disconnected and looked at her as though she’d just told him that gravity existed.

  “Then I took it home with me. Remember? I took it up to my apartment.” He still showed no expression, but she desperately needed to work through this, to make sense of it. Kate drove her hands into her wet hair.

  “We left it there on Saturday while we went to get the crate for Belle. Anyone could have grabbed it then and there! There was no need to shoot at anybody!” she cried, thinking of Betty Morley.

  “They couldn’t have known that the rock salt was in your apartment.” Raphael finally spoke.

  “They,” Kate repeated unsteadily. “The mob?”

  “Well, half of it, anyway. McGaffney’s boys would be my guess.”

  She blinked, absorbing that. “Eagan didn’t order the hit.”

  He couldn’t have, Raphael thought. That was the missing piece to the puzzle—it was the point where he’d first started heading in the wrong direction. If Eagan had ordered that hit, then Eagan—or one or more of his goons—would be dead by now.

  There’d been no further killing, Raphael finally realized, because McGaffney’s guys had known exactly who had taken him out, and it had been one of their own. No retaliatory action had been needed. Now, in hindsight, it was the only thing that made sense.

  As for Kate, her misfortune was that she had been standing between McGaffney’s goons and her rock salt.

  “They didn’t know about that damned little red wagon you use to cart everything back and forth,” he went on. “They probably thought you’d store all that stuff in your vehicle because you work out of a small apartment. Trust me, Kate, no one would ever anticipate that you’re as orderly as you are.”

  Her eyes went to slits.

  “My guess is that they did look in the van while it was in your garage that day. But we didn’t give them a lot of time to strike out in one place and launch a whole new search in another. We went back to your place so you could cook for the Morleys.”