Intimate Betrayal

by Linda Barlow

  Annie was too damn intuitive, she thought. It was hard to hide anything from her.

  In truth, the past few days since Sam had broken up with her had been utter hell. She couldn’t sleep, she’d been eating all sorts of things she didn’t usually touch, and she hadn’t been doing any of her exercise routines.

  Her work was beginning to suffer too. She couldn’t concentrate. Even though she had several very important things to attend to, she kept pushing them out of her mind. All she wanted to think about was how she could change Sam’s mind and get him back in her arms.

  She’d been obsessively comparing their birth charts. There were some communication conflicts—perhaps that’s where the trouble lay. Sam was more secretive than she was. He was lighthearted on the surface, but he was motivated by deep wells of emotion. A lot of water in his chart. Scorpio and Cancer—strong emotions tenaciously held.

  She’d also been consulting her favorite tarot deck two or three times a day, and the spreads there confirmed the astrological findings. All indications continued to be favorable for a lasting romance between herself and Sam.

  What had happened, she hoped, was that Sam had entered the distancing period of the classic approach-avoid syndrome. He was, after all, a single man in his early forties, a man who had avoided commitment all his life. He probably panicked every time he felt himself getting seriously involved with a woman. All Darcy had to remember was not to panic in response.

  Being supportive and understanding was the key. Let him feel separate. Let him begin to miss her. Let him realize what he was losing. And leave the door open so he could easily come back.

  She knew that in a situation like this, she was lucky to be working in such close proximity to the man. He could hardly forget her when he saw her every day! Despite her agitation and sleeplessness, she had been taking extra care every morning with her clothes and her makeup. She had to look her best and act her best. Inevitably he would compare her behavior with that of all the other women he’d broken up with and realize that she was special, one in a million.

  And once he realized that—she had him.

  Darcy wished she could tell Annie. But Sam had insisted on keeping their relationship secret. The architectural design industry was small and full of gossip, and Sam had been very firm about keeping his private life entirely private.

  Even so, Darcy mused, that shouldn’t have stopped her from telling her best friend. After all, women told each other a lot of things that men never dreamed they told.…

  But she’d kept the affair secret from Annie for another reason altogether. For some time she’d suspected that Sam had a bit of a thing for Annie. There was no sign that Annie reciprocated, but Sam was an attractive man. And if he had broken up with her because he wanted to start seeing Annie…

  God it didn’t bear thinking about.

  But if such a thing did happen, Darcy hoped she could be civilized.

  A true, unselfish friend.

  But, dammit it, she wasn’t sure she could stand it.

  Chapter Eleven

  Sidney Canin stopped by Annie’s office later that morning, while she was on the phone with a prospective client. His face was long and gloomy as always. He signaled her from the doorway, pointing to the hold button on her phone.

  Sidney rarely interrupted anything. Usually he was content to wait until she was free. She put the caller on hold.

  “I need to talk to you,” he said, coming into her office and shutting the door behind him.

  “Sorry. I’m right in the middle of an important conversation.”

  “This is more important.”

  “Can you wait a few minutes? This is a prospective client I’m talking to.”

  Nodding, Sidney crossed his arms over his chest. He clearly intended to wait right there in her office, leaning against the wall and scowling.

  Exasperated—she didn’t like Sidney and was beginning to wonder if she would ever get away from him professionally—Annie ended her phone call as quickly and as gracefully as possible.

  “Okay. What’s so important?”

  “The cathedral.”

  “What about it?”

  “There’s a problem.”

  According to Sidney, there was always a problem. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  Before he could tell her, Annie’s phone rang again. She could have let voice mail answer it, but Sidney’s demands irritated her. She picked up the phone while her colleague glared at her.

  “Hello, Annie,” said Matthew Carlyle.

  At the sound of his deep, husky voice, she felt something stretch and curl in the pit of her belly. At the same moment, she was conscious of Sidney watching her. Two impossible men…

  “We still on for dinner tonight?” he asked.

  “Yes. And don’t forget the site meeting at one-thirty.”

  “I’ll be there. About tonight—”

  “Do you mind if I call you back in a little while? I’ve got someone in my office.”

  He gave her his number, and Annie wrote it down and hung up.

  “Who was that?” Sidney asked.

  “Matthew Carlyle. He’s the new chair of the UPC building committee, which means, essentially, that we’re all working for him now.”

  The scowl on Canin’s face was erased by what appeared to be an expression of pure shock. It turned, quickly, to anger. “Are you telling me that that murderer is taking Francesca’s place on the committee?”

  “Yes. Ironic, isn’t it?”

  “It’s worse than ironic! It’s sick. Jesus Christ, has the entire world gone mad?”

  Annie was surprised for a moment by the intensity of his reaction. Then she remembered that even before the murder there had been no love lost between Sidney Canin and Matt Carlyle.

  “It’s going to be difficult, I suppose, but we’ll all have to live with it,” she said. “Whatever we may think of him personally, he was lawfully acquitted.”

  “That was a foregone conclusion even before the trial. Billionaires kill with impunity. They never go to jail.”

  “Well, you might be right, but even so, we’re going to have to work with him. I’m having dinner with him this evening, as a matter of fact, to try to forge some sort of working relationship—”

  “You’re having dinner with him?” Sidney interrupted.

  “Yes. Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Why shouldn’t you?” he said scathingly, as if the question were the stupidest one he’d ever heard.

  “Is there some personal animosity between you and Matthew Carlyle?” she asked. “Seems to me you didn’t like him even before Francesca died.”

  “No, I didn’t,” he said hotly. “I liked Francesca, and Carlyle never treated her right. Her marriage was a torment to her, and just as she was about to escape it, he killed her.”

  Annie decided to ask the question she had long wondered about: “You weren’t her mysterious lover, were you, Sidney?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” he snapped. But the color rose in his usually pale face. “I was her friend and her confidant. That’s all I was.”

  “Well, do you think she had a mysterious lover? Or was that just an invention of the defense attorneys and the press?”

  Canin strode to the door and whipped it open. “I don’t know and I don’t care. She’s dead. To hell with it. To hell with everything. To hell with the fucking cathedral.”

  He slammed the door behind him.

  Great, thought Annie. What a day—threatening letters, strange behavior from Darcy, crazy behavior from Sid, and now, to top it off, she had two meetings with Matthew Carlyle.

  At the cathedral that afternoon, Matt insisted on seeing everything. And he had about a thousand questions. They were intelligent questions, though, about technical matters of architecture and design, and Annie could tell that he had done some research. Apparently he was taking his responsibilities very seriously.

  She introduced him to Jack Fletcher, who appeared suitably impressed to meet s
uch a notorious man. Carlyle shook hands with the subcontractors’ crews that they met during their tour of the site. All of them knew who he was, and several of them took the opportunity to congratulate him on winning his freedom.

  Annie thought that there were some workers among the crews who hated Matthew Carlyle for his wealth and his business success, but if so they kept their feelings to themselves. Carlyle lacked the easy charm that Sam Brody possessed, so he didn’t exactly create a sense of instant camaraderie, but he didn’t piss anybody off either. He grinned and freely shook hands with dozens of people, and the buzz, she sensed, was positive.

  It was positive for her as well. Walking beside him, both of them wearing hard hats as required on the site, Annie felt both conspicuous and oddly comfortable. On several occasions he touched her, once to help her mount a ladder to some low scaffolding to examine the marble facing applied in the exquisite Lady Chapel in the apse, and another time he touched her under the elbow as they clambered over some cans of paint on the floor.

  On the second of these occasions, he looked down and caught her eye. She smiled at him, and something sparked. Chemistry. It had been there all those years ago in London, and it was still beating between them now.

  So how did it work, she wondered, that strange confluence of shoulders and limbs and eyes and mouth and those mysteriously undetectable pheromones that somehow drew one human body to another? Was it all chemical and biological? Was destiny charted in the hormones? Why, knowing all that she knew about this very dangerous man, did these nonverbal messages still have such power?

  The last person they encountered was Giuseppe Brindesi, who was high on the scaffolding at the east end of the transept aisle. Matthew wanted to meet him. In fact, he had actually started up the scaffolding ladder when Giuseppe yelled that he’d be coming down.

  “Have the two of you met?” Annie asked as the master craftsman stepped off the scaffolding. She nodded from one man to the other. “Giuseppe Brindesi, Matthew Carlyle.”

  Matthew put out his hand as he had been doing all afternoon. “No, I don’t believe so. Pleased to meet you.”

  Giuseppe hesitated a moment before shaking his hand. “I knew your wife, sir,” he said slowly. “Please accept my condolences.”

  Matthew looked blank, so Annie added, “Giuseppe is the stained glass expert whom Francesca recommended to us. He did some work in the old UPC church before it was torn down, so I thought you might have met.”

  Matthew’s expression changed—he seemed to grow more alert. But he shook his head and said, “No.”

  “I regret I was in my native Italy when Signora Carlyle died,” Giuseppe said. “After that I was in England, doing restorations. I have only recently returned to this country.”

  “I remember that she spoke of you,” Matthew said. Annie thought she detected an edge to his voice, but his face was once again under careful control, and she had no inkling of what he was thinking.

  “A beautiful lady,” Giuseppe said gently. “She is missed.”

  “Thank you,” Matthew replied.

  He was polite, but there was an audible finality to his words. It was clear that he did not wish to discuss his dead wife.

  They spoke briefly about the stained glass, and Giuseppe seemed somewhat preoccupied as he explained what he was doing. Then he turned to Annie. “May I speak to you a moment?”

  She stepped aside with him. “I’m having a few problems installing the largest panel,” he told her. “I’d like to come into your office tomorrow and have a look at the blueprints.”

  “Of course, but don’t you have your own copy of the latest CAD file?” she asked, referring to the computer-aided design software that all architects and designers used to assist in modern blueprint preparation.

  “Alas, I seem to have lost a page of the blueprints,” Giuseppe said. “I’d like to see the original file, if you don’t mind.”

  “You’ll have to come to my office at the firm for that,” she said.

  “That’s fine. Tomorrow, perhaps?”

  “Okay. I’ll be in by nine.”

  “Good,” he said, and with a polite nod to Matthew he climbed back up the scaffolding and resumed his work.

  “Anything wrong?” Matthew asked.

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  As they left the cathedral, Annie noticed that Jack Fletcher was leaning against a column only a few yards away, half hidden in the gloom.

  Chapter Twelve

  “I don’t know why I’m so nervous about this meeting tonight,” Annie said to Darcy as she changed her dress for the third time.

  “Hey, I’d be nervous too, having dinner with a murderer. Jeez, Annie, at least you could have insisted on meeting him in a restaurant! Going alone to his house doesn’t sound very smart.”

  “It’s really not fair to keep referring to him as a murderer.”

  “He did it—I know he did. I have a strong intuition about these things. Besides, the potential for violence is clear in Carlyle’s chart.”

  Annie raised her eyebrows. She didn’t agree with Darcy’s beliefs that everything had a cause or an explanation in the stars.

  “How does this one look?” she asked, slipping into a black sheath with short sleeves and a V neckline. She and Darcy regarded her reflection in the full-length mirror in Annie’s bedroom.

  “That’s good. Sexy and sophisticated but not too wild.”

  “I don’t want to look sexy.”

  “Honey, all women want to look sexy. We want men to think we’re sexy, too. We just don’t want them to actually do anything about it—at least not while we’re having a business dinner.”

  “You’re right, I should have insisted on a restaurant.”

  “Billionaires don’t meet people in restaurants. They order you to come to their mansions and be tended by their servants and fed by their cooks. But I wouldn’t worry too much. He can hardly rape you in front of his entire household staff.”

  “Whatever he’s thinking,” Annie said tersely, “it’s too late.”

  “You’re still mad at him for saying no to you about Fabrications, aren’t you?”

  Annie shrugged. Her feelings about Matt Carlyle were, at best, mixed.

  “I just read a book on male friendships as compared to female friendships,” Darcy said. “Just goes to show—men are so different from us!”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  “We think of our best friend as someone we can talk intimately to. A man’s best friend is someone he can do something with—you know, hunt, fish, watch football. And even when they do have a conversation, they rarely listen and empathize the way women do.”

  “They’re too busy giving advice,” Annie said ruefully.

  “Right. They even define the term friend differently than we do. Maybe they haven’t seen or talked to someone for twenty years, but because they were on the football team together in high school and swore an eternal pact of friendship, they still feel loyal.”

  “Whereas for us, friendship is more day-to-day, in the present.”

  “Exactly. Women are more practical about friendship. You and I haven’t known each other very long, for example. But we’re close friends.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Compare that with the long and old friendship between a couple of men. For example, Sam and your date for the evening, Matt Carlyle.”

  “It’s not a date!”

  Darcy grinned. “They don’t socialize very often, as far as I can tell. But Sam testified for the defense at Carlyle’s trial. He risked alienating all sorts of people by standing up in court on behalf of a man whom everybody thought was guilty.”

  “I would have done the same thing. Wouldn’t you?” Annie asked. “Surely both men and women are loyal to their friends when the chips are down.”

  Darcy shrugged. “If you asked Carlyle, I’ll bet he’d say that most of his friends abandoned him in his time of need.”

  “Well, maybe they did. But I was ne
ver a friend of his, Darcy.”

  “Still, he’s bound to be angry and bitter. Watch out for this guy, Annie. I’m serious. You want me to come with you—as another representative of the firm?”

  Annie shook her head. “No. I can handle it.” She smiled wryly. “I guess I’ve got to prove that to myself.”

  Their eyes met in the mirror, and Darcy nodded solemnly. “You can handle it.”

  *

  The first thing she thought when she arrived at the secluded, gated mansion was that she must have made a wrong turn somewhere.

  Surely this dark Gothic horror could not be the home of one of the wealthiest and most sophisticated CEOs in the nation. It looked like something out of a Stephen King novel.

  Carlyle lived in the traditionally upscale area of the city known as Pacific Heights. From the tops of the hills residents had a fantastic view of San Francisco Bay, with the Golden Gate Bridge to the left, the village of Sausalito across the Bay, Alcatraz Island looking deceptively picturesque out in the blue waters, and the shores of Berkeley to the right.

  Carlyle’s home was situated on a hilly lot, with high walls and terraced gardens surrounding it. A steep, winding driveway led up to the house from a security gate constructed of tall cast-iron pikes of the sort that, in ancient times, were used to impale the heads of one’s enemies.

  The mansion was a four-story monstrosity of “eclectic” style. The architect must have been either drunk or mad, Annie thought with some amusement as she pulled in and parked. He had combined Georgian ponderousness with a Gothic sense of the bizarre, and crowned it all with ornate Victorian touches. There were crenellated towers and rooftop galleries that resembled battlements, and the square, solid walls looked thick enough to withstand the siege of Troy.

  Keeping guard over a front doorway, that was tall enough to admit a giant on stilts, were three horrific stone gargoyles that looked as if they should have been guarding the gates of hell.

  What a perfect place for a wife killer to live, Annie thought with a shiver.