by BETH KERY
“Don’t talk to me like I’m a criminal, Liam. Do you think the world began on the day you were born? I was young once. I had a life that didn’t revolve exclusively around my children.”
“Don’t try to make me feel guilty,” Liam said, his voice once again like steel.
“We all have secrets,” Brigit continued as if he hadn’t even spoken. “Marc does. You do. Your father certainly did.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s just the truth, Liam. That’s what you’re so fond of, right?”
Natalie started guiltily from her hyper-focus on the exchange when the door was flung open and suddenly she was face-to-face with Brigit Kavanaugh.
“You,” Brigit said softly.
The word seemed to lance straight through Natalie. There was little doubt what Brigit meant, innocuous as her utterance may seem. It’d sounded like a malediction ringing in Natalie’s ears. Liam’s mother clearly held Natalie responsible for turning her calm family life upside down.
Brigit rushed past her.
A moment later, Natalie heard the front door slam and she was staring at Liam, whose face looked tinged with gray in the dim light.
Natalie stood on Liam’s terrace, squinting to make out the shimmering lake. The night was black. Clouds had swept in that evening, obliterating even starshine.
She heard the screen door squeak and close and knew Liam had joined her. Her hands twisted together nervously. They hadn’t spoken much since they’d stood in the hallway of the Family Center. They’d left the fundraiser soon afterward, driven to his cottage and made dinner.
You heard? Liam had asked her as they stood there in the hallway.
Natalie had nodded her head, embarrassed that she’d eavesdropped on something so personal. Liam had just taken her hand and led her out of the building. For the last two hours, she’d still been vibrating with the shock of hearing the encounter. She thought it was similar for Liam, given his absorption and distance.
Now that the shock was wearing off, uncertainty and nervousness were starting to creep into her awareness. Liam’s approach from behind her on the darkened terrace only seemed to amplify her anxiety.
Surely she should leave. She’d overstayed her welcome here. Liam had other things to think about. Perhaps even now he was rethinking the wisdom of becoming involved with her—
“Are you wondering why I didn’t tell you that my mother grew up in the same town as Lincoln DuBois?”
She inhaled slowly. His voice had resounded from just behind her. Yet he didn’t touch her, Natalie realized with a sinking feeling. She sighed and glanced down. After only a few days, she’d become accustomed to Liam’s tender caresses. Their absence now seemed telling.
“Why didn’t you?” she asked.
“I wanted to ask my mother first. It only seemed fair. In case it didn’t mean anything. I was going to tell you, I just wanted to give my mom a chance to give her side first.”
“I understand,” Natalie said.
He put his hands on her shoulders and urged her to turn. He was a tall shadow looming over her. She couldn’t make out his features, but she sensed his intensity.
“Do you?” he asked.
“I’ve told you before how important I think family is. Of course you wanted to speak to your mother about it before you mentioned anything to me.”
“It’s got nothing to do with family loyalty,” Liam said, a hint of frustration in his voice. “I just…I’m starting to think she’s hiding something.”
“Then let’s stop. Let’s stop, Liam.”
He’d pulled her in contact with his body, so she felt the shock that went through him at her resolute tone.
“How can you say that with so much certainty, when you’re the one who started this? Wouldn’t you regret it…stopping?”
She put her arms around his waist. “I might regret not stopping,” she said, her throat thick with emotion. She thought of what she’d told him when she first visited the cottage, here on this very patio where they now stood. She’d told him there was a chance he might love his father more if he knew the truth of what had motivated Derry that night, not less.
After hearing Brigit’s and Liam’s heated exchange at the Family Center, she was starting to realize just how naive—how selfish—she’d been in saying that.
“I don’t want you to get hurt, Liam,” she whispered.
For a few seconds he didn’t speak. The tension increased in his body. She kept her gaze trained on his shadowed face as if she could read every nuance of his expression, even though the shadows blinded her.
“We’re not stopping,” he said. “We’re not stopping any of it.”
His mouth covered hers, and Natalie knew in that second that Liam’s passion had captured her soul…ruled it. Her awkwardness, her unanswered questions, her anxieties and curiosity about the crash—all those things had once been sovereign in her mind.
Now they receded to the background, bowing down to a new master.
His hands—half cherishing, half commanding—moved over her body. Her breasts tingled beneath his touch. She arched into him, eager to make his heat her own.
The earlier conflict seemed to have created a pressure in both of them, the type of friction that required release. Her clothes seemed to melt off her beneath his hasty, adroit fingers. He urged her on to the cushioned recliner. She laid back and stared up at the black night sky, puffs of air and moans flying past her parted lips. His hands and mouth seemed to be everywhere at once, seemingly turning her into a single, throbbing nerve ending.
When he settled on her hip bone, treating it to a gentle kiss, Natalie cried out in rising need and reached for him, trying to urge him up to her, begging him silently to quench the fire he’d set in her flesh.
He made a hushing sound and grabbed her wrists, restraining her. His head moved between her thighs.
She keened softly in awe as pleasure flooded her.
Did he know he kissed her very soul?
The sound of the waves hitting the rocks became obliterated by the pounding of her heart. It became unbearable to exist in this taut world of bliss, friction and intimacy Liam built in her. She strained tight in surrender. The explosion of pleasure—of sheer feeling—that detonated in her flesh was so intense, it almost hurt to succumb.
She still was recovering when she felt Liam slide inside her, filling her, stopping only when they were pressed tight, belly to heaving belly.
“Shh, I’ve got you,” he whispered, his voice a rough caress in her ear before he kissed her there. She distantly heard her own whimpers of anguished release still escaping from her throat and realized he’d been soothing her.
Then Liam began to move, and her pleasure-dazed brain once again focused on approaching ecstasy.
“I’m going to go to Lake Tahoe,” Liam said later, his lips lingering to caress her breast after he spoke.
The hair on the back of her neck stood on end when she registered his words. They lay together on the cushioned recliner, their bodies entwined, the perspiration from their heated lovemaking drying on their skin in the gentle breeze. Natalie realized her stroking fingers in his hair had frozen at his statement.
“To talk to Lincoln DuBois?”
She felt his nod. She resumed stroking him, her mind whirring into overdrive.
“I’m going with you,” she said, glad at that moment he couldn’t see her apprehensive expression because of the darkness.
Once, the truth about the crash had haunted her, eluded her, a hazy outline she could never quite bring into focus. Now Natalie wished she’d never coveted that prize.
What if that elusive truth destroyed the powerful, but still newborn and fragile connection between Liam and her?
Chapter Thirteen
If it weren’t for the breathtaking Lake Tahoe scenery distracting her, Natalie might have thrown up. She was glad Liam was driving the car up the curving mountain road that overlooked the topaz blue alpine lake, and no
t her. He handled the tight curves like a pro. A thought struck her as she stared at the steep drop-off that looked to be only a few skinny feet from the right front tire of the rental car.
“You said your mother grew up in Tahoe. Do you still have family here?”
“Not anymore. My aunt and uncle lived in Incline Village until I was about nineteen, when they moved to Sacramento.”
“Did you visit when you were young? I was wondering why you seem so comfortable driving on this road.”
Liam gave her a quick glance, his brow furrowed. Natalie barely resisted an urge to shout at him to look back at the road.
“Is my driving making you nervous?” he asked, a grin tickling his mouth.
“Not your driving, no. You seem very confident. It’s this road. I mean…maybe you can’t see it, but there’s like a hundred foot drop about two inches away from my door,” she said, glancing anxiously out the passenger window.
Warmth spread inside her when he started to laugh, a lighthearted sound she hadn’t heard from him for several days. In many ways, they’d grown closer in the past week, spending quiet time together, swimming in the continued warm summer weather, taking walks or just sitting on the terrace, always touching, as if they wanted to know the other was there in some tangible sense. He was always warm and considerate with her; he was a great deal more than warm in bed.
But in many ways, she couldn’t help but feel he’d grown distant since that night at the fundraiser. He seemed as if he was constantly trying to work out some kind of puzzle in his head. Over the past few nights, she frequently saw him on his computer. On several occasions she heard him talking on the phone in the distance. He’d spent the duration of the flight from Detroit to Reno working, looking over his notes with a sober expression of concentration.
So his deep, earnest laughter filling the interior of the car sounded especially wonderful to her at that moment.
“I’ve driven this road maybe a dozen times or more in a car, but my cousins and I have circled it a hell of a lot more in dirt bikes.”
Natalie gasped. “I can’t believe your parents let teenagers on this road on dirt bikes.”
Liam chuckled. “People in the area don’t think of this road like you do. Most residents could drive it in their sleep. If you saw some of the mountain paths my mother used to take on horseback, you’d realize this road is a cakewalk.”
At the mention of his mother, his grin flattened.
“Liam…how do you think we should try to get in to see Lincoln DuBois? Should we try and call when once we check into the hotel? I can’t imagine he has a number listed publicly, a man like him.”
“I have both his address and phone number.”
Natalie looked at him in surprise. “How’d you get those?”
“Detectives have their ways.”
She laughed. “Apparently.”
He shrugged. “It’s why you initially hired me, right?”
She wanted to blurt out that a lot had changed since she’d given him a check to investigate his own father, but she figured now wasn’t the time to broach that sensitive topic.
“So, how are we going to proceed?”
“We’re going over to DuBois’ place and ask him if he knows anything that might be relevant about my parents and the crash.”
“Just like that?”
He gave her a wry glance. “He’s expecting us.”
Natalie was so shocked she forgot to clutch at her seat as Liam maneuvered a hairpin turn. “You already spoke to him?”
“I didn’t speak to him personally. I talked to a few people, but the guy who is going to get us in the door is the Chief Executive Officer of DuBois—Nick Malone. Malone’s not the most welcoming of men, but I suppose crackpots try to wriggle their way into DuBois’ presence all the time. We got lucky though. DuBois himself was in the room when I spoke with Malone. The only reason we got a meeting with DuBois was because Malone said my mother’s name out loud, and DuBois heard it.”
“Your mother’s name?” she asked slowly.
“Yeah.”
Liam now looked so grim, his former laughter might have been a hallucination.
Natalie didn’t really know what to expect in regard to visiting a billionaire tycoon’s house. Even though Liam had the lakeshore address, they had to ask for directions a few times, the estate was so secluded by towering pine trees and miles of land. When they finally did find the drive, it was unmarked. They didn’t realize it was the road to DuBois estate until they pulled up to the iron gates and saw the numbers for the address innocuously printed in tiny numerals on the metal of the security intercom.
“Malone may have given us the address, but he sure as hell didn’t want to make things easy for us to see DuBois,” Liam muttered before he pressed the intercom from his car window.
Perhaps a Hollywood influence had her imagining a maid dressed in a black dress and a white apron, so she was a little taken aback when the door to the sprawling house was answered by a cowboy.
Well, not a cowboy, really—there was no hat or enormous belt buckle, but the tall, fit man with the wavy chestnut brown certainly looked as if he’d be comfortable in a horse’s saddle.
“Can I help you?” he asked, although his clear, cold gray eyes hardly seemed like he wanted to give them assistance.
“We’re here to speak to Lincoln DuBois. I’m Liam Kavanaugh. This is Natalie Reyes.” Even though she’d seen Liam shake hands with innumerable people in the past several weeks, he didn’t offer his hand, which surprised Natalie a little.
For a few seconds, the man didn’t say anything. Natalie shifted on her feet uncomfortably when she noticed Liam and the man were having a staring contest.
“We spoke on the phone. I’m Nick Malone.”
“I figured you were. I recognized your voice,” Liam said so pleasantly it was as if he hadn’t noticed the chill in the air, even though Natalie knew for certain he had.
“I don’t like this. Mr. DuBois isn’t at all well.”
“You mentioned that several times on the phone. I promise you we’ll be considerate of his health. It was my understanding that it was Mr. DuBois’ particular wish to speak with me.”
That did it. Nick Malone stepped back, allowing them to enter.
“Follow me,” he said.
Malone led them into a truly stunning great room, featuring a forty-foot ceiling and the largest picture window Natalie had ever seen. The house was built on the side of a mountain. Its panoramic view of a sparkling Lake Tahoe and the surrounding High Sierras was the most jaw-dropping she’d ever seen.
They followed Malone up a grand staircase made with lodgepole pines and down a hallway, which was more of a gallery, given the museum-quality paintings hanging on the wall and occasional sculptures.
Nick gave them a severe once-over as he knocked at a door.
“Linc? Are you awake?”
“I am,” was the quiet reply.
“Mr. Kavanaugh and Ms. Reyes have arrived.”
“Send them in,” the voice on the other side of the door came more energetically.
Malone put his hand on the doorknob and turned to Liam.
“He’s very frail. His level of awareness wavers, depending on how fatigued he is. Don’t badger him with a lot of questions.”
Liam smiled even though his eyes were like blue ice chips. “No worries. We’ll be very gentle. My mother taught me good manners.”
Despite Liam’s sarcasm, Malone turned the knob and pushed open the door. He shut it behind them with an angry click once they’d entered the room.
And what a room…Natalie thought in wonder as she looked around the enormous space filled with everything from plush oriental carpets to detailed nautical maps that had been framed and mounted on the wall. Interspersed were oil paintings of horses.
DuBois himself was in the middle of all this wonder, sitting in a wheelchair, his gaze fixed on Liam. He had the look of a man who had lost a great deal of weight in a short per
iod of time, leaving him lined and shrunken. Only his thick, steel-gray hair carried a remnant of former vitality.
“Mr. DuBois? Thank you for seeing us,” Liam said warmly, shaking the man’s outstretched hand. “This is Natalie Reyes.”
“Hello,” Natalie said, taking DuBois’ frail hand in her own. He nodded courteously at her, but immediately turned his attention back to Liam.
She knew by now that DuBois was only a few years older than Brigit Kavanaugh, but they might as well have been of different generations. Brigit could have passed for a woman in her late forties. DuBois’ multiple strokes had taken their toll, however. He might have been in his late seventies instead of in his sixties.
“I thought you might resemble her more,” he told Liam in a feeble voice. “I thought you might look more like your mother. Beautiful Brigit.”
Liam smiled. “I take more after my father, I’m afraid.”
A cloud seemed to fall over DuBois’ features.
“I understand you went to school with my mother,” Liam said.
“Yes, yes,” DuBois said, some of the animation returning to his face. He waved them over to a plush velvet couch. Once they were seated, he maneuvered his chair so that he faced them. “She was my first love, Brigit Darien. You see? There,” he said, nodding toward several photographs arranged on a round end table. Liam leaned over and plucked out one frame. He held it in his lap, examining the photograph of what was obviously a teenage Brigit Kavanaugh sitting on the back of a brown horse with a gleaming coat. Brigit looked beautiful, the sunlight making her hair a luminous gold, a brilliant smile for whoever had snapped the photo.
“Brigit practically lived on my father’s ranch for a few years. A more natural horsewoman I’ve never seen. It broke my heart when she moved to Chicago.”
“I can see how she would break your heart. She was so pretty,” Natalie said. “When did you and Brigit meet?”
“We were both enrolled by our parents at a local stable for lessons. I grew up on a working ranch, and can’t even remember when I wasn’t riding, but I didn’t know anything about showing a horse until I was fourteen or so. Brigit would have been about twelve. She preferred jumping, and I was into roping, but once we got past our prejudices for each other’s expertise, we became the best of friends.”