Payback

by Jasmine Cresswell

  “I don’t know. I think so. I’m not sure.” Avery tried to smile at her own hopeless indecision. She couldn’t hold the smile. “What if Ron has lost his memory? What if he desperately wants to come home and doesn’t know how to find us?” She leaned against the damp bookshelves, her face whiter than the shelves behind her. The pallor was less shocking to Kate than the fact that Avery still hadn’t found a tissue and wiped the dust and dried tears from her cheeks. Even in the immediate aftermath of Ron’s disappearance, when Avery had been battered by the news that her husband was a bigamist and their twenty-eight-year marriage didn’t legally exist, she had never lost her composure this completely.

  Her heart aching on her mother’s behalf, Kate forced herself to speak gently. “Didn’t you tell me the man in the restaurant ran away as soon as he saw Luke?”

  Avery nodded. “Luke chased Ron…the man…into the parking lot, but he drove off before Luke could speak to him.” Her voice became wistful. “I wish Luke had managed to catch up with…whoever it was.”

  From Kate’s perspective, it was hard to imagine any way that her mother’s happiness would be increased by tracking down the man who’d already seduced her, gotten her pregnant, deceived her through twenty-eight years of bigamous marriage, and now might be perpetrating the ultimate deception by pretending to be dead. A fresh surge of anger swept over her. Dammit, Luke shouldn’t have gone to her mother and presented her with this terrible news! Kate recognized that she was angry with Luke because that was a whole lot easier than being angry with her maybe-not-dead father, but that didn’t alter the facts. Luke should have come to her with his stupid theories instead of destroying her mother’s hard-won peace of mind.

  Unfortunately, the genie was out of the bottle and there was no point trying to stuff him—or Ron—back inside again. She and her mother needed to decide what to do next. She saw only two viable choices: she could talk to Luke in the hope that he had sufficient information to enable a private detective to track down the man in the restaurant. Or they could ignore what they’d heard and carry on as if they’d never learned there was a possibility Ron Raven might be alive.

  It wasn’t in the least difficult to decide which option she preferred. If her father was alive and hiding from his families, as far as Kate was concerned he could stay lost forever. And that was before she contemplated the horror of having to meet with Luke Savarini again, an activity that ranked right up there with the joys of having a limb amputated without benefit of anesthesia.

  Sadly, Avery’s attitude made it clear that her choice would be to look for Ron and attempt to confirm whether her bigamous husband was alive or dead. It was a measure of just how much she loved her mother that Kate made the offer.

  “Would you like me to talk to Luke and find out if there’s any information he has that might help us to track down the man he saw in the restaurant?”

  “Would you?” Avery’s face lit up. “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “Not at all.” She hoped her smile didn’t look as sickly as it felt.

  “Thank you so much, Katie.” Avery sighed with visible relief. “I was so overwhelmed this morning that I really didn’t ask many sensible questions at all. It might be impossible to trace the man Luke saw, but it would be nice to know that for certain, wouldn’t it?”

  “I guess so.”

  This might be a time of emotional confusion for Avery, but she was a sensitive woman and she wasn’t self-absorbed enough to ignore Kate’s lack of enthusiasm. “I’m being silly,” she said quickly. “There’s no reason in the world for you to question Luke if meeting him again makes you uncomfortable. Good heavens, I’m more than capable of asking him if he has any other snippets of information that he didn’t share with me this morning.”

  Avery sounded determinedly brave and cheerful and Kate castigated herself for being a mean, selfish daughter. She knew how excruciatingly hard her mother found it to discuss Ron’s multiple deceptions and criminal acts with anyone, much less someone she knew only as her daughter’s discarded boyfriend. For goodness’ sake, how tough could it be to have a brief, businesslike meeting with Luke?

  “There’s no need for you to talk with him, Mom. I’ll track him down in one of his restaurants tonight and find out what other information he has, if anything.”

  “So soon?” Avery’s face lit up. “Oh, that would be great.”

  “I’m grateful for the excuse to stop cleaning,” Kate lied. “You’re such a slave-driver, you’ll have me working until midnight unless I take this chance to escape.”

  Avery shot her daughter a grateful glance, the only sign she gave of seeing through Kate’s cheery facade. “I’ll treat you to dinner first,” she said, stripping off her rubber gloves. “We’ve both been working long enough. You get to pick the restaurant.”

  The way Kate’s stomach was churning right now, cream of wheat struck her as about as daring a meal as she should risk. “Actually, Mom, if you don’t mind, I’ll skip dinner. Given the way Luke runs between restaurants, it might take me the rest of the evening to track him down. If I do manage to reach him, I’ll get back to you tomorrow morning, okay?”

  “That’s fine. I suppose there’s no real rush.” Avery’s voice became acerbic again. “Ron’s been missing for six months. I daresay I can wait a few more hours to discover whether he’s dead or moved on to greener pastures and a younger woman.” She ruined the effect of her breezy indifference by walking out of the room at high speed.

  Her mother was crying again, Kate reflected grimly. Damn Luke! And double damn Ron Raven. Her confusion finally gelled into certitude. She hoped her father was alive, she realized. That way she could have the pleasure of killing him as soon as she found him. Maybe she could build a bonfire and tie her loser ex-boyfriend and her loser father to opposite stakes. The way she felt about them right now, that would make a definite two-for-one bargain.

  Six

  I t was late that night before Kate caught up with Luke at Luciano’s II, his restaurant in Winnetka. Walking into the once-familiar surroundings, she was impressed all over again by the subtle welcome offered by the clever layout and the classic Tuscan decor. The damp October night turned the log fire burning in the brick fireplace into a cheery focal point. The ocher of the rough plaster walls blended soothingly with the rusty-coral table linens, and an inviting aroma of herbs and simmering sauces seeped out from the kitchen. Cilantro and garlic, Kate thought, and red wine. If her stomach hadn’t been giving such an excellent imitation of a butter churn in full operation, she might actually have felt a spark of appetite.

  The dining room was full, and the hum of conversation was loud enough to suggest everyone was having a good time without being intrusive. Luke had been working to upgrade the acoustics of the room at the time their relationship ended, and his investment had apparently paid off.

  She hadn’t called to let Luke know she was coming. Talking to him on the phone would be difficult in any circumstances, given the way their relationship had ended. She’d decided it would be impossible with Ron Raven as the subject of their conversation. Now that she was here, though, she wondered if a phone call might not have been smarter after all. At the best of times, thinking about her father tended to provoke the urge to scream with rage or sob inconsolably, and meeting with Luke Savarini was light years away from the best of times. Kate broke into a sweat just imagining the horror of bursting into tears when she was around him.

  By a significant effort of will, she brought her feelings under control. She was cool, she was calm, and there was no reason to suppose she’d embarrass herself. Provided she didn’t allow her fears about her father and her worries about her mother to bleed over into what should be a brief, polite conversation, all would be well. God knew, Luke was likely to be as anxious to end the discussion as she was. Neither of them had any interest in reigniting a flame that had caused burns of life-threatening severity without providing either warmth or light.

  The hostess waiting by the door was
new, which was a relief. Kate spoke her carefully rehearsed piece before her courage ran away and died. “Hi, I understand from the executive sous-chef at Luciano’s on Chestnut that Luke Savarini is working here this evening. Would you tell him that Kate Fairfax would like to speak with him? I realize this is a busy time and I can come back later if that would be more convenient.”

  “Kate Fairfax, did you say?” The hostess smiled, giving no hint that she’d ever heard Kate’s name before. The TV coverage had been so blistering when her father disappeared that Kate still half expected to be recognized everywhere she went. The gradual return of anonymity was a blessing she appreciated every day.

  “Yes, that’s right. Luke and I are old friends.” A slight misrepresentation, but she could hardly announce she was a former lover who, in normal circumstances, would prefer being locked in a small cage with a large crocodile rather than spend time with him.

  “I’ll let him know you’re here.”

  “Thanks so much.”

  The hostess headed toward the kitchens and Kate gratefully stopped smiling. She picked up one of the heavy, leather-bound menus to check what was new since her last visit. She soon realized she was only pretending to read and put the menu down again. Her stomach continued to whirl. She strove to ignore it. For the past several months, it sometimes seemed that denial had become her default state of being.

  The hostess returned. “Luke says he’ll be right out. He asked me to bring you a glass of wine from the bar while you’re waiting. Our house white is a Garofoli and the house red is a Valpolicella—”

  “I appreciate the offer, but I’m fine, thanks.” Sipping a glass of wine struck Kate as an invitation to disaster. She’d changed into dress pants, a cream silk blouse and a cropped, brass-buttoned black jacket before coming in search of Luke, and she hoped she looked reasonably put together. Sadly, the aura of a woman in charge of her life was sheer illusion. Unlike her mother, who had clearly been a princess in a previous incarnation, Kate often felt that her social graces were no more than a paper-thin layer stretched over a seething swamp of klutziness.

  She heard a slight stir in the dining room and looked up. Luke had come out from the kitchen and was walking toward her, leaving little ripples of interested conversation in his wake. The seven months since she’d last seen him had clearly done nothing to dim his charisma. Kate accepted, almost with resignation, that her skin pricked and her nipples tingled in automatic response to his approach. Even her stomach stopped whirling long enough to clench with sexual tension.

  She supposed she shouldn’t be surprised by the instant tug of desire. Somehow, though, she’d managed to forget the power of Luke’s sexual magnetism. Still, they hadn’t broken up because they’d fallen out of lust, she reminded herself. Lust had worked well for them, right up to the end.

  What the two of them had lost was mutual respect and any vestige of trust. Which made for a pretty comprehensive indictment of their relationship, she thought wryly. Her own final act of betrayal had simply been an exclamation point to punctuate the end of a relationship that had already died.

  Luke was wearing the traditional starched white chef’s jacket and black cotton pants. The jacket was pristine, presumably because he’d changed before leaving the kitchen. He’d discarded the mandatory head gear and his short-cropped hair stood up in a thick, dark crest above his tanned complexion and smoke-gray eyes. Despite spending twelve-hour working days inside various kitchens, Luke looked as if he made his living outdoors. She knew he started each morning, almost regardless of the weather, with a five-mile run along the lakeshore, which partly explained the permanent tan and the impressive physique. She admired his self-discipline, but even when they first started dating and the gloss was still pretty blinding, she’d wished he could be a little less perfect.

  They’d needed to break up before Kate was willing to admit the extent to which she’d been intimidated by Luke’s assets. He had so darn many, aside from self-made wealth and good looks: his warmth, his friendliness, his easy sense of humor and his ability to roll with the punches while still working at a fiendish pace.

  Then there was his storybook Italian family. She’d loved hearing tales about his brothers and sisters, not to mention his ever-expanding crop of nieces and nephews. She’d envied him the casual camaraderie of his five siblings and the general aura of controlled chaos surrounding his family life, although toward the end of their relationship she’d begun to wonder why she’d never met any of his relatives face-to-face. She knew Luke well enough to realize that any girlfriend he was serious about would be required to get along with his family.

  Even more than his family, she’d envied the ease with which Luke showed his emotions. If he was happy, he laughed. When he cooked for her, he hummed as he worked, completely indifferent to the fact that he was always off-key. When they made love, his passion was all-consuming, his attention totally devoted to her. If he was angry, he yelled. And when the anger passed, it was forgotten, with no lingering bitterness or need to prove he’d been right all along.

  She’d been with Luke the night he learned that his maternal grandfather had died from complications after supposedly routine surgery, and he’d cried as he heard the news. Apparently he’d never received the memo informing him that macho men were required to keep a stiff upper lip at all times. Kate’s grandparents, Southern aristocrats who believed that gentlemen and ladies should avoid behaving like men and women whenever possible, would have been appalled by Luke’s emotionalism. She had simply loved him more for his lack of inhibitions.

  Luke’s ability to grieve openly had haunted her in the aftermath of her father’s disappearance. He had seemed to know instinctively how to integrate death and mourning into the natural order of his life. Kate, by contrast, had floundered. Her father’s death brought nothing but unanswered questions and the hurt of issues left permanently unresolved. Her sadness at his loss seemed too complicated to grasp, let alone to express in something as mundane as tears.

  Kate instructed herself to stop wallowing in the past and focus on coping with the present. Luke had paused to chat at several tables as he crossed the dining room, but now he was only steps away from the hostess station. Steps away from her. Kate wished she could greet him with a casual smile and a throwaway comment about…something. Unfortunately, when your last encounter involved the sort of brutal betrayal that left you internally bleeding, it was a bit difficult to come up with anything that didn’t sound either snide or demented.

  Luke halted a couple of feet away and simply stood there, saying nothing. She pretended to look at him but was actually careful to avoid meeting his gaze. Her brain was a blank, but eventually she managed to manipulate her mouth into a smile. At least, she hoped it was a smile and not a grimace.

  She held out her hand. “Luke, thank you for meeting with me on such short notice.”

  He ignored her hand. “You’re welcome.” His icy tone belied the polite words. “I assume you’re here to talk about your father.”

  “Yes, if we could.” She let her hand drop to her side, her voice chilling to match his. If she’d expected the passage of seven months to heal the wounds of their parting, she had obviously been delusional.

  “Let’s go to my office.” He turned without waiting for her to respond, not bothering to check if she was following as he wove a swift path to the tiny room set aside for him to make phone calls, pay bills and meet with vendors. Unlike the colorful dining rooms, or the shiny stainless steel of the spacious kitchens, his offices in all three restaurants were tiny, white-walled cubes. Small enough to be oppressive, and cold enough to form a suitably icy background for their conversation, Kate thought bleakly.

  “I hope your mother wasn’t upset by what we discussed this morning.” Luke stood behind his desk and didn’t suggest that either of them should sit down. If body language was anything to go by, his attitude to this meeting was several degrees less enthusiastic than her own.

  “Of course my mother i
s upset.” Kate bit back the urge to suggest he should refrain from making ridiculous statements. “Six months ago she found out that the man she’d loved for twenty-eight years was a bigamous, cheating liar. Then she was informed he’d been murdered. The next cheery little revelation was that her supposed husband had left far less money than anyone would have thought possible. What funds did exist went straight to probate, where the lawyers are having a grand time charging huge sums of money to unravel a quarter century of my father’s carefully manufactured deceptions. In the meantime, my mother’s been forced to sell her home of a dozen years and adjust to the fact that at least half her friends weren’t actually friends at all, merely hangers-on, out for what they could get. Now you summon her to your presence so that you can pass on the news that—big surprise!—maybe Ron Raven is alive after all.” She let out an exasperated breath. “How in the world do you think she feels?”

  Luke’s voice and expression both remained cool. “Right now I imagine she’s teetering somewhere between overwhelmed and devastated.”

  “Your imagination is correct. I’m wondering what the upside of your revelation was supposed to be.”

  “The fact that Avery might be able to uncover the truth about what really happened to her husband?”

  Kate made an impatient sound. “Where my father is concerned, truth is likely to remain unavailable however much we scrabble in the dust he left behind.”

  “It’s clear you disapprove of my decision to tell your mother what I saw.”

  “Yes, of course I disapprove. In effect you told her that Ron Raven cared so little about her that he was willing to fake his own death to avoid ever seeing her again. Thanks so much for your comforting words!”

  He winced at her sarcasm. For a moment, his guarded expression broke down, revealing unmistakable self-doubt. “I felt I owed your mother the truth precisely because Ron lied to her for so many years.”