The waiter arrived with their bill and they bickered amicably about who should pay it. Kate won the argument since Luke had shelled out two hundred bucks to bribe Sam at the print shop in addition to paying for their airline tickets. The bill signed, they made their way back up to their rooms in harmony with the world and with each other.
The ease and harmony both fled when Luke stopped outside Kate’s room to say good-night. Sexual awareness always flowed dangerously close to the surface whenever he was around Kate and tonight was no exception. Despite all his dire admonitions to himself about keeping his distance and not repeating past mistakes, he could think of nothing he wanted more at this precise moment than to have sex with Kate.
The overhead light shone on her hair, turning it from ash-blond to magical burnished-gold. Her light floral scent enveloped him, intoxicating in its power to evoke memories of other nights when they’d barely been able to wait to open the door to his condo or her house before tumbling into each other’s arms and searching out the nearest horizontal surface. She glanced up at him, smiling as she said good-night, and the final set of floodgates opened. Desire erupted from the dark, subterranean place where he had it contained, drowning common sense in primitive emotion.
“Kate.” He murmured her name, leaning toward her. He could have resisted the urge to touch her, of course, but suddenly his painful efforts at self-control seemed crazy. He wondered why on earth he was struggling so hard to resist something so uniquely pleasurable.
She stepped away from him, her back flattening against the wall. “No,” she said, her voice husky. “We can’t get involved again, Luke. We’ll only hurt each other in the end.”
She dipped her head, avoiding his eyes, but she didn’t go into her room. He put his hand under her chin, compelling her to meet his gaze. She tried to hide what she was feeling, but they’d been lovers for six fulfilling months and he could read the signs. She wanted him as much as he wanted her.
“Don’t think about the end,” he whispered. “Who cares about the end? Just think about tonight and how great we are together.”
She closed her eyes. “Don’t do this to me, Luke.”
“Don’t do what?” He bent his head and kissed her lightly, teasingly on the mouth. “Not this?” He pulled her close and kissed her harder. “Or this?”
“Neither.” Her voice was husky. She put her hands on his chest and pushed him away, but she made no attempt to move once she was free.
He stroked his fingers across her cheekbones in a caress that was almost more about tenderness than it was about sex. “I didn’t know how much I’d missed you until I saw you again. Did you miss me, Katie?”
She started to answer, and then abruptly spun inside the circle of his arms, pushing her key card into the lock with hands that were visibly unsteady. She spoke without turning to look at him. “Good night, Luke. You’ll thank me in the morning.”
He laughed without mirth. “No, Katie, I won’t. The way I feel right now I can guarantee that I’ll still feel like hell in the morning.” He drew in a deep breath and grasped the lifeline thrown by her moment of sanity. “Okay…you’re right. This isn’t smart and we’ll end up wishing we hadn’t done this. Good night, Katie.”
Although he spoke with reluctance, he honest to God intended to step back and let her walk alone into her room. But somehow he was dragging her into his arms, twisting her around and kissing her with all the force and intensity of seven long months of deprivation. And she was kissing him back, her mouth moving hungrily beneath his. Her body curved against him, provoking conflicting sensations of the forbidden and the familiar. Her breath came in short, sharp gasps and her hands ripped at his shirt, reaching eagerly inside.
The sensation of her fingers against his bare skin literally took his breath away. He had to stop kissing her long enough to breathe in a gulp of air. As he broke away from Kate, she tilted her head back and stared at him for a dazed, silent moment. Then she once again shoved her key card into the door. This time she pushed the door open and held it ajar. “I have to go. We can’t do this. I can’t do this.”
She disappeared into her room and slammed the door. Luke lifted his fists, ready to pound and demand entry, but better judgment won out. Kate was right and he was a fool. They couldn’t do this.
He repeated the mantra all the way into his own room and through the twenty-minute cold shower that did not do a single damn thing to help his state of arousal. Kate was right and he was a fool. They couldn’t do this.
God, he wanted her.
Fifteen
S he should enter herself in the Moron of the Month Contest, Kate thought acidly; she would bring home the grand prize for sure. Leaning against the closed door, she waited for her legs to stop trembling. When her miscellaneous body parts felt more or less under control she staggered to the center of the room and ripped off her clothes, leaving them where they fell.
Once she was naked she had no idea what to do next, so she took herself off to the bathroom and stood under a hot shower for the best part of fifteen minutes. While shampooing her hair, she made a mental list of all the reasons why Luke was totally wrong for her.
It was a long list, but somehow the reasons had seemed a lot more compelling back in April than they did now. Yes, she’d felt that their relationship came in a distant second to his career and an even more distant third to his family, but so what? Holding second place in Luke’s life was a hell of a lot more interesting than being first in, say, Willy-the-Councilperson’s life.
Kate shook herself hard, sending water droplets flying. For God’s sake, she needed to get a grip, or she would convince herself it was okay to walk back into a relationship knowing you were of secondary importance to the man you loved. She needed to keep in mind that Luke had made her feel so worthless that she’d not only come close to blowing an important contest, she’d actually ended up trying to recapture her self-esteem in Michael Rourke’s bed. That particular catastrophe had taken an escape to Europe and seven months to overcome—and she still wasn’t sure she’d recovered. She didn’t need a repeat disaster to reinforce the lesson.
Wanting physical activity, she blow-dried her hair with a lot more attention than usual. Then she filed her nails and even plucked her eyebrows, but she felt no better at the end of her impromptu beauty session. Her idiotic body still wanted to be in bed with Luke and her sensible mind was doing a lousy job of convincing it otherwise.
She stopped pacing long enough to check the bedside alarm clock. It was almost eleven, an hour past her regular bedtime. She was in the habit of going to bed early since her job demanded a crack-of-dawn start and she ought to be tired. Maybe her subconscious would go to work while she slept, providing answers to all her problems by morning. It was a nice fantasy and she decided to run with it. She climbed into bed, pulled up the covers and willed herself to sleep.
Willpower was apparently no match for hormones. Why couldn’t Willy-the-Councilperson be a good kisser, or even a decent one? Or how about all the Willy-the-Councilperson clones she’d dated? Why did it have to be Luke who raised goose bumps and curled her toes? She hadn’t felt the faintest quiver of sexual attraction for any man since that awful, botched experiment with Michael, and yet Luke just had to look at her in that certain way and her entire body thrummed with desire. True, Luke was good-looking…well, okay, he was exceptionally good-looking. But she’d met other good-looking men and managed to survive without developing an overwhelming urge to fall into bed with them. What was it with this bizarre, unwelcome Luke obsession?
By eleven-thirty she was tired of mulling over questions to which she could find no answers. She gave up on the idea of sleep and switched on the bedside light, propping herself against a stack of pillows. She turned on the TV and tuned to the Science Channel, a reliable standby. She watched a couple of galaxies collide and then blow themselves up in brilliant HD color. Unfortunately, Luke wasn’t in either galaxy. Even more unfortunately, he was still in the next room, waiti
ng to be dealt with.
The phone rang and she stared at it in mute reproach. Nobody would be calling her at this hour except Luke, and she wasn’t even slightly in the mood to speak with him. The phone continued to ring. She snatched the receiver. Her voice icy with reproach, she informed him—with self-evident lack of truth—that she was sleeping.
Her caller cut across her complaint, riding roughshod over her comment. “Listen up, because I’m only going to say this once.” The masculine voice was achingly familiar, but it wasn’t Luke’s.
“Looking for me is a fool’s errand. It’s also hazardous to your health. Be smart, for once in your life, and stop looking. Oh, and by the way, just so you know—if by any remote chance you did manage to track me down, you’ll wish you hadn’t. That isn’t a threat, it’s a promise. A certified, Ron Raven promise.” The man gave a short, amused laugh, as if aware of the irony of his final comment.
“Dad? Dad!” Kate finally gathered her wits enough to speak, but she was too late. The buzz on the line told her that the call had already been disconnected.
For a long time she sat on the bed, holding the phone and listening to the buzz. Eventually, when a recorded message instructed her to hang up the phone, she attempted to return the receiver to the cradle. Her movements were so clumsy that the phone fell onto the floor. She bent down and picked it up, her mind blank. She sat down again on the end of the bed, staring at yet another supernova igniting on the TV screen. She finally patted the covers and found the remote so that she could switch off the television.
The sudden cessation of lights and sounds propelled her out of her trance. She blinked, looking all around the room to reassure herself it was still as she would expect. There was some comfort to be derived from the knowledge that the walls remained cream-colored and the furniture exactly where it had been a few moments ago. She wasn’t crazy, then, or hallucinating. She really had taken a phone call from her evidently-not-dead father.
Still not properly coordinated, she pulled on her slacks and searched through the crumpled clothing discarded on the floor until she found her camisole. Then she left her room and walked blindly to the room next door. To Luke. She thought she might feel a little better if she could just talk to Luke.
Kate rapped her clenched fists against the panels of his door, but she was shaking so badly that her wrists were flaccid and she made almost no sound. She raised her arm and pounded again with more determination. After a few moments, the door swung inward and Luke stood in the opening.
He began to say something but checked himself as soon as he got a good look at her. “What is it? Katie, for God’s sake, what’s happened, sweetheart?”
“He phoned me. Just now. A couple of minutes ago.”
“Who phoned?” Luke put his arm around her unresisting shoulders and ushered her into his room.
She was grateful for the solid feel of him, for the strength and for the warmth radiating from his body. She was freezing cold, she realized. A chilled-to-the-marrow, deep-in-her-bones cold.
“Talk to me, Katie. Tell me what the problem is. Who phoned you?”
She looked up at him, but his face appeared blurred and she rubbed her eyes, trying to clear her vision. “My father. He just called. A few minutes ago.”
“Your father phoned you?”
“Yes, he did. The one and only Ronald Raven.” She laughed and heard the wild edge to the sound. She recognized she was barely in control of the hysteria fighting to be let loose, but at this moment, she didn’t really care. “The best of it is, I think he was threatening to kill me.”
Sixteen
K ate was so pale that Luke was afraid she might pass out. He quickly walked her to the bed and sat down next to her. She neither resisted nor cooperated, apparently too much in shock to make conscious choices. She gave the appearance of somebody not far removed from a trance and Luke wondered if she might have been dreaming. Could she have been so deeply asleep that she imagined the call from her father? The horror of a powerful nightmare could linger quite a long time.
He tossed the idea of a bad dream almost as soon as it formed. Kate was a practical sort of person who confined her flights of fancy to spun sugar and sculpted chocolate, and tended to relieve stress through physical activity. In all the time they’d been together, she’d never had a nightmare that was severe enough to wake her, much less one vivid enough to send her into a state of shock. If Kate said her father had phoned her and made threats, he almost certainly had.
First things first. Luke pulled on a T-shirt and boxers, although he was pretty sure Kate hadn’t noticed he’d been naked except for a towel when he opened the door. His hope that she’d changed her mind about having sex and come to find him seemed almost offensive in the circumstances. She was still sitting on the end of his bed, staring into space, so he grabbed a spare blanket from the closet and wrapped it around her shoulders, holding it in place until she stopped shivering.
“Do you want some water? Something hot to drink?” He kept his arm tightly around her. “We can call room service if you’d like tea.”
She shook her head. “No.” She paused for a long moment, searching for words. “Thank you.”
She leaned against him willingly enough, but her body remained rigid except for the occasional convulsive shudder. He decided to wait another few moments before pressing her about precisely what Ron Raven had threatened. For now, he simply concentrated on holding her close, stroking her hair and murmuring the occasional word of comfort.
She finally drew in a long, slow breath and sat up so that she could look at him. “I’m sorry. I probably woke you. It was such a surprise to hear his voice, that’s all.”
“You didn’t wake me, and of course it was a shock for you. If you’re feeling up to it, can you tell me what he said?”
“That we would never be able to find him.”
“He’s been wrong about other things. We’ll make sure he’s wrong about this, too.” If it took him the rest of his life, he would find Ron Raven and punish him for what he’d done tonight to his own daughter. The man was a monster.
Luke took Kate’s hands, cradling them between his and rubbing gently. She was still ice-cold. “We can wait a while longer before we talk about him, you know.”
“It’s okay. I’m over it now and I want to tell you what he said.” She looked less punch-drunk, but she left her hands in his clasp, something she would never have done if she’d been feeling anywhere close to normal.
“Did you talk for long?” Luke asked.
She shook her head. “Not at all. Actually, he cut me off the moment I started to speak.” Kate’s smile was wan. “That was in character, at any rate. My father always liked the sound of his own voice better than he liked listening to other people.”
“Take it step by step, word by word.” Luke wanted to capture exactly what Ron had said before her subconscious started to rewrite the memory. “The phone rang. You picked it up and he said…”
“Listen up. That was one of his favorite expressions when I was growing up. As soon as I heard those words I knew it was him. Then he said that looking for him would be hazardous to my health.”
“Those were his exact words?”
She nodded. “He said there was no point in looking for him because he was too well hidden to be found and, anyway, the search was hazardous to my health. Then he added that if by any chance I did ever manage to find out where he was, I’d regret it. And that wasn’t a threat, it was a certified Ron Raven promise. Those were his exact words. A certified Ron Raven promise.”
A chill ran down Luke’s spine, followed by a flash of white-hot rage. There was no way to interpret that final remark other than as a cruel, frightening joke. It was bad enough for Ron Raven to threaten his own daughter, but it struck Luke as truly obscene that the son of a bitch had taunted her with his lifetime string of lies and broken promises. For the first time he could ever recall, Luke experienced an intense desire to smash his fists into the face of a
fellow human being.
For Kate’s sake, he forced himself to put the rage aside. She had claimed a few minutes ago that her father had threatened to kill her, but from what she’d just recounted, it seemed as if the threat had been implicit rather than explicit. Unfortunately, he wasn’t sure that made the danger any less real. Kate obviously felt the threat had been serious, however delivered.
He tightened his grip on Kate’s hands, trying to provide the reassurance of friendly human contact as he asked the brutal but essential question. “Did your father actually say the words that he would kill you if you continued to look for him?” He could hardly believe he was asking her something so far outside the bounds of normal parameters.
She flinched at the question, but answered calmly enough. “No, he only said that if I didn’t stop searching for him, I would regret it.” Kate thought for a moment, her forehead wrinkled in sudden puzzlement. “I guess that could mean almost anything, couldn’t it? Why did I immediately jump to the conclusion that he was threatening to kill me?”
Because the combination of Ron’s tone of voice, choice of words and general attitude had made that a logical conclusion. And because he’d warned her that looking for him was hazardous to her health.
“You were scared and shocked,” Luke said. “Your fear affected what you heard.” And he hoped like hell that his relatively benign explanation was true.
“That’s true. Hearing his voice was so unexpected that the impact was intensified.” She frowned. “Maybe his call was so shocking because everything he said seemed out of character. He was absent a lot of the time when I was growing up, but he was always kind and affectionate when he happened to be around. Did he manage to put on an act for all those years? Or has something radically changed him in the past few months?”
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