by Sandra Field
“Lay off!”
“I hit a nerve there, didn’t I?” She gazed at him thoughtfully. “You mean you never want to have children?”
“You said no questions and no confidences. That works both ways.”
“Okay, okay. But whether or not we’ve got protection is beside the point.” She looked right at him. “I’ve changed my mind. I’m sorry, but I can’t go to bed with you—no matter what kind of dreams I’ve been having.”
A cold lump had settled in the pit of Luke’s stomach. He said nastily, “Do you do this often—lead a guy on, then say no at the last minute?”
“No! I never do!”
“You could have fooled me.”
“Are you one of those men who think a woman isn’t allowed to say no?”
“Katrin, I know you want me and you know I want you. So what’s the big deal if we go to bed together? We’re not talking marriage and three kids.”
“No,” she said, her voice unreadable, “we’re talking a one-night stand.”
“That’s right. Which suits both of us just fine.”
“Down on the wharf, and then in the car, I thought it would suit me. So that I’d get you out of my system, isn’t that what I said? But now I’ve realized the absolute last thing I need is a one-night stand. With you or anyone else. I’ve never gone to bed with anyone casually, as if sex were in the same league as a game of Frisbee or an afternoon sail on the lake. And I’m not going to start now.”
Luke looked over at her. Her lower lip was set mutinously, her wet ponytail was trailing down her neck, and her bulky sweater almost completely hid the fact that she had breasts. She was as different from his usual women as a woman could be, he thought with uncomfortable honesty. No makeup, no fancy hairdo, no designer clothes. No sophistication. Quite possibly, very little experience. Because if there was one thing he’d stake his fortune on, it was that Katrin Sigurdson was speaking the truth.
She didn’t deal in fancy footwork. In coyness or manipulation. Just the truth, no matter whether he wanted to hear it or not. Keeping her promise that she wouldn’t lie to him again.
He said harshly, “I’m not sure casual is the right word for what happens when we kiss each other. For me, it’s like the combination of an earthquake and a volcanic eruption…you wouldn’t exactly call those casual.” Then he gave an exasperated sigh. “I had no intention of saying that—the truth must be catching. Like the flu.”
She said with suppressed violence, “I’ve never in my life kissed anyone the way I kissed you.”
Luke looked at her in silence, emotion clogging his throat. Once again, Katrin was telling the truth. And once again, just by being herself, she’d knocked him sideways. Warning bells rang in his brain. If he was half as smart as he thought he was, he’d push her out of the car and drive hell-bent for leather in the opposite direction.
Any other woman he’d had an affair with had treated bed as just another playground. Like a game of tennis with no clothes on. But Katrin wasn’t like that.
“Katrin,” he said with sudden intensity, “why don’t we go for it? Is life about running away from risk, taking the safe route time and again until finally you’re buried under the ground and there aren’t any more risks to take? Is that all there is to it?”
She said bitterly, “I took a big risk once, with a slick businessman like you. It backfired and I paid for my mistake. Paid and paid and paid. The answer’s no, Luke. No.”
“Who was he?”
“That’s irrelevant.”
Luke made one more try. “Listen, I’m going back to San Francisco—”
“Where?”
The color had drained from her cheeks; she looked suddenly older. Older, and horribly frightened. “What’s the matter?” he demanded.
“You said you lived in New York!”
“I said I was flying to New York from here—I’ve got a couple of meetings there early in the week. But once they’re over, I’ll be heading home. Which is San Francisco. What’s the big deal about that?”
Her struggle for control was painful to watch. Her knuckles bone-white with strain, she said tonelessly, “Luke, I’m exhausted, I’ve got to go in. I’m sorry if you thought I was leading you on, truly I wasn’t. What happened on the wharf was more than I could have imagined…it did away with all my common sense and my rules. But I’ve had time to think now, and I know I’d regret it if we went to bed together. I have rules for a very good reason, and they’ve always stood me in good stead.”
He wanted to know that reason, and knew better than to ask. His gaze trained on her face, he said softly, “If I kissed you again, you’d change your mind.”
Her jaw tensed. “Please don’t!”
“You don’t have to worry—I’ve never once forced myself on a woman, and I’m not going to start with you.”
“Anyway,” she said with a flash of spirit, “can you imagine how I’d feel tomorrow morning when I’d have to take your order for breakfast? Cream and sugar with your coffee, sir? No way!” She leaned down and picked up her bag from the floor of the car. “Thank you for the drive,” she added in a muffled voice. “Good night.”
He could have stopped her. Very easily. Luke sat still, watching as she ran for the side door of the little bungalow, took a key out of her pocket and turned it in the lock. Then she slipped inside the house. A moment later he saw the dim glow of light through the chinks in the blinds.
He put the car in reverse and backed onto the road. Which did he need more, a hot shower because every garment he had on was wet, chilling him to the bone? Or a cold shower, to take his mind off sex? Sex with Katrin.
That’s all it would have been, he thought furiously. Sex. Nothing less and nothing more.
How long since a woman had turned him down?
Too long, obviously.
The sun was setting behind the last of the storm clouds in a stunning display of orange, magenta and purple. He scowled at it, wishing he could fly home tomorrow. Or tonight. One thing was certain. He didn’t care if he ever saw Katrin Sigurdson again.
Because he was a stubborn man who rarely allowed himself to acknowledge a setback, Luke went to breakfast early the next morning. The morning paper was folded under his arm. He was the first one at his table. He started reading the front page, and when an all-too-familiar voice said, “Coffee, sir?” he didn’t even look up.
“Black, please,” he said, and ostentatiously rustled the pages.
His coffee was poured without a drop being spilled. He added, “A large orange juice, waffles with strawberries and an order of bacon, no toast. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” Katrin said in a voice that implied the opposite.
He forced himself to continue reading the latest story of political patronage, not even looking up when she’d left the table. Rupert arrived, then John, and slowly Luke relaxed. When she brought his waffles, he saw in one glance that she looked as different from the passionate woman on the wharf as she could; her ugly glasses were firmly in place and her hair scraped back ruthlessly. Good, thought Luke. He didn’t want any reminders of those shattering kisses in the rain.
He’d dreamed about her last night. Explicitly and at considerable length.
The sooner he left here, the better.
The day dragged on. Luke had both contributed to and gained from the conference; but now he couldn’t wait for it to be over. Dinner was a full-fledged banquet and seemed to last forever. Guy drank far too much and in a distant way Luke was amused to see that the whole table was united in making it clear that Guy had better behave himself. As for Katrin, she was efficient and polite and a thousand miles away.
Which is where he’d be tomorrow.
The meal wound down, Luke was called on to add to the impromptu speeches, and people began drifting toward the bar. Guy, however, was taking his time. As though he were waiting for everyone else to leave, Luke thought uneasily, and moved over to have one last chat with the Japanese delegation. Then he went back
to the table and said with a friendliness he was far from feeling, “Come on, Guy, I’ll buy you a drink.”
“I could tell you something,” Guy mumbled.
“Oh?” Luke said casually. “What’s that?”
Guy shot him a crafty look. “I’m going to tell her first,” he said, swaying on his feet.
“Her?”
“Our esh-esteemed waitress.”
“What about her?”
“Nope. Her first.”
Under cover of the hum of conversation and laughter, Luke said very quietly, “You leave Katrin alone, Guy. Remember what I said about Amco Steel?”
“Thish-this is for her own good,” Guy said, blinking owlishly.
“Then tell me about it.”
“Tomorrow. At breakfast.” Guy chuckled. “You’ll have to wait, Luke.”
“Fine,” Luke said, as though it were of no interest to him whatsoever. “Let’s go to the bar, that’s where the action is right now.”
For well over an hour, Luke wandered from group to group in the bar, never staying long, always trying to keep Guy in sight. But Andreas and Niko from Greece wanted to show him a fax they’d just received and when Luke looked up, Guy had vanished. He said, “Andreas, that’s good news. I think we should have a talk about this once I get back to San Francisco, can I call you? And now will you excuse me, I want to talk to Guy Wharton for a moment.”
When he questioned one of the waiters, the young man said he’d seen Guy heading for the side door of the resort. As Luke hurried along the corridor, he was stopped by an elderly statesman from Japan, who with impeccable courtesy wished him a protracted goodbye. Holding his impatience rigidly in check, Luke replied with equal good manners. Then, almost running, he headed outdoors.
The side door opened onto a walkway that split into two, one to the guest parking lot, the other to the staff lot. Trusting his intuition, Luke took the path to the staff area. To muffle his steps he kept on the grass, simultaneously wondering if he was overreacting. Was he really going to find Guy and Katrin together? He did know one thing: he didn’t trust Guy, sober or drunk. Especially not drunk.
Then he stopped in his tracks as he heard voices, Guy’s slurred, Katrin’s quiet, but edged with panic. So they were together. Although not, by the sound of it, from Katrin’s choice.
He was going to do his level best to protect her from whatever threat Guy posed.
But first he hoped to find out exactly what that threat was.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LUKE skirted the dogwood and tall shrub roses, whose scent teased his nostrils, and saw that Guy had cornered Katrin several feet away from the staff parking lot. Her back was to a clump of birch; Guy was looming over her, one hand clamped around her elbow. Although his stance was far from steady, he was talking with relative coherence.
“I e-mailed a friend of mine this afternoon,” he was saying. “Wanted to be sure of the facts before I said anything. It was a friend in San Francisco.”
Katrin flinched as though he’d physically struck her; with desperate strength she tried to tug her arm free. “I don’t want to hear this,” she said, “it’s got nothing to do with me.”
“Oh, yes, it does. We both know what I’m talking about.” He gave an uncouth burst of laughter. “A stain on your reputation. How’s that for starters?”
To Luke’s puzzlement, Katrin suddenly sagged against the white trunk of one of the birches. She looked defeated, he thought. Broken. What the hell was going on?
Guy laughed again. “I see you understand what I’m talking about. Well, I’ve got a little proposition for you. You come to my room, say in ten minutes, and we’ll forget the whole thing. But if you don’t, I’ll make sure before I leave here tomorrow morning that you don’t have a job—they wouldn’t want someone with your little secret working for them, now would they?”
Katrin said nothing. It wasn’t just defeat, Luke thought. It was despair. As though Guy had pushed her too far, to a place where she was defenseless. What was her secret? And why did she react like a startled deer whenever San Francisco was mentioned?
As though her silence infuriated him, Guy said nastily, “Room 334. In ten minutes—you be there, okay? If not, I’ll smear your name over every newspaper in Manitoba and you won’t get a job anywhere.”
He dropped her elbow and started weaving along the path toward the lodge. Luke sank back into the shadowed bushes, thorns scratching his neck and hands. Then he stayed very still, scarcely breathing. Guy stumbled past, never once glancing at the rosebushes. When he’d vanished around a bend in the path, Luke carefully extricated himself from the branches. His suit would never be the same again, he thought, and in a few long strides reached the woman who was still cowering under the birch trees.
“Katrin,” he said, “are you all right?”
She stared at him as though she’d never seen him before, as though he were some kind of apparition. She was trembling all over, Luke saw with a surge of compassion that rocked him to the roots. “What’s wrong?” he said gently, and reached out for her.
She shrank from him. “Don’t touch me,” she quavered, “I can’t stand it! Just go away. Please.”
“I can’t do that…you’re in some kind of trouble, aren’t you? Tell me about it, and perhaps I can help.”
Help? he thought blankly. Get involved? Him? Normally he never got involved in the lives of others.
“No one can help,” Katrin said with such a depth of hopelessness in her voice that Luke was chilled to the bone.
“What was Guy talking about? What’s this secret all about?”
Her shoulders drooped. “So you heard him.”
“He let it drop after dinner that he had something to say to you. He’s a bad actor, we both know that. Hell, the whole conference knows it. So I followed him here.”
With none of her usual grace, Katrin pushed herself away from the tree. “Luke, this has nothing to do with you. Stay out of my life…I keep asking you, and you just don’t get it.”
“Are you going to his room?”
“So that’s what’s bothering you,” she flared. “If you can’t have me, then no one else can?”
Luke winced. Then he said in a hard voice, “Guy Wharton’s a sleaze. You can do better than him, Katrin…and no, I’m not referring to myself.”
“Oh, Luke, I’m sorry,” she cried, “I shouldn’t have said that. I hurt you, didn’t I? I know I’m doing this all wrong. But I—”
“I sure don’t like being put on a par with Guy Wharton.”
“I’m not going to his room,” she said rapidly. “I don’t care what he tells the management, he can tell them anything he likes. I’ve been feeling like a caged bear for the last six months, and I’m sick to death of this job anyway. If I got fired it would be no great loss.”
“A caged bear—strong language. Is that why you go sailing on the lake in a south wind?”
“Well, of course.”
Luke let out his pent-up breath in a long sigh. “I’ll deal with Guy. I’ve got enough leverage that I could ruin him if I chose to.”
“I don’t need your help! Let him say what he wants—I’m leaving here by the end of the summer, so why should I care? My friend Anna knows who I really am, and the rest don’t matter.”
“And where am I in that?”
“I’ve already told you,” she said stonily. “Whatever my secrets are, they’re nothing to do with you.”
“I do wish you’d tell me,” Luke said with such intensity that he was taken aback.
“Too bad.”
“You’re one heck of a stubborn woman!”
“If I weren’t, you’d be trampling all over me.”
She had a point. Taking a moment to gather his thoughts, Luke said, “Katrin, you egged Guy on in the dining room—if you were really scared of him, you wouldn’t have spilled the brandy, or showed him you knew your way around the financial pages. But when he was threatening you a few minutes ago, you looked…despairing,
I guess, is the closest I can get. Beaten.”
The words tumbled from her lips. “Have you never had anything so awful happen to you that when you go back there, even in your imagination, all the old emotions overwhelm you? Just as they did when it was going on?” She drew a ragged breath. “Or are you immune from all that, Luke?”
As though time and space had collapsed, Luke was suddenly back in the shack at Teal Lake the day his mother had left, never to return. His father’s drunken rampage, smashing glasses and crockery, the flames from the old woodstove flickering crazily over the ceiling. And in one corner, clutching an old teddy bear, cowered a little boy with black hair and dark eyes, terrified and alone.
Katrin said slowly, “So you do know what I’m talking about. What happened to you, Luke?”
With a shuddering breath, Luke hauled himself back to the present, away from an abyss that he’d fled years ago, a nightmare filled with noise and fire and unending fear. God knows what he looked like. He raked his fingers through his hair. “Nothing happened. Your imagination’s working overtime.”
“I don’t think so.” With sudden violence she cried, “What’s wrong with admitting you’re vulnerable? Just like the rest of the human race?”
Had he ever, wittingly or unwittingly, revealed as much of himself to anyone else as he had to Katrin in the last few seconds? And how he hated himself—and her—for that revelation. Not knowing what else to do, Luke went on the attack. “What if Guy goes to the media? What then?”
She hugged her arms around her chest, lines of strain bracketing her mouth. “He won’t. He’ll be so hungover in the morning, he’ll do well to get out of bed.”
It was painfully obvious she was trying to convince herself as much as Luke. Luke said savagely, “In effect, he’s blackmailing you.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic!”
“I’m telling it like I see it.”
“You’re overreacting,” she said coldly. “Luke, I’ve got to go home, I’m really tired.”
She looked more than tired. She looked at the end of her rope, with faint blue shadows under her eyes, her face haunted and unhappy. His only desire to comfort her, to somehow let her know that she wasn’t alone with her secrets, he awkwardly rested his hand on her wrist.