by Anne Stuart
He moved off her, careful not to dislodge the imprisoning strands of hair, and pulled her tight against him. He still felt oddly disoriented, and he didn’t know what he could do about it. Sleep was probably the only thing that would help.
He closed his eyes, letting the last remaining bits of reaction drain from his body, keeping her tight against him. He was almost asleep when she spoke. He knew she was going to say it. He could feel her own tension; he knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep until she said it. He wished there was some way he could stop her, but he knew it was hopeless.
“Sam.” Her voice wasn’t much more than a whisper, and he wondered whether he could pretend to be asleep. And then he remembered exactly who and what Elizabeth Hardy was. With his body wrapped around hers, there was no way he could keep secrets from her.
“Yes?” He kept his voice nothing more than a sleepy mumble, hoping to discourage her.
It didn’t. “I’m in love with you.” The moment the words were out the tension left her body, and she sighed, snuggling up against him like a sleepy kitten.
He lay without moving for a long moment, pondering the kindest way to respond. “I know you think you are,” he said gently. “It’s only natural to think you’re in love with the first man you sleep with, but it’s just an animal instinct. Love doesn’t have anything to do with it, and if you try to convince yourself it does . . .” He was interrupted by a quiet, unmistakable snore. Elizabeth had fallen soundly asleep.
So much for rational explanations. He pulled her closer, sliding his hand under the red dress until it cupped her breast, letting her curtain of hair drift over his chest. He’d tried to explain it to her, and she’d had the temerity to fall asleep. And it wasn’t until he was almost asleep himself that he realized that in all the nights and days he’d spent sleeping with her, she’d never emitted anything like that ladylike snore. She’d been faking, to shut up his rational explanations, damn her. And he found he was smiling as he fell asleep.
THEY MADE LOVE more gently in the early-morning hours, the red dress on the floor, her long hair wrapped around them like a silken mantle. They made love just after dawn, this time with her on top, her hair rippling around her slender, flushed body, and she thought she could never get enough of him. They almost made love in the shower, until he noticed the slight wince of pain she tried to hide from him, and instead he insisted they behave like rational adults and only neck a little beneath the hot stream of water.
When she finally made it downstairs her legs were still slightly trembly, and her stomach was so empty she thought she might faint. Sam put a huge plate of bacon and eggs in front of her, loaded her with coffee and watched her eat with a troubled, proprietary air.
“I don’t know why I was so famished,” she said finally, draining her second cup of coffee and pushing her curtain of hair over her shoulder. “I used to go days without eating in Colorado.”
“You’ve been getting more exercise.” There should have been at least the suggestion of a leer accompanying that statement; instead he seemed merely distracted.
“So I have,” she said calmly. “What’s the problem?”
“There’s no problem. Danny came by while we were asleep. He brought passports and clothes for both of us. We should be leaving in about an hour if we’re going to make it. We’re flying out of Kennedy in about seven hours. To Venice.”
She ignored the tightening of fear in her stomach. “How’d they manage to do a passport of me without a picture?”
He grimaced. “Bingo.”
“That’s the problem? You couldn’t get a picture?” she guessed.
“No. Never underestimate my resources. Danny got a look at your file photo, found a model with similar looks and had it done, all within a matter of hours. Here.” He tossed it to her, his eyes grave.
She opened it, looking into the eyes of a woman who might have been her twin. It was an eerie sensation, and she realized why the Germans wrote those horror stories about doppelgangers. Somewhere in the Washington area was a woman who looked like her, down to the small nose, large eyes and vulnerable mouth. She was also a woman with very short hair.
She closed the passport and looked up at Sam. “Couldn’t they have found a wig?” she asked mildly.
“They tried. It looked too fake.”
She reached behind her, twisting her thick long hair in a rope. “Got any scissors?”
It took him a moment. “Sure,” he said casually, strolling into the kitchen area and opening a drawer. In a moment he returned with a very serviceable pair of shears.
She leaned over, presenting her fragile neck to him, feeling absurdly like Mary Queen of Scots on the scaffold. She waited, but he made no move to come closer. Finally she looked up, into his tormented eyes, and a small core of hope began to form inside her.
“I can’t do it,” he said, tossing the scissors down on the sofa beside her and walking away. A moment later he’d slammed out of the cottage, leaving her alone.
She hadn’t cut her hair since Granny Mellon died, almost twelve years ago. It had been her only vanity, her one beauty, and a matter of pride that she almost hadn’t realized existed. And its loss was the first tangible sign that Sam Oliver wasn’t as emotionally remote from her as he thought. Picking up the scissors, she headed toward the bathroom, smiling as she went.
She didn’t know when he came back. She had to take her time with the hair—seven hours to a flight from Kennedy didn’t allow for a visit to a hairdresser to fix up any messes she made, so she cut carefully, strand by thick strand, until it lay in a pile around her bare feet.
The woman who looked back at her from the mirror was someone else. Not the eerie clone from the passport photo, not the lost ghost of Colorado. The woman in the mirror was new. Someone strong, and hungry, and in love. Someone who was finally, completely, alive. Someone who had every intention of staying that way, and keeping her man alive, too.
She was dressed in a khaki jumpsuit, her short hair brushed back, when she went back downstairs. Sam was standing in the kitchen, and he didn’t move; he simply stared at her.
For a moment she panicked. What if he no longer found her attractive? What if her antiquated hair held some sort of magic charm? What if . . . ?
He crossed the room in a few long strides, his hands cupping her shorn head, pulling her face up to his, her mouth to his, kissing her with an intensity that washed away the last of her self-doubts.
She wanted to say it again, to tell him she loved him, but she kept silent, knowing it would trouble him. Instead, when he lifted his mouth from hers, she smiled up at him. And to her amazement he smiled back.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said gruffly. “Or it’ll be hours before we get back out of bed.”
IT WAS COLD IN Venice. Elizabeth pulled her coat more tightly around her, resisting the urge to huddle against Sam’s broad, strong body as the vaporetto sped them along the crowded canals. She’d expected warmth and sunshine in Italy, not gray skies and a chilly drizzle that came from both sky and canal and drenched her thin cloth coat. Fool that she was, she’d expected romance from Venice, not this horrible sense of impending doom that grew stronger and stronger. She’d expected beauty in Venice. Not the seedy, sagging dwellings, and the god-awful smell of diesel and sewage and dead fish.
“Anything look familiar?” Sam murmured in her ear. It wasn’t a low, affectionate murmur. The water bus was crowded, and Sam didn’t trust anyone. Neither, for that matter, did she.
The damp winter air was cold on her exposed neck. She still wasn’t used to her short hair—it made her feel curiously light-headed, almost dizzy. Too many dark and horrible things had crowded around her during the past week; too many time zones had been passed. Life had become strangely unreal, and as they plowed through the murky waters of the ancient city on a modern water bus, her sense of disorientation increased.
They’d been in Venice three days. Three long, interminable days, wandering the damp, chilly stre
ets, riding the vaporetti until even Elizabeth’s steady stomach threatened to rebel. She’d slept heavily in the narrow double bed in the tiny old penzione on a side canal, only to wake with Sam asleep beside her, his big hand entwined in her short-cropped hair.
In the daylight hours he didn’t touch her. In the night they made love with a fierce, almost angry passion, as if they knew that time was running out for them, and they had to cram a lifetime of loving into a few short nights. She lay awake afterward, listening to the sounds of the motorboats on the canal outside the window, listening to the voices, wondering whether they’d survive.
At three o’clock that morning she decided to try to find out. Sam was asleep beside her, lying on his back, the sheet pulled up around his hips. She had touched him other nights, slept with his body wrapped around her, and nothing had come. But she hadn’t been trying. This time she lay on the bed, watching him, watching the even rise and fall of his smooth chest, the silky fans of dark eyelashes resting against his high cheekbones. She counted his scars by moonlight, fascinated at the number and variety. One definitely had to be a bullet wound—the scar was neat and round on his shoulder and ragged on his back. There were knife wounds, burn marks, signs of pain that had somehow been incorporated into his relentlessly tough body. An armor of keloid tissue that kept his heart and soul protected, as well.
She reached out a hand and touched him, lightly, so as not to wake him, resting it against the smooth warm skin near his ribs. She could feel his heart beating, a slow, even pace; she could feel his blood pulsing. She watched him for a long moment, and then she closed her eyes and opened her mind, willing the visions to come.
Nothing. Blankness. Darkness as deep and murky as the canals surrounding them. She tried to conjure up the visions she’d glimpsed before, the red dress, the blood, but the pictures were curiously flat and two-dimensional.
Sam’s hand covered hers, pressing it against his heart. She hadn’t realized he was awake—there’d been no change in his breathing, his pulse rate. But his hand enveloped hers, trapping it between his own strong fingers and his steady heartbeat, holding her there. And blood spilled around them.
A moment later she was on the floor, in a corner, staring up at him with terrified eyes, not even knowing how she’d gotten there. He sat up, and wariness radiated through his body. “What is it? What did you see?”
“Blood.”
“Damn,” he said, flicking on the bedside light. “No house? No faces to lead us to where Shari is?”
“That’s not what I was trying to see. I wanted to see whether you were going to survive.”
His reaction was profane and impatient. “I don’t give a damn about my survival. When the time comes I’ll take my chances. Don’t waste your energy on me. Find Shari Derringer!”
She looked across at his cold, emotionless face, at his beautiful, scarred body, and knew defeat. “Tomorrow,” she said.
“It’s that simple?”
“No. All I can do is wander around this city until something looks familiar. I just won’t stop until I find the blue house.”
“You’ll be dead on your feet.”
“You’ll be dead at my feet,” she said bleakly, pulling herself off the cold floor and heading back to the too-small bed.
He had enough sense not to touch her when she climbed back into the soft, sagging bed. If he touched her she might shatter and break, and then where would he be? She was sending him to his death, and he was giving her no choice in the matter. There was no way she could fight him anymore.
Half an hour later his voice broke the darkness. “I don’t think I’m going to die.”
Elizabeth considered not answering. “No one ever does.”
He took her hand in his, his long, hard fingers covering hers, and he brought it up to his mouth, kissing her soft palm. “I’ll do my best not to,” he said. “That’s about all I can promise.”
In the darkness of the moonlit room he seemed almost vulnerable. He wasn’t a man used to giving, not of himself, and she had the sense to realize he’d made a major step. She turned in the bed, resting her short-cropped head against his shoulder. “That’ll have to do.”
Chapter 18
ELIZABETH DID HER research carefully, waiting until just the right moment to make her move. It wasn’t that Sam didn’t trust her. She knew he did, inasmuch as he was able to trust anyone. But she didn’t know how to explain to him that he was interfering with her abilities. She’d wanted that interference, welcomed it, even if it meant being haunted by visions of his bloody death, but last night she’d made a promise, and she always kept her promises. Refusing to help him find Shari Derringer and her cohorts would only postpone the inevitable, not change it. She had no choice but to use it for him. And no way she could use it unless she was alone.
She waited until he was in the bathroom. The penzione had all sorts of brochures advertising walking tours, motor bus tours, even gondola tours. She was heading for the vaporetto, this time equipped with Dramamine, and intended to spend the day seeing the sights of Venice, alone, hoping against hope that sooner or later they’d pass the seedy blue house that haunted her dreams.
And a vaporetto would be safer. Venice was the legendary city of assassins. Not that anyone would suspect a slightly myopic American tourist of being worth murdering, but some of Sam’s paranoia had worn off on her. If Shari Derringer’s confederates were as thorough as they’d proven to be so far, they wouldn’t leave anything to chance. They might already know that Sam and Elizabeth had made it to Venice.
She hoped Sam would understand. She left him a note, asking him to meet her in the piazzetta in the afternoon, hoping she could bring him the information he wanted by then. He was going to be furious when he found she’d taken off without his protective custody, but it was the only chance for her to give him what he wanted. She expected that if he was faced with the choice, he’d opt for her running the risk. She simply didn’t want to give him that choice, since either response would have torn her apart.
She had the sense to wear a raincoat, a silk scarf covering her too-short hair and an oversize pair of sunglasses as she crowded into the sight-seeing motorboat and prepared to tour Venice.
It was the first warm day in weeks, the multilingual tour guide announced as her fellow tourists began to shed their layers. The sun came out, gilding the canals, gilding the famous Ca’d’Oro, and even the gondoliers in their obscenely expensive boats began to sing. Not that anyone could hear them over the roar of the motorized boat traffic, but the sight should have been slightly heartening.
Not for Elizabeth. Despite the growing heat of the day she kept her raincoat wrapped tightly around her, her mind reeling with the scads of useless information the plump, dark-haired tour guide was spewing forth in three languages. She didn’t care about the doges, the history of St. Mark’s Cathedral, Titian, Tintoretto or the Bridge of Sighs. Some other time, some other life, and she would have been entranced. Now all she wanted was to see the blue house by the canal.
Her fellow tourists were a friendly bunch from all over Europe, an American couple clearly on a second honeymoon, probably after their children had finally left the nest and before they returned, and a young college student traveling alone. Elizabeth had done her best to ignore his friendly conversation, trying to concentrate on the houses and palazzi they passed, but he was clearly lonely and longing for another American to talk to, and she finally gave in, managing to partition still another part of her brain for him while she searched for the blue house.
In the end she might have missed the house if it hadn’t been for him. They’d stopped for lunch at a small outdoor trattoria, part of the tour price, but Elizabeth, with her mild case of mal de canal, couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for squid and liver in pasta. Her new friend had devoured his in no time flat, and she suspected that maybe his funds were limited and that any free meal was better than nothing. She wished there was some way she could gracefully offer her own untouched plate wi
thout hurting his pride, but she couldn’t. She smiled at him as he tossed pieces of bread to the pigeons and found herself oddly near tears.
“Something wrong?” he asked, smiling across the table at her. He’d shed his cotton sweater, and his standard issue college clothes—faded jeans and t-shirt—seemed so familiar and safe and ordinary in a world gone haywire.
“Just homesick,” she said, wondering if Sam was going to kill her when she got back. Particularly since she was having absolutely no luck. The day was only half over—she had three more nauseating hours on the vaporetto to go—but somehow her hopes were fading.
“Want to stretch your legs?” the young man—Martin, he’d said his name was—asked,
Elizabeth didn’t even hesitate. This friendly fellow American was no danger to her, and she was tired of being alone with her thoughts and her fears. “Sure,” she said, rising from the table and dropping her silk scarf. “Which way?”
They were in the midst of one of the tiny squares that abounded in the waterlogged city. “You choose,” he said cheerfully, pulling his backpack on.
“You don’t need that. We don’t have time to go far,” Elizabeth pointed out.
“Security. It contains all my worldly possessions,” he said with a rueful grin.
“Okay.” She looked around her and unerringly pointed down one of the narrow alleyways where a side canal glinted in the sunlight. “That way.”
The city was teeming with tourists that golden day, even the backwaters and alleys. Martin was keeping up an entertaining patter about the rigors of Indiana State University, and Elizabeth listened with half an ear. The sun hadn’t penetrated the dark alleyway, and she was suddenly cold. Very cold.
“Something wrong?”
She pulled her coat around her and began refastening it. “No. Just chilly.”