Kendall shook her head, knowing she was staring at him with what had to be an utterly astonished expression. “No. I just . . . it can’t really say that.”
“Sorry, honey. Just like all these other poor souls whose stories are in here, it seems I’ve met my match.” He turned the book to face her. “Read it and weep. We’re destined, beautiful.”
His tone had gone beyond sarcastic; it was pure acid, beyond anything she’d ever heard from him. She glanced at the last entry in the book, read it quickly, and relief flooded her.
“It only says you met the woman you’ll marry,” she said. “It doesn’t mention me at all.”
“And who else do you think it means?” he asked, his tone no lighter. “The merry widow, perhaps?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of that waitress,” Kendall said, some bite of her own coming into her voice.
The instant of puzzlement on his face was, somehow, reassuring; it seemed he had put the woman who’d been so obviously interested in him out of his mind. She could almost see him assessing the possibility, then discarding it.
“No,” he said. “You’re the one with the motive, Ms. Chase.”
Kendall stared at him. “Motive? What motive?”
“Twenty-five million of them,” he drawled.
“You think I’d try to marry you? For Aaron’s money?”
“Well, I sure as hell don’t think you’d do it for love, sweetheart.” He smiled, a coldly mirthless curving of his lips. “Did you and Aaron plan this out? Is this his way of seeing that you’re taken care of, now that he’s dead? Oh, it’s clever, I’ll give you that. The lure of all that money, and of your admittedly lovely self, all wrapped up with a little magic and dangled in front of the poor bastard son . . .”
Absurdly, all Kendall could focus on for the moment was the fact that he’d called her “lovely”. Then the full meaning of his words registered, that he suspected her of somehow engineering this whole thing. Kendall supposed she should be angry, but somehow all she could do was laugh.
“I’m surprised you’re having such trouble believing the Hawk legends. You obviously have a much wilder imagination than I do.”
“Do I? It makes perfect sense. If a hundred thousand dollars is good, access to the whole twenty-five mil is better yet, isn’t it?”
She straightened, wishing she were taller; even when he was sitting down it was hard to glare down her nose at him.
“I don’t need anyone to take care of me. And I don’t need your money. But even if I did, twenty-five million wouldn’t be enough to put up with your condescending, insulting behavior. And if you really believe this nonsense about some kind of plan Aaron and I cooked up, then I was obviously wrong about you. You’re not nearly as smart as I thought you were.”
“That’s nonsense, but this”—he slammed the cover of the book shut—“isn’t?”
“Tell me, Mr. West, just how do you think I’ve managed this sleight of hand? And why? Especially the way that’s coming out, piece by piece? Why not just tell the story, in order, if it’s all a lie anyway? Why make it more confusing?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet. But I will.”
“Then tell me why I would come to you, tell you what Alice was trying to do, when I could end up in jail for it.”
“With me in the next cell, don’t forget,” Jason said, his tone dry. “Or was that part of the story just insurance, to make sure I kept my mouth shut if your little plan didn’t work?”
“What plan?” Kendall exclaimed in exasperation.
Jason gestured at the book. “I guess I’m supposed to . . . what? Be gratified that the old man willed you to me along with all that money?”
Kendall rarely swore, but she barely bit back an oath now. “I have nothing to do with this. You’re the one who’s reading me into that book.”
“So how is it supposed to work? You just present me with the idea, and overwhelmed by your beauty—and all that cash—I meekly fall into line?”
Spinning on her stockinged heel and striding away from him, she let out a strangled sound of frustration. “God, you’re as stubborn as Aaron!”
“What if I already have a wife?”
Kendall stopped, her anger dampened abruptly by that unexpected question. Not that it mattered to her if he had a wife, she told herself. It made no difference to what she had to do. So she didn’t understand why she couldn’t stop herself from turning back to him and asking, “Do you?”
Jason smiled, a twisted lift of one corner of his mouth that spoke of cynical satisfaction more than anything else.
“That would put a kink in your plan, now wouldn’t it?”
“If any such plan existed, I suppose it would,” Kendall said, surprised at her own distraction at the idea that he might be married. “But since it doesn’t—”
“You mean since you already know I don’t have a wife? I’m sure your detective told you that. Have you known where I was all along, when you and the old man planned this?”
Kendall walked back across the room. Reining in her irritation with an effort she couldn’t ever recall having to make so often before, even with Aaron at his worst, she spoke evenly.
“That plan exists only in your head. I told you, the detective Aaron hired hadn’t been able to find you yet. He was still searching, but you dropped out of sight very efficiently, after your mother was killed.”
“Thank you,” he said caustically. “You can run far and fast when you’ve got the prospect of winding up in some foster home hovering over you.”
“They’re not always so bad,” Kendall said neutrally.
He had the grace to look discomfited, as if he had just recalled what she’d told him about her own life in foster care.
“Maybe,” he said after a moment. “But I wouldn’t have made it in that system.”
“It would only have been until you were eighteen.”
His mouth twisted. “At sixteen, two years is an eternity.”
She couldn’t argue with that. “You could have . . . gone to Aaron.”
He laughed, loud and harsh. “Right. Like he wanted me. Besides, I’d promised my mother a thousand times I never would, no matter what.”
If she could get him talking, she thought, maybe she could get past this unexpected snag the book had thrown at her. And if she could just stop wondering why, when the book had told him he’d met the woman he would marry, he had assumed it meant her.
“So what did you do?”
“I got by. For a year or so. Then I got tired of dodging the juvie authorities, so I left Seattle.”
“Where did you go?”
“Alaska. I worked on a fishing boat for a few seasons.”
“But what about school?”
“Fish don’t care if you’ve got a diploma or not.”
“But—”
“Forget it, Kendall. Changing the subject isn’t going to work. I want to know how you planned to carry this off.”
“I didn’t—”
She broke off, irritated by his single-mindedness, and the fact that she hadn’t been trying to change the subject at all, that she had genuinely wanted to know what had happened to him after his mother had been brutally run down on a Seattle street.
“Were you figuring to buy me the way Alice bought my father? Did Aaron tie all this together somehow, so that I only get the money if you come with it? Is that how you get your share? Because I’m his son, it’s less likely to be invalidated than if he left it to you outright?”
“I told you, I have all the money I need—”
“I’m supposed to believe you’d turn down twenty-five million?”
“Why not?” she snapped, feeling provoked. “You did.”
He blinked. Then his face took on an unr
eadable expression. “Touché yet again,” he said softly.
Her irritation faded at his tone. “Why are you so determined to think I have some hidden agenda here?”
“Because everybody does, whether they admit it or not.”
She shook her head slowly. “It must be awful, never to trust anyone.”
He shrugged. “I trust people, sometimes. Once I know what their agenda is, and can predict how they’ll react, what they’ll do. No surprises.”
“And you call that trust?”
“What would you call it?”
“I’d call it an awfully cold, calculating way of living.”
“And I suppose you prefer trusting blindly and having that trust betrayed?”
“It’s better than never trusting at all.”
“Is it? My mother trusted Aaron Hawk. If she hadn’t, it would have saved her a lot of crying.”
“And what would she have lost? If you never taste the tears, you never taste the joy, either.”
“Joy,” he retorted, “is overrated.”
“And if she had never loved Aaron,” Kendall pointed out, ignoring his comment, “you wouldn’t be here.”
She saw his jaw tighten, his eyes narrow, but he didn’t answer. Something he’d said before rang in her head as clearly as if he’d just spoken the words again. Falling in love was the only foolish thing she ever did. Except maybe for having me.
She suppressed a sigh. Despite the string of foster homes she’d lived in after her parents had been killed when she was seven, she had never had to fight that particular battle. Her memories were hazy, but warm and comforting—she had been loved, and wanted. There had been no ambivalence about her birth.
She had no answer for this. She stood looking at him for a long, silent moment. It seemed pointless to argue with a man who was already so convinced he was right. Even though she understood why he was reacting this way, even though the thought of the kind of life he’d had, that had left him with so little faith in anyone other than himself, made her heart ache for him, his suspicions still hurt.
Not because he didn’t trust her, she told herself firmly, but because it was making it so hard to do as Aaron had made her promise with almost his last breath. She was beginning to suspect she would have to do this herself; it seemed she would get little help from the man whose birthright she was fighting for.
“Let me see if I understand,” she said carefully. “You think that I was Aaron’s mistress, that Aaron and I knew where you were all along, and that we planned this all out, a package deal, an inheritance that includes me as your wife, since obviously I need a keeper. And that somehow I’ve managed to manipulate that book and its contents in a way that would have made that original wizard proud. And did we concoct the story of what Alice is trying to do as well? Ah, yes, I recall, it was insurance, isn’t that what you said? So that you keep quiet if by chance you don’t go along with our little scheme. Have I got it right?”
“Close enough.”
“That,” she said with sour emphasis, “is more absurd than believing that book was handed straight down from Merlin.”
But a lot easier, she thought suddenly. For a man like Jason, it would be much easier to believe that people were behaving as he seemed to expect, out of pure, greedy self-interest, than to believe that magic had truly touched his life. No matter how complex the explanation, no matter how unlikely, any answer based in reality, his cold-blooded, analytical reality, would always win out with Jason West. There was no point in arguing with this man. Just as there had been no point in arguing with Aaron.
Aaron.
That’s who she should have been thinking of. She’d taken the wrong track altogether. Jason didn’t respond to emotional appeals any more than his father had. While Jason’s emotions seemed a bit closer to the surface than Aaron’s had ever been, they were still buried deep, and she didn’t have time to try to reach them. Not when Alice would be making her move right away.
She drew herself up to her full height. She stepped into her pumps, which would give her another two inches she felt she needed right now. Then she turned to Jason once more.
“What do you plan to do?” she said, in her most brusque, businesslike voice. She would keep her feelings out of this, no matter what he said, she vowed silently.
“If you’re waiting for me to go down on one knee and propose, don’t hold your breath, sweetheart.”
She ignored his jab and his tone, although his words made it hard to breathe for a moment. “I mean about the will.”
“You mean, assuming I believe any of what you’ve told me about this supposed plot?”
“It’s the truth. You can believe it or not, as you wish. I just want to know if you intend to contest the will.”
His brows lowered slightly, as if he didn’t quite understand her change in tone and demeanor. She waited, silently. When she didn’t go on, he shrugged.
“All right. For the moment, let’s assume it is all true. Fight it how?” Then, as if it had just come back to him, he added, “Ah. I forgot. You have the one remaining copy of this alleged codicil, don’t you? How convenient.”
Again she ignored the sarcasm. And kept her voice carefully even. “Aaron made me get a safe deposit box in my name, and put a copy in it, along with some other things. He didn’t trust Alice. He was right. Will you fight her?” she asked again.
“Aren’t you forgetting something? Trust me, you wouldn’t like jail.”
“I like the idea of her getting away with this less,” Kendall said flatly. “Besides, you’re assuming we’d lose.”
“I’m just the poor, illegitimate son, remember?” he said. There was an odd glint in his eyes, a glint that made her think of his bloodline namesake, circling with deceptively lazy grace before focusing those piercing eyes on a target and diving in with talons outstretched for the kill. “Go up against the Hawk Widow? With her resources? In a court in a county she probably owns most of?”
“You have a right to this, and a legal claim. That has to count for something.”
“I’m sure it will make a big difference,” Jason said dryly, “when they drag out your little bank statement and prove I put you up to this.”
“Then you won’t contest?”
For a moment he turned that piercing stare on her. She felt oddly pinned, and more than a little uneasy, but she forced herself to meet his eyes. Silence spun out between them, taut, wire-drawn. Finally something in his steady gaze changed, as if he’d backed off. He nodded slightly, as if in salute.
“I think,” he said slowly, “I should be asking you what you intend to do if I don’t.”
Kendall took a deep breath. “If you don’t, then I’ll fight her myself.”
“That would be very foolish, Kendall. What’s to stop me from leaving you holding the bag? I could opt out of the whole deal, maybe go to the merry widow and offer to sign away any claim in return for that hundred thousand she gave you.”
“You wouldn’t get it. She’d never agree. Not with you.”
He was silent for a moment. Then, “She hates me that much?”
Kendall nodded. He didn’t look hurt, or angry, or even upset, merely thoughtful. And, she realized, he was responding as if he did, indeed, believe this was true. Was he just humoring her, or had she somehow convinced him?
“Since she doesn’t know me well enough to know how truly disagreeable I can be,” he said, without a hint of humor or even sarcasm, “I assume it’s because of who I am.”
Again Kendall nodded. “I believe you’re a symbol to her. Of what she never had from her husband. And she blames your mother for Aaron never having loved her.”
“Pardon me if I don’t bleed,” he said. “My mother never had much to show for loving Aaron Hawk. And she’s been dead for twenty years. That’s a hell
of a long time to carry a grudge.”
“Yes. It is.”
She said no more, and there was no particular inflection in her voice, but his eyes narrowed as if she’d gone on to point out the obvious; he’d carried a grudge against Aaron for longer than that. Again she waited, silently, until he spoke again.
“Then I guess I’ll just have to tell her to keep her money. That I’m out of it. Out of her way, out of her life. That ought to make her happy.”
“I doubt,” Kendall said, “that Alice knows how to be happy.”
He gave her a considering look. “Then she should be really ticked if you insist on pursuing this.”
“Yes.”
He let out a compressed breath. “I don’t want any part of this. You’re on your own.”
She’d been half expecting that. “All right. That’s what I needed to know.”
She turned and walked over to the dresser, picked up her purse, and reached for her car keys. She sensed rather than saw him get to his feet.
“You’re still going to do this?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t get it. I told you, I don’t want anything my father might have left me to ease his guilt. I don’t want anything from the Hawks. Not money, not the name, nothing.”
“I know.”
“Then why?”
She turned to face him. Despite the two inches she’d gained in her pumps, he was still so much taller than she that she was more aware than ever of her lack of stature.
“Partly just because it’s right. Because it’s only fair that you get what Aaron wanted you to have. Because you should have had him in your life, but didn’t.”
“I didn’t want or need that old man in my life. And nobody would risk jail for reasons like that.”
Kendall didn’t try to tell him he was wrong. “I said ‘partly’. The main reason is much simpler. I promised Aaron I would see this done.”
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