Lindsay murmured something appropriate and smiled professionally as the introductions went around. Catlin's smile matched hers in sincerity and social polish. She was relieved to see that he made no overt response to the frankly sexual signals Jackie was sending out. Pretending to be Catlin's lover was difficult enough for Lindsay. Pretending to be one of a slumber party would be beyond her acting abilities. It also would be so far out of her known character as to be unbelievable, no matter how intense her supposed infatuation.
"And this is Sam Wang," Jackie concluded, resting her fingertips on the back of Catlin's forearm as she urged him closer to her side. She looked up at him out of large gray eyes. "You're new to the art scene, aren't you?" she murmured.
"Not really," said Catlin. He switched his attention to Sam Wang. The Eurasian's calm expression was at odds with the bleak calculation of his eyes. Catlin had met a lot of people like that. He smiled, feeling better about the prospect of the night not being a total loss in terms of coming closer to Qin's charioteer. "I've been looking forward to meeting you, Mr. Wang. Lindsay told me that you come up with some astonishing bronzes from time to time."
Wang gave Lindsay an enigmatic look. "Did she?"
"Do you?" Catlin asked, smiling.
Wang made a dismissive gesture with his hand. "What is astonishing?"
"One of Emperor Qin's bronze charioteers," Catlin said succinctly.
There was a hissing sound in the instant before Wang controlled his surprise. "Astonishing indeed," he said quietly. "As well as very, very valuable. You have such a bronze?"
"I want such a bronze."
Wang's eyes crinkled slightly. His laugh was soft, surprisingly low. "So do I, Mr. Catlin. So do I!"
"For yourself or for sale?"
There was a moment of silence, then Wang sighed. "For sale, I'm afraid. That's too much capital for me to tie up in a single piece of art."
"Not for me," Catlin said distinctly. He looked from Wang to Malloy to Jackie. "I'll pay a generous finder's fee."
"What about Lindsay?" asked Jackie, looking at the other woman with barely restrained curiosity.
"Lindsay will authenticate the bronze," Catlin said flatly, "no matter who I buy it from." He turned and drew Lindsay to his side, running his fingertips from her cheekbone to the pulse beating just beneath the soft skin of her throat. "Won't you, honey?"
"Yes," answered Lindsay. She hated the husky sound of her voice but could do nothing to control it. She reacted to Catlin's presence, his touch, his heat even though she knew it was all an act. The pragmatic side of her mind consoled her with the fact that the throaty, sandbagged-by-passion voice added immeasurably to what otherwise might be an unconvincing performance on her own part.
Catlin smiled and caressed Lindsay's bottom lip with his thumb, bringing a stain of color to her clear cheeks. "That's my honey cat. With you, I'll never be cheated or surprised, will I?"
Mutely, Lindsay shook her head because she didn't trust herself to open her mouth. She didn't know whether she would answer Catlin's rhetorical question or bite his caressing thumb; and if she did bite, she didn't know if it would be in retaliation or in sensual provocation.
If she had thought Catlin were simply teasing her for the sake of watching her response, she would have walked away and left him standing there. But he wasn't enjoying teasing her.
There was neither laughter nor cruelty in his eyes, simply the cold calculation of a man who had learned to survive in hell.
A good teacher. The best. She had no complaints coming.
Lindsay's head came up with new determination. She gave Jackie the kind of look usually reserved for dubious art. "I've promised Catlin his charioteer," Lindsay said simply. "I'll remember anyone who helps me."
Catlin shot Lindsay a sideways glance, hearing the ring of certainty in her voice. His expression changed subtly, shifting from approving lover to just plain approval. Do unto others. Period.
"That's what attracted me to Lindsay," said Catlin, slanting her a very male smile. "She gives as good as she gets."
Both Malloy and Wang looked at Lindsay with new interest, for there was no mistaking the fact that her lover was obviously satisfied. That kind of satisfaction raised interesting sexual speculations in other men.
"I'll remember that if I ever need anyone to vet my bronzes," Malloy said, smiling meaningfully at the small blond woman who had been standing silently, patiently, by his side throughout the entire conversation.
"Don't count on it," Catlin said, his voice cool. "The service I get from Lindsay is exclusive."
"Does that work both ways?" asked Jackie, smiling innocently up at him.
"Yes," said Lindsay, before Catlin could answer.
"Well." Jackie shrugged, looking at Lindsay. "I can see you haven't changed that much. You still have a high opinion of yourself." She lifted her hand from Catlin's sleeve as she turned back toward him. "I have some bronze harness pieces that are either Warring States or Qin. Would you be interested?"
"I'm always interested in good bronzes,"
Jackie smiled. "Ten o'clock tomorrow?"
"Fine."
"Where are you staying?"
"Lindsay's place."
There was a fractional pause. "Oh. In that case, just tell the cab driver to "
"That's all right," Lindsay interrupted smoothly. "I know the way. That is, unless the harness pieces are displayed in your home?"
"It's settled, then," Jackie said brightly, ignoring Lindsay's rather sarcastic question. "I'll see you at my shop at ten."
Catlin turned to Wang. "Will you be there? I'd like to talk more about bronzes with you. It's been a few years since I've actively collected. Frankly," he added, smiling, "all that lured me out of retirement was the chance of getting one of Qin's bronze charioteers."
"Unfortunately, I'm going back to the Coast tomorrow, but " Wang turned toward Lindsay. A smile transformed his face from merely handsome into the kind of riveting male beauty that was distinctly Eurasian, flawless without being in the least feminine. "Are you going to be out my way anytime soon? I just received two animals from the Hsing-p'ing district of Shaanxi that are quite remarkable. I'm sure Mr. Catlin would like to see them."
"Third century?" asked Lindsay, answering the charming smile with one of her own. "Inlaid?"
Wang nodded. "I wouldn't bother a woman of your taste with anything less."
She blinked, hardly able to believe that Wang was sending out seductive signals to her. The last time she had met him, he had been impeccably polite, no more. If it hadn't been for Jackie's suddenly narrowed gray eyes, Lindsay would have thought she was being overly sensitive. Then Catlin's hand settled heavily on the nape of her neck, underlining the accuracy of her judgment. The handsome Mr. Wang was definitely on the make. But did he want her, or simply an entree into Catlin's wallet? Did Wang feel that if one man controlled her with sex, so could another?
"Lovely," murmured Lindsay. She tilted her head toward Catlin. "Will we be going out to the Coast soon, darling?"
"I'll go wherever I can find good bronzes," he said flatly.
"Then I can safely say that I'll be seeing you," Wang said, holding out his hand first to Lindsay, then Catlin. "The best bronzes pass through Vancouver or San Francisco." He smiled. "I have shops in both cities." He turned, dropped a casual kiss on Jackie's beautifully outlined lips and said, "I have to run. My plane leaves at an ungodly hour."
After Wang left, the group around Jackie fragmented. Catlin and Lindsay drifted off to find new dealers, announce their new status as lovers and seekers of a Qin charioteer, and moved on again. The pattern was repeated until after midnight, when Lindsay finally drew Catlin aside.
"I think we've done enough damage to my reputation and feet for one night," she muttered.
"Home?"
"Home."
As soon as they were outside, Lindsay glanced around to see if they were alone. Catlin saw the ge
sture, understood and pulled her very close to his side.
"Questions?" he said very softly.
"I know that for the sake of appearances we have to stay together, but why are we using my place instead of yours?"
"I have maid service."
"So?"
"So anyone who's interested can slip her a ten and find out if we slept in the same bed."
"Oh."
"Yeah. Oh. Unless you have a maid, too?" asked Catlin.
"Uh, no."
"Figures. No maid and the world's shortest, lumpiest couch." He made a disgusted sound. "Flip you for the bed?"
Lindsay gave Catlin a sideways look. "With what, a two-headed coin?"
Catlin's smile was as dark as the night around him. "No, with half a coin. That way nobody wins and everybody loses."
"What?"
There was no answer.
A few hours before, Lindsay would have asked the question again. In the small hours of night, she did not. She was learning very quickly.
As Catlin's fingers closed around the mutilated coin in his pocket, he hoped that very quickly was fast enough.
Chapter 9
The shadows came again, rising out of a black well as deep as time. But the shadows themselves weren't black. They were a sticky, glistening red. They poured through her hands endlessly, yet still more shadows rose out of the well, a red tide lapping up over her feet, her knees, her hips, her waist, rising, rising, while red poured hotly through her cold fingers. She couldn't stem the deadly tide, she couldn't run, she couldn't hide, she couldn't breathe, she was choking, no air, red strangling her until
Lindsay sat up in bed with a smothered cry.
The irrational part of her mind wanted to scream in fear as primal as the bloody shadows waiting to claim her when she slept again. The rational part of her mind knew instantly that she was safe, it was just the dream again, the nightmare that always came in times of stress and had come so frequently since her mother had died.
With fumbling fingers, Lindsay turned toward her bedside light. In the instant before she screamed, she realized that the shadow standing in the doorway was black, not red.
"Bad dreams, Lindsay?"
She swallowed the scream clawing at her throat as she recognized Catlin's deep voice. Numbly she searched for the light switch.
"Yes. The dream. Again." Her voice was tight, a stranger's voice. The light came on and Lindsay wished she had screamed while she had had the excuse of the nightmare.
Catlin was naked but for the blue-steel shine of the gun in his right hand. There was nothing seductive about the muscles shifting and coiling beneath his skin with each movement of his body as he walked toward her, nor was there seduction in the controlled intensity of his yellow eyes watching her. He was a predator, not a lover, and as deadly as the gun gleaming in his hand.
Catlin's glance went automatically around the room. He found what he had expected to find since he had heard Lindsay's choked cry a nightmare rather than an attacker. He flicked on the gun's safety with a casual gesture that spoke of long experience with weapons.
"Want to talk?" he asked matter-of-factly.
Lindsay made a guttural sound that could have been laughter or despair. "With a naked man carrying a loaded pistol? My God in heaven, Catlin, where did the FBI find you!"
"They didn't." He walked out of the room, reappearing a moment later. His hands were empty and he was wearing a pair of comfortably faded jeans. "Better?" he asked.
She let out a long breath. "I think so."
For an instant Lindsay was tempted to ask if he owned a shirt, too, something to cover the dark invitation of the hair curling across his chest and narrowing down below his narrow waist. She closed her eyes and her mouth, knowing that was one question she would not ask. Now was definitely not the moment to let her thoughts wander. She was too vulnerable. She was also too proud to seduce a man who wanted nothing more from her than an act.
And she had no doubt that an act was all that Catlin wanted. The instant the door had closed behind them that night, his loving touches and indulgent smiles had vanished. He had made her stand just inside the apartment while he checked out each room. He had refused her offer of a nightcap and politely waited while she used the apartment's sole bathroom to get ready for bed. Feeling self-conscious and uneasy, she had emerged from the bathroom in a simple burgundy silk nightgown, which was the only nightwear she owned that wasn't nearly transparent. Even so, she knew that the gown clung to her breasts and hips and made her skin glow as though lit from within.
If she had any doubts whether Catlin found her as attractive as she found him, they had died when she walked past him in the narrow hall. He had looked at her as though she were a piece of furniture. It was as if they had been together so long that there was nothing left between them, not even good memories. The moment reminded her all too painfully of the man she had married in the full flush of hopeful youth, and had been divorced by five years later, when neither one of them could think of any reason to stay together, good or bad.
"Lindsay?" asked Catlin, his voice gritty with the aftermath of the adrenaline that had yanked him from sleep when she had cried out. "Are you sure you're all right?"
Slowly she opened her eyes, preferring the difficult, uncertain present to the irretrievable certainty of the past. Besides, if she were lucky, the nightmare wouldn't come again. Not tonight. Maybe even not tomorrow night.
And if it did, then she would get through the nights as she always had. Alone.
"Fine," she said hollowly. "The nightmare always comes when I'm under unusual stress."
Catlin said nothing for the simple reason that there was little he could say. The stress Lindsay was under would get worse, not better, but there was no point in telling her that at three in the morning, when emotion screamed that dawn was too far away to be believed. He knew all about the dark hours of the soul and the unbridgeable gap between fear and sunrise.
"What do you do for it?'' he asked, his tone low, soothing.
"The stress?"
"Yes."
She shrugged. "I work a little harder at my tai chi chuan in the morning and try to tell my subconscious that I'm thirty, not seven, and China is far, far away, over and beyond the curve of the earth."
"Do you talk with anyone?"
"Once in a while. Larry never understood."
Catlin knew who Larry was but he asked the question anyway, for Lindsay knew nothing of the file locked in Catlin's safe. "Larry?"
"My first and last husband." Lindsay's mouth turned down at the corner. "Poor Larry. He thought he was marrying a respectable Lutheran missionary child who would love, honor and obey in silence no matter what a jerk he was."
Catlin's laughter made Lindsay wish that they were what they were supposed to be. Lovers. She would have given a great deal to curl up in his arms, to touch the roughly curling hair on his chest with her lips, to fall asleep hearing his heart beat beneath her cheek.
It was more than the comfort Catlin could offer her that made Lindsay want to lie next to him. She had had the nightmare many times in the past, and sometimes there had been a man beside her in bed. Illusory comfort. She would have been better off alone. No one had understood that a platitude and a pat on the head enraged rather than eased her. Because her would-be comforters had seen nothing of sudden, inexplicable, violent death, they had assumed that it existed only in her mind and could be exorcised by a condescending shrink at one hundred dollars an hour.
She had learned not to hope for comfort from men. Yet somewhere, at a level as deep as the nightmare itself, Lindsay sensed that Catlin was different. He understood that horror was real. He understood that it could cast a shadow across time and distance, consuming both, leaving only horror itself. Horror was something that you lived with every day.
And sometimes at night you dreamed.
"Thank you," said Lindsay, lying back with a sigh, feeling the last of th
e shadows slide back down into the bottomless well of the past.
"For what?" Catlin asked.
"For not patronizing me. For knowing that horror is real." Lindsay smiled crookedly. "For being an understanding kind of genuine bastard, I guess."
"But still a genuine bastard?" he asked softly, his voice as dark as the night beyond the curtained window.
"Oh, yes. You taught me that very well, Catlin," Lindsay said, her smile fading as she remembered the ease with which he had aroused her and then had turned away from her, all business, a candle burning in ice, brilliance without warmth. "I'll try not to forget. I don't think my pride could take another lesson like that."
"Lindsay," Catlin said urgently, "I didn't want to hurt you. It was "
"I know," she interrupted, reaching for the bedside light again. "It was necessary. Good night, Catlin."
Lindsay didn't know how long he stood in her bedroom doorway, not moving, not speaking. She wondered what he was thinking, what he was feeling, but she fell asleep before dawn revealed his expression.
She slept deeply, awakening to the fragrance of coffee steaming at her bedside table. Catlin was leaning casually on the doorframe as though he had spent the night there, thinking of just the right question to ask to explode her sleepy contentment.
"Are you on the pill?"
"What?"
"Contraceptives," he said, sipping from the mug he held in his hand. "Or would you leave it to your lover to take care of that little detail?"
"Only if he could get pregnant instead of me," Lindsay retorted instantly.
Catlin's mustache shifted over his faint smile, "I thought you'd feel that way about it, but I couldn't find any contraceptives in your bathroom. Do you keep them in the bedside table?"
Lindsay took a slow breath and reminded herself that she was always volatile in the first few moments of waking. It was as though her intelligence woke up more slowly than her visceral responses, which at the moment were telling her to yell at Catlin that it was none of his damned business what she did or did not have in the way of contraceptives.
"At the moment, I don't need contraceptives," she pointed out reasonably.
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