But he appeared to hear the implication anyway. She saw his shoulders tense as he took a shirt out of the drawer.
She tensed, too. The last time she'd seen him, with Goddard and Viceroy on the floor, Felix had looked at her with—with—an unmistakable emotion in his eyes. She'd been sure that emotion was love. Where had it gone?
He took another shirt out of the drawer. To the wall, he said, "You shouldn't have done that."
Aletheia's brows flinched downward. "Um..." What was he talking about?
After setting his shirts on top of the dresser, Felix stalked over to the closet. He slid the door open. From her angle, she could only see the edge of his jaw, and the way his muscles there locked.
"You shouldn't have jumped in front of me." He addressed the inside of the closet. "Viceroy's bullet would have killed you."
Aletheia's eyebrows shot upward. That's what was on his mind? "I—I couldn't watch you die," she tried to explain. Nerves beat along with her heart as she watched him, wondering if he could understand. If he would understand. She loved him.
He reached into the closet and pulled out his suitcase. "It was wrong of you."
"Wrong?" Aletheia frowned at his back. Stupid, maybe. Impulsive, certainly. But wrong? Her nerves edged into fear as she asked, "What do you mean?"
He shot her a quick look as he threw his suitcase onto the bed. "You would have died, while I survived." His voice was hard.
Aletheia gave a slow, thoughtful nod. "Maybe. But...if our positions had been reversed, wouldn't you have done the same for me?"
His movement checked only briefly as he swung back toward the chest of drawers. "That's different."
"Is it?" With her fear growing, Aletheia watched him scoop out the rest of his clothes and take them over to his suitcase. He'd walled himself off, was denying—everything. "Please tell me how."
With a hard shove, Felix got his clothes into the suitcase. He didn't attempt an answer.
Aletheia shook her head. "There is no difference, Felix. You love me, the same way that I love you."
That finally stopped him. He halted packing. "I love you," he repeated. Looking down at his folded shirts, he asked, "Is that what you think?"
All right, it did sound presumptuous, her words coming out of his mouth that way. But it was true. Aletheia knew it was true. Fighting back a growing sense of dread, she drew herself up. "Yes."
He glanced over at her. In a flat voice, he said, "I feel nothing."
Aletheia could only stare at him.
He straightened. "I feel absolutely nothing. At all. Good or bad." He paused and frowned slightly. "Not even the darkness."
Aletheia kept staring. Uncertainty rolled around her earlier conviction. He seemed sincere. Was it possible he'd been right all along, that he was unable to feel love?
No. Too much evidence pointed otherwise. But he was clearly above the fray at the moment. He did, indeed, appear unmoved. And he said he didn't even have the darkness. What could have happened to it? "So..." She frowned. "What are you going to do?"
He shrugged. "My job is done. I'm going home."
He said it simply, as if it meant nothing.
"Oh," she said out loud, her voice pitifully small. Without me? she thought.
As if to answer her question, he latched his suitcase.
Pain struck Aletheia. He was leaving. Without her. He was dumping her. Without even admitting they'd ever been together.
She had a good idea what was going on. His emotions had become too much for him to handle, so he'd shut them all down, lost even the dark place where he could usually access them.
So... She had to do something about this, didn't she, help him? He was her challenge—wasn't he?
Face expressionless, he lifted his suitcase onto its side.
But despair engulfed Aletheia. There was nothing more she could do. She'd already told him she loved him. She'd done everything she could to convince him of that fact. Heck, she'd even stepped in front of a bullet for him.
But apparently all that act had accomplished was to annoy him.
"Then this is goodbye?" she asked. Her voice cracked on the last word.
Looking at his suitcase, he nodded.
There was nothing she could do. Nothing she could say. He was closed and he wasn't listening.
He hesitated, though, before lifting his suitcase from the bed. Looking over at her, he asked, "Are you set for getting home? Have a way to get to the airport, enough money for tickets?"
Despite her despair, Aletheia had to choke back a laugh. He would ask. He would care. Without admitting he cared, of course. Suddenly, she saw it all clearly, where he was at. Despite the way her throat was tightening, a wobbly smile crawled onto her face. "You know what I think, Felix?"
"About plane tickets?"
"About you." Her wobbly smile broadened as she walked up to him. "I think you know how to love perfectly well." He remained impassive as she reached up to tap his chest. "I think your problem is being able to accept love."
His gaze didn't change as he looked down at her. Perhaps no response existed, as he claimed. Or perhaps it didn't matter. Maybe being unable to accept love was just as freakish as being unable to feel love.
Maybe, in a way, Felix was right about himself.
"Do you need anything?" he asked again.
Only you. But she didn't say that. He wouldn't hear. She couldn't make him hear. That's what she had to accept. There was no getting through.
"I'll be fine, Felix." Of course she would. Aletheia Cooper wasn't allowed to fall apart. People depended on her—people who freely admitted they needed her. People she needed, herself, in her own way.
But she felt as if a knife were slicing through her gut. She'd thought she'd found a man she could depend on. It turned out he was the least dependable of all.
It wasn't easy, but she forced her voice to sound normal. Pride. She was allowed some of that, wasn't she? "Benjamin, Zara, and I are all going home together." At least, that was the plan now, now that Felix had so completely rejected her. "We have money, a way to the airport, everything."
Felix nodded. He appeared utterly stoic at their parting, himself. Perhaps he was. Emotions were something he was good at crushing.
"Good," Felix said. "That's fine, then." He picked up his suitcase. With a long stride, he made for the door.
Something. Wasn't there something she could do to stop this train? But Aletheia finally understood. There was nothing. She had no control. None at all.
No control over having fallen in love with him. No control over failing to convince him of this truth. No control over his progress out of her life.
No control, either, over the pain cascading through her.
She remained silent, standing still, as Felix swung the door open, walked through it, and left.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
She would probably never see him again.
It wasn't the first time Meredith had had the thought since she'd climbed into her rental car and driven away from the big old Victorian house in Deer Creek. She was afraid it wouldn't be the last time, either, as she sat at her desk on a Tuesday evening three weeks after leaving the mountain town. She tapped a pen on the blotter and absently watched the other employees of Morrison World Security depart the premises at the end of the workday.
She felt such...loss. A sense of sheer lack.
Perhaps it would have helped if she'd had a chance to see Parker before she'd left, if she'd been able to apologize. He wasn't the one who needed to fix his life. She was.
There'd been no such chance. Parker had made himself scarce during the day-and-a-half between their argument at his cliff-face sculpture and Aletheia's return from her adventures in Boston. Meredith had barely seen him, let alone had an opportunity to talk to him.
"Dinner." The deep male voice came from over Meredith's head. Startled, she glanced up. Felix leaned against the half-wall of her cubby. He wore the same phlegmatic expression he'd been wearing since
his return from Boston. "Want to have dinner with me tonight?" he elaborated.
"Dinner? Tonight?" Meredith tapped her pen harder on her blotter. A few weeks ago she would have been thrilled to hear these words coming out of Felix's mouth. Now she had to think about her answer.
She had no romantic aspirations here, but dinner with Felix would be a distraction, and she was definitely in the market for those. "Sure," she told him. "I just need to—" What was it tonight? Oh, yeah. "I'll have to cancel my saxophone lesson."
Felix's eyebrows shot up. "I didn't know you played a musical instrument."
"I just started." Meredith opened the bottom drawer of her desk to fetch her purse. The teacher's phone number was somewhere in her wallet. "My life needs more balance, you know? Something beside work."
Felix watched while Meredith rooted in her purse. "That explains why you haven't been working late Tuesday. But what about Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday?"
Meredith lifted a finger while she left a message for her teacher, then turned back to Felix. "Monday is watercolor. Wednesday's ballet. Thursday's Japanese flower arranging, and on Friday I've been going to different drama productions."
Felix's expression was bemused. "Very...cultured."
Meredith popped her wallet back into her purse and stood. "Like I said, I need something else going on." It had been damn hard trying to fit back into her old life with its old priorities. Not hard, actually. Impossible. She was no longer sure what was important. What was there in this world into which it would be worth pouring passion? The kind of passion Parker had.
Other than Parker, himself, that was?
Meredith only hoped there was something, because she'd lost her chance with Parker. Burned her bridges.
Outside the building, Felix asked, "What do you think of going to North Beach? Italian?"
"Sounds good to me."
He glanced down at her shoes. "Can you walk there, or should I call a cab?"
"I'd like to walk." She was a soldier in high heels.
Twenty-five minutes later they were seated in a corner booth of a dim restaurant that steamed in scents of garlic and basil. An open bottle of Merlot sat on the table between them.
A complete absence of tension told Meredith that Felix had no more romantic aspirations for the evening than she did. If she'd had any doubts, his first words would have dispelled them. "That damn house is still set to be auctioned next week."
She didn't need to ask what he was talking about, but she was surprised. "I thought you sent Aletheia Cooper a check, the amount she needed to clear the loan."
"I did." Lifting his wine glass, Felix frowned. "I don't know what's going on."
Meredith gazed at him intently while a deep stab of fear went through her. If the house were sold, what would Parker do? All his sculptures, stuck there on the land— Tensely, she asked Felix, "Do you intend to find out?" Somebody had to. Oh, Parker...
Felix sat with his gaze on his uplifted glass of wine. "Would it mean I cared if I did?"
"Uh..." An odd question, but it seemed he wanted an answer. "Yes?"
Shaking his head, he set down the wineglass. "There's a big difference between a sense of responsibility and one of caring. Believe me."
She frowned at him, confused.
He sighed. "I don't care. In fact, I don't feel anything. At all. About...anything."
A chill swept through Meredith as she continued to gaze at him. "That's funny," she muttered. "I feel the just the opposite."
He looked startled. "You do?" Then his eyes narrowed. "What happened to you while you were in Deer Creek?"
"Nothing." Meredith made the claim quickly, blithely. Honestly. Nothing had happened in the end, had it? By telling Parker he was wasting his time creating sculptures no one would see—or buy—Meredith had pushed him away so completely the end result had been a blank. She rubbed a fingertip around the rim of her wineglass. "So what happened between you and your...travelling companion?"
A tiny smile curved Felix's mouth. "Nothing."
Their eyes met and they both laughed, small, unhappy laughs.
Meredith decided to come clean. "Parker," she told Felix. "Can you believe it? Is there a man less likely to work out for me? He's almost my exact opposite." She shook her head in self-disgust. "Obviously that went nowhere." She tilted her head. "And Aletheia?"
"Aletheia—nothing." Felix looked away. "That's the story. I feel nothing toward her. Nothing at all."
Meredith tried to peer into his averted face. "You must feel lonely... Or we wouldn't be sitting here."
He frowned. "To tell you the truth, I do feel something, but not loneliness." His jaw tightened. "When I think of Aletheia—"
Meredith raised her brows. She was frankly amazed Felix was admitting anything had gone on between him and Parker's cousin. But since he was, she didn't mind knowing more. "When you think of Aletheia—what?"
He glanced at her. "The only feeling that does come to me is...anger. When I remember her jumping in front of that bullet—"
Meredith goggled. "She jumped in front of a bullet?"
"One meant for me." Felix looked stony. "Fortunately, the gun never went off. But if it had..."
"She would have died for you." Meredith was impressed. "That's the real thing then, isn't it? True love."
Felix's gaze went past her. "Is it?" He ran a finger down the knife at his place setting. "I wouldn't know."
Meredith felt a buzzing sensation as she watched him. There was a feeling emanating from Felix that she recognized in herself. "I think you know," she softly told him.
His gaze shot to her. "That's what Aletheia says." His eyes moved away again. "But...it's all gone... Even the darkness."
The darkness? Meredith had no idea what he was talking about. But his pathetic situation was spurring her to take action for herself. "You know what I'm going to do?"
His eyes settled on her distractedly.
This required fortification. Meredith grabbed her wineglass. "I'm going to see my mother. She'll pound some sense into me. Getting all hung up over an artist, for crissake." Meredith took a swig of Merlot. "My mom will set the right notions back in my brain, just see if she doesn't." Unfortunately, Meredith doubted even her formidable parent would have the power to banish Parker from Meredith's heart, but it was worth a try.
Meanwhile Felix commenced staring at Meredith as if she'd discovered the Holy Grail. "Mother," he muttered.
"Yep." The thought made Meredith gulp some more wine. "They're awfully good at telling you what's what, aren't they?"
Felix's gaze sharpened on her. "Yes," he agreed softly. "They certainly ought to be."
~~~
"Felix?" His mother opened the door to her office at the federal courthouse in Miami, looking as carefully groomed and coiffed as if it were the beginning of the workday, instead of the end of one. Her hair, dyed a sober honey-blond, swept around her face in a style suited to a professional woman of sixty-eight years. She wore a linen suit from Yves Saint Laurent. As always, she looked every inch a success.
Her surprise on beholding her son was evident.
"Hello, Mother." Felix clasped his hands behind his back. He supposed her surprise was understandable. He hadn't warned her he was coming. On purpose. Less understandable, he thought, was the expression of displeasure on her distinguished face. He was her son, her only child. Shouldn't she be happy to see him?
"What are you doing here?" his mother demanded.
Felix almost smiled. Of course she wasn't happy to see him. She'd never wanted him to begin with. Raising Felix had been a duty. And one that was over now. "May I come in?" he asked.
The question appeared to fluster her. "Well! You came all the way out here— Of course you should come in." She moved back from the door.
Stepping into her tidy office, Felix felt a disorienting sense of recognition. The neat rug, subtly stylized furniture, and minimal clutter in a pile of papers on the oversized desk—he could have been stepping
into his own office in San Francisco.
A bit dizzy, Felix turned to face her. For three thousand miles he'd been determined and committed. Now that he was here, he felt slightly nauseous.
His mother moved toward her desk. "I got your message last month about the mess in Boston." Her voice was clipped, her movements brisk. She was over her surprise and back in control again. "Homeland Security is trying to keep everything quiet, given the secret techno-development angle, but really, Felix." Behind her desk, she gave a disapproving sigh. "To get mixed up in something with such potential for damage. I thought you were more careful than that."
"There are many aspects of my character of which you are probably not aware." Some of the nausea receded as, with this statement, Felix started down his chosen path.
She shot him a sharp look. "There are probably thousands."
"Not the forthright type, am I?"
Her brows rose. "No."
He smiled slightly. "But at least I haven't been the...criminal type, have I? At least you can be thankful for that."
Reaching for her chair, she stopped dead. She stared at him. "What are you talking about?"
He glided toward her, feeling lightheaded. "I'm talking about my father."
There. It was out. The forbidden words. Felix stopped on the other side of the desk from her.
She'd gone completely deer-in-the-headlights. In a near-whisper she asked, "What about your father?"
Felix rested his fingertips on her desktop. "I don't take after him, at least not completely. Do I?"
His mother was the one who looked sick now, but that was too bad. Felix was going to finish this, now that he'd started.
"Brian Greco is still doing time, isn't he?" Felix tilted his head. "I believe it was three murders, along with racketeering, loan sharking, and grand theft. Even the mess in Boston isn't as bad as that."
His mother's brows drew down. "Brian Greco? That gangster? ...Years ago."
"Thirty-nine years ago." Felix reminded her. "My father."
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