Paper Rose

by Diana Palmer

  Holden nodded.

  “And it’s why you didn’t want me at Wapiti.”

  Holden nodded again.

  “But Cecily knew. She’s known from the beginning, hasn’t she?” he demanded, remembering tidbits of conversation that had puzzled him until now.

  Holden got up from his seat, looking every year of his age. Things would only deteriorate from now on. He had to go, he had to give Tate time to work through it. It must have come as the worst kind of shock. He remembered how he’d felt when a complete stranger had confided that the senator had a son. Holden hadn’t taken his word for it, of course. He’d dug into the records of Tate’s birth for his whole name, which was Tate Rene Winthrop. Holden’s father whom he adored was called Rene, and Leta knew it. His blood type, a rare one, was also shared with Tate. There wasn’t much guesswork after that.

  “I wanted you to know the truth before you heard it on the evening news,” he said curtly as he paused at the door, meeting his son’s hostile gaze evenly. “You’ll never know how I felt when I learned about you. I hated your mother for a while. I had a child I’d never seen. I missed his first steps, his first words, I missed his whole damned life! And while I was sitting up here on my nice white cloud, Jack Winthrop was playing hell with the family I didn’t have. While you’re hating me, think about that. I could have spared you, and her, if I’d only known the truth!”

  He opened the door and went out, closing it sharply behind him.

  Tate opened another beer. He was glad he had several. He held up the beer to his image in the mirror. “To bastards everywhere!” he said sarcastically, and chugged it down.

  Later, when he was calm enough to use the telephone, he called his mother.

  “Guess who just paid me a visit?” he asked her with a faint slur in his angry voice. “My dad.”

  There was a long, heavy pause. “Your father…he did?” she stammered, shocked. She’d never dreamed when Matt Holden called her that he might be willing to tell Tate the truth himself. She was sick to her soul, to have her child know that his whole life was a lie. She felt guilty, as she had when she’d heard Matt’s deep, beloved voice after thirty-odd years. She’d been too flustered to say much to him, and in the end, regretfully, she’d hung up on him out of sheer embarrassment.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded. “Why?”

  There was another pause. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am, but now’s not the time to discuss this. We’ll talk about it one day, when you’re ready to listen. Call me back after the shock’s worn off. Please forgive me. I love you!”

  She hung up.

  He dialed the number again. She didn’t answer. He tore the telephone cord out of the wall and threw the phone. It shattered with a nice noise. He wondered a little dimly if that had been his father’s reaction when Leta had hung up on him.

  His father. His father! He put his head in his hands, fighting the sickness that welled up in his belly. He’d been unique, a member of a vanishing race, a vanishing tribe, an individual in an ancient society. Now he was one of thousands with mixed blood, not unique anymore, not even Lakota. He was part Moroccan, part Berber if he believed the senator. The illegitimate son of a senator, how was that for a shocker? And if it hadn’t been for a renegade gambling syndicate trying to get a casino on Sioux land that they could siphon off profits from, he’d have gone the rest of his life without ever knowing the truth. His mother had kept her secret for thirty-six years. His whole life.

  He remembered Jack Winthrop’s temper, the vicious attacks, the hateful attitude. No wonder the man hated him. It made sense now, when it was too late to matter. Leta’s fault. His mother’s fault. Not that she hadn’t suffered, too.

  He leaned his head against the wall. He didn’t want it to clear. He didn’t want to think about what he’d learned. Not now. It was too much. He needed to sleep.

  He fell into his bed and all but passed out on a single six-pack of beer, which had hit him hard because he didn’t ordinarily drink. The next morning he woke with a headache and a renewed burst of bad temper. Cecily had lied to him. She’d lied to him. Well, she wasn’t going to get away with it. He was going to her office and he was going to tell her a thing or two!

  It was midday of an otherwise unremarkable day when Cecily’s head lifted with surprise at the force with which her office door was pushed open and then closed. Her secretary was at lunch. The office was deserted. And a furious black-eyed man stood over her desk looking as if he planned to come right across it after her. She knew what had happened, even before a weeping Leta had phoned her the night before to give her the latest news. She’d coaxed Leta into getting on a plane Tuesday and coming to stay with her before the news media ran the scandal and destroyed her privacy at Wapiti.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t find out eventually?” Tate asked in a bitter tone.

  She wasn’t sure how to handle him. He looked completely out of control. “Find out what?” she asked, even though she had a pretty good idea.

  “Matt Holden finally got around to telling me who my father was,” he said with an unpleasant smile. His calm voice belied the storms in his eyes.

  It was no use pretending innocence anymore. She sighed heavily. “We were all trying to protect you,” she began. “If we could have gotten enough on the syndicate, they’d never have dared print what they knew. But we didn’t count on them doing it for revenge because Matt threw a spanner into their nasty plan. Matt decided that you had to be told, and there was only him to do it. Your mother wouldn’t.”

  “My mother had no right to keep such a secret from me. Neither did he. Neither did you!” He pointed at her. “You had no right, Cecily!”

  “I gave my word to Senator Holden, and to your mother, that I wouldn’t say anything,” she said softly, rising from her desk. She walked around it slowly, approached him cautiously as if he were completely wild. In fact, he was. He was vibrating with frustration, shock, hurt, fury. “I knew it was going to be impossible to keep the secret, but they wanted to try, to spare you the truth.”

  “All my life, I knew who I was,” he told her. “I knew what I was, where I belonged, where I was going in life. In the space of a day, I’ve been set adrift. Suddenly I’m an outsider among my own people. My ancestry is a lie. My life…is a lie!”

  “That isn’t true,” she replied gently. “Your mother didn’t dare tell your father the truth. His wife hated Native Americans. She could have hurt your mother. She could have hurt you. Even the knowledge of you could have cost him his career.”

  “Jack Winthrop knew the truth,” he said huskily. “It’s why he hated us so much—her for loving another man, me for not being his child. He made us pay every day we lived, and until yesterday, I never knew why!”

  She winced, feeling his pain. She started to reach out to him. He backed up a step.

  “Don’t,” he warned softly, his eyes glittering with conflicting emotions. “So help me God, if you touch me,” he breathed, “I’ll have you right here on the carpet!”

  He made it sound like a threat, but in fact, it was what he needed, perhaps why he’d come here. He needed comfort and he’d come to her for it, bristling with bad temper to disguise the need. She wasn’t afraid of him. She loved him too much to be bothered by sizzling black eyes and a straight line of a mouth. He had every reason to be angry, to be hurt. But what he needed from her wasn’t words. She could give him what he really yearned for. It might be the last time he ever would touch her, now, when he was out of control and not thinking clearly. He wasn’t a particularly forgiving man, and she’d betrayed him.

  She went to lock the door before she went back to him. She reached up and pulled his mouth down over hers without a word.

  He actually trembled before his arms caught her, held her, lifted her into the viciously aroused contours of his body. His mouth was devouring on her lips. He was bruising her a little with the ferocity of the embrace, but it was oh, so sweet, to be needed like that. She sighed i
nto his lips. It seemed like forever since he’d kissed her.

  It seemed that way to him as well. He was losing himself in her and she was seducing him deliberately. He didn’t want to do this. It wasn’t right. But he wanted her to the point of madness, needed her, ached to have her. He’d come to her for comfort, even if he couldn’t admit it. All the long weeks he’d denied himself were over. Feast after the famine, even if he was angry. Somehow, the anger was translated into the hottest, fiercest passion he’d ever expressed to a woman.

  Inevitably kisses weren’t enough. Oblivious to the time, the place, their surroundings, he carried her down with him to the floor. Fastenings were loosened, obstacles moved aside, hands searching for bare skin in a frenzy of heat.

  Then she lay under the slow, hard thrust of his body on the imported Persian rug with her eyes closed, her mouth answering the deep, hungry kisses, smiling under the ferocity of his lips. It was feverish and rough and even a little dangerous, here in her own office, even with the door locked. The danger made it even more passionate. She pulled him closer, dimly aware that they were still almost fully clothed. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the…pleasure!

  He covered her mouth quickly to stifle the surprised sob of joy that prefaced the violent tremor of her body under him. He held her to him with a lean hand at her hip, jerking her up to him as the rhythm grew more violent, more demanding. He groaned into her welcoming mouth as the fever rose high and bright and suddenly exploded into fiery particles of pleasure that shot through his body like cellular fireworks. He stiffened helplessly as the spasms shook him and felt her eyes on him. He groaned harshly at the overwhelming pleasure it provoked to know that she was watching him.

  When he could breathe again, he lifted his face from her throat and looked down into her eyes, his own eyes strange and turbulent.

  “You watched,” he said coldly.

  “Yes.” She opened the buttons of his shirt and slid her hand over his smooth muscles to where she could feel his heart beating. She could feel him intimately and she moved deliberately, knowing that he was still fiercely aroused and that her movements would renew the passion. She lifted her hips, gasped at the sensation. “Are you…going to watch…this time?” she whispered, pulling his head back down to her.

  He went right over the edge. His eyes were as hostile as the look on his face when he pushed down with a fierce surge, impaling her further. It aroused him even more than her restless movements had. He did it again. His eyes blazed. His body shuddered.

  “Yes, that’s it,” she whispered feverishly. Her hands slid down his back, under his slacks. “Yes. Do it again. Make it last. Make it last forever! You can watch me, too…!”

  “Damn you, Cecily,” he bit off with helpless desire, trembling with new urgency as he found her mouth and his taut body moved helplessly on hers all over again. It shouldn’t even have been possible. She was demanding this time, fiercely enjoying everything he did to her, and he’d never been so aroused.

  He lifted his head, and he did watch. She laughed with shocked pleasure, looked up at him with love blazing out of her green eyes.

  When she lifted into his body with a sharp, funny little cry, he saw her eyes dilate until they were almost black. She clung to him, sobbing.

  Her face was beautiful, like that, he thought while he could. She was completely uninhibited, as if the past had never happened, as if she were a whole woman. In the back of his mind he knew that there wasn’t another man in the world she could give that response to, and it humbled him. Her contorted features and those pulsing little sobs took him over the precipice so that he could fall with her, into that exquisite hot void that beckoned so seductively. He heard himself cry out huskily with ecstasy before he finally collapsed in an exhausted, beloved weight over her.

  “Why did you do that?” he asked roughly, when he was able to speak. “Why did you knock me off balance like that?”

  “You know why,” she said softly, brushing back a strand of loose dark hair from his broad forehead. “You needed me.”

  He lifted his head and looked down at them. “It was supposed to be a punishment!”

  She lifted both eyebrows and smiled a little wickedly. “Was it really? I didn’t notice. Do it again,” she whispered boldly, “and I’ll try to look chastised.”

  She always could knock him off balance when no one else could touch him. But this was too solemn for humor. He was still bristling with what he’d learned and her part in it. Besides that, he hated having her know how helpless he was with her. He’d come to tell her he didn’t want such a woman in his life, a woman who’d lie to him. It had been pure fantasy to think he could get within five feet of her after weeks of abstinence and talk rationally. He ached for her even now, when he was satiated.

  His pride gnawed at him. He pulled away from her without meeting her eyes and got to his feet. He didn’t even look at her while he rearranged his clothing with vague shame and a lot of guilt.

  She got up from the floor gracefully, glad that the cleaning woman had done such a good job, and rearranged and dusted off her own clothing. It had been an exciting little interlude, and if he’d known that she suspected that she was pregnant—which she did—she supposed it would have been the last straw for him. He’d had quite enough shocks already.

  “I can’t believe I did that,” he said almost to himself. He turned on her, furious. “I can’t believe you let me do that! On the damned rug! Have you no pride, no shame?”

  She leaned back against her desk with a weary but satisfied sigh. “I guess not. We both know I’d crawl to you over broken glass to do anything you liked,” she said simply. “Why should you be shocked at what just happened?”

  He glared at her. “You wouldn’t move in with me because I wouldn’t marry you. But now that I know I’m half white, you think I might be in the market for a white wife. So you seduce me on your office floor to show me what I could have if I gave you a ring. Is that how you see it?”

  She shook her head. The mention of a ring hurt. She remembered what Holden had said about Audrey wearing a copy of Tate’s. She remembered the tabloid photo of Audrey with Tate as well. It wasn’t too hard to guess that he was probably going to marry the horrid woman out of sheer spite. There wasn’t anything she could do about that. Although, she mused sadly, he certainly didn’t act like a man who was getting what he needed in anybody’s bedroom. “You’re in no condition to think at all,” she said. “Matt said you’d feel betrayed and hate us all for a while. I understand. It’s all right.”

  “I wish the three of you would stop trying to guess what the hell I will or won’t do.” He glared at her. “My mother hung up on me. She hung up on him, too. I don’t guess you’ve spoken to her?”

  “Yes, I have,” she said. “She’s very worried and miserable. I asked her to come and stay with me before the media decides to break the story. I’m meeting her at the airport tomorrow.”

  “I don’t want to see either of them,” he said shortly. “I don’t want to see you again, either.”

  “Okay.” She nodded. She raised her eyebrows. “What comes next, the hair shirt or the leather flail?”

  He wasn’t going to give an inch. He was still furious with her, and it showed.

  “Why didn’t you tell me, Cecily?”

  “It wasn’t my secret to tell,” she replied solemnly. “I’m sorry you had to learn it like this. But it could have been much worse. You could have learned it on the evening news. That was the plan, if your father hadn’t given in to the syndicate’s demands. That’s why I went to Wapiti. That’s why Colby was there.”

  He stared at her. “You’re sorry. And you think an apology will make everything all right?”

  Her eyes were quiet, and very sad. “I don’t,” she said wearily, searching his face. “We don’t always get the things we want most in life. You know that it wasn’t really for a racial reason that you didn’t want to marry me,” she added unexpectedly. “It was because you want
to be self-sufficient. You don’t want to have to depend on people, because people have let you down so many times. The work you did for the government made you cynical, distanced you from normal ordinary folk. Now you feel that your own mother has betrayed you with your worst enemy. And, of course, there’s me. I’ve let you down, too.”

  He didn’t speak. He just glared at her.

  “I will love you,” she said softly, “for the rest of my life. But I can’t live alone, work alone, die alone. I’m not going to grieve for you until my hair turns gray. You like being alone. I don’t. I want a home of my own and children to raise. You can’t give me those things. It took me a long time to realize why you went around with Audrey, but I think I understand now. It was because she didn’t make any inroads into your privacy. She could marry you and she’d never want closeness except maybe in bed. That’s not much of a relationship, but then, you don’t want a real one. You have nothing to give. You only take.”

  The words went through him with the force of a hammer. He turned away. His hand resting on the doorknob, he turned and glared back at her. “I won’t be able to forget that you betrayed me,” he said. “I won’t be able to forgive it, either.”

  “I know that, Tate,” she said with deliberate calmness. Inside, she was screaming. “You don’t forgive people. It was inevitable that you’d find something eventually that you couldn’t forgive me for. It’s as good an excuse as any to cut me out of your life before you find yourself addicted to me.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” he said with a faint mocking smile. “You weren’t my first woman. You won’t be my last,” he added with pure venom.

  “And I know that, too,” she agreed, holding on to the remnants of her smile as she absorbed the emotional blow that she was already expecting. But her face didn’t show her grief.

  It irritated him that he couldn’t hurt her. He knew he was acting out of character. He couldn’t help it. He’d lost everything he valued. She’d betrayed him. She’d lied to him. Nothing had hurt as much, not even his mother’s silence for thirty-six years.