The man stood. But he didn’t move.
He leaned down and retrieved the issue of Saucy instead. He tipped his head to the cover shot of Dare. “I can understand your wanting to defend the man. I mean, Sabura saved your life. But I was also told he didn’t want you to move in here. Though I suppose his reluctance makes sense.”
Figures. Pike would have filled him in on that.
But who’d filled him in on the rest? The reason Dare had initially blocked her application. Even she didn’t know that. But Hook did. There was no other reason for the satisfaction gleaming in the man’s eyes. The man had lived up to his name, because he had her hooked and he knew it.
She folded her arms about Dare’s jacket. “It does?”
His brow kicked up a notch.
“Okay, I’ll bite. Why do his objections make sense?”
Those massive shoulders shrugged. “The other apartments.”
The other what?
She might as well have shouted it because the man nodded. He rolled the magazine into a tube and waved it about the room—toward the ceiling. “Near as I can tell, he owns the penthouse, along with all four apartments upstairs.”
Dare’s coat fell to her feet.
He owned the entire nineteenth floor and the penthouse?
She forced the shock down.
So Dare owned more real estate than one man could use. That wasn’t a crime. He probably sublet the apartments. It made sense. That was probably why he’d tried to block her purchase, because he’d wanted this place for himself.
Hook shrugged. “Makes you wonder what he’s doing with them—in them—doesn’t it?”
She crossed her arms in a vain attempt to ward off a second wave of chills. There was no way she was retrieving that coat. “Maybe he just wants to keep the riffraff out.” Her glare bounced right off Hook.
“Which riffraff would that be? You…or his known associates? You do know he was arrested, right?”
“Yes. He was fifteen. He and a friend hot-wired a car for heaven’s sake. So it was a police car—big deal.” Knowing Dare, he’d done it for the adrenaline. The thought succeeded in burning off the chill that had pierced her skin. “It was a prank that got out of control, Detective. One your buddies extracted their pound of flesh for when they threw him in Riker’s Island. Personally, I think the cops were as much to blame as Dare and his friend. You guys should keep a better eye on the things.”
Instead of offering a comeback, Hook unrolled the magazine, flipping through the pages as he spoke, “Actually, ma’am, it was a big deal. Well, the theft wasn’t. You’re right about that. The whole thing was supposed to be a prank. The other kid eventually admitted it was his idea. Sabura just got caught up in it.” Hook stopped at the four-page spread on Dare and snapped his stare up, trapping hers. “But the crime Sabura got himself involved in after he got out of Riker’s, now that was no prank. It was very, very serious.”
Despite the fire burning in that stare, the chill was back, and this time it was spreading into her bones.
Abby licked her lips. “What crime was that?”
“Murder.”
Chapter 7
From the moment Dare began his search, it took three hours and forty-eight minutes to track his father down, roughly three hours and forty-four minutes longer than he’d possessed patience for. Especially given where Dare had managed to locate the man—specifically, at the town house Victor Sabura had rented for his current receptionist. Even more specifically, in the bed of said receptionist.
It appeared little had changed in Victor’s life these past thirteen years.
Victor simply leaned against the walnut headboard, nodding to his companion as he smirked. “Angie, meet my son. I’d offer his name, but he won’t be staying long.”
Dare caved in to the latent humiliation emanating from the woman, leaning down to snag a blue silk robe from the carpet at his feet. He tossed it to the woman. “Leave.”
She complied, silently donning the silk and knotting it about her waist as she slipped out from the sheets and hurried across the room. Dare waited until the door closed behind her before he pitched a larger swath of silk toward his father. “Get dressed. We need to talk.”
Victor ignored him.
The man did have the decency to drag the robe about his waist as he rose from the bed and headed for what was undoubtedly the master bath. Five seconds later the sound of running water confirmed it.
Dare swallowed his curse.
Showers meant glass. He didn’t have that long.
Abby might not have that long. Not with that bastard and his knife on the loose.
“Come on in the room. I’ll be decent enough with the steam to appease even your antiquated sensibilities and you won’t get another chance to grill me about last night.”
Meaning Victor knew.
Hell, knowing the old man, the chief of police had probably phoned him personally. His father had become that successful over the past decade, mostly by winning the majority of the city’s more heinous and lucrative cases for all the wrong reasons. For Abby’s sake, Dare swallowed his distaste and entered the bathroom. Victor was right—the tempered glass had combined with the swirling steam to obscure a view no son wished to behold of his father, even a father he’d never respected.
Unfortunately, that same tempered glass obscured the rest.
The man’s emotions.
Victor squashed a dime of liquid soap onto the reverse of the steamed glass at face level and rubbed out a large enough diameter for Dare to make out his father’s Botox-enhanced features. “Spill it. What has the prodigal son so worried he had to interrupt his old man’s Sunday-morning romp?”
Dare folded his arms across the T-shirt he’d dragged on that morning and leaned back against the marbleized bathroom counter. “You know damned well why I’m here.”
“True.” His father slicked the water from his face, his earlier smirk returning as he grabbed a can of shaving cream from the shower shelf, squirting out enough foam to cover stubble ten shades lighter than the rest of the hair some high-priced barber had dyed black. “She must be some piece for you to show up here.”
“Not in the way you imply.”
Crude laughter spilled over the top of the shower. “Let me guess—instead of feeling her up, you felt her innocence.”
Dare let the comment slide. He had too much to lose if he opened his mouth now and reminded the bastard. He had even more to gain if he didn’t.
Another laugh. “I thought so.”
Dare stepped forward and glared through the glass. “Are you going to tell me what Pike and his department have on the thug who attacked Van Heusen, or not?”
The smirk spread as the razor scraped off another row of shaving cream. “Depends. You willing to trade?”
What? Dare might as well have inherited the empathic curse from his dad for all that he’d been able to keep his shock from showing as another strip of foam disappeared. “How about Mrs. Chang? I hear she’s…lost her way home. I’d like to be able to put her husband’s mind at ease. Care to help?”
Son of a b—
“Surely you didn’t expect me help you out for nothing?”
“Why not, Dad? There’s a first time for everything, even for a prodigal son.” Dare ripped the shower door open—and stiffened. Because there wasn’t a first time for him.
Not with Victor Sabura.
Because he wasn’t Victor’s son.
Dare stumbled backward as the denial socked in, landing against the sink as the man he’d believed that fateful day all those years ago calmly reached out and retrieved the robe he’d hooked beside the shower. The blue silk soaked up the excess water, clinging to the man’s broad shoulders and powerful chest as he pulled the belt tight. His high cheeks and taut lips might still be flushed from the steam of his shower, but those dark green eyes were cold, as cold as Dare had ever seen them, as cold as they had been to him the night he’d begged the man for help and received an even c
older fist in return.
“Took you long enough to figure that out.”
It had. Thirteen years. But why, dammit? Had he still been so screwed up from his stay at Riker’s that he’d been unable to read the truth?
“Well?”
“Why did you lie to me?” It sure as hell hadn’t been to spare him pain, let alone to protect his mother—or had it? “Did Mom put you up to it? Threaten you with her will?” Only, that didn’t make sense either. Miranda had left the bulk of it to him anyway. Victor hadn’t even controlled the trust. Some lawyer upstate had. Nor had Victor cared. He’d made enough on his own by then anyway. “Did my mother—”
For the second time in as many minutes the shock slammed in. Only this time it struck with as much force as that cry in the night, ripping him not from his sleep but from his past. His childhood. His hopes and his dreams. His memories.
His very identity.
Mother in heaven. “Miranda never gave birth to me.”
This time Victor stiffened—because there was only one way he could be as certain as he was. He’d felt it. It was ironic. His father finally believed him, believed he was an empath. Dare could see the fear in his eyes, feel it roiling up from within. He felt the plea that came with it, but it was too late. He could feel the confirmation within the man’s heart even before he asked the questions. He knew why Victor had lied to him all those years ago. He hadn’t done it to protect his wife. He’d done it to protect himself.
“The birth certificate—you signed it.”
“So I was cuckolded, big deal.”
“You forged it.”
But there was more. For years growing up, Dare had believed he was incapable of reading the man he’d called Father. In a matter of minutes he’d discovered that not only could he see into the blackened depths of Victor Sabura’s soul, he found more than he’d ever have believed possible. Victor might as well have been standing in front of the Supreme Court wearing little more than the briefs that were still dumped at the base of that rumpled bed, because he was trapped and he knew it. Convicted. Of more than mere forgery. His license to practice law revoked if Dare so much as breathed a word of the extent of his crime to the right people.
Dare took a moment to pull his own churning emotions into line, and then he clipped a nod toward the bedroom beyond. “Get dressed…Father. It seems I am going to be here long enough for you to fill me in on everything you know about my bloodline—as well as everything you know about the attempt on Stuart Van Heusen’s life. And I do mean everything.”
The moment Dare stepped through the Tristan’s main glass doors he knew Abby was upset.
No—she was terrified.
And becoming more so by the moment.
Dare’s own panic shot off the scale. He lunged across the lobby with barely a nod toward the doorman as Jerry tried to flag him down. An instantaneous read of the man’s emotional aura as he raced past assured him that whatever Jerry wanted was important—but it wasn’t urgent. Abby’s terror was. Dare reached the elevators in record time, blessing the second lift’s empty, waiting existence as he vaulted inside, every sensory receptor in his body tuned to the roiling fear emanating from above as he slammed his palm into the button for the eighteenth floor.
Abby’s floor.
What in God’s name had happened? Had that murdering bastard tracked her down already?
When he’d left that morning to arrange her and her brother’s security, she’d still been asleep—scratch that, passed out. With Jerry serving as interim lookout and the remainder of the building’s doors tied to an alarm system, he’d risked a visit stop at his father’s town house in Gramercy Park. Damned near four hours later, he’d finally located the rutting bastard and had his entire world turned upside down—and that didn’t even include the information he’d uncovered about his purported parents. At the moment, though, he couldn’t help but wonder if the entire visit had been a mistake—because of the absolute fear he could still feel radiating down from above.
Unfortunately, the massive hit of adrenaline that had crashed into his bloodstream the second he’d felt Abby’s fright was interfering with the connection.
Their connection.
Even as he prayed, he forced himself to breathe. To calm down.
Concentrate.
As the elevator crawled upward, Dare used every single biofeedback technique he’d studied over the years to try to slow his racing heart. To purge the numbing adrenaline from his blood. It was working, but not fast enough. It wasn’t until the lift had reached the fifteenth floor that he was able to refine his assessment. Abby was deathly afraid, all right, but not of the faceless murderer she’d stumbled across outside Avery Fisher Hall last night. She was terrified of him.
By the seventeenth floor, he knew why.
Damn. Dare slammed the override button as the elevator approached the eighteenth floor and forced the lift to keep going. The second the doors opened onto the nineteenth floor, he shot outside, whipping around the corner and racing down the carpeted hall, barreling past the first empty apartment, then the second before turning down the final hall—
He was too late.
Abby was already at the end, standing in front of the door to the sole occupied apartment, her hunched side to him, the jacket he’d worn the night before over her arm, the replacement master key Jerry had slipped him already out of the jacket pocket and in her quaking hand. In the lock.
She pushed the door open and gasped. “Oh, my—”
“Who the hell are you and what do you think you’re doing?”
Dare sprinted the final yards on desperation alone, reaching Abby’s side and pulling her out of the way of an equally terrified and completely enraged Charlotte Dennison as well as the woman’s gleaming and, at the moment, menacing cast-iron skillet. “I’ve got her, Charlotte. You did good—but you can back down now. This is Abby.”
He tucked Abby’s shaking body firmly against his, automatically absorbing the brunt of her shock along with the dregs of her hangover as he nodded to the battered woman and child cowering behind his assistant. Dare nodded to the Chinese émigré he’d spent all of ten minutes with the previous morning. Those ten minutes had been long enough to absorb the memory of ten years of sheer hell at her husband’s fist. “It’s okay, Mrs. Chang. Abby is no threat to you or your daughter. She doesn’t know your husband. Even if she did, she wouldn’t tell him anything. I give you my word.”
The woman bobbed her head and turned, scooting her daughter deeper in the apartment until they were both out of sight. An equally relieved Charlotte smoothed the salt-and-pepper curls from her forehead as she lowered the skillet.
She smiled. “It’s nice to meet you, Ms. Pembroke. I look forward to getting to know you better.” Charlotte tacked on a faded-blue wink before he could stop her. “Later, of course.” The damage already done, Charlotte risked radiating one of those waves of amused motherly sympathy she cursed him with now and then before she, too, departed.
To be honest, the stunt wasn’t entirely unexpected.
Unlike his father, Charlotte had managed to drag damned near the entire story out of him this morning. But then, he could actually share the details with her, couldn’t he? Charlotte had believed him when he’d told her what had really happened during her sister’s final moments all those years ago, as the police hadn’t. She’d accepted the rest when he’d finally confessed it, too. Granted, she’d had the advantage of knowing her bastard of a brother-in-law as well as she’d known her sister. While his father, of course, had never even tried to get to know his own son. He’d always hoped eventually that would change.
This morning he’d learned it never would.
Dare pushed the disappointment aside. He stared down at the key still clutched in Abby’s hand, determined to give her the time she needed to absorb what she’d seen, to sort out her own jumbled, changing emotions. Unfortunately, that key had opened more than a door to an apartment just now. It had cracked the door to th
e truth. As much as he could give her. Eventually he would have to give her the rest, before she figured it out on her own.
And she would.
Their connection was growing. Deepening. Whether he wanted it to or not. Just as it had with his mother—a mother he’d just learned was not his any more than his father was. Not biologically. To be honest, he wasn’t surprised. Deep down, he’d known for years that he didn’t belong in the Sabura home. He’d sensed there were others—that somewhere, he had siblings. Why else had he branded that mark on his chest? But he’d never sought them out. Not actively. He knew why. As difficult as accepting his mother’s death had been, he hadn’t dared risk searching for someone else like himself. Someone able to teach him to harness the curse he possessed and use it more than he was willing to.
Or worse.
What if he discovered that, yes, there was another man out there who possessed the right to call him son, but in the end cared nothing for him? What if he discovered his real family didn’t want him any more than Victor or his mother had? Unwilling to relive the rejection, he’d sealed himself off. Unfortunately, that note he’d received suggested that at least one relation had found him first.
As had Abby.
She was nothing like him. She was normal. Wonderfully, perfectly normal. Better yet, their connection was nothing like the one he’d shared with his mother. It was stronger.
But was she?
“Abby?”
The query succeeded in burning away the bulk of her shock. She stepped away, far enough to break contact, but not so far as to cause panic in him, then turned. For a moment he saw her as Charlotte and his guests must have seen her: the rumpled clothes and snarled hair, her scraped and bruised temple from where she’d hit the street, the deathly pale skin and hollowed eyes left over from her own night of hell.
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