Vaguely surprised by his use of an indefinite phrase like “assuming you plan,” Kate watched him shave his upper lip, and then she said, “Exactly what is your ‘gentlemanly’ role?”
“I am obliged to express a willingness to bow out temporarily so that he can have whatever is left of his vacation with you, along with the opportunity to fight for you during that time.”
“What’s his role?”
Passing the razor from jaw to cheekbone on the left side of his face, he said, “As soon as he understands that you’re serious about wanting to be with someone else, he is obliged to accept defeat gracefully and wish you well—thus impressing you with what a prince you’re losing while drowning you in guilt and doubt—and then to get the hell out of my way.”
“And my role is?”
“To convince him that you’re serious in the shortest possible time—measured in hours, not days—and to avoid letting him get you near that nice big bed while you’re doing your explaining and convincing.”
The reason for his curt tone and his reference to the bed hit her, and Kate stared at him. “Are you jealous?”
“Not yet, but I’m heading in that direction,” he said, making short, quick razor strokes beneath his left ear.
“But why?” Kate said, trying to hide how shamefully pleased she was by his admission. “I can’t just break up with him on the telephone or meet him at the airport and tell him there. I need to be at the villa so I can talk to him and let him down easily.”
Instead of responding to that, Mitchell rinsed off his face and asked a question of his own: “How long does it take to fly here from Chicago?”
“Around eight hours, since there aren’t any direct flights.”
“It seems to me that encouraging him to fly eight hours to get here, thinking he’s going to be with you for the rest of his vacation, is a curious way to ‘let him down easily.’”
It finally dawned on Kate that he was under a mistaken impression, and she quickly clarified the situation for him. “That phone call wasn’t from him; it was from his secretary. He had her call me to tell me his flight left at two-thirty this morning, and lands at twelve thirty-five. I didn’t think he’d try to come down here at all when there are only four days left of our vacation. If I’d had a chance to talk to him before he left, I would never have let him come here thinking everything was going to be the same between us.”
“I’m sorry. I should have known that.”
Kate dismissed his worry with a smile, but she was intrigued by the flattering discovery of her feminine power over him, and fascinated by the rules of conduct that he’d recited with such absolute certainty. Deciding to put both of them to a harmless test, just for fun, she folded her arms over her chest, tipped her head to the side, and pretended to inspect her manicure. “About those rules you talked about—What would you, as a gentleman, be required to do if I were to vacillate a little about breaking up with my boyfriend?”
The studied nonchalance in her voice instantly alerted Mitchell to what she was up to, and he suppressed a smile as he reached for a towel. A stranger to the games that tipped the delicate balance of power between male and female he was not. “Under those circumstances,” he said mildly, “the rules are very clear, and very simple: You would be required to telephone me to tell me that you’re having doubts, and then I would simply switch roles with him.”
“You would just accept defeat gracefully, wish me well, and then get out of his way?” Kate asked, disappointed.
Behind the towel, Mitchell’s smile widened to a grin. “Are you sure you want to play this particular game with me, sweetheart?”
“I don’t think so,” she said warily, and he laughed.
Suffused with pleasure at his endearment, Kate added sternly, “Just don’t let my Orphan Annie curls and guileless choir-girl image fool you; I can hold my own with you.”
“You have a police record; your choir-girl image is shot.”
Kate laughed and shook her head at him in feigned disgust. He lifted his brows, waiting for a verbal comeback, and when she had none, he gave her a boyish grin of satisfied superiority and turned back to the sink to comb his hair.
Kate glanced at her watch. “I don’t want him to have to watch me packing, so I need to be finished before one, which is about when he’ll arrive at the villa. It’s a little after eleven now, so I should leave in fifteen minutes.” She glanced down at the bright blue silk shirt she’d knotted at the midriff above a pair of white shorts, and decided to wear pants instead for what lay ahead of her. “I think I’ll change clothes,” she said aloud as she walked over to the closet. She took out a pair of white pants and noticed that the black dress and shoes she’d worn the night before were missing. “Do you know what happened to the black dress I wore last night?”
Mitchell paused, comb in hand, and frowned in disbelief as she walked behind him. “If that’s what you’re planning to wear while you’re doing your explaining and letting him down easily, I don’t think you’ve completely grasped the concept behind the rules we discussed.”
Kate reacted with horror, then hilarity, at his imagining she had any such intention; then she quickly lowered her eyes and slid serenely onto the chair at the dressing table opposite the sink to brush her hair. “There’s that tone again,” she mused as if thinking to herself. “Was that—yes, I think it was—the sound of a slightly jealous man who claims he would give me up without so much as a protest if I were to change my mind today at the villa.”
Briefly closing his eyes in amused resignation, Mitchell silently conceded the last verbal round to her and resumed combing his hair. “I’m beginning to understand why your father wept.” The truth was the opposite—as he watched her brush her glossy red hair, he couldn’t remember ever feeling as utterly lighthearted and content as he felt at that moment. “Diederik took our clothes from last night away while you were in the shower. He’ll return everything nicely pressed and brushed in a little while.”
She joined him on the balcony ten minutes later, where he was standing at the wall, looking out at the water. “I have to leave.”
Mitchell turned, noticed the suitcase she was carrying, and the sight of it gave him a moment’s pause before he realized she’d need it to pack her things at the villa.
The cheerful mood of a few minutes earlier turned somber as she put the garment bag on the table and walked over to him to say good-bye. “Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you and wait in Philipsburg?” he asked, slipping his hands around her waist.
Kate rested her hands against his chest and shook her head. Beneath his white knit polo shirt, she could feel his heart beating in a slow, steady rhythm, and she drew strength from that. “I need some time alone before I see him, time to separate mentally and emotionally from us and focus on him instead. I’ll meet you at Captain Hodges Wharf, right where we got off the boat yesterday, at four o’clock.”
“Depending on how he reacts, you may end up there in a lot less than three hours after you break the news.”
“Then I’ll use the time to separate myself from him and begin to focus on us.”
Mitchell smiled down into her green eyes, admiring her ethics and sense of fairness.
She smiled back, the breeze teasing her hair, her fingers splaying across his heart in a tender touch he was already associating with her.
She was absolutely right, Mitchell knew, about the wisdom of forgetting about “them” for the next few hours. “Kiss me good-bye,” he said, prepared to give her a brief, chaste kiss, but she wrapped her arms around him, molded her parted lips to his, and gave him a long, scorching kiss that made his hands flex and his fingers dig into her back.
On the beach below, Detective Childress lifted his camera and aimed it casually at the façade of the hotel; then he shifted it to the left and up, and casually snapped yet another picture of the couple on the fourth-floor balcony.
Mitchell stayed where he was, rather than walking her to the door of th
e suite, but his view from the balcony included the main entrance of the hotel, so he saw her a few minutes later when the doorman signaled a taxi for her and put her suitcase into the backseat. As the taxi passed below their balcony, she smiled and waved at him through the open window.
“Hurry back,” he called to her, and she nodded.
The taxi made a U-turn and drove off down the private drive toward the main road, and Mitchell watched it vanish; then he turned his head toward the beach and leaned his forearms on the balcony wall, watching a cruise ship gliding slowly across the horizon. Tomorrow, he decided, he’d take Kate for a cruise aboard Zack’s boat. In a few days, Zack and Julie would arrive from Italy, and he could introduce Kate to them. He wanted to show her the house he was building on Anguilla, too—his first house, one that was being built amid a grove of palm trees on a gorgeous stretch of pristine beach with a breathtaking view of the water.
Of all the places in the world where he could have built a home, he’d chosen on a whim a tiny island in the Caribbean where a redhead with shining green eyes and a heart-stopping smile was going to douse him with a drink, delight all his senses, warm his heart, and then steal it. All of that—in less than forty-eight hours.
Chapter Twenty-five
THE DOOR TO THE STATE’S ATTORNEY’S OFFICE IN THE Richard J. Daley Center on Washington Street was closed. Outside the office, the atmosphere was unusually hushed, and Paula Moscato, Gray Elliott’s secretary, was keeping it that way by frowning at anyone who approached her desk and then pressing her finger to her lips.
Inside the office, two assistant state’s attorneys were standing at the far wall, watching Gray Elliott prepare their prize witness in the investigation of the murder of William Wyatt. The witness was seated behind Gray’s desk in his comfortable swivel chair; in front of him was a pencil and a pad of paper containing a few phrases to prompt him during the phone call he was about to make, a call that was intended to lure Mitchell Wyatt back into Cook County’s jurisdiction.
The witness’s mother was seated in front of Gray’s desk, twisting a handkerchief in her lap, her beautiful face stricken with grief over the discovery of her husband’s body, her expression dazed as she watched her son lay a trap for her husband’s killer. Lily Reardon, one of the ASA’s observing the procedure, nodded her head toward Caroline Wyatt and whispered to her colleague, “Can you imagine what it must be like to realize that your husband’s killer has been your houseguest since his death?”
Jeff Cervantes shook his head. “If Gray doesn’t get this over with pretty quick, she looks like she’s either going to pass out or be sick.”
Gray perched his hip on a corner of his desk. “Are you feeling all right, Billy?”
The handsome fourteen-year-old looked at him, swallowed, and nodded. He was tall, slim, and well-built for his age, and he wore his dark suit, white shirt, and patterned tie with the relaxed aura of a privileged, preppy kid who was as accustomed to wearing suits as jeans. In that respect, he was no different from what Gray had been at his age.
“Take another drink of water while I go over this one more time, okay?”
“Okay, Mr. Elliott.”
“Please, call me Gray. Do you think you’re up for this call?”
Despite the boy’s visible anxiety, he nodded; then he nodded again with more conviction. “He killed my father. I will do whatever it takes to get him here.”
“I know you will,” Gray remarked, smiling a little because at that moment, sitting behind Gray’s polished desk, in Gray’s executive chair, Billy exhibited both his father’s likability and Cecil’s steely resolve. “Okay, let’s run through it one more time. All you have to do is tell Mitchell that your father’s body has been discovered and his killer has confessed—”
“Got it.”
“Then you’ll tell him your grandfather and your mother have taken the news very badly, and you need him to come back here because you’re really, really scared.”
“Okay,” Billy said; then he added, with a twinge of touching ingenuousness, “I know I can do the last part, Gray, because I am—really, really scared.”
“Try to be as convincing as you can about all of it.”
“I will.”
Satisfied, Gray leaned across the desk to his telephone and pressed the intercom button. “Make the call, Paula.” Trying not to do anything to unnerve the fourteen-year-old more than he already was, Gray reached slowly behind him and flipped the switch on the tape recorder; then he glanced at his watch. It was one-thirty in St. Maarten, and according to Childress, Mitchell Wyatt was in his suite at the hotel.
In an effort to make time pass more quickly and to distract himself from thoughts of the ordeal Kate was facing, Mitchell had phoned his New York office and asked his assistant to fax some documents that Stavros had asked him to go over.
When his cell phone rang, Mitchell continued reading the documents in his right hand and reached absently toward his cell phone on the coffee table with his left.
“Uncle Mitchell, it’s me. It’s Billy,” the boy clarified needlessly in a voice so shaken he was nearly stuttering.
“What’s wrong?” Mitchell asked, rising slowly to his feet in anticipation of very bad news.
“It’s my dad—”
Closing his eyes, Mitchell waited for what he’d known he would hear someday.
“They’ve f-found my dad’s body in a well out near the farm.”
“I’m so sorry,” Mitchell said hoarsely; then he opened his eyes and shook his head to clear it. “A well? He fell into a well?”
“No, he didn’t fall; he was murdered. He was shot in the chest.”
Afraid to say the wrong thing, Mitchell waited helplessly for the boy to say more. “Go on, Billy, I’m right here. I’m listening.”
“The Udalls’ caretaker shot him. He—he’s confessed. He’s a filthy old drunk, and he admitted everything to the police when they finally came down hard on him. That worthless old bastard—he shot my father! Please, Uncle Mitchell, can you come home? My mom is locked in her room, and I don’t know if she’s okay, and Grandpa Cecil—they’re taking him to the hospital with angina.”
“I’ll come home,” Mitchell promised.
“Tonight? Please say you’ll come tonight. I’m trying to be brave and be the man of the family, like Grandpa Cecil said I should do, until you get here to take care of things.” His voice broke, and Mitchell’s heart squeezed in sympathy. “Uncle Mitchell, I’m really scared for my mom. She has sleeping pills up there and she isn’t answering me.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Will you leave right away?”
Mitchell glanced at his watch. “I’ll leave here around five, that’s three your time. I should be there by eight.”
“Okay,” he said meekly. “Uncle Mitchell?”
“What, son?” Mitchell said.
“My dad really loved you. He said—said—that you made him proud to be a Wyatt.”
Mitchell swallowed over an unfamiliar constriction in his throat and stared out the windows. “Thank you for telling me that.”
In Chicago, Billy leaned back in Gray’s chair and grinned broadly at his mesmerized audience. “How did I do?” he asked, tapping his pencil on the yellow pad like a drumstick on a drum. “It was a bunch of bullshit, but I think it did the job, don’t you? I thought the way I improvised about the ‘old drunk’ had a nice touch.”
On the other side of the office, Lily Reardon suppressed a shiver and avoided meeting her colleague’s eyes.
“You’re amazing, Billy,” Gray said proudly, and stood up. “You are absolutely amazing.”
Chapter Twenty-six
FOR SEVERAL MINUTES AFTER BILLY HUNG UP, MITCHELL stood beside the coffee table, immobilized, his head bent, his forehead furrowed, trying to cope with the flood of grief he felt at the loss of a half brother he scarcely knew, and whose death he’d only just accepted.
Until eight months ago, he couldn’t even have conceived of how
it felt to have a relative, let alone how it felt to lose one. Now he understood a little of both, and the emotions running through him were poignant and painful.
In his mind, he saw William standing in his London living room with Caroline and Billy in tow. “I understand why you haven’t returned my phone calls and letters, Mitchell,” William had said with a smile when Mitchell stalked angrily into the living room, intending to throw them out once and for all, “but you cannot choose your relatives, so I’m afraid you’re stuck with us.”
Despite the fact that he’d been determined to reject this long-overdue overture from his family when he strode into the living room that day, Mitchell experienced a shock at coming face-to-face with a man who bore an indefinable but definite resemblance to him. “I’m not interested in acquiring a brother,” Mitchell snapped.
“I am,” William replied with that combination of warmth, friendliness, and surprisingly strong will that was uniquely his. “May we sit down?”
The word no was on Mitchell’s tongue, but Billy was there watching him closely, and Caroline was smiling at him as if to say, “We know how you must feel; this is awkward for us, too.”
Before he knew it, he’d agreed to see them the next day, and the next, and the next.
William was eager to get to know Mitchell personally, even though he already knew more about Mitchell than Mitchell knew about himself. Besides possessing all the facts surrounding Mitchell’s conception and birth, he’d also gone through all the old files he’d discovered in Cecil’s safe, including letters and reports from Mitchell’s schools—none of which had been opened, William had frankly admitted.
What William couldn’t find out from those files, he’d discovered by researching Mitchell on the Internet. He knew about Mitchell’s degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, and about Stavros Konstantatos and about Mitchell’s marriage to Anastasia. He even teased Mitchell about several of his highly publicized flings over the years.
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