by Nora Roberts
The disgust in Jed’s voice gave Brent hope. “If we can find him. Our boy seems to have gone underground.”
“Then we’ll dig him up. I’ll call you from New York.”
He hung up, leaned back against the headboard and smoked another cigarette. The water had stopped running. He hoped she was lying back in the tub, her eyes closed and her mind blank.
Dora was lying back. She did have her eyes closed while the hot water and bath salts slowly relaxed her body. It was more difficult to relax her mind. She kept seeing the way Helen Owings’s eyes had filled and overflowed. She kept hearing the way Thomas Ashworth III’s voice had thickened when he’d spoken of his grandfather. She kept remembering how pale and fragile Mrs. Lyle had looked lying in a hospital bed surrounded by machines.
Even in the warmth of the bath she could feel the memory of the cool barrel of a gun pressed against her breast.
Worse, she could still hear Jed’s flat, dispassionate voice questioning the victims, and see his eyes, so gorgeously blue, blank out all emotion. No heat, no ice, no sympathy.
Wasn’t that its own kind of death? she wondered. Not to feel—no, she corrected, not to allow yourself to feel. And that was so much worse. To have the capacity to permit yourself to stand to the side and observe and dissect without any of the grief touching you.
Perhaps she’d been wrong about him all along. Perhaps nothing really touched him, nothing got through all those carefully constructed layers of disinterest and frigid objectivity.
He was simply doing a job, putting together a puzzle, yet none of the pieces meant any more than a step taken toward a solution.
She stayed in the water until it began to cool. Postponing the moment when she would have to face him again, Dora dried off carefully, soothed herself by slowly creaming her skin. She let the towel drop, then reached for her robe.
Her hand hesitated, then brushed over the vivid green terrycloth. She’d let herself forget that side of him, she realized. The gentle side, the perhaps reluctantly-kind-but-kind-nonetheless side.
Sighing a little, she slipped into the robe. It was her own fault, she decided. She always seemed to look for more, and was always disappointed if more wasn’t available. But it was so hard to settle, she thought, and secured the belt. So Goddamn hard to settle.
She opened the door, letting out a flow of steam and scent. He was standing at the window, looking out at the rain. The room-service cart was beside him, set for two. He’d already poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot and was lifting the cup to his lips as he turned to her.
It was like a fist in the solar plexus, watching her come into the room. The bath had brought color back to her cheeks, yet her skin had that soft, fragile glow brought on by exhaustion. The hair she’d pinned carelessly up was damp from the steam. And quite suddenly, the air smelled only of her.
He’d dimmed the lights, not for romance but because he’d thought the softer light would comfort her. In it she looked fragile and lovely, like a flower under glass.
He forced himself to bring the cup the rest of the way to his lips and drank deeply. “Dinner’s here,” he said as he set the cup aside. “You’d better eat while it’s hot.”
His eyes weren’t blank now, she noted. Nor were they disinterested. It was more than desire she saw in them, more basic, more needy than lust. It was hunger for woman. For her.
“You’re trying to make things easier for me.” Why hadn’t she realized that before? she wondered.
“I got you some fuel, that’s all.” He started to pull out a chair, but she was crossing to him. Her arms went around him, her body pressed close, she buried her face against his neck. She made it impossible for him not to offer whatever he had in comfort. He held her like that, his hands stroking her back, and watched the rain stream down the window.
“I was scared,” she murmured.
“You don’t need to be.” His grip on her tightened fractionally, then relaxed again. “Nothing’s going to happen to you.”
“I was scared of more than that. I was scared that you wouldn’t be here to hold me like this when I needed you to. Or that if you were, it would be because it was a part of the job you couldn’t graciously avoid.”
“You’re being stupid. I don’t worry about doing anything graciously.”
She laughed a little, surprised that she could. “I know. I know that. But you see, I got in your way.” She tilted her head back so that she could watch his face, so that she could see what she needed to see there. “Pushing you to feel things you can’t afford to feel if you’re going to do what you have to do. Wanting you to have feelings for me you don’t want to have.”
“I don’t know what I feel for you.”
“I know that, too.” She lifted a hand to his cheek, smoothing away the tension. “Right now you want me, so we’ll make that enough.” She touched her lips to his, gently, gently deepening the kiss. “Make love with me.”
Need coiled in his gut. “That isn’t what you need now.”
“Yes, it is.” She drew him toward the bed. “Yes, it is.”
Later, she curled against him, steeped and sleepy. He’d been so gentle, she thought. He’d been so patient. And, she knew, he’d been absorbed. It hadn’t been only she who had forgotten, for that one stretch of time, why they were there. He’d given everything she’d asked for, and had taken everything she’d needed to offer. Now she listened to the rain and let her consciousness hang suspended just above sleep.
“The food might be cold,” Jed said. “But you still need to eat. You looked ready to keel over when we walked in here.”
“I’m feeling better.” She smiled when he linked his hand with hers. He was doing things like that more often, she thought. She wondered if he realized it. “Tell me what we do next.”
“We go to New York in the morning.”
“You said ‘we.’ ” She cuddled closer. “You’re making progress, Skimmerhorn.”
“Just saving myself an argument.”
“Uh-uh. You like having me around. You might as well admit it.”
“I like having you in bed. Most other times you’re a pain in the neck.”
“That may be, but you still like it.” Dora pushed herself up, ran a hand through her tangled hair. “You did make me feel better.”
He skimmed a fingertip over her nipple. “My pleasure.”
She laughed and shook back her hair. “Not just that—though it was exceptional.” Smiling gently, she rubbed her knuckles over his chin. “I like having you around, too.”
He caught her wrist, held it. “Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you should be running hard in the other direction.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t know me, Dora. You don’t have any idea where I come from, and you wouldn’t understand it if you did.”
“Try me.”
He shook his head, started to get up.
“Try me,” she said again, and made it a dare.
“I want dinner.” He tugged his jeans on again and turned his back on her to uncover their cold steaks.
“Fine. We can talk while we eat.” It wasn’t an opportunity she was going to let slip by. Pulling on her robe, she took a seat at the room-service cart. He’d gotten only one cup for coffee. Obviously, she mused, he’d figured it would keep her awake when he wanted her to sleep. She poured some into the brandy snifter and drank it black and cool. “Where do you come from, Skimmerhorn?”
He was already regretting his words and the position they put him in. “Philadelphia,” he said simply, and cut into his steak.
“Moneyed Philadelphia,” she corrected. “I know that.” So, she would prime the pump. “I also know that the money came from both sides, and that your parents’ marriage had the scope of a high-powered merger.” She shook salt onto her steak. “And that they indulged in a number of public spats.”
“They hated each other, for as long as I can remember.” He shrugged, but the movement was stiff. “You got
the merger right. Neither of them was willing to let go of any of the joint assets, so they lived together in mutual disgust and animosity for twenty-seven years. And ironically—or maybe suitably—died together when their driver lost control of the limo and crashed.”
“It was hard for you, losing them both that way.”
“No.” He lifted his eyes, met hers. “It wasn’t. I didn’t feel anything for them when they were alive but a kind of mild contempt. I told you, you wouldn’t understand.”
She waited a moment, eating because the food was there and filled a hole. “You’re wrong. I think I do. You didn’t respect them, and somewhere along the line you’d given up loving them.”
“I never loved them.”
“Of course you did. A child always loves until the love is abused badly enough—and often long after. But if you stopped, it was because you needed to. So when they died, if you felt anything, it would have been guilt because you couldn’t feel more.” She paused again, measuring him. “Close enough?”
It was a bull’s-eye, but he wasn’t ready to say so. “They had two children they didn’t particularly want,” he continued. “Elaine, and then me, because it was important to carry on the name. I was reminded of that over and over while I was growing up.”
You’re a Skimmerhorn. You’re the heir. The least you can do is—not be so stupid. Show some gratitude. Be less of a nuisance.
“My responsibilities,” Jed continued tightly, fighting back the ghosts of resentment. “And their expectations. Your parents wanted you to go into the theater; mine wanted me to make more money from the family fortune.”
“And in our own ways, we let them down.”
“It’s not the same, Dora. Your parents’ ambitions for you came out of pride. Mine came out of greed. There was no affection in my house.”
He hated saying it, hated remembering it, but she’d spun the wheel and he couldn’t stop it until it had completed the circle.
“Your sister—”
“Meant no more to me than I meant to her.” He said it flatly, without passion, because it was pathetically true. “An accident of fate made us both prisoners in the same cell, but inmates don’t always develop a fondness for each other. The four of us spent most of our time avoiding one another.” He smiled a little at that, humorlessly. “Even in a house that size it wasn’t always easy.”
Though she knew he hadn’t intended it, her sympathy was stirred. “Wasn’t there anyone you could talk to?”
“About what?” He gave a short laugh. “It wasn’t any secret that my parents hated each other. The fights they had in public were only the preliminaries. They’d always finish them up at home. If they weren’t at each other’s throats, they were at mine or at Elaine’s. I turned to petty larceny, malicious mischief and short cons. She turned to men. She’d had two abortions before she was twenty. They managed to keep them quiet, just as they managed to keep my trouble with the law quiet. Shipping us off to boarding school didn’t help. I got kicked out of mine, and Elaine had an affair with one of her teachers.
“In the end, they threw up their hands—it was one of the few things they agreed on. They made a deal with Elaine, settled a tidy sum of money on her if she married a handpicked candidate. I went to live with my grandmother. Elaine’s first marriage lasted just shy of two years. I went into the police academy about the same time she was divorced. That really pissed them off.” He picked up the brandy and poured generously. “They threatened to cut both of us out of the will, but they didn’t want to let all those holdings fall out of the family. So Elaine went through another husband, I got my badge. And they died.”
She felt too much—much more, she knew, than he would want her to offer. The pity for the child, the outrage on his behalf, the sorrow for a family that had had nothing to bind them together.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said slowly. “I can’t understand how people could stay together when there was no love. Or how they could be incapable of giving it to their children. That doesn’t mean I don’t understand you.”
“What you need to understand is that I may not be able to give you what you want.”
“Then that’s my problem, isn’t it?” She took the brandy and poured. “It occurs to me, Skimmerhorn, that you’re more worried I might be able to give you exactly what you want.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
Dora had always loved New York. Years before, she had imagined herself living there. A loft in the Village, a favorite ethnic restaurant, a circle of Bohemian friends who always dressed in black and quoted from the latest esoteric literature. And a wacky neighbor, of course, who was always falling in and out of love with the wrong man.
But she’d been fourteen at the time, and her vision had changed.
Yet she still loved New York, for its unrelenting pace, its energy, its arrogance. She loved the people hurrying down the sidewalks careful not to make eye contact with anyone else, the shoppers burdened with bags from Saks and Macy’s and Bendel’s, the electronics shops that were perpetually having going-out-of-business sales, the sidewalk vendors with their roasted chestnuts and bad attitudes, and the blatant rudeness of the cabdrivers.
“Son of a bitch,” Jed muttered as a cab cut him off with little more than a coat of paint to spare.
Dora beamed. “Great, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Right. I doubt a cop’s written a moving violation in this hellhole since the turn of the century.”
“It wouldn’t be very productive. After all—oh, look!” Dora rolled down her window, craned her neck.
“You breathe out there, you’re going to die.”
“Did you see that outfit?” Dora narrowed her eyes, not against exhaust fumes, but to try to make out the name and address of the shop. “It was fabulous. It would just take me five minutes if you could find a place to park.”
He snorted. “Get real, Conroy.”
She huffed and plopped back in her seat. “Maybe after we’re done, we could come back by. All you’d have to do is circle the block.”
“Forget it. Aren’t there enough shops in Philadelphia?”
“Of course there are. That’s not the point. Shoes,” she said with a long sigh and studied another storefront while Jed fought Madison Avenue traffic uptown. “They’re having their after-Christmas sale.”
“I should have known better. Goddamn it, get out of my lane!” he shouted, and took the aggressive route by gunning it past another cab. “I should have known better,” he repeated, “than to have driven you through Manhattan. It’s like offering a steak to a starving dog.”
“You should have let me drive,” she corrected. “I’d be more good-natured about it, and I wouldn’t have been able to look at the shops. Besides, you’re the one who wanted to check out DiCarlo’s apartment.”
“And we may get there alive yet.”
“Or we could have taken a cab from the airport.”
“I stress the word alive.”
Dora was feeling very much alive. “You know, we could stay over tonight, book into some hideously expensive midtown hotel. Catch Will’s play.” She looked longingly at a boutique. “Shop.”
“This isn’t a sight-seeing trip, Conroy.”
“I’m just trying to make the best of the situation.”
Ignoring her, Jed made the turn onto Eighty-third. After a quick scan for a spot big enough to slip the rental car into, he did the sensible thing and double-parked. “I’m going to have to trust you.”
“All right.” She prepared to be trustworthy. “About what?”
“I want you to sit behind the wheel while I go in and check out DiCarlo—run down the super, maybe a couple of neighbors.”
Her mouth moved dangerously close to a pout. “How come I can’t come in?”
“Because I want the car to be here when I get back. If you have to move it, you drive around the block, making no stops whatsoever for outfits or shoes, and park it right back here. Got it?”
“I’m not an idiot,” she began, but he kissed her and got out.
“Lock your doors, Conroy.”
When five minutes passed into ten, and ten into twenty, Dora began to consider leaving Jed a note telling him to pick her up at the boutique, then hailing a cab to get her there. She was just reaching into her purse for a notepad when Jed jogged back to the car.
He switched on the engine and waited for a chance to jump back into traffic. “Now, how the hell do we get to Brooklyn?”
“Is that all you have to say? You leave me sitting here for nearly half an hour, now you want a map to Brooklyn?”
“The super let me into DiCarlo’s apartment.”
“That’s hardly an excuse.” She fumed a moment in silence, but curiosity prevailed. “So? What did you find?”