Light in Shadow (20 page)

He led her into the nearest lounge. They sat down in a booth. Ethan put the bouquet on the table.

A waitress dressed in a tiny gold costume appeared.

“Champagne,” Ethan said.

The waitress glanced knowingly at the flowers. “Is this a celebration?”

Ethan put an arm around Zoe in an unmistakably possessive move.

“Just got married,” he said.

“Yeah, that happens a lot around here.” She gave both Ethan and Zoe a genuinely warm smile. “Most of the time I figure it'll last about a week. But you two look good together. Congratulations.”

 

The champagne took
some of the edge off the tension, but it did nothing to allay the unsettling mix of excitement and apprehension that Zoe was experiencing. By the time they arrived at the door of the hotel room, the fluttery feeling in her stomach was almost unbearable.

Calm down. It's not like this is a real wedding night. I'm just sort of having an affair with him. Actually, until now, it's been more of a one-night stand.

But that freshly minted wedding license in Ethan's pocket and the ring on her finger made it all seem surreal. What did you call it when you slept with the man who had just married you?

She was concentrating so hard on the question that when Ethan opened the door she walked into the room without her usual pause on the threshold.

The heavy wave of raw lust hit her so hard that she dropped her flowers and nearly fell to her knees.

“What the hell?” Ethan flipped on the light switch. He caught her arm and steadied her. “Are you okay?” Concern edged his voice.

“Yes.”

That was an outright lie. She was not okay. The suffocating essence of recent sex suffused the atmosphere. It was not the kind of earthy, natural emotional energy that sometimes clung to a bedroom for a while. This room reeked of sick and twisted cravings. She breathed shallowly and looked around with a sense of desperation.

On the surface, everything was pristine. The beige-colored carpet had been properly vacuumed. The massive, round bed with its gold-and-black-striped spread and matching, king-sized pillow shams appeared clean and fresh. The bathroom door stood ajar, affording a view of acres of white tile.

But the taint of unwholesome sex clung to the furnishings like a terrible stench.

There was no way she could spend the night in this room. She needed an excuse to ask Ethan to call the front desk and request a move, and she needed it fast.

The answer came when she looked up and saw the large mirror installed in the ceiling over the bed.

“I can't handle that,” she said.

Ethan followed her gaze. He saw the mirror and smiled slowly. “Maybe I shouldn't have asked the front desk clerk for the address of the nearest wedding chapel. Got a feeling he tried to do us a favor by upgrading us to a honeymoon suite.”

“Would you mind very much if we downgraded ourselves? That mirror is a little over the top for me.”

“See, that's the thing about you interior decorators. Picky, picky, picky.”

But he was already reaching for the phone.

His request was granted immediately. They collected their bags and went downstairs to get new keys.

“Will you need help with the luggage?” the clerk asked.

“No, thanks,” Ethan said. “We can manage on our own.”

They made their way back through the casino to the elevator lobby in silence.

Five minutes later they opened the door of another room on the eleventh floor. This time Zoe remembered to halt on the threshold. Nothing intense hit her, just the usual assortment of minor sensations that she could easily tune out.

Ethan watched her walk into the room. “This one okay?”

“Yes, thank you.” She was embarrassed but enormously relieved. “Sorry about the fuss.”

Ethan hauled her suitcase and his own small flight bag into the room and dropped them on the floor. “I admit that the mirror over the bed was a little on the tacky side.”

“Yes, it was.” She went into the bathroom, found a glass, and stuck her bouquet into it. “I regret to say that there are a few people in my profession who don't know when to stop when it comes to mirrors.”

Ethan came to stand in the bathroom doorway and watched her run water into the glass. “I don't think those flowers will make it through the night.”

“Probably not.”

But she could not bring herself to dump them into the trash.

“Zoe?”

“Look, there are two sinks,” she said brightly. “Which one do you want?”

He walked to where she stood and gently cradled her face in his hands.

“It's okay,” he said. “I got one room because I was going on the assumption that we needed only one bed. But if that
assumption was wrong, all you have to do is tell me. I can afford two rooms tonight.”

A deep warmth flowed through her. She spread her fingers across the front of his shirt, savoring the hard strength in him. The hunger in his eyes was unmistakable, but it was under full control. If she asked him to get another room or to sleep on the floor he would do it.

“Your assumption was not wrong,” she said.

He drew his knuckles lightly along her cheek. “You don't know how happy I am to hear that.”

He deserved some kind of rational explanation, she thought. She was behaving like a nervous bride on a wedding night.

“I know I'm acting weird,” she said.

“The stress.”

“That's part of it, but it's more than that. This whole situation just feels so strange. I mean, we've only had one night together and I was just starting to adjust to the idea that we might be sleeping together and wondering how things would go between us and now we're married but it's not a real marriage. I don't know. I can't seem to grasp the concept.”

“Listen to the advice of an expert.” He kissed her ear. “Forget the license and the ring. Concentrate on the sleeping together part.”

Before she could respond, he was kissing her, a heavy, intoxicating kiss—a magic spell of a kiss that set everything inside her gloriously free.

Concentrate on the sleeping together part.

“Ethan.” She gripped his shoulders and kissed him back, abandoning herself to the moment with a kind of desperate, feverish need that was entirely new to her.

“That's it,” he said against her throat. His voice was thicker and heavier, rich and dense and imbued with dark promises. “You're getting the hang of it.”

She leaned into him, absorbing his heat into all the cold places inside her, trying to let him share some of her own warmth.

He scooped her up, carried her out of the bathroom, and stood her on her feet beside the bed. Reaching down, he grabbed a fistful of bedspread, blankets, and sheets and tossed them all out of the way with a single, sweeping motion.

She stumbled out of her shoes, holding on to Ethan to keep her balance. He got out of his own shoes somehow, and then they were falling together, down, down, down.

The next thing she knew she was on her back and Ethan was on top of her, levering himself up on one elbow so that he could strip away her blouse and bra.

She slid her hand downward, got a grip on the zipper of his trousers, and lowered it.

When she found him with her fingers, she discovered that he was fully aroused. She cupped him gently.

“Oh, yeah.” In the shadows, his smile was both very dangerous and very sexy. “You have definitely got a good grasp of the concept now.”

 

A long time
later she opened her eyes. The first thing she noticed was the moonlight dancing on her wedding ring. The pale gleam was as delicate and ephemeral as hope and possibilities for the future.

Ethan stirred against her and gathered her close. “What are you thinking?”

“I'm thinking that I won't go back to using my other name,” she whispered. “I'm going to stick with Zoe.” A new name and, just maybe, a new future.

“Zoe Truax.” He leaned over her and kissed her deeply. “Yeah. I like the sound of that. It suits you.”

“So,” Harry Stagg
said. “Come here often?”

Arcadia contemplated the thin man with the deep, world-weary eyes who sat across from her in the small booth. She had never had a bodyguard before and therefore had not been altogether sure what to do with one.

She had agreed to put up with him only because it had been clear that Zoe had had enough to worry about as it was. Flying off to Vegas for a marriage of convenience to Ethan Truax had caused her a great deal of anxiety. Fretting over her friend's safety while she was out of town would only make matters worse.

When Harry Stagg showed up in Gallery Euphoria at six-fifteen, Arcadia had suggested that they have dinner out and spend the evening at The Last Exit. The plan had been to buy as much time as possible before taking him home to her silver-and-white apartment. Unlike Zoe, she had a spare bedroom, but it was hard to picture any man, let alone this one, inhabiting it.

“I like jazz.” Arcadia ran her fingertip around the rim of her martini glass. “More than that, I need it. It puts me in another place for a while.”

Harry took a swallow of the fizzy water that he had ordered. “Know what you mean.”

The trio on stage shifted into a Thelonious Monk tune, “Brilliant Corners.” It was a notoriously difficult piece, but Arcadia had heard the group do it before. They could handle it. The piano was leading, the bass and drums moving smoothly into its slipstream.

Harry Stagg blinked a little in muted surprise when the astonishingly clean, compelling music started to flow through the intimate room. Very slowly he lowered his glass. His face was rapt with concentration.

Arcadia gave herself up to the otherworldly sounds, and time shifted into another dimension.

When it was over, neither she nor Harry moved for a while. Then her companion turned slowly back to her.

“Haven't heard anything that good since the last time I was in New Orleans,” Harry said. There was reverent awe in his harsh voice.

“Took me by surprise the first time, too.” She smiled slightly. “In response to your question, yes, I do come here often.”

“I can see why.”

She removed the little stick from her martini glass and put the olive between her lips. No sense wasting the moment, she thought. This was a golden opportunity to do some digging.

“Have you known Ethan Truax long?” she asked.

“We met a few years ago,” Harry answered.

“In a professional context?”

Harry appeared to ponder that for a moment. Then he nodded. “You could say that. I worked for some people who wanted me to scare him off a case.”

“I assume that plan did not go well?”

“No. Once Truax locks onto a target, he doesn't unlock.
And on that occasion, he was investigating the murder of his brother. I'd have had to kill him to stop him.”

“Zoe told me about what happened to his brother. I gather that, although the man responsible walked free, he later met with an unfortunate accident.”

“Accidents happen,” Harry said.

“You told me that you would have had to kill Ethan to stop him. I can't help but notice that you didn't go that far. Does that mean that you draw the line at shooting people?”

“Let's just say I don't do it for money,” he said.

“Ah. A small, but profound, distinction.”

“As it happened, I did not have to explain that distinction to my employers. They were reluctant to resolve the problem in that way because they were bright enough to figure out that it would come back to haunt them.”

“Were they right?”

“Probably. Getting rid of Truax would have made life very difficult for them. You see, Truax had already made a lot of waves by that point. He had a stack of evidence regarding money laundering a mile high. Some of it contained links to my employers. He also had tapes of me coming to see him in his office. After I left, he made sure that a memo connecting me to my employers and them to various shady financial matters went into a safe-deposit box together with the tapes.”

“In other words, if he had turned up dead, there would have been more questions than your employers would have wanted to answer.”

“Yeah.”

“I still don't understand how you and Truax came to be, shall we say, business associates,” she persisted gently.

“I did not like the way in which my employers dealt with the Truax problem. When it was all over, I quit. Went into business for myself.”

“As a bodyguard for hire?”

“I prefer to think of myself as a consultant.” Harry leaned back in the booth and regarded her with his
bottomless eyes. “I've answered your questions. Feel like answering some of mine?”

“Depends.” She took a sip of her martini. “What do you want to know?”

“I didn't have time to get the whole story from Truax, but I got the impression that you were in that Candle Lake Manor place together with his client?”

“Yes.”

He squinted a little, deeply curious. “How'd you end up there? Are you really crazy?”

She smiled. “You could say that. I had myself committed under a false name.”

“Huh. Well, you must have had your reasons.”

“My husband tried to murder me shortly before he disappeared with most of the assets in my portfolio. I had learned too much about his connections to some illegal activities. I was a loose end.”

“Looks like he missed.”

“Yes. He missed. But I was afraid that he would try again. So, I faked my own death, got a new identity, established a trust, and used it to have myself committed to Candle Lake Manor. After I escaped I used another new identity.”

“Sounds complicated.”

“It was.”

“Why go through all that?”

“My husband is a very, very clever and extremely dangerous man. Too clever, perhaps, to buy my convenient death. I thought that if he was still trying to find me, a private psychiatric hospital would be the last place that he would look. The plan was to stay at the Manor for a few months and then disappear a second time. Figured two changes of identity would make it harder for him to track me.”

“What went wrong?”

“Nothing at first. Candle Lake turned out to be pretty much what I had expected, a nice, remote place where rich folks stashed their embarrassing relatives. It wasn't hard to
pretend to be clinically depressed and uncommunicative. They weren't into serious talk therapy there. Just meds. I flushed those down the toilet. Then I met Zoe.”

“You two became buddies?”

“Yes. Unfortunately for Zoe, the chief shrink, Dr. McAlistair, took a personal interest in her. Wanted to study her. The result was that she was more closely watched than the rest of us. She had more trouble avoiding the meds than I did.”

“But you two found a way out,” Harry said.

“Yes.”

“What's next?”

“I'm starting over,” she replied.

Harry thought about that. “Me, too, I guess. But, then, Truax seems to have that effect on people.”

“What do you mean?”

“I dunno. It's hard to explain. Just that if you get into his orbit, things change.”

Luminous music flowed into the silence that followed his comment. When the piece was over, Harry looked at her with a long, considering expression.

“Must have been rough there at Candle Lake,” he said.

“Zoe had to endure it much longer than I did. We escaped a couple of months after I arrived. She was there, on her own, for four months before that.”

“Jesus. Six months.”

“Yes.”

“Must have left its mark.”

“It did,” she admitted. “On both of us. We've each dealt with it in our own ways.”

“How's that?”

“Zoe signed up for self-defense lessons.”

“What did you do?”

“Bought a gun.”

Harry nodded. “Works for me.”