Smoke and Mirrors (23 page)

"G-good eve-ening, Mr. M-Mansf-field," Ruth stammered.

He didn't spare her a glance. His eyes were on Cass, Cass alone. She'd never seen him look this fierce, like an avenging warrior swooping down on the enemy.

He halted in front of the desk and just stared at her. Not a word was spoken. Not a word was needed.

Derek had come for her.

The world around her faded. Time slowed. As though he were willing her to do
it,
Cass moved around the desk, toward him. Her steps were slow and deliberate, her gaze locked upon his. When she neared him, he snatched her wrist, then pivoted and strode toward the elevator, dragging her behind him.

But he wasn't dragging. She was right there with him.

Every detail flashed excruciatingly clear. The echo of her heels across the hardwood floor. The woodsy scent of his cologne. The gentle power of his grip upon her wrist. The certainty that she must follow
him, that
at long last she'd reached the turning point she'd been seeking for months. Maybe years.

Cloyd ushered them inside the elevator. He chattered amiably as they rode up, but his voice barely registered. Cass's heart thundered too loudly, in warning and anticipation, in joy.

Love and lies, she wondered maniacally. How could the two flourish side by side?

Derek said nothing as they stepped off the elevator, nor as they entered his darkened office. Rather than jabbing the button to close the door, as she expected, he pressed it gently, then strode across the plush carpet and poured a drink. One drink. For himself. Water. He threw it back, poured another. Threw it back, turned to face her.

"Come here."

Not a request, but a command.

He knew. God help her, he knew.

The cameras. He'd warned her that he knew every move she made, but she'd thought he would be too occupied with Marla to give a damn about her whereabouts.

She'd been wrong. He knew exactly where'd she'd been, no doubt had his own suspicions about what she'd done.

And he wasn't just angry about it. He was coldly furious.

She stopped before him, refusing to reveal the unease swirling through her. "Contrary to what you may have been told, this silent brooding act isn't the least bit appealing."

The blue of his eyes hardened into blazing shards of cobalt. "Don't you ever,
ever
do something so foolish
again.
" His voice was low, lethal. "Don't you know what kind of man Vilas is? Don't you know what could happen to you, alone in his room?"

Impossible to tell whether his attack came from concern or possession, but it ruptured Cass's composure all the same.

"Nothing happened to me," she defended. "What do you care, anyway?" she added, her tone deliberately snide. "You haven't said one word to me in days."

His sudden smile was somewhere between blinding and devastating. "So that is what this is about? Revenge?" He pulled her up to her tiptoes, so close she had to tilt her head back to see his eyes. "You saw me with Marla—"

"No." It couldn't be. Just couldn't. "Vilas said there was a problem with his room."

Her words, honest though they were, didn't cool the fire in his eyes. They fanned it.

"And you," he mocked, "fearless champion against all that is wrong in this world, believed him?"

She angled her chin and narrowed her eyes. Said nothing.

"So that's the way it's going to be." He flicked his gaze down her body, returned to her face. "Fine." In one fluid move, he tracked her back against the paneled wall of his office, held her there.

She wanted to push him away from her, to slap his arrogant face and walk out on him. But even more she wanted to give over to him, to match his fire with her own, to lose herself in a mindless reunion with his body.

Which she did.

She opened to him, mouth, body and soul. Heated kisses gave way to desperate moans. Sliding hands to possessive caresses. He pushed her skirt up her hips, pulled down her hose. She unfastened his pants, yanked down his briefs,
freed
his erection.

Her body cried out for him. Her heart. She felt like a junkie who'd been deprived of the very substance she couldn't live without. Derek. Only Derek. He was what she needed, she realized, despite everything. The past three days without the healing power of his touch had been torture. The past several hours, imagining him with Marla, hell of the worst kind.

"Now," she panted. "Oh, God, please. Now."

"Look at me," he commanded hoarsely.

Desperate to feel him inside her, she looked into his passion-glazed eyes and felt her heart swell.

"Mine," he ground out,
then
pushed inside. "From this day forward."

"Yes," she answered, though she wasn't sure the word made it past her raw moans. He was pumping into her, filling her. Completion and possession, pure and simple. No less blatant than if he'd branded her with a hot iron. No less permanent, either.

"You," he growled. "Only you."

"You," she promised. "Only you."

Their reunion spiraled on, building, deepening,
desperate
. If the wall hadn't been there to support her back, she would have collapsed beneath the power of his passion. But she clung to him, welcoming each deep thrust with an arch of her hips. Her body strained for release, but even more, it strained for him. She welcomed his mouth to hers, loving the feel of body to body, heart to heart.

They came together in a firestorm of passion and fulfillment. Limp, rattled to her care, Cass wrapped her arms around his now damp suit and held him as tightly as she could.

Derek pulled free of her arms. He looked down at her, his eyes fevered and confused. Maybe even lost, like a warrior stunned at the atrocities he'd just witnessed. Committed. Without a word, he jerked up his pants and strode to the door.

Then he was gone.

Shocked, confused, devastated, Cass slid down the wall and sat on the floor, staring at the closed door. His sweat still clung to her body, his scent, his seed. But he'd left her.

She tried to make sense of what had happened between them, of how anger could combust into … into…

She wasn't sure what it combusted into. She would have called it possession, but it hadn't been dirty or one-sided. Desperate and needy, certainly. Mindless. Undeniable. The fusion of two souls who couldn't stand to be apart.

Tears welled. She fought them, knowing they didn't change a damn thing. They hadn't brought back her husband and son; they sure as hell wouldn't change the way she'd come to feel about the one man who had the power to help her heal, the same man whose imminent hatred might just topple her once and for all.

Love couldn't grow from lies, she knew. Love healed. Lies destroyed.

But reality didn't stop the low keening sounds, the deep, gut-wrenching sobs that tore through her body. She was in too deep. Despite everything, she'd responded to him on a primitive level that propelled her to throw caution to the wind and simply feel.

Feel. There it was again, the damning truth she couldn't escape. It would all end soon enough, though. The last domino would crash, the truth would spill out, and Derek would never touch her again. Not in anger. Not in possession. Certainly not in passion.

* * *

"It won't be much longer now." Derek dragged a silver letter opener along the glossy page of a magazine, watching in grim fascination as it desecrated the manor's most recent rave review. "I know, I know," he agreed impatiently. "Just a little longer. A few more days and everything will fall into place."

Moments later he replaced the receiver and leaned back in his chair, bracing his crossed ankles atop his desk. Soon he would free himself from the shackles of this place. Soon all the watching eyes would be turned elsewhere. Soon it wouldn't matter what Cass did or said, who she saw.

But not soon enough.

He'd had everything under control, unfolding according to plan, when he discovered Cass's indiscretion. At first he'd thought Ruth's frantic call a mistake, some kind of warped joke,
a
trick of his paranoid imagination. Cass and Vilas. As if. No way in hell. But the proof had been irrefutable, and it had shattered his hard-won resolve to stay away from her.

Sex. That's all he wanted their relationship to be, the safest avenue of all. Just sex he could handle. Just sex and it wouldn't matter if she got tarnished by the game he was playing.

Just sex and it wouldn't matter when she walked away.

But it
did
matter, all of it. Because it wasn't just sex, none of it. It was more, so much more. Any doubts had been eradicated the second he discovered her trip to Vilas's room. His blood had boiled, his heart thundered. A long-dormant battle cry had risen to his throat, turning him into a madman until he'd found her—reclaimed her.

She was his, damn it. His. His heart, his soul. The first person who'd made him want to be a better man.

And he didn't share.

But he didn't keep, either, at least never before.

"Hi-ya, Uncle Dare!" Ryan raced around the desk and skidded to a halt by Derek's side. "Why do you look so mad?"

Normally his nephew's innocent smile melted away the demons, but not today. "I'm not mad, son, just thinking."

Ryan scrunched up his face. "Must be about something bad, then." His expression grew solemn, as though debating a monumental decision. Then his smile returned, brighter than before. "Tell y'what," he began, eyes shining. "Dad said we could go to grandpa's house today. Wanna come?"

The invitation appealed, as much for the peace the house provided, as for the escape it would furnish. Escape from the manor, from Cass, but most especially, from himself.

* * *

"You sure about this?"

Cass looked up from the teddy bear in her hands. "It's time," she told Gray's wife, Dawn, and meant it more deeply than she'd once thought possible. For years she'd lived in a numb fantasyland where she didn't have to face all she'd lost. Now she knew the time had come to rejoin the land of the living.

They sat amidst the sanctuary of Jake's room, surrounded by toys and balls and stuffed animals, stacks of shirts and shorts, scattered pairs of shoes, anything and everything a four-year-old boy would need.

Barney was there, too, sitting back from the chaos, watching the scene with big, sad, doggy eyes. It was as though he sensed what was happening, and was no more ready to say goodbye than Cass was.

But the time had come.

Dawn picked up a small leather jacket and brought it to her face. "Maybe we should wait—"

"No." Dawn's support warmed Cass. She'd known this day would come, yet if someone had told her the trigger would be an affair with her suspect, she would have laughed in their face.

She wasn't laughing now.

"I can't dwell in the past," she told her friend, absently stroking a stuffed purple dinosaur. "Jake will always be here," she said, rubbing the ache in her chest, "in my heart, but I can't keep pretending I'll find him here in this room."

"Oh, Cass…" Dawn leaned forward and pulled her friend into a hug. "I'm so sorry."

"I know. Trust me, I know. But I'm okay." Despite the chaos of overflowing boxes, the room already looked barren.

"Just think…" Cass sniffed against the painful lump in her throat. "You can turn this room into that plantation drawing room we've always talked about." A highly talented artist, Dawn had been hounding Cass to let her paint a mural in the house. Something southern, Cass always said. A little slice of heaven way up north. "I can already see
it…
Tapestried sofa and wing chairs. A fire in the hearth. French doors thrown open to the outside, revealing the thick white columns of the verandah…"

Cass stilled, though in some far corner of her mind, she realized Dawn continued the illusion.

"…sprawling oak trees in the distance…"

Whose house was she describing? The lush splendor of Oak Alley, one of the great Southern plantations?

"…a gravel road winding away from the house…"

Or the startling beauty of Derek's grandfather's house, as out of place in the northern woods of
Illinois
as Derek was in the confining high-rises of downtown
Chicago
.

Derek.
God, what had she let happen? She'd hardly slept the night before. Every time she'd dropped off, he came to her, eyes blazing, touch branding. She should be mortified and offended at the way he'd taken her, not stimulated and alive. There'd been so much more to his touch than mere possession. It was the desperation, she knew, the
need, that
tore at her heart and had her craving more.

"Cass?"

Dawn's voice came to her through a tunnel, pulling her away from Derek's arms and into Jake's room.

"Cass," her friend said again, this time accompanied by a tug on her arm. "Cass."

"What?" She blinked, confused by the panic in her friend's voice.

Dawn's eyes widened,
then
motioned toward the doorway.