Tempting Fate (25 page)

He dispensed with his own clothes in a matter of seconds.

While he did, Dani backed up and sat on the edge of the bed, almost primly. Then he saw her black eyes on him—not embarrassed or second-guessing him or herself, but shining with unabashed lust.

“Changed your mind?” he asked, half-serious, half-playful.

She shook her head. There was no hesitation. He went to her, sat beside her, and without touching her anywhere else, ran his palms up her bare arms. He could feel the awareness shooting through her.

Her eyes never leaving him, she smiled and came to him. They fell together onto the cool, soft sheets, with the breeze from the courtyard and a cat yowling. Soon Zeke felt nothing but the passion and the power of the emotions he had for this woman…and heard only the voice inside him—insistent, annoying—warning caution and distance because those were his way.

“Zeke…” Her face was a mask in the shadows as she pulled him deeper into her. “I've never felt this way about anyone. It's a little frightening. I know I shouldn't fall for you…I can't…”

“You don't have to.” He could hear the aching in his own voice. “Just love me a little now.”

Her mouth found his. “I do, now.”

Later she fell asleep with her head against his shoulder. He felt the softness of her still-damp hair on his chin, smelled its freshness. He shut his eyes, letting himself relax in the moment.

Suddenly it was as if Mattie and Nick had met on the Cumberland River all those decades ago not for themselves, but for them, the ex-heiress and security expert, both with too many dead dreams.

And Zeke knew what he had to do.

As he extricated himself from Dani's arms, he could see her long, thick eyelashes against the paleness of her skin and the soft shape of her mouth as she slept. There was no evidence of the tension of the last days. She looked relaxed and at peace with her world, a world so different from his. He imagined her at nine, alone, her mother gone, her father shattered. She must have been a tiny girl, a spitfire determined from day one not to be just a “Chandler heiress” or a “Pembroke scoundrel” but only herself, whoever that might be.

Not making a sound, Zeke gathered up his clothes and dressed in the bathroom, quickly, and he got out of there before he could change his mind.

Ninety minutes later, he was driving a newly rented car—now he'd have two—north on the interstate. He finally had himself under control. He could think, figure out what came next. He'd head to Saratoga, find Sam, lay everything out for him, get his unbiased opinion. There'd be no putting off the tough questions. Joe was dead, and Lilli Chandler Pembroke had been missing for twenty-five years. Maybe they were somehow the cause of the break-ins at Dani's cottage and his room and the attack on her father. Maybe they weren't. But it was time to focus on the present before someone else got hurt.

A centered calm descended over him. He was finished standing back. Dani didn't have to like him. She didn't have to appreciate or understand him or the choices he'd made about his life. She didn't have to want him meddling in her life. She could think whatever she wanted to think. Be who she wanted to be. But he'd quit worrying about treading lightly where Danielle Chandler Pembroke was concerned. He'd just added her to his mission in Saratoga.

And that wasn't her problem. It was his.

In the morning Dani got up much later than usual and microwaved a muffin she had in the freezer and found a note on the table, read the precise no-nonsense handwriting.

No, she thought with a jolt of surprise, she had no regrets.

She'd heard him leave but hadn't stirred. On some level, she'd understood that he'd needed to get out of there, be back on his own. He'd tried to be quiet, but it was her door length of locks that had alerted her. If she'd been clothed, she might not have resisted going after him. But she'd have had to dig out clothes and put them on, and by then he'd have been gone anyway. She'd debated wrapping herself up in her quilt and intercepting him, but that could have led to other things, like making love on the hall floor, because it was getting to be that way between them. She'd imagined them using the quilt as a pad. He was an expert in security and self-protection. There was no telling what ideas he'd come up with.

Then she found a sheet of paper under the note.

It was a photocopy of a blackmail note.

Dani dropped her muffin and fell back against her chair. Her hands shook. Tears sprang to her eyes.

“Oh, Mother…Mama…”

She moved fast, downing another cup of coffee and cleaning up the kitchen, trying to focus—as Zeke had suggested—on the present. On what she was doing. Not on the questions slicing through her mind.

But where had he gotten that note? When? What did it mean?

Did Mattie know—Nick—her father?

“Stop,” she said out loud, calmly but forcefully. She needed to be able to function. She couldn't indulge wild thinking or ask questions she knew she couldn't answer.

In ten minutes, she was on Mattie's front stoop, ringing the doorbell.

There was no answer. It was a warm, humid morning, and Dani tried again, waited and finally let herself in with the key she'd always had. In the quiet town house there was no indication that her grandmother had gone anywhere special or planned to be away for long or knew that her daughter-in-law had been blackmailed twenty-five years ago. Or maybe not twenty-five years ago. Maybe the note had been written more recently.

But your secret is safe with me if you pay up tonight….

Using her cell phone in the kitchen, which overlooked her grandmother's beautiful private garden, Dani called the hospital in Saratoga.

Her father was grumpy but on the mend. “Hey, kid, what's up?”

“I'm at Mattie's. Did she call? Is she on her way to Saratoga?”

“Not that I know of. We talked last night—she didn't mention coming up. Why? Is something wrong?”

It was in her voice. Her father had always been able to tell when she was upset. “She's not here.”

“Is there some reason we should worry?”

“No, I just…” She exhaled, not knowing exactly what she “just.” Just had good reason to worry these days? Just had made love to Joe Cutler's brother and didn't have her head on straight? Just had read a blackmail note to her missing mother? “Never mind, Pop. How're you feeling?”

“Lousy.”

“Take care of yourself, okay?”

“Yeah, sure, kid.”

On the surface he was lighthearted, irreverent, confident, every bit the man he'd become since his father-in-law had caught him with many thousands of Chandler Hotels's dollars in his personal account. But underneath, where perhaps only a daughter knew to listen, Dani heard his fear.

“Pop, what's going on?”

“I've got to go—the vampires are coming to suck my blood. You should see my day nurse.”

“Pop—”

“Talk to you later, kid.” He sighed. “Just listen to Zeke, okay?”

“Then you trust him,” she said.

But he'd hung up.

Dani left a note for Mattie, and feeling uneasy but at least reasonably rested, fought her way onto the subway and to an Amtrak train heading north.

N
ick's stamina wasn't what it used to be. The long flight from Los Angeles to New York had worn him out. The young man who'd taken Hollywood by storm seemed to have been another man altogether, someone Nick didn't even know.

Mattie didn't help him feel any less old and useless.

“Good heavens, Nick,” she said when she greeted him at LaGuardia. “You look older'n dirt, as we used to say down home.”

He grunted at her. “I am older than dirt.”

She smiled that still-dazzling smile of hers, ever the dark-eyed eighteen-year-old girl he'd found staring at the Cumberland River. She kissed him on the cheek. “I've a car waiting.”

Using his cane, he followed slowly behind her. They didn't speak until they were in the cab, on their way into the city. Mattie placed a wrinkled hand gently on Nick's wrist. She smiled. Two smiles in the same hour. He really must look awful. “We have time,” she said. “We'll clean up and have something to eat and catch our breath. Then we'll go to Saratoga.”

Leaning back against the seat, Nick nodded and watched out his window as they moved toward a city he no longer knew.

Sam Lincoln Jones stood outside John Pembroke's hospital room in jeans, a bright orange polo shirt, running shoes and military sunglasses. He wore a shoulder holster that held his Smith & Wesson .38.

“Subtle,” Zeke said.

“Subtlety doesn't work with these people.”

“Then I take it you've met our patient.”

Sam's mouth twitched in what passed for a smile when he was working. When he wasn't working, he'd put on jazz and his half-moon glasses and read thick tomes on criminological theory, and sometimes he'd laugh out loud. “He mistook me for a lawyer.”

Zeke laughed, not sure if Sam was kidding.

“I had on a jacket,” Sam said. “Got hot in here and figured maybe the gun might impress him.”

“Did it?”

Sam just looked at him.

“Anything interesting happen?”

“Roger and Sara Stone showed up a little while ago. They were all real polite and cool to each other. Roger and Sara talked about how worried they were about their niece.”

Zeke nodded. “I just stopped at their place here in town. Roger tried to hire me again.”

“Bet the pay's good.” Sam drank some gray take-out coffee. “But you don't need money to make you keep an eye on this lady, do you?”

“No.”

“She blew in here, too. Left about twenty minutes ago. Nurses gave her daddy something to calm him down after she got through with him.”

Zeke had second-guessed his decision to leave her a copy of the blackmail note. But it was done. “You listen in?” he asked.

“Part of the job, isn't it?” Sam spoke without relish or distaste; he was just stating the facts. “From what I gather, Dani Pembroke (a) hates anyone taking her for granted, (b) hates anyone short of the CIA deliberately keeping her in the dark about anything, and (c) hates anyone feeling responsible for her happiness and well-being, which is tied up with (a) and (b). I could give you some technical mumbo jumbo analyzing her behavior and attitude, but you get the idea.” Sam's eyes were unreadable behind his dark glasses. “She's intense.”

“And John?”

“Threatened to pour a pitcher of ice water on her head or hire you if she didn't back off. A real pair. Devoted to each other under it all.” Sam was silent a moment. “I debated following her.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Bad vibes.”

Reason enough.

Even with the sunglasses, Sam's gaze penetrated. “You holding back on her?”

“Not as much as she thinks.”

“You've always liked to take your life into your hands in the most peculiar ways,” Sam said, not as lightly as Zeke would have wished. “I assume you know Mattie Witt and Nick Pembroke are on their way.”

“To Saratoga?”

“Ah. I see you did not know.”

Without a word Sam handed over his gun. Zeke took it. Knowing Sam as he did, he'd probably hauled an arsenal east with him. Yet he seldom resorted to violence, even in their sometimes violent profession. He just liked to be prepared.

“Hope you don't need it,” Sam said.

“So do I.”

It was quiet and cool in the woods, with almost no breeze. Dani followed the narrow path from the bottling plant. She'd let her staff there know she was on the grounds. The receptionist, a sixty-year-old woman from Saratoga, had reported that Ira was looking for Dani. “He said it was important but not urgent.” Meaning whatever he wanted probably didn't involve a burglary or a ransacked room.

Mosquitoes buzzed around her head in the stillness. She'd checked the spot where her father had claimed to trip. It might have happened as he'd said. But she didn't think so, no matter how stubbornly he clung to his story.

Despite the warm air, she shivered, feeling incredibly alone. Her father had said the man posted outside her room—Sam Jones—was Zeke's doing, a partner or friend or both. Jones didn't say a word to her, but had looked as if he was considering stuffing her in a closet until his pal returned. Dani hadn't introduced herself.

She slapped at a mosquito on her leg. She had folded Zeke's copied blackmail letter into a small square and shoved it in her shorts pocket. Its words were seared into her memory.

She went around the hemlock at the top of the cliffs and down the steep incline to the boulder above the narrow ledge where she'd found the gold key her mother had been wearing the night she disappeared. Her heart raced. She felt light-headed. She'd come here straight from the hospital. She needed to eat, rest, think.

A woodpecker drummed nearby.

Did her mother drop the key off the ledge that night? Or was it put there or dropped there sometime between that night and when Dani found it a few weeks ago?

Did it have anything to do with the blackmail note?

Was it here—on the spot where she was standing now—that her mother had met and paid off her blackmailer?

Dani smelled the pungent odor of evergreen needles and heard the faint hum of traffic on the interstate in the distance.

There was a movement behind her, above her, in the woods. A rustling wind in the trees or a crunching of dried leaves. She went absolutely still and listened.

Nothing.

Ordinarily she wouldn't have noticed such a sound. Now, however, following her visit to her father in the hospital, seeing his battered head, feeling her own fading bruises, she was on heightened alert. Her senses picked up every nuance of sight, sound, smell.

“Damn mosquitoes,” Ira Bernstein grumbled.

In her immediate, overwhelming relief, Dani almost lost her balance on the rock. She could hear Ira thrashing along the narrow path that spidered out from the old logging road that led through the woods to the Pembroke's main grounds.

“Over here, Ira.”

“Yeah, yeah, I'm coming. You know, I've about decided I'm a city person. Think I'll look up your grandpa and see if he doesn't have a new job for me in some decent city in—Hey, who are you?”

Dani tensed at the change in Ira's voice. The sudden fear mixed with indignation. She looked around for a stick or a loose rock, anything she could use as a weapon.

“Dani, run!”

Without thinking, she scrambled up the steep incline, pausing just to uproot a rock about the size of a football and twice as heavy, scraping her fingertips as she dug it free. She ducked under the low branches of the hemlock.

She heard sounds of grunting and choking.

“Ira! Ira—what's happening? Talk to me!”

He didn't answer. Stemming a surge of panic, Dani plunged through the undergrowth of ferns and brush onto the narrow path.

She swallowed a scream and almost dropped her rock.

A tall, muscular, red-faced man had Ira pinned by his throat to the thick trunk of an oak tree. Ira's face had turned purple. He wasn't making a sound.

Dani raised her rock shoulder-high and quickly debated heaving it down on the side of the attacker's head. But she said, “Let him go.”

The man had his back to her and couldn't see whether she had a gun or a pitchfork or just a stupid rock. But he released Ira, who immediately sagged to the ground, clutching his throat and gasping for air.

His attacker turned to Dani.

“Get off my property,” she said, surprising herself with her quiet determination.

He grinned. “Who's going to make me?”

He sounded like a fourth-grader, only deadlier. The bastard had just tried to kill Ira or at least put him out of commission for a long time. Dani made a quick assessment. The attacker was bigger, stronger and obviously more accustomed to beating up on people in the woods than she was. But if he had a weapon, at least it wasn't pointed at her.

If she was lucky, she'd have one good chance with her rock. Then that would be that.

Not very promising.

“If you leave now,” she said, “you'll be long gone by the time I tend to Ira and have a chance to call the police.”

He laughed. “Do I look worried?”

That he didn't.

But he added, by way of explanation, “I don't react well to people sneaking up on me.”

He blew her a kiss—insultingly, cockily—and trotted off into the woods, not making a sound.

Dani ran to Ira, on his hands and knees, vomiting. “Ira, are you all right? Should I get an ambulance?”

He turned his pale, purplish face toward her. “I'm moving back to Istanbul.”

Sinking back against the tree, he coughed and rubbed his neck where there were red fingerprints and broken blood vessels. He winced in pain, growing even paler.

“Ira, I'm getting help.”

He held up a hand. “Wait.”

“You're hurt—”

“I'll be okay.” His voice was raspy, and he was clearly hurting, but he was dead serious. “The Pembroke doesn't need any more bad PR right now.”

“I don't care. We can ride this out and—”

“Dani, listen to me. A reporter found out Zeke's been staying at the Pembroke. Figures something's afoot and wants to talk to you.”

Dani knelt beside him as his words sank in. Everything was coming apart so fast. She was falling in love with the wrong man, her father was in the hospital, she'd been abrupt with Mattie and Nick, rumors were flying about her and her companies and Ira had just been attacked on his way to find her.

“Did you recognize that thug?” she asked.

Ira shook his head. “You?”

“No. Ira, we can talk about this later. You need to take it easy.”

“Dani, one more thing. Mattie called. She and Nick are on their way—they want you to pick them up at the train station.”

Just what she needed. Her famous grandparents wouldn't exactly slip into town unnoticed. First, it wasn't in their natures. Second, it was impossible. Somebody would recognize them. “I'll take care of it. Right now I just want to get you out of here.”

There was a crunching sound behind them in the woods. Dani whirled around with her rock, which Zeke quickly snatched from her hand, ever the professional. “Good thing your pal didn't test your arm,” he said mildly.

Dani felt relief at his presence even as she digested his words. “You saw him?”

“Watched from behind that pine back there. I got here too late to keep him from nailing Ira. You already had the situation in hand.” Despite his sardonic tone, his eyes were flat and dark, without humor. He squatted and quickly examined Ira's bruised neck. “Ribs okay?”

“Sore, but I don't think he broke any.”

“Throat, neck?”

“They hurt.”

His eyes narrowed, Zeke lightly touched the red fingerprints and nodded, as if reassured Ira's injuries weren't more serious. “If it's any consolation, he wasn't trying to kill you. You'd have been dead before Dani or I could have done a thing.”

Ira licked his lips. “I suppose I had to know that.”

“More to the point,” Zeke said, rising, “Dani had to know.”

She felt her stomach twist.

“You don't go after a man like that with a rock.”

Zeke spoke without apology or arrogance. They were on his turf now, and he knew it.

“Well, if I'd had a gun, I'd have gone after him with that, but I didn't and I wasn't going to run while Ira—” She stopped midsentence, seeing the gun tucked into a small holster on Zeke's waist.

He followed her gaze. “Just a precaution.”

For the first time she thought she really understood what he did for a living. How little she knew about this man who just hours ago had been so gentle and loving and passionate in bed with her.