Teresa Medeiros (13 page)

*  *  *

As they strolled toward the Tower, Tristan stole a puzzled glance at Arian’s stormy profile. She hadn’t laughed or spoken once since they’d left Bloomingdale’s private salon, not even when he’d coaxed her into trotting down the up escalator, offered to give her a spin in a revolving door, and pointed out Sven crashing into a girdle display because he insisted on wearing his sunglasses indoors.

He should be the one brooding, he thought grimly. He’d wasted an afternoon of invaluable time playing personal shopper, leaving his corporation to defend itself against the press’s ruthless assault.

He clenched his teeth against a sigh, wishing he could forget the naked longing he’d glimpsed on Arian’s face before she’d thrust the Givenchy gown back at the harried clerk. He’d been a fool to let it affect him. Women had been using that look for centuries to beguile men into begging, borrowing, or stealing whatever their calculating little hearts desired.

He’d traveled several long, angry strides before he realized that Arian was no longer at his elbow. He whirled around to discover she’d pressed her palms and nose to a store window like a child at a bakery counter. She was studying a display of orange and yellow boxes. Halloween films, he noted indifferently, no doubt teeming with ax-wielding maniacs and decapitated babysitters.

“Is this place a library?” Arian asked, her face showing its first trace of animation in over an hour. “Might I go in and examine the books?”

Tristan glanced up at the yellow block letters of the towering sign. “It’s not a library. It’s a video store.”

“Vi-de-o?” She sounded out the word as if it were utterly foreign to her.

“You know—a place to buy and rent movies.” She continued to look blank. “I know the French have movies because I’ve been forced to sit through several of them. Subtitles? Sad clowns? Brigitte Bardot?”

Nothing.

Tristan sighed and reached for the door handle. She hung back, shooting him a furtive glance from beneath her lashes. “You’ve already been far too generous, sir, and I don’t wish to keep you from your work. Perhaps Mr. Nordgard could escort me back to the Tower?”

Tristan recognized a dismissal when he heard one. He gave her a cold smile. “You’re absolutely right, Miss Whitewood. I’ve neglected my duties long enough.”

He crooked a finger at Sven, who was lurking behind a nearby Italian ice stand. Sven came trotting over, visibly pouting to be summoned in so ignominious a manner in front of his colleagues.

Tristan handed him a credit card. “The lady has carte blanche. See that she gets whatever she wants.”

As Tristan watched Arian vanish into the store’s interior, he was almost grateful to her for rekindling his suspicions so effectively.

The Manhattan skyline glittered like a freshly cut diamond, radiating beauty, but no warmth. Tristan gazed at it through jaded eyes as he brought the tumbler of Scotch to his lips. The digital clock on his desk silently heralded the arrival of midnight.

“The witching hour,” he murmured, lifting his glass in a bittersweet toast.

Another man might have identified the emptiness inside of him as loneliness, but Tristan had long ago learned to endure his own company as penance for his mistakes.

Exhausted from dodging press and having photographers masquerading as window washers popping up outside his corporate suite, he had cocooned himself in his private office shortly after leaving Arian to Sven’s care. It dismayed him to discover the infusion of fresh air had blunted his brain’s efficiency instead of sharpening it. He’d caught himself snapping at his personal assistant, yawning over the quarterly reports, and shivering at the stifling chill of the air-conditioning, which
he always insisted be set to a comfortable and ecologically sound seventy-two degrees.

When Sven had returned with his written report detailing Miss Whitewood’s every gesture and blink, Tristan had snatched it out of his hands, eager to search for evidence of her duplicity. The single sheet of paper now lay crumpled on the floor beside his overflowing trash can.

Contrary to Tristan’s hopes, Arian hadn’t attempted a rendezvous with a potential accomplice or even eluded Sven’s surveillance long enough to use a public phone or restroom. The only anomaly Sven had noted in her behavior was her panicked dive into an open manhole when a helicopter had passed overhead.

Shaking his head, Tristan drained the Scotch and rose from his desk, forced to accede the day an abject failure. He could only hope tomorrow would be more productive. If his team of scientists couldn’t give him the ammunition he needed to discredit Arian, perhaps his army of private detectives could.

He emerged from his office into the darkened living room, nearly tripping over a brightly colored game-board that attested to Sven and Arian’s evening activities.

“Candy Land?” he muttered.

Monopoly he could understand, but what was the point of playing any game where you couldn’t charge exorbitant rent for hotels or bankrupt your opponents?

His bedroom door was cracked ajar, allowing a strip of flickering light to escape. He shot the room a hostile look, resenting its occupant anew for making him feel as if he should tiptoe across his own suite.

He was reaching to summon the elevator when the muffled sound of weeping drifted to his ears.

Tristan froze, his finger poised above the glowing call button. He wanted nothing more than to retreat to the plush sofa in his corporate office and seek the oblivion of sleep.

Torn between an infuriating sense of helplessness
and his desire for escape, he slowly lowered his hand. Surely any man who could compute the independent variables of logarithmic functions in his head could comfort a crying woman. After all, it was only a logical process of isolating the problem, formulating an acceptable hypothesis, and providing feasible alternatives. She’d probably lost a round of Candy Land or was sulking because she thought he hadn’t overridden her feeble objections and bought her the Givenchy dress.

Tristan’s purposeful stride did not falter until he eased open the bedroom door.

Arian was perched in the center of his bed, her attention riveted on the unearthly blue glow of the television. Relief surged through Tristan. She was undoubtedly engrossed in one of those sentimental “chick flicks” Copperfield adored—
Love Story
or perhaps
An Affair to Remember
. After the older boys at the orphanage had teased him mercilessly for crying when Bambi’s mother died, Tristan had vowed to never again let his own emotions be so manipulated.

He started to withdraw, but a pathetic hiccup enticed him into the room. Arian was oblivious to his presence, offering him an irresistible opportunity to study her.

She sat with her legs tucked beneath her, a soggy bowl of popcorn cradled in her lap. She’d pinned her clean, damp hair in a careless knot at her nape using a duo of mismatched tie clips. The shirt from one of his own pairs of silk pajamas draped her slender form. Black, of course, he noted dryly.

Several empty video cases were scattered across the bed. He tilted his head to read their titles:
Bell, Book, and Candle, I Married a Witch, Escape to Witch Mountain, The Witches of Eastwick
. He shook his head in wry disbelief. Even the thick-headed Sven should have been able to detect a discernible pattern and included it in his report. She was probably researching the proper deportment for a con artist masquerading as a witch.

A reluctant smile touched his lips as he watched her dab at her nose with a drooping sleeve. Unlike most women of his acquaintance, she didn’t cry as if she lived in mortal terror of smudging her mascara. If he lingered long enough, he suspected he’d catch her blowing her nose on the sheets.

A fat tear rolled down her cheek. Her breath caught in a piteous sigh.

“Arian?” he said softly, the casual intimacy of the rumpled bed and moody lighting making “Miss Whitewood” seem too formal.

She cast him a beseeching look. Tears spiked her lashes, making her eyes look even larger. He realized she’d been aware of his presence the entire time, but too engrossed in the film to care. “Did you see it? That nasty Dorothy dropped a house on the poor witch. The innocent creature was just minding her own business, then
splat!”

Tristan slowly turned his head to gaze at the television. He had expected to find Deborah Kerr in a wheelchair or Ali McGraw gasping her last, not a chorus line of munchkins gleefully chirping, “Ding-dong, the witch is dead!”

“Horrid dwarves,” Arian muttered, staunching a fresh spill of tears with the hem of the satin sheet. “Should have known they’d take that bratty Dorothy’s side.”

Reeling as if he, and not the unfortunate witch, had just had a house dropped on his head, Tristan stared at Arian as if seeing her for the first time. Copperfield might have shed a sheepish tear when Old Yeller died, but Tristan had never encountered anyone so tenderhearted as to weep for one of the vanquished witches in
The Wizard of Oz
.

His natural inclination to laugh was overwhelmed by a far more unnatural inclination to gather Arian into his arms. To lower his lips to her face and kiss away
each salty tear in turn. To part her trembling lips with his tongue and …

Shaken, he picked up the remote and thumbed off the TV. “The witch was wicked,” he said flatly. “She deserved to die.”

He tossed the remote on the bed and walked away, convincing himself that he had only imagined the flicker of fear in Arian’s eyes.

The hillside blazed with the light of a hundred torches. Arian backed toward the yawning chasm, preferring its certain doom to facing the creatures that came shambling out of the darkness
.

The beasts stalked her, their soulless eyes glowing yellow out of empty sockets. An icy claw brushed her throat. As she recoiled from the skeletal face of Goody Hubbins, a scream caught in her throat, choking her with blind terror
.

“Halt!” came a cry from the top of the hill
.

The Reverend Linnet stood silhouetted against the moon, a black cape swirling around his ankles. The brim of his tall hat shadowed his features. Her accusers shuffled backward until she stood alone at the edge of the pond
.

Linnet pointed a finger at her trembling form and uttered a single damning word. “Witch!”

She went tumbling into the water, but before its murky blackness could enfold her, the man on the bluff drew off his hat. The moon spun his hair into purest gold and frosted his gray eyes with moonbeams. The last sound she heard before the icy water closed over her head was the mocking music of Tristan Lennox’s laughter
.

“Holy Mother of God,” Arian gasped, sitting straight up in the bed.

Desperate to escape the lingering miasma of the nightmare, she threw back the satin coverlet and bounded out of the bed, sending a stack of video cases cascading to the floor.

She had hoped to learn about this society’s attitude toward witches from their amazing miniature plays, but
the videos had only left her more confused than before. In
I Married a Witch
, the groom viewed his bride’s magical talents with amused tolerance while in
Bell, Book, and Candle
, the hero lived in mortal terror of falling beneath an enchantress’s spell. In
Escape to Witch Mountain
, two children were persecuted and terrorized because of their supernatural powers. Most disturbing of all,
The Witches of Eastwick
actually
were
in league with the devil! Arian blushed anew to remember the lewd acts they’d offered to perform on a smirking Satan.

Huddled beside the bed, she rubbed her arms through the thin silk of her borrowed nightshirt. Beads of rain had begun to pelt the windows and there seemed to be no escaping the artificial draft that cooled the air. ’Twas almost as if the chill of that watery grave still clung to her.

Remembering that there was a fireplace in the spacious salon off the bedchamber, Arian padded in that direction. The drapes had been drawn and a single lamp left burning, enclosing her in a cocoon of understated luxury.

A dejected pair of potted ferns flanked the fireplace. The sunken marble hearth felt like a chunk of ice to Arian’s bare feet. She peered into the polished brass grate, but found its interior as pristine as its exterior, with no sign of ash or ember. She reached up the chimney, thinking to dislodge the flue and start a blaze of her own, only to discover its narrow opening had been bricked shut.

Shivering, she straightened, both puzzled and exasperated. Winter was drawing nigh and a crackling fire on a damp fall day was a pleasure no man should deny himself.

The sight of a sleek ebony urn sprouting a profusion of blossoms cheered her. She drew the vase off the mantel and buried her face in its blooms only to recoil as she encountered the scratchiness of silk instead of the velvety softness of fragrant petals.

Her pensive frown deepened as she returned the vase to the mantel. Flowers woven of silk? A bricked-up hearth? Windows that did not open? Portraits of women he’d never met? Was there nothing in Tristan Lennox’s life that wasn’t an elaborate illusion? Or were his hollow surroundings only a reflection of the man himself?