Every Breath You Take (49 page)

“The hell you weren’t.”

Kate knew she wasn’t beautiful; at best, her coloring might qualify her looks as striking. And except for an
indirect reference to her legs the night they went to the casino, Mitchell had never commented on her appearance. No, that wasn’t true at all, she remembered. In bed, he’d lavished her with whispered praise while he stroked and touched—

Kate mentally put her foot down, pushed all those thoughts away, and added ice to his glass. She finished making his drink and poured a glass of red wine for herself; then she turned around, glasses in hand. “Let’s talk about Danny,” she said with an overbright smile. Walking out from behind the bar, she nodded toward a nearby pair of small burgundy upholstered sofas facing each other across an oval cocktail table, and Mitchell followed her there. She put his glass and a cocktail napkin in front of one of the sofas; then she walked around to the sofa on the opposite side and curled up on it, her legs tucked beneath her, her wineglass in hand. Across from her, Mitchell reached for his glass, propped his ankle on the opposite knee, and took a swallow of his drink. “What would you like to know about Danny?” she said as soon as he started to lower his glass.

Mitchell already had his own conversational agenda firmly in mind, and he had no intention of letting her divert him from it; however, there was one thing he did want to ask her about Danny before he started. “In the bedroom tonight, he was talking, and then he stopped and looked at me as if he couldn’t say a word, but he was trying to.”

“And tomorrow,” Kate explained, “he may lapse completely into baby talk and not say two words you understand. If he’s extremely upset or agitated, he’ll look at you in mute, heartbreaking misery. If that happens when he’s with you, say quietly to him, ‘Use your words.’”

“Does that help?”

“Often it does.”

“If there’s a problem with his speech—”

“Danny’s verbal skills are remarkable,” Kate assured
him. “So much so that, right now, they’re outpacing his brain’s ability to simultaneously process his thoughts and words. He’s also extremely well-coordinated. In addition to inheriting all of your features,” she finished with a smile, “he also inherited your gift for language and your physical coordination.”

In response, Mitchell stretched his left arm across the back of the sofa and casually inquired, “Whose temper did he inherit?”

“Yours,” Kate said without thinking.

“What a relief. I won’t be afraid to put a glass in his hand.”

His deliberate reference to their confrontation at the fund-raiser doused Kate’s smile. “Please don’t go there,” she warned. “That’s very deep water, and—”

“Our history is all deep water. Because of Danny, we can’t avoid going, so let’s discuss it now, but try to tread water instead of trying to drown each other.”

“What exactly are you suggesting?”

“Honesty and restraint.”

Kate stared at him in wary silence.

“Shall I start?” Mitchell volunteered, and when she nodded slightly, he said, “All right. You gave me two reasons for not telling me you were pregnant: my refusal to have children with my ex-wife and my treatment of you the last time we met. As to my behavior at the hospital benefit, I apologize for that. It was inexcusable, and there will never be a repetition.”

Kate looked at him over the rim of her glass and decided to test the depth of his commitment to honesty and restraint. Very politely, she said, “I’d rather have an explanation than an apology.”

“Fair enough. If you’d sauntered up to me with that same coy expression on your face and told me you’d just gotten engaged to anyone except Evan Bartlett, I would have courteously and insincerely offered you my very
best wishes and that’s all. If I’d have known about your engagement to Bartlett longer than twenty seconds before you were standing in front of me with that same playful expression on your face, I wouldn’t have given you the satisfaction of evoking any reaction from me whatsoever. Unfortunately, things didn’t happen that way.” He reached for the cocktail napkin on the table, knowing she’d find it easier to lie if he wasn’t looking at her. “I have an unpleasant history with the Bartletts. Did Evan tell you about that?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “He told me how you feel about them and why.”

Pleased with her reply, Mitchell transferred his gaze to hers and rewarded her honesty with a forthright explanation about the second issue: “I refused to have a child with Anastasia because I knew she wouldn’t sacrifice her freedom or change her lifestyle if we had one. She was doing recreational drugs, and it was getting out of hand. She went on tangents. She came home from Paris with two Yorkshire terrier puppies that she dressed up in clothes from doggie boutiques, played with constantly, and took everywhere she went. They were the center of her life for a few months, and then she lost interest and ignored them. When they still tried to follow her around, they became an annoyance, so she gave them away. She decided she wanted horses instead and she bought two Thoroughbreds that she never went near. Then she wanted a baby.”

“Babies are different; they capture your heart. Just because she lost interest in puppies and horses doesn’t necessarily mean she’d have been an indifferent mother.”

“Maybe not, but in those days, I had additional reasons to feel that fathering children was a pointless risk for me: I knew nothing about being a father, and I had no idea what sort of genes I carried. Based on what Bartlett told you happened to me as a child, you should be able to guess why I felt that way.”

Overwhelmed that he was willing to admit so much to her now and saddened by the needless fears he’d endured, Kate looked down at her lap and decided he’d been right to insist on this conversation. Lifting her eyes to his, she said with soft candor, “I don’t have to fill in any blanks. I know everything about you. Evan only knew how the Wyatts disposed of you when you were a baby. I know everything about your life afterward.”

“Such as?”

“Let’s see …” she said with a sudden smile, eyeing him from beneath her lashes, “I know that you broke sports records at all your schools starting when you were eight. I know you excelled at all your studies except art. I know that you had nowhere to go when school closed, so you stayed with a faculty member or a custodian during the holidays, and that during the summers you went to camps. I know that students were required to write home twice a month, and so you wrote letters to a custodian at your previous school. I also know you were fascinated with religion, but no one religion in particular. You changed your religion at each new school.” Tipping her head to the side, she asked, “Were you interested in theology, by any chance?”

“No, I was interested in spending the least possible amount of time in church. Since church attendance was mandatory at all my boarding schools, I ‘reoriented’ my beliefs according to whatever church service was shortest at the current school.”

“Judaism takes up a lot of time.”

“Not when there’s no rabbi in the vicinity.”

She burst out laughing, and an answering smile tugged at Mitchell’s lips—until he realized that after three years, he was still helplessly captivated by those russet-lashed, glowing green eyes smiling into his. He doused his smile and took a quick swallow of his drink. Despite her claim that she knew everything about him, it was obvious that
she knew only what was in his school records. He was wondering how she got her hands on those when she sobered and said something that made him stare at her over the rim of his glass.

“I know who Calli is, Mitchell. I wouldn’t have agreed to leave Danny upstairs with him otherwise. The Calliorosos were the closest thing you had to a family.”

“Where did you get all this information?”

“Your brother’s investigators put together a file on you.”

“He told me he had a file. How did you get it?”

“The day after I got back from St. Maarten, Gray Elliott ‘invited me’ to his office for a chat. He had a huge file on you, including pictures of us in St. Maarten, and he told me you were a suspect in your brother’s murder.”

“What the hell did he expect to find out from you?”

“He wanted to know how long we’d known each other, and what you’d told me about your brother.” Kate paused, momentarily diverted by the scowl on Mitchell’s handsome face because he suddenly looked like a formidable version of Danny when he scowled. “Anyway, four months after that, I was in the terrifying position of carrying a baby inside me whose father was a dark mystery to me. I remembered those files in Gray Elliott’s office, and so I went to see him and asked if I could look through them. Ethically, he couldn’t let me see anything the police had accumulated about you. But since your brother’s file didn’t fall into that category, he let me look through it at his office.”

“He had no business letting anyone see that file.”

“Be glad he did,” Kate said forcefully. “Before that day, I didn’t know how I was going to be able to love my baby. But once I read that file, I understood you. I understood why you needed to get even with the Bartletts and why you would have seized the chance to do it by seducing me.”

Shock and disbelief annihilated every other emotion in Mitchell’s body. Outwardly relaxed and inwardly tensed, he studied her, assessing her face, her inflections—even her logic—for indications that she was lying. But as she continued, what Mitchell heard was truth, and it was so painful to endure that he found himself almost wishing she were lying to him while at the same time he wanted everything she said to be true.

“To be fair to you,” she went on, oblivious to the havoc she was wreaking in Mitchell, “you were very straightforward the first night at the villa in Anguilla. You made it clear that you didn’t want to share anything with me except a bed—not even meaningless information, like your brother’s name and how many languages you speak. You told me straight out in St. Maarten that you didn’t want complications, and that if I went to bed with you, nothing would come of it.

“I had to have magic, though, or I wouldn’t go along, and when you realized I meant it, you reversed your attitude in a matter of seconds and told me we had magic. And then you took me to bed and made sure I believed it. I thought I loved you, and I think you knew that. Even so, you let me go to meet Evan in Anguilla, knowing exactly what was going to happen and what Evan was going to tell me. That was despicable, by the way.”

Kate paused, waiting for him to react, but all he did was nod, wordlessly accepting her condemnation and urging her to go on. So Kate went on. “I couldn’t find a way to forgive you for that—or the baby in my womb either—until I read your file. Once I did that,” she said, looking at him without rancor, “I realized that you meant me no real harm, but I was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for revenge that you simply couldn’t pass up. Actually,” she said, flashing Mitchell a wayward smile, “after I read your file, I actually felt a little bit of satisfaction that I was the tool you used to retaliate.”

Desperate for her to continue, Mitchell drew a steadying breath and said quietly, “You have a very loyal, forgiving nature, Kate.”

Kate’s hand shook at the soft caress she imagined in his voice when he said her name, and she stared hard at him, but his handsome face was composed, attentive, and nothing more. “Actually,” she said briskly, in case he’d noticed her momentary loss of concentration when he said her name, “it was a picture of you, taken at the dock in St. Maarten, the day I left with Evan, that changed everything for me.”

“How did it do that?”

“It was a police photograph with the date and time stamped on it. It was five forty-five and you were waiting for me. Until I saw it, I never imagined that you went to the dock at all that day.”

Mitchell’s expression didn’t change, but he had just registered the first flaw in her logic, a large flaw that called her other claims into question.

Across from him, she finished the wine in her glass and said drily, “You have a gift for diabolical revenge. Evan’s reaction at the villa was all you could have hoped for.”

Mitchell lifted his brows inquiringly. “Really? Do you mind telling me what happened?”

His complete imperturbability suddenly rubbed Kate the wrong way. “Yes, I think I do mind,” she said.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. That’s completely between Evan and you.”

Kate gaped at him. His last sentence absolved him from any part or responsibility for what took place at the villa, which was completely, outrageously arrogant and unfair. Without an inkling that his remark was verbal bait being dangled in front of her nose by an expert, Kate swallowed the hook, and decided she deserved the opportunity to tell him
exactly
how brutal he’d been. Unfortunately, she couldn’t do that without feeling a little
humiliated, so she stared at the empty wineglass, twisting the stem in her fingers. “The day I left you at the Enclave in St. Maarten, I went straight to the villa and packed my suitcases like a good little idiot; then I waited for Evan. When he arrived, I told him I’d met you and that I thought we had something special—”

Mitchell interrupted with a quietly spoken instruction. “Look at me.”

Kate automatically obeyed because she assumed he wanted her looking at him while he told her something important. Instead, he nodded and said, “Go on.”

It was the first inkling she had that his relaxed pose and pleasant, dispassionate expression were feigned, and that he was weighing everything she said. It was not a pleasant realization, and her voice sharpened a little.

“Without trying to list the revelations in the order of their heartbreaking effect, Evan told me that he’d met you at Cecil Wyatt’s party, that he’d told you my name and that I was going to be staying at the Island Club with him. He also told me about your childhood and the reasons you hate his father and him. Then he asked me if I knew you were staying on Zack Benedict’s yacht, building a house on Anguilla, and living in Chicago with Caroline Wyatt.” She waited for Mitchell to respond, and when he didn’t, she shook her head at her own stupidity. “I was so insane about you that none of that mattered, except for the one thing that I couldn’t invent an excuse for.”