Keeping Watch: Heart of the Night\Accidental Bodyguard (16 page)

“You’re sure?”

“Just the pie. I have a sweet tooth.”

“Confessions of the damned. Me, too. That’s why Elliot plans dessert before anything else.”

As he talked, he opened the refrigerator and took out a casserole. Kate wondered why the action seemed vaguely wrong, and then she realized there had been no automatic flash of light when he opened the refrigerator. He closed the door and set the dish on the counter.

“You want it heated?” he asked.

“Not really. When I was a kid I used to eat the leftover cobbler cold. I’d stand in front of the refrigerator, grab a couple of spoonfuls straight out of the bowl, and gobble them down. My mother would have died if she’d caught me.”

He laughed. Like Kahler’s, his laugh was deep and pleasant, nice to listen to. She watched as he dipped two generous portions into bowls and then opened a drawer to supply them with spoons. The damage to his right hand didn’t seem to have caused any loss of dexterity. He had learned to compensate for the missing fingers, and here in his familiar darkness, it seemed he had also forgotten to be self-conscious about them.

He carried the bowls to the small round table set in a windowed bay. He pulled one of the chairs out for her and then seated her. He sat down across from her, unconsciously licking the thick juices of the cobbler off his thumb. The dark eyes looked up to discover she was watching him.

He grinned. Not distant. Not unapproachable.

“My mother would have killed me, too,” he said.

She laughed, and then embarrassed to have been caught staring at him, she concentrated on the cobbler and not on Thorne Barrington. The pie was cold and delicious, the peaches sweet and the thickened juices congealed under the sugar-glazed crust.

“This is wonderful,” she said after a few mouthfuls. “My compliments to the chef.”

“I’ll tell Elliot you enjoyed it.”

“You don’t have a cook?”

“Elliot’s the only staff I have. We have a cleaning service that comes in once a week, but Elliot cooks. He’s wasted on just me, I’m afraid. His talents were appreciated in my mother’s day when there was a lot of entertaining.”

“Then he hasn’t always been your butler?” she asked, taking another bite of Elliot’s cobbler.

“He started in service here when my great-grandfather was alive and worked his way up. Or, as he explains it, he simply outlived everyone else. Becoming my butler was the only way he’d consider letting me pay him half of what he’s worth to me. Elliot’s standards of being in service are rigidly pre-war.”

There was something archaic about his speech patterns, she thought. She had noticed it before. Maybe it was simply the rarefied social atmosphere he had grown up in. Maybe they all talked this way. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the way he talked. It was just a little more formal than she was used to, a little out of her league, as she and Kahler had decided. She hadn’t even been sure which war Thorne meant. Someone accustomed to those who were “in service” would probably have known what the phrase implied, but her family had never had a butler or a cook, other of course, than her mother.

“The first time I saw Elliot,” she said, “I thought he looked like something out of those thirties comedies, Carole Lombard’s butler maybe.”

There was a small silence, strained, and belatedly she realized she had reminded him of the day she had met Elliot. The day she’d come to accuse Thorne Barrington of sending her the confetti package. The day she’d decided to let a little light into his darkness. “That day,” she said, remembering. “Did throwing up the shades cause—”

She cut off the question. The migraines were something he didn’t talk about. He had never publicly discussed his injuries. He was a very private man, and just because he had relaxed that vigilance with her tonight didn’t give her the right to probe.

Embarrassed, she looked down into the cobbler. She pushed her spoon through a piece of the crust, breaking it into two pieces, the thick, pink-tinged juice seeping up between them.

“Obviously…” he began, and she looked up when he hesitated. “Obviously, you now know some things about me that you didn’t know when you came here that day. I find myself curious as to how you know them.”

A good reporter protects her sources,
she had told him before, but that excuse wouldn’t suffice any longer. He had invited her into his home out of kindness, because she had admitted that going into her apartment gave her the willies. He deserved an explanation rather than a brush-off.

“Detective Kahler told me some of them,” she said.

“Kahler?” He sounded surprised by the revelation, and given the detective’s normal reticence, she understood why.

“And my editor knows some people who…know you.” That certainly was vague enough.

“Lew Garrison?” he questioned.

She nodded, pushing her spoon into the cobbler again.

“I see,” he said.

When she glanced up, his face had tightened, the line of his mouth again straight and uncompromising. Probably the way he’d looked at the about-to-be-condemned standing before his bench.

“It’s not really the way it sounds,” she offered. “I just thought I needed to understand what had happened to you.”

“I’m always surprised when people I know are willing to talk about me. It’s disappointing that friends would share that kind of personal information.”

“At first, I believed you’d sent me the package, and I thought that…it was weird that you live the way you do. Lew and Kahler both defended you, gave me some background, some reasons for…”

“The fact that I
hide
in the darkness,” he finished for her. His eyes were steady on her face.

“Yes,” she said. It was only what she had already said to him. Why bother to deny it? There was another silence. She realized that he had stopped eating a long time ago, his cobbler almost untouched.

“As a matter of fact, a friend of mine called today,” he said. “He wanted to warn me that someone had been asking questions about the bombing, specifically about my injuries. He seemed to think it involved an upcoming news story. He suggested I might want to take some kind of legal action to stop it. To stop the invasion of privacy. I’m not a public figure, Kate. I haven’t surrendered my right to privacy.”

That must have been Lew, she thought, following through on the request she’d made. An entirely personal request for information, now that she was sure Thorne Barrington hadn’t been involved with the package she’d received.

“
That’s
why you invited me to come in tonight,” she said, realizing the truth. “To issue a warning.
Not
because I told you I was afraid to go home.” She had wanted him to be some kind of knight in shining armor, so she had made him into one. She had made a fool of herself. Surely she was smarter than this, she thought in disgust.

“Did you have anything to do with that inquiry?” he asked.

She considered lying to him. Denying that she had been the one who had set it in motion. If she didn’t deny it, she knew she’d never see him again. But, she reminded herself, what did it matter? Tonight hadn’t been what she had thought. Just because she was obsessed with him didn’t mean…

“Kate?” he said.

“Yes, I did.”

He said nothing in response, although she met his eyes, had made hers make contact until his fell. He was still holding the spoon with his right hand. He put it back into the bowl and pushed it away from him. She could see the depth of the breath he took before he spoke.

“I see,” he said. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You
did
try to warn me.”

She shook her head, wondering what he meant. She couldn’t remembering trying to do anything of the kind.

“If you’ll forgive me, Ms. August, I think that it might be wise if we call it a night,” he said. Despite what he believed, he wouldn’t be rude to her. It wasn’t in his nature or in his training.

“It’s not what you think,” she said and watched the subtle realignment of his mouth. Cynicism this time and not humor.

“I believe that’s what you told me the first time,” he said.

She remembered then the conversation he was referring to. The parking lot outside the police station. Her confession.

“I could have lied to you. Both times.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because you’d have found out sooner or later.”

“And that mattered to you?”

“Yes.”

“Because you thought I’d eventually give in and give you a story? Something about my life after Jack? About the bombing itself? How I felt?”

Now
she should lie, she thought, hide her real motivation behind what he believed, the easy out his contempt of her profession provided. “No,” she said instead.

He didn’t probe, but she knew he was still looking at her. She could feel his gaze. She couldn’t confess the real reason she had always told him the truth, the real hope behind the things she’d done. Not if he hadn’t figured it out on his own, if he didn’t feel whatever this was between them.

Between them, hell,
she ridiculed. What was between
them
was all in her head. Since she’d collected his pictures. Since she’d done the profile. It had all been just in her head.

She pushed her chair away from the table suddenly and stood up. She had been guilty of doing all the things he hated. She had pried into his private life, had even asked Lew to question his friends. It didn’t make any difference that she was really trying to help Kahler catch a madman. If she couldn’t convince herself that was the reason for her interest in Thorne Barrington, how could she think she might convince him?

“Thanks for the cobbler,” she said. “And for the company,” she added, almost bitter that this had all turned out to be something very different from what she had been imagining when he’d invited her in.

She crossed the room and entered the small, dark hallway. Barrington moved fast for a big man. And silently. He caught her before she had emerged into the part of the foyer under the grand staircase. This time he didn’t release the grip he had taken on her arm, not even after he had pulled her around to face him and her eyes had fastened again on the damaged hand holding her wrist with such strength.

“Was that
all
it was?” he demanded. “Just for some damn story? Is that what all this is about?”

She struggled, but he refused to let her go.

“Answer me, damn it,” he ordered. Although his features were hidden by the shadowed darkness, the black eyes glittered, hard and demanding.

“No,” she whispered.

He was close enough that she could smell him. Closer than in the big car the first night. The scent of his body more intimate here in the shadows. Still pleasant. Warm. Male.

“Then what?” he said. “If not for a story, then why the hell do you keep coming here?”

“Please let me go,” she said. “You’re hurting my arm.”

It was a lie, but the hot moisture had begun to burn behind her eyes. She didn’t want him to see her cry, and she couldn’t tell him the truth.
I’m here because I’ve fantasized about being with you like this, held close against your body in the darkness.
That was the truth, but not one she could confess. Too humiliating. Too bizarre.

He released her. She had known he would. He was too much a prisoner of his upbringing to do anything else. She didn’t move, held motionless by her obsession as she had been from the first. She could see nothing of his expression. There was no clue in his darkness to tell her what she should do.

Leave,
her brain ordered suddenly.
Get out.
The instinct to flee was primitive, but very strong.

Obeying it blindly, she began to turn. His left hand, the one that had survived the attempt on his life virtually unscathed, was suddenly pressed, palm flattened, against the wall beside her, his outstretched arm a barrier to prevent her escape.

She hesitated, unsure again. His hand left the wall and moved to the back of her neck, slipping under the fall of her hair. She didn’t react, couldn’t have moved away from him had her life depended on it. His fingers slowly threaded upward through the long strands and then spread out against her scalp, cupping the back of her head. The lobe of her ear rested in the V formed between the spreading fingers and the caress of his thumb, which had begun to move back and forth over her cheekbone.

Her eyes closed, her breath sighing out in a small unintended whisper of sound. At her response, his hand shifted, drifting forward so that his fingers trailed over her jawline and the sensitive skin beneath it. His thumb teased along her lips, which opened, without her volition, to allow her tongue to touch him. He used his thumb to force her mouth open more widely, pulling downward against her bottom lip, the moisture on his skin cool against her own as his thumb skimmed down her chin to lift her face for his kiss.

His mouth tasted of peaches. Sweet. So sweet. Just as she had imagined. Through the long months. Imagining this so long. His tongue found hers, demanding response. Touch and retreat. Savoring the warmth of his mouth, finally where it belonged. Over hers.

He was exactly the right height, tall enough that she found her body straining upward, made small and somehow more fragile, more feminine by his size. She liked how that made her feel, but she had always known it would feel this way. This rightness.

The kiss wasn’t long. He broke the connection, leaning back slightly as if to read her expression, and she wondered suddenly if his vision were more acute than hers in the darkness. Because this was the way he lived. Surrounded by darkness.

“Not just for a story,”
he said softly. His voice was deep and intimate, not colored with amusement and not cynical. An acknowledgment of all that had been in her response.

“I told you the truth,” she said. “It wasn’t for the series. That wasn’t why I was asking questions.”

He stepped back, half a step farther away, but she felt exposed by the distance between them, by what she had confessed. There was always vulnerability in admitting how you felt. It was inherent in caring for someone and probably necessary, but so risky. The possibility always existed that the other person wasn’t interested or wasn’t affected in the same way.