Moonrise (21 page)

She wanted to lash out at him, to stop him, but she didn’t. She’d been brought up to be polite, well behaved, discreet. She couldn’t have a raging emotional fit in front of the most emotionally controlled man she’d ever known.

She leaned back against the leather seat of James’s car. “All right,” she said. “What did Win tell you to tell me?”

If he didn’t like the way she’d phrased it, he didn’t say so. As usual he was in control, cool, reasoned. “It was a mistake, Annie.”

“What was a mistake? I don’t recall we did anything particularly shocking or torrid. You kissed me. So what? That’s all it was. You regained control of your animal passions quite
quickly, and my reputation remains unsullied. What’s the big deal?”

“That’s my point. I want to make sure we’re agreed on it,” he said.

“That it was just a kiss? I don’t remember anything else, but maybe you drugged me and had your wicked way with me and the shock and horror of it sent me into a Victorian swoon—”

“Shut up, Annie,” he said pleasantly.

She was still half shocked at her flippant tone. She never talked that way to anybody. But then, she seldom got mad at anybody. And she was mad now. Furious.

“What’s your problem, James?”

“You, Annie. I know perfectly well you have a crush on me—”

“I do not!” she protested hotly.

“It’s been going on since the summer you turned nineteen and I came to visit you and Win in Maine.”

“Bullshit,” said Annie, who never swore. It had been going on at least a year before that. She’d just been better at covering it up.

“I don’t want to argue with you, Annie. I just want to make it clear that it’s not going to happen. Not now, not ever.”

“What’s not going to happen?”

“I’m not going to bed with you.”

“Why?” she asked.

She’d managed to startle him. “Why?” he echoed. “Because it’s a bad idea. Because you’re a generation younger than I am. Because I work with your father. Mainly because I don’t want you.” He spoke with devastating frankness, and it would have taken a blind fool to think he was lying.

But she was being a blind fool. “You mean my father told you to keep your hands off me.”

“If you think that, then you don’t know Win very well. And you don’t know me.”

“You mean you wouldn’t listen to my father?”

He sighed, a weary, bored sigh. “Annie, I’m not going to argue with you. This isn’t up for discussion. I’m flattered, but I’m really not interested. I’m involved with someone else at the moment, and even if I wasn’t, my tastes don’t tend to run to college girls.”

Win had taught her to be ladylike and serene, never to show anger or passion. He’d taught her to be strong as well, and it took all her strength to force a cool smile to her face.
Think Grace Kelly
, she told herself.

“You make yourself very clear,” she said sweetly. “So why don’t you let go of me, and this college girl will head back to college?”

He couldn’t have forgotten that he still held her wrist. But he might not have noticed that
he was absently caressing her with his thumb. It hadn’t escaped her attention.

He released her, climbing out of the car, ignoring her protests that she could carry her small bag by herself. He walked beside her through the crowds of people heading for the terminal, and all the time her temper was simmering.

He wouldn’t leave her at the security check-in. “Are you afraid I’m not going to get on the plane, James?” she demanded. “I promise, I’m not going to show up at your door looking like a lost sheep.”

“I know you’re not. My mama taught me to make sure a lady gets to where she’s going,” he said, his drawl deliberately more pronounced.

She swallowed her snarl. So they waited, on hard plastic chairs, surrounded by noisy children and bickering parents, worried grandparents and impatient businessmen. They waited, and Annie ignored years of indoctrination, refusing to fill the time with the polite small talk she’d become so adept in.

They finally announced her plane. She rose, and James rose, looming up beside her, remote and removed. He seemed older now, miles away from her, and she wondered if he felt relief that he’d finally managed to get rid of her. She wondered if he really believed what he’d told her.

She looked up at him, smiling brightly. “Good-bye, darling,” she said in a silken voice. And she flung her arms around his neck, pressing her open mouth against his.

She expected annoyance, tolerance, perhaps even a distant amusement. She hadn’t expected his reaction.

His arms closed around her like a vice, pulling her tightly up against him. And she didn’t have time to kiss him—the touch of her mouth against his seemed to ignite a firestorm. She could feel him through every inch of her body, the lean, deceptively strong body beneath the suit, the heat and lure of muscle and sinew, the sheer intensity of him. She felt as if she were being absorbed into a maelstrom, and all she could do was hold onto him as he kissed her, he kissed her, using his tongue, kissing her with a thoroughness she’d never experienced. His hands slid down over her hips, pulling them up against him, and she could feel how hard he was, feel the need and tension rippling through his body.

She was vaguely aware of the noise around her. The chatter of tourists, the smattering of applause. But it came to her from a distance. All that mattered was James, his mouth, his hands, his body.

And then he broke away from her. Distancing himself physically, emotionally, taking a
few steps back when she wanted to scream at him, to claw him, to beg him to take her back to the car, to a darkened alley, anywhere …

But he wasn’t going to. She knew that as she saw the defenses shutter his face once more and he was the distant family friend who’d never touched her.

And she wouldn’t beg. All she could do was keep her dignity, her battered sense of humor. “You should say good-bye more often, James,” she said lightly.

There was no answering warmth in his bleak eyes. “I’ve said enough good-byes to last me a lifetime,” he said. And he turned and walked away.

Ah, she’d been full of plans for him. The memory of that kiss had warmed her during the trip back to Boston, stirred her for the next few weeks, and she anticipated Christmas with a mixture of dread and delight. She had a month off at Christmas, and she would concentrate on James, who always spent the holidays with them since his own family had died. She would ignore her father’s disapproval for once in her life, she would conquer James’s idiotic, noble reservations, and it would be very sweet indeed.

But James hadn’t been there that Christmas, for the first time in fourteen years. Win murmured something about him spending the
time in Europe, but before Annie could accuse him of interfering, she met Martin Paulsen. Martin, who was everything she’d ever fantasized about. Martin, who gave her everything she wanted in bed, never frightened her, never made any demands, and kept her so mesmerized that she couldn’t think of anything else.

They’d been married that June. And James had been there, looking older, more distant than ever. She’d forgotten her fierce passion for him. She’d even danced with him at the wedding and accepted his chaste salute on her proffered cheek.

And three years later, when the haze of passion had finally lifted and she realized how truly empty her marriage was, she got a quiet, uncontested divorce with Win’s help and never looked back.

She was looking back now. She was looking backward, forward, upside down, and in dark corners to try to make sense of her tangled past. And as she bounced along in the tiny plane, the familiar stranger beside her, a sudden, painful thought struck her, and there was no way she could dismiss it.

“You said Win molded me,” she said abruptly.

James turned to look at her through the murky light of the small plane. “You know that as well as I do,” he said in a husky voice.

“You said he chose my men for me. What did you mean by that?”

He shrugged, turning away from her. “I don’t know what the hell he did, Annie.”

“Yes, you do. He chose Martin, didn’t he? He approved of Martin and me, threw us together.”

“I’d say that was obvious.”

“Did he want me to marry him? Did my father have a hand in that as well?”

He turned then, and she held her breath, dreading the answer. She should have known James wouldn’t sugar-coat it. “Annie, your father controlled every man who ever came near you. He picked Martin out of his recruits, groomed him to be exactly what you dreamed about, and handed him to you on a silver platter. You took him with slavering gratitude.” There was no missing the faint bitterness in his voice.

“Why?”

“Because he wanted to keep you away from me. He didn’t trust me to keep my distance, and he didn’t trust you. He knew how determined you could be, no matter how he tried to mold you into someone more amenable.”

“Why Martin? Why not you?”

“Because he could control Martin. Martin was his creature, his perfect proxy husband for you. Martin was just like him in so many ways.
He considered me a more volatile proposition.”

“So my father set me up for a lousy marriage because he was afraid I’d get involved with you,” Annie said, trying to keep her voice level. Everywhere she turned there was a new betrayal, and she wondered how deep that betrayal went. “What a foolish waste of time. Considering that you didn’t want me in the first place.”

He turned and looked at her. There was an odd light in his eyes, and he smiled at her. The feral grin of a jungle cat. “Didn’t I, Annie?”

I
t took them three days to reach Ireland. Three goddamn miserable days, during which he kept her so drugged up she barely realized where she was. At least it stopped her questions. It closed her haunting eyes. It smoothed the worry from her face and made her look far too young for him once more.

He needed to remember that. She would always be too young for him, in experience, in the cold, cruel facts of life. It was her blessing, and his curse.

He got drunk whenever he could. During the long night flights, when there was no way anyone could get to them, he’d make his way through a quart of tequila and watched the woman asleep beside him. He usually managed to sneak the stuff into her food, but once or twice he had to resort to a hypodermic needle when she got too restless. He wondered if she’d notice the tracks.

The trailer was equipped with everything. Weapons, the makings for bombs and mind-altering drugs, the stuff for phony passports and ID’s. It had been a simple enough matter to make an arrangement via a cellular phone to get what he needed together. It kept his mind off her body, her mouth, while she slept.

Nothing, not even the booze, could distract him now. She noticed too much. She was her father’s daughter, in certain ways that he didn’t want to admit. But he’d never lied to himself about anything. Not about who and what he was. And who and what he wanted.

He wanted Annie.

He just didn’t plan to take her if he could help it. Because to take her would be to sign her death warrant.

He wasn’t even sure where they were going. Ireland was a small country, Northern Ireland even tinier, but there was a whole world there. The last place Win Sutherland had been before he returned home to face his execution.

In the end he simply followed his instinct. For the first time in more than twenty years, he went home.

Derrymore hadn’t changed. A few more bombed-out buildings, a few less tanks patrolling the streets. But the look on the pale, pinched faces of the people was still the same,
from the very young to the very old. Hatred and fear.

He’d looked the same. For more than twenty years of his life he could look in a mirror and see that same, hollow-eyed rage. But he’d learned to hide it. Learned to bank it, channel it, use it. Learned to kill for someone else’s patriotism and not his own.

He could thank Win for that. He could curse Win for that. He’d saved him and damned him at the same time. And never a day went by when he didn’t wish he’d starved to death in Highroad Prison.

Annie was moving, but just barely, her mind still befogged by the drugs he was giving her. He steered her through the narrow streets to the empty house he’d found, surrounded by other derelict buildings, shutting down his own reaction to it. It was a tiny, dismal place. He’d never been in this particular council house. But he knew it as well as he knew his soul. The smell of it. The random, cheap furnishings and tattered wallpaper. The luminous pictures of a wavy-haired Jesus praying over his poor, benighted followers.

There were two bedrooms. He took her to the smaller one, to a bed that was little more than a narrow cot, pushing her down on the mattress and pulling a thin blanket up around her. She watched him, silently, as he pulled
off her shoes, checked the tiny window, and then turned back. Her eyes had already closed once more, and she was breathing the shallow, steady sleep of the drugged.

He didn’t dare give her any more. He’d lost track of how much she’d had, and the stuff he’d pumped into her was still experimental enough that he couldn’t be sure of the consequences. She was out once more, and he could only hope she’d stay out long enough for him to reconnoiter, gather some preliminary information, and get back to her.

He stood over her. It was dark and cool and bleak in the room, and her face was pale and still. Almost deathlike. And he’d seen death too often.

He touched her throat, but she was warm, and he could feel the lifeblood pulsing through her. He slid his hand down her blouse, opening the buttons. She had small breasts, encased in a flimsy lace bra, and her nipples were hard in the chilly room.

So was he.

He moved away from her, pulling the blanket back over her. She slept on, oblivious, and he backed out of the room before he could change his mind.

Annie’s dreams were cloudy, full of blood and death and heavy eroticism, and they
seemed to go on forever. She was caught in a thick fog that she couldn’t bat away, and she lost track of time, of place, of anything but the man beside her, touching her, holding her, keeping her still. She felt oddly weightless and she dreamed there were airplanes, but she couldn’t summon up enough energy to ask where they were going. She knew they landed, but everything looked dark and strange to her.