Pursuit (31 page)

He shook his head. Hadn’t even thought of it.

The crowd murmured as three men and a woman filed out of a small door set in the mammoth wall.

“Oh look!” Charlotte exclaimed. “The musicians are coming out! I’ve heard that the cellist is excellent.” She opened the program and sighed happily, running her finger down the program. “The String Quartet Number 17. I haven’t heard that in years. Since college, in fact. This is going to be so wonderful.”

Matt looked down at her. She was excited, happy, looking forward to the concert. She clearly
liked
this stuff. Hard as it was for Matt to believe, she truly enjoyed listening to live classical music. Her cheeks were pink with pleasure, that pretty mouth uptilted, eyes gleaming.

This
was Charlotte Fitzgerald, he suddenly realized. This elegant, smiling, cultivated, happy woman. My God, this woman was utterly irresistible. What he’d been seeing was a woman down, at her lowest ebb, sapped of vitality. Already that woman had him tied in knots, but this one—this one brought him to his knees.

He picked up her hand, contemplating it for a moment. He could feel the delicate bones beneath the soft skin, all the miraculous elements of bone, tendon, muscle that made up her long, elegant artist’s hands. He brought her soft hand to his mouth and kissed the back of it gently, as if he were a gentleman in a tux at the Met instead of a roughneck sailor in one of the two dress shirts he owned on a folding chair in the middle of nowhere. He felt like a gent with a tux. He felt like a knight in shining armor with his lady love. Every cliché in the book—Jesus, that was him, right there. All wrapped up in a woman, heart skipping a beat when she smiled at him, willing—hell, more than willing—to ford rivers for her, climb mountains, slay dragons. Willing to kill for her. Certainly willing to die for her.

“Matt,” she whispered, the torchlight flickering in her eyes. How it loved her face, caressing the mysterious hollows under her elegant cheekbones, that soft skin the color of moonlight. He turned her hand and pressed a kiss into the palm. She smiled at him and curled her hand closed, as if keeping the kiss inside.

Oh yeah. He’d do anything for her. Even sit on an uncomfortable chair and listen to longhair music. Gah. The musicians had all trooped onto the stage, which was empty except for four chairs and four music stands with sheets of music on them. The only extra light for them were four huge torches at the four corners of the large wooden dais that served as a stage. They sat and tuned their instruments for a couple of minutes, then the violinist on the left suddenly straightened and tapped the music stand with his bow.

Inside a minute utter silence reigned. Three hundred people in the courtyard, and yet Matt could hear the wind soughing through the leaves of the bushes surrounding the cloister. The musicians picked up their bows, and Charlotte squeezed his hand in excitement, letting out a happy sigh.

Okay, this was it. By an act of heroism, Matt refrained from rolling his eyes and braced himself, totally in Stoic Mode. He’d done harder things in his life than sit through a boring hour of music. Shit, he’d stood watch thousands of times through the night. He’d hunkered behind a big rock for two days waiting for a convoy to pass. He’d lain on his stomach for nearly a week with only a thin plastic sheet under him, a plastic bottle to piss in, a plastic bag to shit in, and seven MREs, studying the movements in an enemy camp. Hell, most of life in the military was hurry up and wait . . . endlessly.

He could do this. He could especially do this with a happy, relaxed Charlotte by his side. One of the violinists, clearly the leader, looked each of the others in the eye and gave a sharp nod.

Suddenly, in the space of a heartbeat, music filled the courtyard. It didn’t sound as if it came from the musicians sawing away at their instruments. No, it seemed like it came from some mysterious otherworldly source—from the cool night air, perhaps, from the bright stars in the sky, from the dense, ancient stone walls and the rustling branches of the trees.

He had no idea how long the concert lasted. A minute. Forever. He lost all sense of time and of himself as he listened to the clear notes. The only thing he was always conscious of was Charlotte’s hand in his, soft, warm, grounding him.

She seemed as caught up in the music as he was, leaning a little forward in her seat, head wobbling gently in time with the rhythms. Matt had never heard any of the pieces before and yet as soon as he heard the notes, it was as if he’d been listening to them all his life—

instantly familiar, instantly a part of him. The notes shimmered in the air, as if they were starlight made sound.

After a time, the lead violinist met the other musicians’ eyes, the music rose on a great crescendo, then stopped on a breath, leaving utter silence. As one, the musicians rested their right hands, bows upright, on their knees.

The silence lasted a heartbeat, two, then the audience erupted in ecstatic applause. Matt released Charlotte’s hand—the only thing he’d do that for—and joined in. The musicians suddenly grinned at the wild applause, and Matt realized how young they were. They’d seemed almost superhuman while playing—deathly serious, plugged into something higher and bigger than they were. But now he saw that they weren’t much more than kids. Hugely talented kids who’d probably been practicing their instruments since they were five.

They were touched by magic, just as surely as Charlotte was.

He was stunned that he’d lost himself so much in the music. That had never happened before—music was something that had always been a take it or leave it kind of thing for him. It certainly never affected him emotionally. But now he felt shaken, as if sands had suddenly shifted beneath his feet, ripping open a hole in the ground, but instead of danger, the abyss that had opened up had showed him a new, shimmering reality, better and stronger than this one.

He came to as a sharp little elbow dug in his ribs. Charlotte was gazing at him, head tilted.

“Well? Tell the truth, it wasn’t that bad, was it?”

He swallowed. “No, no it—”

He stopped, unable to go on. He looked away sharply, so she wouldn’t see how moved he was. What was going on? He was utterly baffled by the swell of emotion in his chest, almost too big to contain.

Get a grip
.

When his throat loosened, and the bands around his chest yielded, he took in a deep breath. “It was beautiful,” he said quietly, in answer to her question. “Truly beautiful. It was like—like they were one person and one instrument.”

“Yes,” she said absently, shifting her knees as people started getting up to leave, filing past them. All around them was the sound of people talking, laughing, scraping the chair legs across the flagstoned courtyard as they got up and started moving toward the big gate. It all sounded far away to Matt, who was still lost in the music, floating in the darkness of the night, anchored only by the moon and the stars. She seemed to sense that his silence was unusual, because she gave him a sharp glance.

“You’re surprised,” she said, sounding surprised herself. She peered at him, eyes narrowed, studying him as if she’d never seen him before. “You’re surprised you liked it. Tell the truth. You really enjoyed the music, and you didn’t think you would.”

The disgruntled look he gave her made her laugh. The sound rose in the night air and lifted his spirits. She didn’t laugh nearly enough.

“Admit it!” Charlotte crowed, looking like a beautiful little she-devil. She jabbed him in the side again. “Come on, tough guy. Admit it. No wonder you’re looking like someone punched you in the stomach. You loved it. So here we have Mr. Macho, Mr. I’m-just-asoldier, ma’am-and-don’t-know-nothing-else, who has discovered he has an appreciation for art and has actually started his first art collection and now finds out to his horror that he has a taste for classical music.” She shook her head, making a
tsk
-ing sound. “My heavens, who knows what’s next? Maybe a passionate interest in fashion or interior design?” She laughed when she saw his expression.

Charlotte leaned forward and spoke softly into his ear. “I won’t tell anyone, I promise. And I should talk. I’ve discovered that I like shooting people.” She shook her head. “Who knew?”

San Luis

April 28

The trip back to San Luis seemed to take forever and was over before Charlotte had time to gather her senses and decide what she was going to do about Matt. They rode in silence, Matt giving increasingly lengthy sidelong glances at her as he drove them back. He drove the way he did everything physical—superbly. Charlotte watched the play of muscles in his forearm as he shifted gears in the ancient Jeep. The vehicle wasn’t built for comfort, and the road was terrible, but Matt managed through sheer driving ability to smooth out the ride.

She was fascinated by his forearms and hands. They were powerful without being meaty—pure masculine grace. If she could, she’d make sketch after sketch of his hands alone—large, strong, nicked, and scarred but beautiful just the same. The very essence of male power.

It was hard to keep her eyes off him, so she forced herself to concentrate on the road instead. Though the moonlight was bright, the landscape was flat and featureless. She concentrated on the only thing visible, the faded yellow lines in the middle of the road, flickering in the headlights.

It was so hard not to look at Matt, she had to clench her fists, digging her fingernails into the palm of her hand. Everything about him fascinated her. She’d spent the entire afternoon immersed in the details of him—how his short dark hair grew in a whorl at the back of his head, how the ball of his shoulders strained the soft cotton tee shirt, how powerful his hands looked even in repose, how his dark eyes never lost that careful watchfulness, as if he was aware of everything at all times.

Oh, she was smitten. It was such an unusual feeling for her that it had taken her this long to realize it. And she was smitten with a man who was utterly alien to her, a man she’d never have even considered as a possible lover six months ago.

Charlotte was well aware that she had grown up preposterously privileged and wealthy, the beloved daughter of two doting parents. She didn’t consider herself unduly spoiled, but by the same token she’d always just assumed that her life would take a straight, golden and pleasant path down to her future, and that that future included a loving husband, equally wealthy and privileged, children, trips to Europe, art and music in abundance. The men she’d dated and the few lovers she’d had all shared more or less the same characteristics. They were witty and charming and well-read and well traveled. The places they went to all had museums, which they dutifully visited, unlike Matt, whose travels to her seemed to be exclusively to places “where the bad guys are” as he put it. Matt was not her type. He was rough and grim, rather than witty. He had a take on the world that a year ago she would have called paranoid but which she now knew to be realistic—the world
was
full of bad people and danger. However, Matt was perfectly prepared, by training and character, to deal with it.

Charlotte Court would have found Matt intriguing for a minute or two, back in her old life, but would never have stuck around long enough to find out what he was really like. What made him tick under that stone-cold exterior. She preferred her men to share her interests, to have a little feminine streak to them, and Matt was unequivocally and entirely
male
. But Charlotte Fitzgerald—ah, that was a different matter. Something had happened to her to change her beyond all recognition. Whether it was on the long, perilous trek across the country, a wounded fugitive, living by her wits, pushing herself farther than she’d ever thought she could go, or whether it was over the past two months in San Luis, living frugally, her life pared down to the essentials in this gorgeous place of elemental shapes and colors—whatever it was, she was a changed woman.

It was as if a ferocious wind had blown away all the trappings of Charlotte Court that she’d thought were her essence—her wealth, her place in society, her invulnerability—and left a stripped-down version of herself that rang true because it was bedrock. That strippeddown, essential Charlotte could survive on very little. She didn’t need a mansion, servants, designer clothes, the company of other wealthy, privileged people like herself. She’d become Charlotte Fitzgerald, survivor, who’d been through hell and survived. And she recognized in Matt a kindred spirit. He’d been through hell, too, and come out the other end even stronger than before.

They were in many ways alike, and if she hadn’t been on the run, fighting for her life, she would never have known that.

Matt looked over again and their eyes met. Charlotte nearly gasped at the power of his gaze, like a punch to the stomach. It was an electric charge crackling between them, uniting them.

He picked up her hand and brought it to his mouth again. His lips were warm and soft, the skin around his mouth rough with heavy beard. As his lips touched the back of her hand, another jolt of electricity shot through her, and she finally recognized it for what it was—

desire.

Desire was something she thought she understood. A man and a woman could have a good time in bed together—a nice, civilized time. A good meal, maybe a dinner theater, decent sex, followed by a nice glass of wine and good conversation. That had nothing whatsoever to do with the punch to her senses when she met Matt’s gaze. Desire flared in her, a swell of heat from her head to her toes. Her hand trembled in his. He felt it. Of course he felt it. He was preternaturally aware of what was going on in her, as if he were inside her skin, directing her responses. Matt didn’t get that triumphant look men got when they knew they’d done what had to be done to coax you into bed. No, his face turned taut, sober, somber—as if they were embarking upon a serious life-ordeath mission. Maybe they were.