The Darkest of Shadows (40 page)

“Would she really leave?”

“She hasn’t yet, and she’s been with me nearly two years. With Lilly, it’s more that she needs the option available. In her mind, she needs to know that this is all temporary.”

“What about you two, your relationship?”

Lawrence gave a bitter laugh. “That’s even better. We’re on a day-to-day arrangement.”

“I beg your pardon?” Nicholas was astonished.

“Today I make her happy. Or she tells me that I do. But tomorrow, if she wakes up and isn’t sure, or if she decides that this is too much like a real relationship for her to handle, then I have no doubt that she will simply walk away.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Lilly isn’t mine, any more than she ever belonged to Patrick.” Lawrence downed the last of his drink. “I didn’t know who she was when I first met her, not really. I first met this astonishingly beautiful woman at one of my Christmas parties. She was willful and bright and told me that I was an arrogant, pretentious man. Actually, she said much more than that at the time, but the concept was the same.” Nicholas raised an eyebrow in surprise. “She wasn’t afraid of me at all,” Lawrence went on. “Not from the very first time we met, and that intrigued me about her. So I had her checked out, and the more that I learned about her, the more she interested me. When I made the offer to Patrick, I assumed that Lilly would jump at the chance to work for me. Most everyone else in the world would have, especially considering the sort of money that I was offering. I should have known better.”

“I believe you mentioned that she told you to go fuck yourself,” Nicholas remembered.

“She did indeed say that. She didn’t pull any punches with us that day. It was quite a humbling moment, truth be told.”

“I could imagine that doesn’t happen to you all that often.”

“No, it most certainly does not.”

“Obviously she did finally agree,” Nicholas prompted.

“Eventually, but it took some talking and some strict conditions, especially in relation to the length of the contract. You see, for Lilly, she doesn’t have to work. She doesn’t need the money; she only does it to keep occupied. She quit, right before she told us to go do the nasty to ourselves, she told us to stick the job. The offer was outstanding—she should have been falling all over me to accept. But not Lilly; she threw it back in my face.”

“I thought I knew her pretty well. I would call her a friend. But the more you say, the more I realize I don’t know her at all,” Nicholas admitted.

“Very few people really know Lilly,” Lawrence confirmed. “She doesn’t get close to people. It has taken me nearly two years to know her as well as I do, and even that isn’t close to being enough. She still keeps her apartment here in London, you know. It’s empty, and has been since the day she moved out, but she can’t let it go, because then she would feel trapped. She needs to know that she has somewhere to go. That she has options.” He sighed. “She’d kill me if she knew, but I bought it about six months ago. I’m not sure why. Maybe so that if she ever does leave, then she will still be somehow connected to me.”

“How do you live with the total uncertainty of every day?” Nicholas asked.

“I told you, I’ve had to rethink what’s important to me. I’m living each day as it comes, and I’m thankful every night when I lie in bed beside her and hold her in my arms. I know that as far as she is able, she feels much more for me than she ever did for Patrick. I know that he is the only other relationship she has had. She doesn’t love me. I’m not sure that is an emotion that she is capable of anymore, but she does care about me; and at the moment, I have to be happy with that.”

“Do you love her?”

“Totally. Absolutely. Stupidly and completely,” Lawrence admitted with a resigned sigh.

“It must hurt to know that she doesn’t feel that way about you,” Nicholas commented.

“Like you could never imagine,” Lawrence confirmed, then added, “But not as much as it once did. Like today, Lilly mentioned her family, that she was once married. That’s a big step for her, and I think it was a good step. She has never mentioned him to me before, and the fact that she did tonight and didn’t freak out shows me that she trusts me; and for Lilly, that’s a pretty miraculous thing.”

“Do you think she will ever get better? Enough to function more normally?”

Lawrence took a deep breath. “It’s not as simple as that. I can’t take back what she went through, and I wouldn’t, because the Lilly that I know today wasn’t the Lilly that existed back then. She is who she is today as a result of what she suffered through. I wish the pain away, I wish her reconciled with what happened, but I don’t want to change who she is now. I’ll take all the bad, and the strange, and the worry, as long as she doesn’t hurt anymore.”

“Why are you telling me this now?” Nicholas asked after a long moment of silence.

“Because I trust you, and I think that Lilly does too,” Lawrence replied. “And I need to talk to someone, or I’m going to go crazy.”

“And here I was thinking that you had the perfect life. The perfect job, the perfect woman.”

Lawrence laughed, a bitter sound. “And do you know what makes it even more crazy?” he said. “The fact that I wouldn’t swap her for someone else, even if the tradeoff was for that perfect life. Something about Lilly completes me. She understands me, she understands the world that I live in, and she doesn’t think the sun shines out my ass.”

“I know how special she is,” Nicholas acknowledged. “I see her with you, and wish that I could find someone like that. I see how she works around you and with you and isn’t intimidated by any of it. She’s a remarkable woman.” Nicholas sighed. “As difficult as it is, and as hard as it is to watch, I find myself envious of you and what you have.”

“I nearly lost her once already,” Lawrence said, and leaned forward on the chair to rest his head in his hands. “On New Year’s Eve. We were at a party, and there was an incident.”

Nicholas nodded for him to continue.

“It still scares me to remember,” Lawrence confessed. “Some crazy man wanted to buy a casino development I was involved in, but when we looked at the offer, it just didn’t add up to a reasonable proposition. Oh, the money was good—way too good, which is what first raised the alarm bells, so I had the lawyers reject it. The next day a secondary offer came through for an even larger sum, but we rejected that one, too. That night at the party, the man responsible for the offer kidnapped Lilly and held her hostage in exchange for me signing off on the deal.”

“Fucking bastard.”

“Kind of what I thought at the time,” Lawrence agreed. “I was really lucky. Scary lucky, actually. They took her from the home of one of my friends, who was hosting a very select gathering of individuals, including some US Senators, a few congressmen, and one of the security advisors with the CIA. Let’s just say that between them, there were some seriously pissed-off men.”

Nicholas whistled quietly in appreciation. “I could imagine.”

“They found Lilly within about half an hour and then sent in a special strike force. She was released and returned safe less than an hour after she was taken.”

“Did they hurt her?”

Lawrence shook his head. “She was unconscious for most of it. They drugged her when they grabbed her. I’m not sure what they might have done if she had been in their custody for longer, and I’m thankful that I’ll never know, but I’m telling you this so that you might have some concept of what she lives with every day. Being taken hostage, kidnapped, tied up, and terrified is traumatic. It’s a horrible situation that most people, would take scars from. Lilly, she walked away from the whole thing relatively easily. She had a few moments right at the beginning, but as she said, that incident was nothing compared to what she has already lived through. So for her, it was easily forgotten. Just another speed bump in her life that she dealt with and moved on.”

“What the hell happened to her before?”

“That’s her story, and I can’t tell you.”

“Does someone need to be made to pay for it?” Nicholas asked the question carefully, but Lawrence shook his head.

“I wish it was that straightforward,” Lawrence replied. “But suffice to say that if blame could be attributed anywhere, then the people involved are already paying the price.”

“I wish that made me feel better.”

“You and me both.”

“I’m not so sure that I’m better off with this knowledge,” Nicholas said, after a moment’s thought. He held up his hand to stall Lawrence when he looked like he was going to say something in response. “Do you know that only a few hours ago I lived in a world where everyone thought I was wonderful, and there were rainbows in the sky and fairies magically made my bed each morning, the paper found its way to my breakfast table each day and women fell over themselves to get into my bed. My world was a happy place, Lawrence.”

“I lived in that world once.” Lawrence understood exactly what he was saying.

.

Sixteen

Thursday found us on a plane to Belgium, where Lawrence was attending a conference where he had been asked to speak. He didn’t often accept public speaking invitations; he felt that his ideas were his own, and his business was different from most others out there, and for him to be giving advice that would probably not work for others was irresponsible and dangerous.

This event, however, was more a charity than a conference and dealt with how businesses could help support underdeveloped areas of the world and their responsibilities in that field. Lawrence was a generous philanthropist and had no problems encouraging others to give where the money and support were needed.

“Where are we going?” I asked Lawrence the morning, after the conference. I watched in confusion as the English coastline moved closer and closer through the window of the jet. “Aren’t we meant to be heading east—because last time I checked, Italy was not near England.” We were meant to be heading to Rome to finalize details on a development that had just sold. I wasn’t aware of any change to those plans, so I found it puzzling that we were heading back to England after leaving Belgium.

“I cancelled the meeting with the buyer.” Lawrence didn’t look up from the paperwork he was reading when he announced that. “Our agents in Rome will take care of that. They don’t need us there for this part of the negotiations.”

“Did you really?” I raised an eyebrow at him; a wasted effort, as he still didn’t look at me. “Do you mind if I ask what we’re doing instead?”

“We’ve been invited to stay with an old friend of mine in the country. We’ll be heading there as soon as we land.”

It was a strange statement from Lawrence. Granted, this wasn’t the first time that we had made an impromptu visit to a friend, but he never canceled an event to attend something like that. They were always last-minute parties that he went to only if there was a spare space in his calendar. There definitely wasn’t a spare space in his calendar for this country visit.

“How long are we staying?” I asked casually. It was Saturday afternoon, and we had to be back in the States on Friday of next week, something that would have been much easier and quicker if we were leaving from Rome instead of London or God-knows-where in the countryside.

“We’ll make it to LA by Friday,” he assured me, knowing instantly what I was referring to.

So we had a week in the country. Didn’t sound too bad, actually; it would really depend on who the friend was and who exactly would be attending this little gathering.

“Anyone I know?” I queried.

“Nope.” He shot me a quick grin but didn’t elaborate.

There was a very sleek, low-riding sports car waiting for us when we got off the plane outside London. Interestingly, it only carried two people. A dilemma for Frost and Charlie, but I quickly learned, much to my amazement, that it wasn’t a problem. Lawrence shook hands with both of them as our bags were transferred from the plane to the extremely small boot of, if I wasn’t mistaken, an Aston Martin.

“Enjoy your time off. I’ll call you when we leave, so you can meet us at the airport in LA,” Lawrence told Frost and Charlie; then he grabbed my hand and led me over to the car.

I shot a wave over my shoulder at our two guards. These people had been a stable and nonoptional presence in my life for nearly two years now. In all that time, neither of them had ever been away from us, at least not at the same time. It was a strange shift to my reality to walk away from them now, strange and somewhat exposing.

“Why aren’t they coming?” I asked, as Lawrence settled into the driver’s seat beside me. It was odd, but it had never occurred to me before that he even had a driver’s license. I realized that I had never seen him behind the wheel of a car before, but of course he was a male, so hardly uncommon for him to have a fetish for fast cars.

“The place we are going has sufficient security for us. I thought it would be a good opportunity to give them both some time off. They deserve it, and we’ll be safe enough while we’re at Parkgrove.”

“Parkgrove?” I queried. “Any chance you might tell me where the hell we’re going now, and why?” I was pretty sure this wasn’t business related, so I felt I had a right to say no if I didn’t want to go.

“William Edward Bates,” Lawrence announced. “The third,” he added with a smile. “He’s been a friend to me for nearly twenty years; he was what you might call my mentor when I first started in business. My first official partner.”

“OK.”

He hesitated, and I knew that he was considering how much to tell me, what to tell me—which worried me. “What?” I asked, a particular edge to my voice.

“Some time ago, we spoke about you talking to someone,” Lawrence reminded me. “Will has listened to me for as long as I can remember. He’s not a shrink, far from it. But he’s very good at listening, and I think that when you meet him, you might like him.”

I knew this was going to be a bad idea. “Talking to someone isn’t going to fix me, Lawrence,” I warned him. I really didn’t appreciate being pushed into this situation, and I liked it even less that he had waited until we were driving to the man’s house before telling me about it.