The Fall of Lucas Kendrick (4 page)

Kyle’s hand came out blindly and felt the solid comfort of an oak kitchen chair. She sat down automatically at the table and set her coffee cup before her trembling fingers dropped it. “No,” she said numbly, shocked. “I never bought—or sold—drugs. Never.”

“I saw you.”

Belatedly her mind began to work. “You were a cop, weren’t you?”

He met her unfocused gaze, his own eyes beginning to reflect a soul-deep uncertainty that had haunted him for a decade. Her shock and surprise were genuine; he could feel that. Then, what he had done … He pushed the thought away. “I was a cop. Undercover to find a campus link to a major dope dealer. The dealer was found dead a few days before—before I left.”

“And you thought I was the link,” she murmured.

“I
saw
you.” The three stark words held the sound of something repeated so often and with such grinding force that they had been chiseled in stone.

Kyle remembered the suitcase now, remembered getting it; the incident had been so trivial, she hadn’t thought of it since, or ever even missed the case. And she thought she understood. Drawing a deep breath, she said slowly, “You thought I was the link; you were sure of it. But I wasn’t arrested or even questioned. Ever. Why not?”

He was silent, his gaze dropping to the cup in his hand.

“Why not, Luc?”

“You were seventeen,” he said, still staring at his cup. “Wild, a little spoiled. Thoughtless. It was just a game to you, like all the other games. You didn’t realize what you were doing. You didn’t stop to realize it would have ruined the rest of your life.”

She was staring at him. In a slow, wondering tone she asked, “What did you do?”

His mouth twisted in an unconscious, painful movement. He didn’t want to tell her, but he had to. It seemed that this was the day to open up the past.

“Luc?”

“I was the only one who had proof, and I hadn’t reported to anyone. I destroyed the photos and the heroin. There was a small-time pusher on campus, another student; he’d sold a little here and there to support his own habit. About the time you’d gotten the suitcase, he was found off campus, dead of an overdose. I
reported to my superiors that as far as I could determine, he was the only one dealing on campus. I wasn’t terribly popular with my superiors, and when I refused to answer questions about any of my findings, they decided I was hiding something. I would have resigned, anyway. They didn’t give me the chance.”

Kyle felt a jolt that took her breath away. “You … you were protecting me? You gave up your career to—”

“I was sick of the job,” he said, interrupting flatly. “I’d already decided to quit and accept the position Josh had offered. I gave up nothing, Kyle.”

She felt another jolt, this one far deeper and much more painful. She wouldn’t have understood ten years before, she knew, because at seventeen there was no perception of such things. Lucas had indeed given up something to protect her, she thought, something far more important than a career.

He had given up his honor.

And it was only this realization that kept her
from lashing out at him now for the terrible hurt inflicted on them both. For a fleeting instant she was tempted to let him go on believing that his sacrifice had gained something for someone, that he had indeed protected her from the results of insane folly, because she was afraid of what it would do to him to find out the truth. But he had to know.

No matter what it did to them, to each of them alone and to both of them, he had to know.

“Did you know I had a brother?” she asked suddenly. “He lived off campus until our father called him back home. That was just before you left.”

Lucas frowned a little, thrown off stride by the seeming non sequitur. “I knew. He was killed a few months after you went to Europe, wasn’t he? A car crash?”

“Amazing what money can do.” Her voice was quiet and flat. “A car didn’t kill my brother.”

“Then what did?”

“Heroin. He died of an overdose.”

Lucas began to feel curiously chilled inside. A cop’s training took over, sifting through new facts and old ones. A brother who used heroin and died from it—and who had lived in an apartment near the university campus where his younger sister attended classes. A sister who was wild and a little spoiled but didn’t use drugs …

Kyle kept her eyes fixed on his face, and her voice was soft. “I adored him. You said I was a little spoiled; Dorian was a lot spoiled. Our father instilled in him all the beliefs of the family, but Dorian twisted them to suit himself. He thought that wealth and power meant everything. Ultimately he believed he was invincible. And since he was the heir, he was indulged. He never would admit to a fault when we were kids; if something happened—a rock breaking a window, or a vase shattering—he always blamed me. And I took the blame because I adored him and it seemed right that I take his punishment for him.”

She sighed softly. “I was blind. The packages, the suitcase, they were his. I was used to doing things for him, without question. And since I was … well, rather involved with what was happening in my own life then, I wasn’t much interested in what all the
favors
really were. I never looked in the packages, the suitcase. Maybe if I had—”

If I had, he might still be alive. If I had, I would have confided in you, and ten years of our lives would have been different
.

Lucas set his cup on the counter and walked out of the kitchen. Kyle didn’t turn, but she heard the front door open and shut quietly. She closed her eyes, and in the silence of the house her voice sounded as though it were wrenched from the depths of her body.

“If I had, you wouldn’t have sold your honor for me.”

Kyle was a realist; she knew it hadn’t been completely her fault. She had been young, thoughtless, and in love. Too preoccupied with the dam-burst of her own feelings to notice
that Lucas had grown quieter those last couple of weeks. Too self-involved to understand why she’d sometimes caught him looking at her with a brooding expression. Too accustomed to doing things for her brother to notice anything unusual about the packages she picked up for him.

And Lucas … Considering what he had sacrificed for her, he clearly had been in love with her. He hadn’t lied about that. But even though he had been an undercover cop, what had happened to them was also his fault. Trust was a part of love; he should have doubted the evidence at least enough to confront her with it.

But Lucas hadn’t loved enough, or doubted enough. And she had loved her brother too blindly to question. And because of that, each of them bore a wound that was raw and bleeding. Her wound was less, she thought, because knowing what Lucas had done for her would start the healing now.
He hadn’t left her lightly
. But Lucas … His wound was a deep and terrible
one, damaging an integral part of his very self.

She had the comfort of knowing he had not loved or left her lightly, that he had sacrificed something of himself for her. But Lucas had the devastating awareness that he had sold his soul for nothing.

If ten years hadn’t separated them, Kyle would have gone out then in search of him, all her instincts telling her that a man shouldn’t be alone while facing such a terrible truth. She had earned the right to go after him all those years ago in a single night of passionate giving.

She wanted to go after him, even if her comfort could be no more than presence or a simple touch. But she couldn’t. What he had done for her had changed him in ways she might never fully understand, had made him less than he was—and more than he was.

Far back in a dark corner of her mind was another reason she couldn’t go after him now. Love was perhaps the strongest human emotion of all—and also the most fragile. And it
was less likely to die a quiet death than to alter itself to bitterness and regret. Sacrifice always cost someone something. Lucas might have learned to hate her in ten years.

He might have learned to hate her in ten minutes.

Kyle got up slowly and went into the living room. She sat on the couch and picked up the phone, dialing a number even more familiar than her own. Her father was an early riser, and the household staff as well, but even the butler sounded sleepy when he answered.

While she waited for her father to come to the phone, Kyle fretted about the phrasing of her question. There had been little between her and her father; Dorian had been the pride of his life. To her, Phillip Griffon had always been a strict authority figure, and what she felt for him was made up more of respect than affection. A calm, humorless man who sat at the head of both boardroom and dining tables, he had made no secret of his disapproval of her, his disappointment in her.

She had never learned how to talk to him.

“Kyle?” His voice was as dry and precise as always, as unhurried and without much inflection.

“Hello, Father.” There was no need, she knew, to ask how he and her mother were; he would consider that a waste of time. She stared fixedly at her fireplace and tried to find the words. “I—I need to ask you about something.”

“What is it?”

“It’s about Dorian.”

There was a long silence, and then his voice came through the lines flatly. “Your brother’s dead.”

Kyle half closed her eyes. “Yes. Did you know he was using drugs while I was at the university?” Like all hard questions, hers came out quickly, bluntly, and without tact, as she had been afraid it would.

“I won’t allow his name to be dirtied,” Phillip Griffon said. “Has some scandal sheet approached
you, Kyle? Your family name is important, even if you don’t think so.”

She felt cold and lonely. “Nothing like that, Father. I just need to know. It’s been ten years—don’t you think I have the right to know?
Was
he using drugs then? Is that why you called him home?”

“Kyle—”

“Father,” she said evenly, “I’ve just found out that I was almost arrested because of what Dorian was doing. I have the right to know.”

“Just found out?” His voice sharpened. “From whom?”

“An ex-policeman. I want to know if you knew about Dorian’s life then. Did you?”

“Who is this ex-policeman? What has he told you about your brother?”

“Will you answer me, please?” She felt like screaming at him but didn’t, of course. “Did you know before you called him home that Dorian was using drugs? Selling them?”

“I suspected,” he said finally, briefly.

She was looking blindly at nothing. “I see.
Why did you send me to Europe? Did you suspect me too?”

Again he hesitated. “No harm in telling you now, I suppose: I was warned that drugs were common on campus and that it wasn’t a safe place for a sheltered seventeen-year-old.”

She felt detached. “Who warned you?”

“Joshua Long. It seems he had a friend on campus who warned him about the problem.”

Meaning Lucas, she knew. What had it cost his pride, she wondered, to turn to his new employer and request a favor such as that one?

“Who is this ex-policeman?” her father asked sharply.

“Never mind.”

“Really, Kyle, have you no thought of your family’s name or my position? If this man has information potentially damaging to us, I must be made aware—”

In a still, remote voice she said, “Oh, don’t worry, Father. He doesn’t need to sell information to the scandal sheets. And blackmail isn’t
his style. He won’t disturb the precious family name.” And she quietly cradled the receiver.

Her father didn’t call back. But then, she hadn’t expected him to.

Suspected. Her father had suspected that the apple of his eye was using and selling drugs. So he had yanked him back home, so quickly that Dorian hadn’t been able to reclaim the suitcase full of his latest purchase. Knowing Dorian, he had shrugged off the loss of those drugs, quickly found a supplier closer to home, and never even thought to warn his sister to drop that damning suitcase into a river.

And three months later he was dead.

Kyle was beyond assigning blame to anyone for any part of that tragic series of events. It was over, ten years over, and they all had to learn to live with the results.

Her father had learned to live with whatever he felt by never mentioning his dead son by name and by acting as if he had no offspring; from her years in Europe on, Phillip Griffon had taken no further interest in Kyle. And her
mother coldly blamed Kyle for the loss of Dorian. She should have been able to do something; after all, hadn’t she always watched out for her brother, even if he was two years older?

But what of the other two who had suffered—Kyle and Lucas?

She didn’t know, not really. Not now. Not yet.

Hours passed before Lucas came back into the cabin. Kyle was on the couch, curled up before a blazing fire drinking coffee. She didn’t look at him, just told him that coffee was in the kitchen. He was probably chilled to the bone, she thought, because it had suddenly turned cold outside, the way it sometimes did in the mountains. The radio was playing softly, and the weather forecast had just been announced. Snow within twenty-four hours.

She heard him go into the kitchen, where faint sounds indicated he was ready for some kind of warmth, at least. In a little while she felt him sit
on the couch a foot or so away from her. Still, she didn’t look at him.

Softly, wary of disturbing the high wire under her feet, she asked, “Do you have a family?”

“No.” He didn’t elaborate.

“Have you ever been close to anyone?”

“A few friends. You.”

It surprised her so much that she turned her head to look at him and found his gaze steady on her face as he sat half turned toward her. And she was even more surprised when he went on in a quiet, musing tone.

“I think I went a little mad when I met you. You were … someone very special. You were at a crossroads in your life, suspended between woman and child. I don’t know, maybe if I’d had sisters and watched them grow, you wouldn’t have affected me quite so strongly. I think that was a part of it, watching you turn into a woman before my eyes. And you were—forgive me—starved for affection.”

Kyle nodded slowly, unable to take her eyes off a face that had grown worn and haggard
these last hours but was still incredibly beautiful and no longer a mask. And with all he must be feeling himself, he still thought of
her
feelings. She swallowed hard. “I guess I was.”