The Glory Game (36 page)

At her suite, Raul unlocked the door and pushed it open for her. She walked straight into the sitting room and deposited her purse on a chair. Unconsciously she reached up and began pulling the pins to free her hair from its French pleat.

“The key is on the table.”

Turning at the waist, Luz glanced back to the door, where Raul stood just inside the suite. His hand motioned toward the kingwood bureau standing against the wall, indicating where he'd left the room key.

“Fine.” She stared at him, drawn by an attraction she couldn't deny. She was conscious of his leanly muscled physique and the steel-blue eyes. He looked so strong and capable.

“If there's nothing else …”

“No.” She squared around, turning her back to him once again, and dropped the hairpins onto the chair beside her purse. Her glance strayed to the door of her private bedroom. The prospect of climbing into that bed and lying alone made her ache. She wanted to be held and loved and needed by someone. Hugging her arms to ease their empty feeling, Luz absently caressed her shoulders. “I want someone to make love to me.” The declaration seemed to echo through the room.

“Do you always get what you want?” Raul demanded harshly.

Luz swung around to face him. “I'm a Kincaid.” She had always had everything she wanted until now.

“I should have guessed. You expect people to perform according to your command, no?” he challenged, and she was too sensitive to rejection not to see it in the iciness of his expression.

Angrily, she hurled words at him, hurting inside. “Just get out! Get out and leave me alone.” She bolted across the room to the small refrigerator where the miniature bottles of liquor were stored.

“Shall I ring for a maid to assist you?”

“No!” She wanted him to take her to bed—not a maid. Her fingers closed tightly around a gin bottle as she braced herself with one hand flattened on the refrigerator top. “I don't need you. I don't need anyone. Just go away!”

For a moment there was no sound in the room except for the harshness of her own breathing. Then she heard the door shut. She shook with quiet sobs. Her gaze fell on the small liquor bottle in her hand. She swept it away from her, along with the glasses and ice canister. All went crashing onto the carpeted floor, bouncing and rolling across it with a muffled clatter. Her hands clutched the edges of the refrigerator as she sank to her knees.

“Good gracious! What's going on out here?” Emma came
bustling out of her room, tying the sash of her long cotton robe, a satin scarf around her head to protect her hairdo while she slept. “Are you all right, Luz?”

“Yes.” She scrubbed a hand across her cheeks to wipe away the tears, then pulled herself up.

Emma's slippered foot accidentally kicked a glass and sent it rolling against a chair leg. “What's all this mess?” Her gaze narrowed suspiciously on Luz.

“It's not what you're thinking, Emma, although, Lord knows, I've given you cause to think I'm always drunk. But no more. It never helps. It only makes things worse. I realized that and—” She waved indifferently at the drink items strewn across the carpet. “What you see is the result of that discovery.” She watched Emma pick them up and stack them back on top of the small refrigerator.

“Where's Trisha?”

“With the Chandlers. I … I left early.” She ached inside, and it was a heavy, hollow feeling. “It's hard to get used to being alone, Emma. I don't know what I'll do if Rob and Trisha stop loving me, too.”

“That isn't likely. You're their mother. What you need is a good night's rest. Nothing ever looks quite as gloomy in the morning.”

But Luz thought of Audra. Did she love her mother? Or was it duty and obligation that forged the link? Was there any real closeness? Rob and Trisha were all she had. She couldn't stand the thought of losing them. They had to care about her as much as she did about them. She didn't want them resenting her the way she sometimes resented Audra. What an awful irony that would be.

“Are you coming to bed?” Emma paused halfway to the door of her own room.

“Yes.” Alone. She'd sleep alone, the way she always had.

Awakening slowly, Luz rolled onto her back and lay there for several seconds, waiting for the dull pressure to begin pounding in her head, but it didn't come. The only dullness she felt came from sleep, not the aftereffects of alcohol. She stretched, arms reaching, back arching, legs moving beneath the bedcovers, then relaxed and let her eyes come open to look about the drape-darkened room. For another moment, she lay
motionless, then swung her legs off the edge of the bed, the sheets rustling, and reached for the silk robe lying at the foot of the bed.

Sunlight was trying to force its way through the thick folds of the drapes, its brightness glimmering about the edges. Luz slipped into the robe, the silk material gliding across her skin, and she crossed from the bed to the window. The plush carpet was soft beneath the bare soles of her feet. She located the draw pulls and opened the drapes, letting the sunlight pour into the room.

Below, the Place de la Concorde was swarming with traffic, creating a muffled hum of noise. As she gazed at the octagonal square, once skirted by a moat fed by the river Seine, Luz tied the inside strings of her robe at the waistline, then reached for the outer silk cords to secure the front. It was over by the statue to the provincial capital of Brest that Louis XVI had been beheaded. Later the guillotine stood near the gates of the Tuileries, where it served its bloody three-year reign, severing the heads of some thirteen hundred victims.

Looking at the classical proportions of the square, so symmetrically balanced, it was difficult for Luz to imagine the terror the square had known. Built as the Place Louis XV to proclaim his glory, it was fittingly renamed the Place de la Concorde, consecrated to concord between men, and the venerable Luxor Obelisk had been erected in the center where the statue of Louis XV had stood. Luz wondered when she would again find concord, an internal calm, in her life.

There was a knock on the connecting door to the other rooms of the suite. “Room service!”

Recognizing Trisha's voice, Luz smiled. “Come in.” With a final pull to tighten the knot of the cord belt, she turned toward the door as it opened. Her robe-clad daughter wheeled through a serving table, draped in a white linen tablecloth and laden with a coffee service, juice, and a basket of croissants. There was a miniature assortment of jams and marmalades and a small vase of fresh flowers.

“I heard you stirring about and thought you might like some coffee,” Trisha said as she pushed the wheeled table over by a painted fauteuil chair of the Louis XV period.

“I would.” Luz moved to the table and poured the steaming
coffee from the silver pot into a cup. As it cooled, she sipped her orange juice.

“How do you feel?” Trisha helped herself to one of the croissants.

“I don't have a hangover, if that's what you're wondering,” she replied dryly, combing fingers through one side of her sleeptousled hair to push it away from her face. As Trisha moved to sit cross-legged on the bed and nibble at the flaky croissant, Luz picked up the coffee cup and saucer and carried it to the damask chair.

“What happened to Raul last night? He left to check on you and never came back.”

A fine tension rippled through Luz as she studied the deep brown color of the coffee, so close to the shade of Raul's hair. “He came back to the hotel with me. After that, I don't know where he went.”

“Well, he never showed up back at the restaurant. We waited almost an hour before we decided he wasn't coming back.” She picked at the crumbs that had fallen onto her lap. “Last night you seemed to get along with him better. Have you finally started liking him?”

She glanced sharply at her daughter, wondering if Trisha had realized that she had been competing with her last night for Raul. But the question seemed to be as casual as it sounded. “I don't dislike him,” she said and sipped at the hot coffee, hoping Trisha never learned of her jealousy.

“Well, you've gotta admit he's all male,” Trisha declared, a smile crooking her mouth and dimpling a cheek. It was apparent that even while mocking the attraction she felt she was enjoying it.

“That he is,” she agreed. She knew it too well. “But I still don't think he's suitable for you. And that's a mother's prerogative,” she stated to check the protest forming on her daughter's lips. “I don't want to see you make a fool of yourself over him. It hurts too much. I should know.”

A small silence followed. Luz was conscious of Trisha studying her. She sipped at the coffee, giving her attention to the cup and saucer instead of to the girl on the bed. “You were referring to Drew when you said that, weren't you?” Trisha said quietly. “I know you must still miss him.”

The statement prompted Luz to attempt to analyze her
present feelings toward her ex-husband. The bitterness and pain of the divorce were still too fresh for that to be true. “I'm not sure. Mostly I miss not knowing what tomorrow will bring. I always knew what I was going to do, what was going to happen, what to expect. Now I don't know what it's going to be like. It's scary sometimes,” she admitted.

“If things didn't work out for him with Claudia, would you and Dad go back together?”

Luz breathed in deeply, then exhaled in a heavy sigh. “That's a loaded question,” she hedged. She doubted if any direct reply was possible. Maybe two months ago it might have been, but now, it didn't seem likely. “There's a lot of pride and hurt feelings involved—and he's married.”

“I know Dad loves you and always will. He's told me that. Don't you still love him?” Trisha frowned.

Although she understood exactly the dream her daughter was cherishing, she didn't believe it would ever come true. So much was destroyed that she wasn't sure how much love she had left for Drew. “You've always been the practical one, Trisha. You surely don't believe that Drew and I could pick up where we left off if something happened between him and Claudia.”

“No, I guess not.” She absently pulled off a piece from the croissant.

Luz watched her, afraid that she had somehow failed Trisha, that she hadn't been all a mother should be to a daughter—perhaps she was too much like her own mother. Or like last night, when she'd actually treated Trisha as a rival.

“I know we've had our differences in the past, Trisha,” she began hesitantly. “And I haven't always understood. But I do love you. You know that, don't you?”

“Yes.” An impatience seemed to push Trisha off the bed, her pajama-clad legs uncurling and carrying her to the serving table, where she brushed the pastry crumbs from her hand onto a plate. “Sometimes I just wish you'd let me grow up. You let me make my own decisions about some things, but I have to make my own mistakes, too, Luz.”

“Like Raul, I suppose.” A certain hardness entered her voice.

“If Raul is a mistake, then yes,” she asserted, then made a determined attempt to throw off the grimness. “It's after nine already. Rob should be arriving from the airport anytime now.

I'd better get dressed.” She moved away toward the connecting door.

“Thanks for the morning coffee.”

“Sure.”

It wasn't a very satisfactory conclusion to their conversation. Luz rested the cup in its saucer, wondering why she could never say the right thing to her daughter. She could talk to Rob, but with Trisha she always came away with the feeling she had failed to make herself clear.

Outside her mother's door, Trisha paused. No matter what Luz said, she was convinced her mother objected to Raul solely because he was older. It wasn't fair. Luz was letting her bitterness and resentment over Drew's marriage to a younger woman color her opinion. All that business about a mother's prerogative was simple jealousy of any relationship between a younger woman and an older man. In a way, Trisha felt sorry for her, but that didn't alter her determination to pursue Raul.

The lock clicked and the main door to the suite opened. Rob walked into the sitting room, followed by the porter with his luggage. Trisha noticed his drawn, irritable look as he swung impatiently toward her.

“Which room is mine?” he demanded.

“That one.” She pointed to a door. “And hello to you, too, brother dear.”

“Sorry. Hello.” Immediately after the perfunctory greeting, he glanced at the porter and motioned to the door she had indicated. “Put the bags in there.” Rob turned away from him and ran a hand over his hair, then wearily rubbed the back of his neck.

“Heavy night?” Trisha guessed.

His head came up slightly, his hand stopping its motion. There was an instant of sharpness in his expression, then he crooked his mouth in a rueful grin. “You could say that.”

“Don't tell me. Let me guess. You had a farewell fling with Lady Cyn last night and sampled more of her sinful delights.”

Rob looked at her askance. “What do you mean by that?”

“Come on, Rob,” Trisha mocked. “You were with her, weren't you?”

“Yeah. So what?” he challenged.

“So I doubt that you sat around and held hands if half of
what I heard about her is true. I'll bet she even taught you a few new things,” she teased.

“A few,” he admitted with a faintly secretive air.

“Is she as kinky as they claim?” Trisha asked.

Hesitating, Rob glanced at her. “She's not into whips and chains if that's what you mean. And I didn't find anything particularly kinky in her methods of getting turned on.” He sounded defensive.

“Rob, you aren't serious about her, are you?” She frowned warily.

“Hardly,” he scoffed. “She showed me how to have a good time and turned me on to some new ways. We got a little high together and had a little fun. That's it.” He closed the discussion. “Where's Luz? Is she up yet?”