The Lady and the Lion (16 page)

But she said nothing, because he'd granted her no right by accepting her love. There was still a wall between them, and she wasn't yet ready to pit her own strength against it.

Without another word, Keith released her and gathered up her things, then took her hand firmly and led her into the hotel. She knew what he wanted, what they both wanted; their passion was so strong and uncomplicated that it swept everything else aside, leaving no room for anything except the pleasure they found in each other's arms. And because that was all he would give her now, because she was bound by her love to give him all that she was, she held nothing back.

That morning set the tone for the next two days. Having accepted her love, Keith was different only in that he didn't say another word about their relationship; he didn't question, didn't insist he was bad for her, and was far less contradictory than he'd been before. His desire for her seemed to grow more intense, and her response deepened until even a glance from him was enough to kindle a fire inside her.

He left each evening, literally tearing himself away from her, and returned in the dark predawn hours so tightly wound with strain it was like an aura around him. There was something hard-edged about him when he first returned, something almost violent and dangerous. He was rougher then, his need unhidden,
his
desire potent. She couldn't help but respond to that, her body like a hair trigger to his touch. It never frightened her, but what she felt in him made her anxiety grow.

The most difficult thing she'd ever done in her life was to ask him no questions. She couldn't hold back her own words of love, not once he knew, but clung grimly to at least the spirit of the terms she'd agreed to. In her father's world, with all its subtlety and deception, an agreement had to be honored, a promise upheld; over the years she had gained a deep understanding of how important it was to stand by one's word.

At first, it helped to know that she was good for Keith. The passion between them seemed to... anchor him somehow, help him to regain his balance when he returned in the night so tormented by his demons. He slept deeply afterward, waking late in the morning, and for a few hours he'd be almost relaxed, able to laugh at her bemusement when she demanded to know how on earth they'd wound up on the floor, or when she told him some of the comical stories of growing up in the diplomatic corps.

"You did
what?"

"Well, the American ambassador's daughter told me that all sheikhs went berserk over redheads, and I knew his fourth wife was only a year older than I was, so when he gave Dad a camel, I was convinced he was trying to buy me. I was so terrified that I hid, and somehow or other I got locked into the women's quarters, and Mother thought I'd been kidnapped...."

He watched her constantly, and at first she thought the anger in him was lessening. But, gradually, she realized that it was stronger than ever—only more deeply contained. It dawned on her finally that there was a tug of war going on.

By the third morning, she knew. She knew what this was costing him. He had returned later than usual last night, finding her awake on the balcony, and he'd been wearing a tuxedo that bore the faint scents of smoke and exotic perfume. He had held her as if she were his lifeline, with a desperation that had moved her unbearably, and even as she had responded wildly to his desire, she had recognized the moment Fortune had foretold.

It was after ten when she heard Keith's shower running. She was in the sitting room of his suite, dressed more decorously than usual in slacks and a sedate blouse. She had ordered brunch an hour before, but hadn't been able to touch anything except coffee. She was on her third cup when he came out of his bedroom in jeans, his thick hair still damp from the shower.

He came toward her, smiling, but the smile died and his eyes narrowed as he stopped suddenly a couple of feet from her position at one end of the couch. "What's wrong?"

"Am I so easy to read?"

"Yes."

She was hardly surprised; the question had been a somewhat ironically rhetorical one. But she managed to keep her voice quiet and almost tranquil, leaning heavily on all the years of being a diplomat's daughter and an asset to his career.

"The coffee's still hot," she said.

Barely taking his eyes off her, Keith went over to the table by the balcony doors and poured a cup for himself. Watching him, she wondered with a pang if he realized that there were new threads of silver in his hair and a finely drawn exhaustion in the tautness of his face. His will was relentless, his strength almost indomitable, but there was a limit beyond which even the strongest of men would be destroyed; she wondered if he even knew how close to the edge he really was.

"What's wrong, Erin?"

She couldn't put it off any longer, couldn't deceive herself into hoping it wasn't necessary. Steadily, she said, "I can't stay with you, Keith. I have to go."

He set his cup back on the table with unnatural care, and his eyes went curiously blank. "What are you talking about?"

It was almost impossible for her to hold on to control when he asked that harsh question, but she managed to.
Barely.
"Maybe you can't see what it's doing to you. Maybe you don't want to see. But I do. And I can't be a part of it anymore."

"Erin—"

"It's destroying you. You go out at night, and whatever you're doing is eating you up inside, and then you come back to me but only halfway. I've felt it all along, but now I can see it, and it scares the hell out of me."

He moved slightly, jerkily, as if he would have crossed the space between them, but then went still. "Are you afraid of me?" he demanded in a stony voice.

"No. I never was, even in the beginning. But I'm afraid
for
you. Whatever you're doing is wrong, and it's killing you."

"It isn't wrong. You don't know what you're talking about. I told you—"

"Yes, you told me you weren't a criminal, what you're doing here isn't illegal. It probably isn't. There are some things the law just doesn't cover. But it doesn't make them right. I know you're obsessed, and angry, and have been for a long time. But I promised not to ask questions, so I'm not asking, Keith. I'm just telling you I can't be part of it anymore."

"You aren't part of it." His voice was edging away from control now, tensing with anger. "I made sure."

"By holding me away?
Do you even realize what that made me?
One side of a tug of war.
You want me, but your obsession, your blind anger, keeps pulling you away. I don't know what it is, or where it comes from, but I know you won't let go of it. I know I can't stay here and watch you be torn apart."

"I can handle it," he said harshly.

Erin looked away from him for the first time, her gaze dropping to her tightly laced fingers. "I can't."

"You can't leave. You love me."

After a moment, she raised her eyes to meet his again, hurting so much she knew he saw it. "That's why I have to leave. I'm sorry, Keith. I'm sorry your obsession matters more to you than love."

It was his turn to look away, and he turned stiffly to stare out the open balcony door. He was so tense that his powerful shoulders were rigid, and when he began speaking abruptly his voice was taut with strain. He talked methodically, but as if some dam had burst despite all his efforts, as if every word was wrenched from him totally against his will.

"My natural father died before I was born; he was an air force pilot, killed flying an experimental jet. I was a year old when my mother married Patrick Calloway. He raised me; I've always thought of him as my real father."

Erin listened silently, her own body tense, sensing the root of his anger had to be exposed this way, slowly,
a
gradual uncovering of all the layers he had wrapped it in.

"He insisted I keep the name I was born with, and explained it to me carefully when I was a kid and hurt that he wouldn't adopt me. He said that my blood father had been cheated in never knowing me, and that all he'd been able to give me was his name; I had to honor him by keeping it. Dad—Patrick—had everything else, everything I would have given my father if he lived. And he treated me as if I'd been born to him."

"He sounds wonderful," Erin said softly.

"He was. So was my mother. I had a great childhood, filled with love and understanding. I was in high school when my sister was born, and I adored her from the first moment I set eyes on her. She was beautiful, I told you that, and she could wrap anyone around her little finger. She was a good kid, right from the first, not at all spoiled or willful. She would have grown into an incredible woman."

Erin was beginning to feel very cold, and only just stopped herself from crying out.
Not all of them?
But she forced herself to remain still and silent, watching his broad back that was so tense, feeling even across the distance between them the brutal rage clawing at him. She forced herself to wait, and after a moment he went on.

"After college, I began working in Dad's company; from the ground up, we both wanted it that way. It's an engineering firm, based in New York, with offices on the West Coast and in Europe. After a few years, I took over the traveling for Dad, so he and Mom could enjoy more time together. I wasn't home a lot, and I didn't really know what was going on in their lives."

Keith's voice had been growing steadily more remote, quieter and without force or emotion, as if now he were saying words that meant nothing to him. That chilled Erin, because it told her all the turbulent feelings were still trapped in him, and he still wasn't willing or able to release them.

"A little over a year ago," he went on, "I was in Paris, and had been for a few months. The call woke me in the middle of the night. It was a friend of mine, a cop with the NYPD, and he said there'd been an accident. Dad's car had gone off a slippery road in the Catskills. Mom had been with him, and Cathy. They were all dead."

"Keith... Oh, Keith, I'm so sorry." She wanted to go to him, comfort him somehow, but she could feel the distance between them was greater than it had ever been, as if he'd withdrawn completely inside himself. And he seemed not even to hear her voice, going on in that dispassionate tone as if he felt nothing.

"All I knew until I got home was that they were dead. And there was so much to do, so many things to take care of. At first I didn't realize there'd been more to it than I'd been told. But I found out. I found out the police were certain it hadn't been an accident, even though they couldn't prove who was responsible. They knew the car had been run off the road deliberately. They even knew who had ordered it done.

"Dad had been involving himself in conservation efforts, something I hadn't known. There was a wealthy businessman with political influence named Guy Wellman, who wanted to acquire a piece of property the conservationists were trying to save. Wellman would have netted millions from the deal; he already had an agreement under the table to sell the property to a foreign conglomerate. Dad was spearheading the fight against him, and it looked like he was winning."

Erin fought to keep her voice steady. "Then it was Wellman who—"

"That lily-white coward?"
The total lack of emotion in Keith's voice was almost eerie. "He wouldn't dirty his elegant hands with such a distasteful thing as murder. But he didn't mind crawling in bed with the devil to get it done. He asked a favor of Vincent Arturo, an up-and-coming crime boss with a lot of ambition. Arturo had been scratching for political ties, needing the influence to smooth his climb to the top, and Wellman looked like the perfect tool.

"So Wellman went to Arturo. Arturo's old-line
mafia,
and they know how to protect themselves. He set up the hit in such a way that no one would ever be able to prove he gave the order, even if the police found the men who'd actually run the car off the road.

"When Dad was killed, the conservationist group he'd been working with yelled murder. That was the first I'd heard of it. But over the next few months, I found out the rest.
Pieced it together, just like the police had.
All the circumstantial evidence that would never reach the inside of a courtroom.
Until I was sure."

Keith turned suddenly to face her, his face like granite and eyes completely shuttered. His voice was still remote and dispassionate when he said, "Then I came here to destroy them."

"How?"
Erin whispered. He was so far away from her now that he looked at her as if from the cold, dark reaches of some alien place with no way to get back and no will even to try.

"By playing on their greed and mistrust," Keith explained in that distant voice. "Wellman came down here because he'd found out too late what it meant to have Arturo's claws in him and he wanted to get away. Arturo followed, because he'd had his eye on the drug traffic in Florida and thought he could control this territory—if he could find a way to remove Martine, the man who was already in charge here. The setup was perfect. Wellman was squirming, Arturo was demanding more and more of him—more introductions, more influence, more of his flesh than just a pound. Arturo didn't have the manpower to declare war on Martine, but he was working to get it. They hated and mistrusted each other." Erin swallowed hard. "What did you do?" Keith took a step away from the doors and sat down in a chair near the table. His gaze was fixed on her unwaveringly. "I created a Colombian drug cartel, and made myself their representative. It was absurdly easy. All I needed was enough money, and I had that. A faked identity, a boat and jet with Colombian registry, a few paper holding companies with impressive cash
balances,
a bribe or a favor here and there so that anyone checking would find what I wanted them to. It took a few months to set up, and then all I had to do was come here, splash money around, and meet the right people."

"Wellman.
And Arturo."

He nodded slowly. "For nearly three weeks, I've been setting them up. Wellman thinks my cartel will get Arturo off his back because we intend to kill him and deal with Martine; all I ask of Wellman is a little political clout in return. The same deal he made with Arturo, in fact.
Poetic justice.
Arturo believes he's found the backing to launch a war against
Martine, that
my cartel prefers to see him in charge, so he's gathering his forces. But of course, there is no cartel. Keith..."