When neither of the people on the bed answered her, Suzie leaned over them. “Do your friends think the world of you?” she asked loudly.
At that Ace lay back on the bed and opened his mouth to tell Suzie what he thought of her. But Fiona didn’t want to hear it. Yes, she wanted to make love with Ace, wanted to very much, but there was something holding her back from giving herself to him fully. She didn’t know what it was, but there was something between them that hadn’t been resolved. Maybe it was that she didn’t think they had a future, what with his being in love with Lisa and the fact that they had been together only under horrible circumstances, but, yet, there was something else too.
So she rolled off the bed and stood. “Yes, my friends think a great deal of me.”
It was obvious that Suzie had wanted to break Ace and Fiona apart. But why? Fiona wondered. In fact, when she looked back on it, Suzie’s many timely interruptions couldn’t have been by chance. Every time that she and Ace touched each other, there was Suzie asking some inane question or doing things like insisting that she sleep between the two of them.
Whatever Suzie was doing, it was certainly intentional, and it was very personal.
“There’s hot coffee downstairs,” Suzie said cheerfully as though she were unaware of what she had deliberately interrupted; then she got off the bed and turned her back on them.
Fiona almost giggled as Ace stood up, made his hands into claws, and went for the back of Suzie’s neck. But Suzie turned in the doorway. “Ace, dear, your clothes are in the other bedroom, aren’t they?” she said and seemed determined to wait until he followed her. She was not going to leave the two of them in the room alone together.
To Fiona, it was funny. Yes, she wanted to make love with Ace, but there was something old world and chivalrous about Suzie’s attitude, as though she were protecting Fiona from something. She smiled when Ace left the room.
After Fiona had dressed, she went downstairs, and there she saw Ace in a towering rage pulling Suzie out the back door. Fiona followed them outside.
“Look what you’ve done!” he was saying in a low voice that had undercurrents of murder in it.
“I’m sorry,” Suzie was saying. “It was an accident, I can assure you. I didn’t mean to do it.”
“So what happened?” Fiona asked, yawning. It wasn’t full daylight outside yet, and she’d had very little sleep.
“This woman,” Ace spoke with contempt, “just destroyed the papers your friends sent us.”
“No!” Fiona breathed, then looked at the sodden mess that Ace was holding.
“She dropped the glass coffeepot on top of the papers, then tried to clean the mess up with the wet papers.”
“I just forgot, okay?” Suzie said, sounding as though she was on the verge of tears. “I put the papers down on the counter, then dropped the pot on top of them. It was a reaction to start scrubbing with the papers.”
“Do you have any idea what those papers could have cost those women?” Ace said angrily. “I don’t know how they got into Fiona’s apartment, but it had to be by illegal means. Then they stayed up all night doing whatever they had to to transcribe them so they could fax them to us. If they’d been caught, those women would be prosecuted.”
Fiona didn’t like to think about what he was saying, and she didn’t like the way Suzie was shaking. Fiona didn’t know what it was, but there was something about Suzie that she liked. Maybe it was the way she played chaperone to her and Ace.
Whatever it was, Fiona put her arm around the shorter woman’s shoulders and drew her head against her chest. “It was an accident, so let up, will you?”
“Accident?” Ace said, scowling. “You know what? I think she did it on purpose. In fact I think her whole act is just that, an act. I don’t think she’s who she says she is or that she’s as innocent as she pretends to be.” He was advancing on her.
“Me innocent?” Suzie said, sniffing, and clinging to Fiona. “You’re the one who’s a liar. Why did you allow Fiona’s friends to risk their lives to get these papers? Why didn’t your family just buy their way into her apartment? In fact, why don’t you just buy your way out of this whole thing? What would it cost you? A few million? What’s that to someone as rich as you?”
By the time she finished, Suzie was hiding behind Fiona, her hands on the younger woman’s waist, and Ace was going for her throat.
“I’m going to kill you,” Ace whispered.
Fiona drew herself up and kept her place between the two of them. “What is she talking about?” she asked softly.
“Nothing important,” Ace said, still trying to get to Suzie.
Fiona put out her arm, barring his way. She was looking hard at Ace and with great intensity. “Is this why we don’t look at newspapers and TV?” she asked softly. “You didn’t want me to find out that you were … rich?” She said the last word so quietly he could barely hear her.
Stepping back, Ace looked at her. “It wasn’t a secret,” he began. “I …”
Fiona turned to Suzie, pulling her hands away from her body. “How rich?”
In answer, Suzie made a sound in her throat. “Kings have run countries on less money than he has.”
Fiona sat down on a barstool. “So everything you’ve told me has been a lie,” she said softly.
“Fee,” Ace said, reaching out his hands to touch her.
But Fiona put her hand up to halt him. “From the very beginning, everything has been a lie. You told me that you had worked for years to earn the money to buy the plastic alligator, but that was a lie. You could have bought it out of the cash you had in your wallet.”
“I’ve never spent a penny of my inheritance,” Ace said, his face twisted with emotion. “I’ve tried to make it on my own.”
“I think it was Henry Ford who said ‘Nothing kills ambition like an inheritance,’ right?” she said. Her voice was flat and her eyes were even flatter. “Do you own the hotel where we stayed?”
“No,” Ace murmured.
“But I bet his family does,” Suzie said. “At least one of his relatives is a billionaire.”
“Oh, my,” Fiona said. “Not merely millions, but billions.”
“Fiona,” he said, his hands outstretched in pleading. “It hasn’t been like that. I never meant—”
“To lie to me? Why not? Who am I to you? Tell me, is your beloved Lisa from a wealthy family?”
Ace didn’t answer her, but just stood there with his lips tight.
Fiona turned to Suzie.
“You really haven’t been reading the papers, have you? Miss Lisa Rene Honeycutt’s family is almost as wealthy as the Montgomerys. Not quite, but nearly. According to the papers, his family, throughout history, has married money.”
“Well,” Fiona said, turning back to Ace. “In this case only I was available, so I guess you take what you can get.” It was a nasty comment, but she wanted to hurt him for lying to her.
She waited for Ace to answer, but he didn’t. He just stood there glaring at her. Part of her wanted to scream at him to tell her that the thoughts inside her head weren’t true. But another part wanted to hold on to her anger and hurt. When a man has lied to you as completely as this man had, you couldn’t be dumb enough to fall in love with him.
Fiona turned her back on both of them. “Is everyone ready to go? The sooner we get started, the faster we can get this over with.”
“I’m ready,” Suzie said, moving away from the protection of Fiona. “Just a trip inside to the little girls’ room and I’m all set.”
When Ace and Fiona were alone in the backyard, he moved to stand close to her. “I think we ought to talk about this. I never meant—”
Turning, she smiled at him coldly. “What you have in your bank account is none of my concern,” she said with as little emotion as she could manage. “You don’t owe me anything, and I don’t owe anything to you. What has happened to us hasn’t been exactly a party. We were thrown together under extraordinary circumstanc
es, remember? And you had no obligation to tell me anything about yourself other than what was absolutely necessary. That you finagled me into telling you everything there is to tell about myself while you kept the basic essence of yourself, literally, who and what you are, from me, means nothing.” Her voice was rising, but she didn’t care.
“No,” she said, putting up her hand when he started to speak. “You don’t have to defend your actions. What were you going to say to me? ‘By the way, Burke, I’m rich, and I’m just living on a run-down bird farm for a lark? I wanted to see how the other half lives. It makes great dinner party entertainment. I—’”
“I think you’ve said enough,” he said just as coldly. “I don’t think you should talk about something you know nothing about.”
“You’re bloody right there. I know nothing, do I? You know about my mother, my father, about my being the poor lonely kid in boarding schools, and about how I’ve felt about my job, about everything there is to know about me. But I know nothing about you.”
“You know everything that’s important to know about me,” he said quietly. “I have always considered that there was more to me than what I had in the bank, but if you think that that’s the most important thing there is to know about me, then I’ve misjudged you.”
“Misjudged me?” she hissed at him, but he’d turned away and started out of the kitchen.
“Everybody ready?” Suzie asked cheerfully, then was greeted with scowls from both of them as they stalked toward the Jeep. “Something tells me that this isn’t going to be a pleasant excursion,” she said, but she was smiling as she said it, smiling as though she’d accomplished what she meant to.
Nineteen
On the drive to Kendrick Park, all Fiona could think about was Ace’s betrayal of her. How could she have thought that she knew him? She had been thinking that she knew the real him because she knew what he liked to eat for breakfast. And because she knew about his love of birds. But all this time he had been excluding her from the real him.
And why not? she wondered. What was she to him? They had been thrown together by a freak accident, because her father and his uncle had been involved in something that happened long ago. And because Roy Hudson had stolen the story from her father. And because—
“You want to talk about this?” Ace asked softly, glancing away from the road to look at her.
“Nothing to talk about,” she said with as much carelessness as she could put into her voice. “Will we get there soon? I was wondering, you know Kendrick Park and you saw the map, so how long do you think it will take us to find the lions? If they’re still there, I mean. I certainly hope they are because—”
Ace glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that Suzie appeared to be sleeping. He doubted that she was, but at least she was pretending to give them some privacy. “The reason I didn’t tell you that my family has money,” he said softly, “is because I didn’t want it to matter.”
She stopped talking and looked at him, one eyebrow raised. “I see. You just wanted to make me feel bad about smashing your expensive alligator and taking food out of your employees’ mouths.”
“Yes,” he said simply. “At first that was true. I was angry. I had earned the money on my own to pay for the thing; then to have it smashed like that and know that I was going to dip into money I hadn’t earned …” He glanced out the side window for a second before looking back at the road. “I wanted to blame you for everything, but then …” He looked at her.
“Then what?” she said, her voice still full of anger. “You what? Fell in love with me? Is that why you tried to get me into bed with you? You don’t think I’m going to fall for that, do you?”
“Is that how I come off to you?” he asked, turning quickly to glare at her. “Do you think I set this whole thing up just to go to bed with you?”
Fiona looked out the window and realized how ridiculous she sounded. Her girlfriends often called her a prude. Jean had once gone to a Caribbean island and spent a week in bed with a young man she never planned to see again. But here Fiona was, at thirty-two, on the very edge of the twenty-first century, and she was acting like the virgin in a Greek play.
But logic had nothing to do with it! she thought. His lies went beyond the ordinary lies that men told to women. Ace’s lies were fundamental, and they had almost made her believe in them. Believe in him.
“Look,” she said as calmly as she could manage, “I have no right to be angry about anything. Your life is yours, and whether you have money or not, whether you pay for your alligators yourself or your daddy does, is none of my business. Maybe in another forty-eight hours we’ll have found the lions and maybe found out who really killed Roy, and maybe … I don’t know, maybe everything will be solved and you can go back to your rich family, and I can go back to … to …” For the life of her, she couldn’t think what she had to go back to. Kimberly was no longer hers, and she had a gut feeling that neither was Jeremy. And the truth was, she didn’t think that she’d ever be able to look at Jeremy without seeing Ace Montgomery. In fact, she wasn’t sure she was ever going to be able to look at any man without seeing him.
Ace had pulled off the highway onto the overgrown back road that entered Kendrick Park, and now they were heading toward the cabin.
He didn’t respond to her statement, and she wondered what he was thinking. For her, with every plant they passed, every bird they saw darting about, she remembered the first time they had been to his uncle’s old shack. Fiona remembered being frightened, but she also remembered the simple camaraderie they had shared in those days. She remembered how Ace had protected her from bullets with his own body; he was ready to be shot rather than allow her to be hurt.
Had he been acting? she wondered. Was anyone that good an actor?
But even back then she had known he was hiding something. She hadn’t had a clue what it was, but she knew that he wasn’t who he seemed. And now she knew what it was that he had been covering up: Money. He was wealthy and he hadn’t wanted her to know about it. Why? Wasn’t she his social class?
When they were close to the cabin, Ace said, “Fiona, I want to tell you that—”
He didn’t finish his statement because standing on the porch of the falling down old shack was Jeremy. And beside him was a lovely young woman who Fiona recognized from TV as Miss Lisa Rene Honeycutt.
Twenty
“This is not a garden party,” Ace said through his teeth to his cute, perky little fiancée.
Fiona had to turn away to hide her smile because when she’d first seen the adorable-looking Lisa, she’d been afraid that Ace was going to fall all over her, and Fiona wasn’t ready to see that yet. She didn’t know when she was going to be ready for that, but it certainly wasn’t now.
Now they were inside the old shack, and from the looks of the place the animals were grateful that an attempt had been made to clean it, because they’d redoubled their efforts to make it their home. But Fiona happily sat down on a couch that a few weeks before she wouldn’t have touched. Smiling, she patted the space beside her for Jeremy to take, but he gave her a curled-lip glance that asked if she’d lost her mind.
Everyone in the cabin was focused on the argument going on between Ace and Lisa, watching them as though they were the stars of a movie.
“Lisa,” Ace said through clenched teeth. “Do you have any idea how serious what you’ve done is? If the police followed you, Fiona and I could be taken to jail before we get a chance to clear our names.”
Lisa stuck out her lower lip in the prettiest pout imaginable. “If you talk to me like that, I won’t tell you our surprise.”
When Ace’s face turned dark and his hands made fists, Fiona decided to step in before there was a fourth murder. “If your surprise is something to wear and in silk, I’m all for it,” Fiona said, trying to inject humor into the situation, because, so far, there had been no humor. Jeremy had greeted her with a hand tightly gripping her upper arm, as though she were a wayward two-year-o
ld and he were bringing her back into line. Had he always treated her like a child? she wondered.
At Fiona’s words, Lisa turned to her, and her blue eyes were fire, a fire that asked who Fiona thought she was.
But instead of angering her, Lisa’s hate-filled look made Fiona give a warm smile of congratulations to Ace. What a lovely lady you’ve chosen, her smile said.
“He is my surprise,” Lisa said coldly, pointing to the door.
In the doorway stood an old man. But on second glance, Fiona thought that maybe he wasn’t as old as he seemed but just beaten about by weather and time. His gray hair was sparse, as was his body, and his neck hung down in whiskery folds into a shirt that was clean but nearly worn out.
“Forget about these?” the old man said, then held out his thin hand to show three little listening devices.
“Did you find them easily because you put them in the cabin?” Ace snapped.
Fiona was staring at the man. There was something familiar about him, and when he turned to address Ace, she let out a gasp. The man turned back to her and gave a wide grin. He was missing his left incisor.
“Know me, do you, Little Smokey?” he said, laughing.
“Gibby,” Fiona whispered, for she’d seen the green dragon tattoo going up the back of his right calf.
“Smokey always said you were smart,” the man said, then turned sharply to look at Suzie. “You ain’t changed much,” he said, looking her up and down. “What’d you do? Sell your soul for youth?”
Suzie smiled at him. “Screwed the brains out of a plastic surgeon and he was real grateful.”
Gibby laughed with her.
“All right,” Jeremy said in his lawyer voice. “I want to know what’s going on. This man said that if we’d take him here, he’d clear up this whole mess, so now I want to know what’s going on.”
But no one answered him, because Ace, Fiona, and Gibby were pulling on backpacks.
“We have to get going. We have a long hike ahead of us,” Ace said, then looked at Jeremy in his lightweight suit. “We’ll be back as soon as we can get back. The car keys are on the table.” It was obvious that he planned to leave Jeremy, Lisa, and Suzie behind.