Gift of Gold

  Strange. Kincaid knew all the names on that list and he knew all of them did their own bidding.

  If Tresslar’s discreet mercenary agency had done its job properly two nights ago, Kincaid wouldn’t have been bothered with Quarrel now. But things had gone wrong; disturbingly wrong.

  The report of failure had arrived a few minutes earlier, delivered by Tresslar in that annoying hick accent. Kincaid had been furious.

  “Is your man alive?” he’d demanded.

  “He’s alive.”

  “How much does he know?”

  “The only thing he had was a description and location of his target. He does not know why the contract was issued or who issued it. I assure you our safety precautions are all in place and functioning. You are in no danger.”

  “What happens to that idiot you hired to take care of Quarrel?”

  “As I said, he knows nothing of importance. He’s on his own. It was part of our arrangement. My guess is he’ll tell the authorities he was merely looking for an empty cabin in which to spend a cold night and was startled to find it occupied. He thought he was being attacked. He panicked and tried to protect himself. As I said, it’s his problem. My agency is out of it and so are you. We are both protected by my precautions.”

  “What about the down payment I gave you?”

  “You have two options. We will be happy to refund your money, or you can give us the go-ahead to conclude the contract, in which case, I myself will do the job this time. We like satisfied customers.”

  Kincaid had given that consideration. “I believe I’ll have you finish the contract, but this time we’ll do it my way. I want to give the instructions. I will be actively involved and I will be in charge in the field. Don’t worry, I don’t need to see your face. You’ll be working at night and out-of-doors. You can wear a ski mask or something.”

  There had been a long pause on the other end of the line. “It’ll cost you a lot more to do it that way.”

  “Never mind the cost. Can you guarantee the job this time?”

  “You got it.” The phone was replaced on the other end of the line.

  Kincaid reran the conversation several times in his head and then reran his own blossoming plans. After a moment he got up and went to the wall to take down a handsome rapier. Dropping into fencer’s crouch, he made a few quick feints before sliding skillfully into a long, deadly thrust that buried the blade in the stuffed dummy.

  He was looking forward to the night he would be spending at the house. It was a long time since he’d had an excuse to do his own dirty work. But an old lust that he’d kept under control for a long time was stirring deep within him.

  There had been little problem satisfying his superficial sexual needs in the past few years. Women were drawn to power and money the way moths were drawn to flames. But he’d been forced to suppress this other need, obliged to dampen and conceal it in the darkest part of himself.

  The prospect of personal involvement in violence was enough to draw aside the veil that had covered this other lust for far too long. He discovered that the dark, thrilling passion was still there within him, as strong as it had ever been. Now that he had awakened it once more, it would not be hidden again until it had been satisfied.

  Kincaid thrust the rapier into the helpless dummy again and felt the sensual tension that pulsed in his groin.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The sea appeared deceptively calm from the windows of Caitlin Evanger’s house. Verity stood in the bedroom she had been assigned, the same one she’d had last time, and gazed down at the cliffs. She noticed that from this angle she could see the broken safety fence where it sagged precariously at the edge. Caitlin really ought to get that fixed.

  Verity wondered what the view was like from Jonas’s window and smiled to herself as she recalled the annoyance in his eyes when he discovered he’d been given a separate bedroom.

  Moving into Verity’s Sequence Springs cottage had wrought an interesting change in the man. Jonas had become fiercely territorial in the past few days.

  Verity was still trying to decide how to adjust to this new, possessive side of her dishwasher-waitperson-handyman. She was also trying to decide how to deal with her reaction to having a lover under her roof. Her emotions were still jumbled in some ways, but diamond bright in others. She spent a lot of time warning herself that the situation was temporary at best and that she shouldn’t allow herself to invest too much emotion in the man or the situation.

  Jonas had a talent for reading the past but he obviously preferred to ignore his own future.

  But Jonas showed no signs of wanting to leave Sequence Springs yet, and the more settled in he got, the more Verity began to think in terms of permanence. She was wondering what would happen if Jonas ever found another woman with whom he could “anchor” himself, when the door opened almost silently behind her. Verity spun around at the faint creak and saw who stood there.

  “Oh, hello, Tavi. You took me by surprise.” Verity summoned up a bright smile. She got no response. “I was just admiring the view.”

  Tavi looked at her with unhappy, anxious eyes. “I want to talk to you.”

  “Of course. Have a seat.” Verity indicated a black leather chair.

  Tavi ignored it. Her hands twisted together as she spoke. “What’s going to happen here is wrong, but I don’t know how to stop it. I have done a great deal of thinking about it and I have come to the conclusion that only you can do something about it. You’re the key, just as Caitlin says. That’s why I want to talk to you.”

  Verity stared at her. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Tavi. Does this have something to do with Caitlin’s decision to sell Bloodlust?”

  “It has everything to do with it,” Tavi whispered fiercely. “She must not sell it. It will be the end of everything. I think it will kill her.”

  “Oh, Tavi, no.” Verity sighed and sank down onto the chair Tavi had ignored. “I was afraid of something like this. The morning she told me of her plans, I wondered why she was so obsessed with selling this one last painting and then not painting again. Do you think she means to kill herself?”

  “I don’t think she has thought about anything, including life or death, after the sale of the damned painting.” Tavi looked at her pleadingly. “You could stop this whole thing.”

  Verity jerked her eyes up in astonishment. “I could stop it? What on earth are you talking about? What could I possibly do to stop her from selling Bloodlust?”

  “You could take your lover and leave and never come back,” Tavi whispered.

  Verity recoiled from the plea in the other woman’s eyes. “What good would that do?” she managed to ask in a reasonably steady voice.

  “If you leave she will be forced to cancel all her wild plans.”

  “Tavi, be reasonable. There’s nothing to stop her from carrying out the auction without me. At least if I’m here, I’ll be able to talk to her afterward. We’ll know then just how much the sale is going to affect her. You must see there’s no point in forcing me to leave. I can’t do anything for her if I’m not around.”

  “It all hinges on you,” Tavi rasped. “Can’t you see? Why do you think she invited you here? You and that man who watches you as if you were gold he must protect at all costs. You don’t really think that under normal circumstances Caitlin would have made friends with someone like yourself? She has no friends except me. She has seduced you in ways you don’t even comprehend. But your lover knows. I can tell by the way he acts around her. He knows she’s dangerous to you but he doesn’t know what to do about it. Only you can do something about it. Take him and leave. Now.”

  “Tavi, I don’t understand any of this. You’re not talking rationally. What is it you think Caitlin wants to do to me?”

  The door opened again before Tavi could respond. Jonas stood on the threshold scowling at
both women. Tavi glanced at him, turned, and walked swiftly out of the room. Jonas watched her go and then shut the door behind her.

  “What was that all about?” he asked, raising dark eyebrows as he scanned the bedroom.

  “I don’t know,” Verity admitted. “I think Tavi might be slightly unbalanced, Jonas. She was acting very strange. The one thing that was clear is that she’s concerned for Caitlin. She worries about what Caitlin’s going to do after she sells the painting.”

  “So what?” Jonas began to prowl the room. “You’re worried about Caitlin, too. Hell, everyone seems to be worried sick about the poor, eccentric artist who’s obsessed with selling one last painting. Let me tell you something, honey. Evanger is no fool and she’s no innocent eccentric. She’s got something up her sleeve. I can feel it. If you had any sense you’d see it.”

  “Is that right? What do you think she’s up to?” Verity snapped, irritated.

  He shrugged his graceful, courtier’s shrug. “Who knows? It’s probably got something to do with jacking up the price of Bloodlust until it’s high enough to keep her in cocaine for the rest of her life.”

  “Jonas! That’s enough. I don’t want to hear you say anything like that again. Caitlin is no druggie and you know it.”

  “How do I know it?” He stopped by the bed and stood staring at it with great intensity. “I’ll tell you something else I don’t like. I don’t like the way she’s split us up tonight.”

  “We’re guests in her home and we’re not married,” Verity said stonily. “It’s only natural she’d give us separate rooms. We had separate rooms last time.”

  “This time it’s different between us. You should have told her to put us together,” he insisted, his attention still on the bed. “Hell, we’re lovers now. It’s official. We’re even living together.”

  “We’ve been living together for all of a few days. That hardly constitutes a long-term relationship,” Verity pointed out dryly. “Be reasonable, Jonas. It would have been embarrassing for me to ask to have you moved into my room, especially when all the arrangements have been made for us to have separate rooms.”

  “You’re embarrassed about having me for a lover?”

  Verity pleaded silently with the heavens for forbearance. “That’s not what I meant and you know it. It’s one of those social situations, Jonas. One does the polite thing. There are still certain proprieties, even in this day and age. One doesn’t contradict the sleeping arrangements provided by one’s hostess. Can’t you understand that?”

  “Don’t lock your door tonight”

  She eyed him warily. “Why not?”

  “Because after the party I’m going to sneak down the hall and slip into this room. The same way I did the last time we were here,” he added with satisfaction.

  “You didn’t exactly come tippy-toeing down the hall last time. You showed up half-naked with a big sword in one hand. When the lightning lit the room I thought I was about to be stabbed to death by a madman.”

  “You have an overactive imagination.”

  “Hah. You’re the last person on the face of this earth who should be lecturing someone else about an active imagination. Jonas, why are you staring at that bed?”

  “I don’t know. Something about it is…” he broke off, searching for the word. “Disturbing.”

  “Now who’s showing signs of an overactive imagination? What do you mean, disturbing?”

  “It’s disturbing in the same sense the dagger in Kincaid’s office was disturbing. I’ve never picked up vibrations from modem stuff until I met you, Verity. But things seem to be changing. First the dagger and now this bed.”

  Verity froze. “The bed? You’re picking up a sensation from the bed? Something that leads to that damned corridor? I thought you only responded to weapons.”

  “Or something that has a close association with violence. Anything can be used as a weapon or have an association with violence,” he explained absently.

  “But a bed?”

  “Let’s see what happens.”

  Belatedly Verity’s alarm bell started ringing. “Wait! Jonas, I don’t think this is a good idea. Maybe you’d better not touch it.”

  But she was too late. He had already curved his fingers around the steel bedpost and the instant he touched the metal, Verity was disconcerted to find herself inside a fuzzy version of the now-familiar psychic corridor.

  “Jonas.”

  “I’m here.” He came up behind her in the corridor and his hand closed over her shoulder. “Look.”

  He spun her around and Verity found herself staring at an insubstantial dream image of the bed. It floated in the corridor, vague and indistinct. But in this image the bed was wildly rumpled. The sheets were bloodstained and the nude figure of a woman was lying obscenely spread-eagled across the mattress. There was blood between the woman’s legs and in her dark hair. She had her head turned away. The woman appeared to be either dead or unconscious.

  Verity reacted with more horror than she had felt toward any of the other images she had encountered in the corridor. She was paralyzed with it. She knew without further examination that she was staring at the scene of a violent rape. Even as she watched, savage red emotions unfurled from under the bed and twisted blindly toward Jonas.

  They got sidetracked when they sensed Verity’s presence and reluctantly swerved to curl around her feet in obedience to the invisible pull she had on them.

  Verity cried out and found some control over her muscles, enough to enable her to flee. She whirled to run, afraid she would vomit before she could get out of the corridor. Her stomach was churning.

  “Jonas, help me. Help me.” It was the first time she had ever called out to him. Always before he was the one who had demanded help in the corridor. He caught hold of her, his fingers like iron on her shoulders.

  “I’m here, Verity.” He held her tightly, refusing to let her flee. “It’s all right. Everything’s under control. I want to see if I can handle a couple of those ribbons. I’ve definitely been getting stronger lately and I may be at a point where I can manage some of the emotions instead of being overwhelmed by them. Should be an interesting experiment.”

  Verity was trantic with her horror. She grabbed the front of his shirt with two small fists and shouted in his face, “No. Absolutely not. Get us out of here. Now.”

  Something of her terror must have gotten through to him. He looked down at her and in real time he released his hold on the bedpost.

  An instant later they were both standing safely in the bedroom. Verity was trembling so badly she had to sit down. Automatically she started to sink onto the bed and then she remembered the scene she had just witnessed. She jumped up again and went across the room to the chair, taking deep breaths to steady herself.

  “Oh, God, Jonas, that was the worst one yet,” she whispered. Her hands twisted together in her lap. She tried to still them between her jeaned legs.

  Jonas went over to stand beside her, his hand moving soothingly in her hair. “Maybe it was bad for you because there was a woman in it,” he suggested. “You’ve never seen a woman in one of those images before.”

  Verity shook her head desperately. “It wasn’t just that there was a woman. It was the fact that I know her.”

  “What?” Jonas’s hand stopped making gentling movements in her hair. He caught her chin and lifted her face so that he could look at her. “You think you know her? Verity, I’ve never seen anyone I know in those images.”

  “Since you’ve only recently started seeing contemporary images, that’s hardly surprising,” she muttered.

  “Well? Don’t keep me in suspense. Who is she? Or should I say who was she?”

  “I’m not sure. There was just something about her I recognized. I just had a feeling I knew her, that’s all.”

  “Honey,” he said gently. “I don’t think th
at’s possible. She may have resembled someone you’ve met at some point in your life, but that’s all.”

  Verity surged to her feet. “I know what I saw. Jonas, this is awful. How can I sleep here tonight? I won’t be able to close my eyes without seeing that horrible picture of that poor woman. She’d been raped. She might have been dead. I couldn’t tell for sure. I can’t possibly sleep in this room.”

  “That problem is easily solved,” he said firmly. “You’ll sleep with me. Now come on. Get your jacket. We’re going for a walk down on the beach. It will clear your head. Exercise is good for stress.”

  For once she was grateful to have Jonas take charge. Verity didn’t argue. She got her jacket and meekly allowed him to lead her down to the sea. On the way down the steep trail that led to the beach she decided he was right. She would be the one sneaking down the hall tonight. The hell with social niceties. She was not going to sleep alone in that terrible bed.

  “Jonas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Remember what Caitlin said about her house having once had a reputation for wild orgies?”

  “I remember.”

  “Everyone has a different definition of what constitutes an orgy. It’s easy to see where the locals might have exaggerated things for the sake of a good story.”

  “True,” Jonas agreed neutrally.

  “But now I wonder.”

  “Yes.”

  Neither of them said anything else for a long time.

  Verity could not get either the rape scene or Tavi’s demands out of her mind after lunch. Caitlin seemed not to notice her guest’s uneasiness. Throughout the midday meal, which was served by a grimly silent Tavi, the artist talked incessantly about her plans for the evening and about the auction she intended to hold the next day.

  Lunch was served in an alcove off the kitchen because the rest of the bottom floor of the house had been taken over by caterers and decorators. Caitlin was sparing no expense to recreate her Renaissance salon scene in the huge room that fronted the house on the ground floor.