Twist of Fate

  “Then to what do I owe the honor of this visit?”

  “I’m thinking of selling you a product you might find interesting.”

  “I didn’t know you sold any products for computer firms.” Nick smiled politely, his eyes watchful.

  “It’s a new line. You’d be my first customer.”

  “I’m waiting for the kicker.”

  Gideon gazed around at the expensively designed office, noting the stacks of papers and binders piled on every available surface. “Would you be interested in some management consulting, Nick?”

  “From you?” Nick looked startled.

  Gideon smiled briefly. “What I have to sell is expertise. I can save you from having to do a lot of things the hard way. I can make sure you survive.”

  Nick absorbed the information. “I’m still waiting for the kicker.”

  “The price? It’s negotiable.”

  “Not if it includes a chunk of Accelerated Design stock.”

  Gideon smiled again. “It doesn’t.”

  Nick absently tapped the end of a pencil on the desk. “I’m not sure I can afford you, Mr. Cage.”

  “We’ll work out something. The details can be left for later. Right now I’m only here to find out if you’re interested.”

  “I’d be fool not to be interested, wouldn’t I?”

  “Not necessarily. You’ll probably make it on your own. I learned a great deal about you during our last encounter. You held things together when another man might have given up and abandoned ship. You have potential.”

  “That’s what my sister says.” Nick hesitated. “Is that why you’re here? Because of Hannah?”

  “Hannah doesn’t approve of my coming to see you.”

  “She’s a fairly good judge of human nature.”

  “Not right now she isn’t. She’s too wary of me to be a good judge. If we agree to work together you’d have to trust your own instincts.”

  “I’m willing to back my own judgment.”

  “You wouldn’t be heading up your business if you weren’t. Are you in the market for some consulting?” Gideon asked.

  “I’m in the market. As I said, I’m just not sure I can afford you.”

  “It can be arranged.”

  “I’ll bet. I’d want a contract. One that guaranteed you’d keep hands off Accelerated Design in the future. I’d want your fee tied to verifiable improvements in standards of operation and profits. And I’d want a trial period to see whether we can work together before we agree to any long-term arrangement.”

  “You’re a cautious man, Nick.”

  “I recently learned caution the hard way.”

  Gideon shrugged. “It’s a good lesson to pick up early in life.”

  Nick smiled slightly. “I paid a high price for it. I don’t want to wind up paying that much for anything again. Especially not consulting work.”

  “As I said, we can work it out.”

  “Have you had lunch, Gideon?”

  “Yes. On the plane.”

  Nick considered the man in front of him. “Got plans for the afternoon?”

  “No. Not until this evening.”

  “My sister tells me you swim. There’s a large pool at my club. I’m going to work out this afternoon. If you’d like to come along, you’re welcome.”

  “Fine. We can talk.”

  Some of the casualness went out of Nick’s eyes to be replaced with grim directness. “I owe you for what you did for Hannah. You saved her life.”

  “Is that why you’re taking the risk of talking to me?”

  “That and simple curiosity.”

  HANNAH WAS ANNOYED to find herself pacing the floor at six-thirty that evening. She had been dressed for half an hour, her uneasy restlessness putting her much too far ahead of schedule. The black-and-white tropical safari dress she was wearing was of linen, and she was afraid to sit down for fear of wrinkling the fabric before the evening had even begun. Hopefully the linen fashion craze wouldn’t last long, she told herself. Not everyone looked good rumpled.

  Pacing with a still-healing knee was not the most comfortable exercise in the world. She was relieved when Gideon arrived. She went to the door still feeling a sort of generalized irritation. The fact that he was looking very good in a conservative light-tweed jacket and slacks didn’t appease her.

  “You’re late.”

  He glanced apologetically at his watch. “Only five minutes. I had trouble finding a parking space.”

  “But you had no trouble finding my brother?”

  “No. Where’s your coat?”

  “In the closet.”

  “You’d better get it. It’s getting chilly out there, although the rain has stopped.”

  She frowned. “The coat will just make my dress wrinkle more than it already intends to wrinkle.”

  He grinned. “It’s all right. I’ll pretend not to notice.” He walked to the closet and pulled out a black trench coat trimmed in khaki. “There. We’d better get going. I’ve got reservations at seven.”

  “Where?”

  “A place your brother recommended down on the waterfront.”

  Hannah slanted him a long glance as they walked toward the stairs. “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “What did you talk about with my brother?”

  “Business.”

  “Gideon, if you don’t give me some straight answers, I’m going to call the evening to a halt right here.”

  He sighed. “Okay. I offered to do some management consulting for him.”

  “Management consulting! You don’t do management consulting. Your firm is an investment company.”

  “Do you think it’s too late for me to explore other areas of business?” There was a thread of wistfulness in his voice that startled Hannah.

  “No, of course not,” she said automatically. Guidance counselors always took the positive approach when people talked about making changes. “It’s just that I don’t see you going into a new field like that. Not unless there’s something in it for you.”

  “There’s something in it for me. A fee.”

  “Something more than a fee. My brother couldn’t possibly afford much for management consulting right now, so how is he going to pay you?”

  “You’re a suspicious woman, Hannah.”

  “Can you blame me?”

  “Yes. I’ve never lied to you. Never given you cause to distrust me. You don’t have to worry about your brother. My arrangement with him is straightforward and aboveboard. Stop worrying about it. Relax and enjoy the evening.”

  She would gain nothing more by questioning him, Hannah decided. In the morning she would pin Nick down. “Maybe you’re right. I’m just not convinced that you’re genuinely thinking of branching out into another kind of business.”

  “I’m not convinced of it either. This is an experiment.”

  “I’m not sure I want you experimenting on my brother.”

  “You, Hannah,” he told her gently, “don’t have anything to say about it.”

  The restaurant was a traditional fish house located on one of the old piers that lined Seattle’s downtown water-front. The huge container ships that docked regularly in Elliott Bay were too large for the old port facilities. They used the modern ones farther to the south. The old wharves had been turned into restaurants, shops, and parks. From the window Hannah could watch the ferries arriving and departing for their regular excursions across the bay.

  The evening was turning out more pleasantly than she had expected. The salmon was excellent and so was the chardonnay. On top of that, Gideon was going out of his way to be a good host. Half way through the meal Hannah realized that she was doing all the talking. She closed her mouth in the middle of a sentence and eyed him thoughtfully.

  “What’s wrong?” Gideon asked.

  “I just realized I’ve spent the whole evening telling you about my aunt’s journals.”

  “So? I’m enjoying it. I have a vested interest. Finish
what you were saying about the women’s cult of the goddess on Revelation.”

  “Well, I’m just getting into it, but it’s clear that my aunt recognized the cult immediately as the basic power structure for the islanders. Nord was obviously quite fascinated with it. She goes on for some length about it in her writings. The goddess was associated with the sea and with fertility. Only the women could appeal to her or ask her blessing. There was a special vessel used during ceremonies in her honor.”

  “From that she assumes the women ran things on the island? I seem to remember that in her book she made a big point of interpreting all the customs as female oriented.”

  Hannah nodded. “I’ve also come across some notes about my own ancestresses. This necklace has been in the family for generations, Gideon. It belonged to the relatives I told you about. The mathematician and the artist. It also belonged to a female member of the family who was a writer during the generation before the artist.”

  “I remember. The women in your family who never married.”

  “And who were very successful. Now the necklace belongs to me.”

  “And you don’t consider yourself worthy of wearing it because you’re just a guidance counselor.” He grinned lazily and forked up another bite of salmon.

  But Hannah took him seriously. “It’s true, you know. The women who have worn this necklace have wielded considerable personal power of one kind or another. People like you take power for granted, Gideon. But I don’t. Writing the definitive book on Elizabeth Nord would be a start in the right direction for me. It would give me a chance to do something important. Something that would make me successful.”

  “You’ve said yourself, your talent is in guiding people.”

  “It’s a talent that people like you and Vicky Armitage don’t take seriously.”

  His grin faded. “You want to be taken seriously by Vicky Armitage?”

  “Is there anything wrong with that?”

  Gideon considered the matter. “Nothing wrong with it, I suppose. I’ve never met the woman, but offhand it doesn’t sound like much of a goal.”

  “You’re laughing at me, aren’t you, Gideon?” Hannah smiled wearily. “You see what I mean? You don’t take me seriously, either. I would like to find a man who did take me seriously.”

  “Hannah, this is nonsense. I don’t know what got you off onto this chain of thought, but it’s a sure-fire conversational dead end. You know damn well I take you seriously. Do you think I’d leave Tucson in the middle of this mess with Ballantine to take off on vacation with you if I didn’t take you seriously? Do you think I’d be chasing up here to Seattle now, if I didn’t?”

  “It’s not me you’re chasing, Gideon. You’re looking for some answers in your own life. Answers about the situation in which you find yourself with Ballantine. Answers about the mid-life crisis you seem to be battling. Business answers. Who knows? For some reason you think you might find some of those answers by hanging around me. But you won’t.”

  He watched her narrowly. “How do you know that?”

  “Because I’ve stopped giving advice to people like you, Gideon. I’m going to concentrate on following my own advice.”

  “Is that so?” he challenged. “Just what sort of advice are you feeding yourself these days?”

  Hannah thoughtfully put her elbows on the table and laced her fingers together. Resting her chin on her folded hands she looked at him. “I’m going to stop worrying about other people and worry only about myself. I am not going to let either you or Hugh Ballantine use me. I’m going to make myself worthy of the necklace I’m wearing. I’m going to discover my own personal kind of power, Gideon, whatever it may be. And then I’m going to exploit it to the fullest. I have suddenly become very ambitious.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SHE WAS SERIOUS. Just how serious Gideon was finally beginning to realize. Hannah was no longer interested in saving him or anyone else. She was concentrating on herself.

  It came as a shock because in the back of his mind he’d known that the restlessness he’d been experiencing could be assuaged in Hannah’s presence. The cure might be temporary, lasting only as long as he was with her, but it would bring some peace of mind. Perhaps he had come looking for the answers he already knew he couldn’t accept. Knowing he couldn’t accept an answer didn’t necessarily keep a man from wanting to hear it.

  “Just how ambitious are you, Hannah?” he asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” she said. “But every day lately I get a little more so. It’s curious, Gideon. I feel as though I’ve just discovered something in myself, something quite useful, quite powerful. All I have to do is focus and aim it and live for it. It must be the same sensation that people such as you and Vicky Armitage take for granted. A kind of single-minded devotion to a goal. I’ve never felt so single-minded before. You’re looking at the woman who changed her college major so many times she lost count.”

  “But you eventually concentrated on a career,” he pointed out. “Guidance counseling.”

  “I think,” she said musingly, “that guidance counseling was really a way of not having to choose a career at all.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Helping people is a skill, a talent you have.”

  “No, I think in my case helping people choose different paths was just a way of making up for my own inability to choose a field and rise to the top.”

  “Hannah, that’s idiotic.” He was getting angry now, maybe a bit desperate. Grimly Gideon clamped a lid on his emotions. “I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t write this book on your aunt, but you’re wrong to think that you’ve been wasting your life up until this point. What are you going to do? Go back to graduate school and get that damn Ph.D. in anthropology?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “The world has enough anthropologists. Too many of them. Just ask any lost tribe that’s tried to stay lost in the twentieth century. I’ll bet a lot of anthro grads can’t even find decent jobs.”

  “I’ll have an edge over most of them. I’m Elizabeth Nord’s niece, remember? I now own her personal library. I can build on that. If I make a big enough splash with the book I’ll be off and running. But I may not go back to school. I may decide to do this on my own terms and in my own way. There’s more than one book to be had from Elizabeth’s library. It’s a treasure trove of information, not only about herself but about the people she studied. Any anthropologist or linguist who wants to do research on Nord or her writings will have to work through me.”

  “I get it. You’ll be the one in charge, the one with the key to the library. Hannah, think about it. Do you want to spend the rest of your life guarding her secrets?”

  Her eyes widened. “When I decide how I want to spend the rest of my life, I’ll let you know. If you’re still around, which I doubt. I’m sure you’ll be heading back to Tucson very soon. That Surbrook deal sounds as if it’s getting hot.”

  “Hot enough for Ballantine to try to bribe you with a piece of it.”

  She smiled. “That bothers you, doesn’t it?”

  “Naturally it bothers me. The man’s making a blatant attempt to use you. He tried to appeal to any lingering notion of revenge you might have and when that didn’t work, he tried outright bribery.” Gideon struggled to keep the deep anger out of his voice. “By the way, what did you tell him when he asked if you were interested in revenge?”

  “I told him the same thing I’m telling you. I don’t want to get involved in the battle.”

  Gideon shook his head once, impatiently. “You must have said more than that. Didn’t he try to arouse some sisterly sense of protectiveness in you?”

  “Unlike you, Ballantine didn’t push. He asked his questions and accepted my answers.”

  “What kind of answer did you give when he asked about our trip to Santa Inez?”

  “He didn’t ask about the trip. He already knew about it.”

  Gideon inhaled deeply, a fierce sense of satisfaction fighting to t
ake command. Ruthlessly he held it under control. “He knew we’d spent the time together? In the same house? That we had an affair down in the Caribbean?”

  “I think it was a fling, not an affair,” Hannah said seriously.

  “If he knew we’d had an affair,” Gideon pursued, ignoring her comment, “then what made him think you might still be in the mood for revenge?”

  “He implied that by now I must realize you had taken me to bed only as a way of topping off your little victory over my brother,” she said easily. Too easily, Gideon decided. “He said you did things like that to add a fillip to your wins.”

  “The bastard.” Gideon studied her intently, trying to see beneath the cool, flippant facade. “Did you believe him?”

  “I thought he had made a logical assumption under the circumstances.” She reached for her wine.

  “I asked if you believed him.” His anger was getting hard to control and he thought Hannah knew it. The knowledge didn’t seem to bother her. He was beginning to wonder if she was enjoying herself.

  “I don’t see why it matters to you, Gideon, but, no, I didn’t believe him. I’ve already decided that the reason you find me interesting is because you’re trying to work something out in your own mind and occasionally I make a good sounding board. The victory over my brother was too minor, too unimportant for you to be bothered with trying to augment it by taking me to bed.”

  He felt frustrated and stymied. She was sitting there, just out of reach tonight, baiting him. Gideon tried to take heart from the knowledge that at least she hadn’t bought Ballantine’s interpretation of the situation. But he sensed that he was fighting a losing battle this evening, and he was beginning to feel a little savage because of it. He had to find a way past the defenses she had in place. Gideon didn’t question the necessity of finding a breech in the facade she had erected. He just knew he needed to do it.

  “I’m glad you didn’t buy what Ballantine was selling. He’ll use anything he can to get at me. Using you wouldn’t bother him at all.”

  “I know. As you said, he’s a lot like you.”