Breath of Magic

  "He's a monsta!" the woman wailed. "I quit!" Bursting into tears, she fled the room, slamming the door behind her.

  Although the stack of files shielded Arian until there was little visible of her but her sloppy chignon, a pair of legs encased in slim black leggings, and ten bare toes twitching with trepidation, she could still feel Tristan's scrutiny like a palpable thing. She slowly lowered the files to offer him a tentative grin.

  "You!" His eyes narrowed as he peered over her shoulder as if expecting to find Sven lurking behind a potted fern. "Where the hell is Nordgard? If he's abandoned his post to sneak off to the gym and pump up those damnable pecs of his…"

  Tristan left the ominous threat unfinished, but Arian still felt compelled to jump to Sven's defense. "He's still in the penthouse. He fell asleep watching an opera."

  Tristan cocked a disbelieving eyebrow. "An opera? I didn't know Sven's tastes ran to the sublime. I thought he preferred American Gladiators."

  " 'Twas a piece called Guiding Light. The music lacked substance, but the drama moved him to tears."

  "Oh, that sort of opera."

  Tristan advanced on her, but Arian stood her ground, determined to let him know she could not be bullied or intimidated. She drew in a breath for courage only to feel her will melting beneath the wintry spice of his cologne.

  He leaned down until his nose was less than an inch from hers. Since his sandy lashes tended to fade against his golden skin, Arian had never before noticed just how sinfully long they were. "Can you type?"

  "No, but I can milk a cow, clean a cod, churn a wicked tub of butter, and handstitch the entire alphabet on a sampler."

  He blinked at her precisely three times before wheeling away to pace the length of the room. "This is all your fault, you know. If you hadn't staged that silly broom crash, the press wouldn't be camped on our doorstep, Lennox Enterprises stock wouldn't be plunging, and Miss Alonzo would be sitting behind that desk instead of spilling my most intimate secrets to the tabloids." He threw his watch a helpless glance, then ran a hand through his immaculate hair, rumpling it until he looked nearly as irresistible as the boy he had been. "It's already four-thirty," he muttered more to himself than to her. "We can stop answering the phones in half an hour."

  He shot her a speculative glance before removing the files from her arms. His warm, competent hands closed over her shoulders, guiding her to the chair abandoned by the beleaguered Miss Cotton.

  "Sit here," he instructed, his breath teasing the sensitive hairs at her nape. "And don't move. This is the telephone. If it makes a ringing noise, pick it up, hold it to your ear and say 'Hello.'" He demonstrated. "Tell whoever is on the other end of the line that Mr. Lennox is in a meeting and not taking any calls until tomorrow morning. If they insist on speaking to me, tell them I'm not here. Tell them I went home sick. Do you understand?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "And if you simply can't refrain from disturbing me in the next thirty minutes, tap this button. I'll be able to hear everything you say."

  "Yes, sir."

  "And stop calling me sir!"

  "If you wish, sir."

  Growling beneath his breath, Tristan retreated to his office, slamming the door so hard it rattled the tasteful prints on the wall. Arian grinned as she leaned back in the chair and propped her bare feet on the desk, thinking she just might have stumbled onto the perfect opportunity to observe Tristan Lennox in his natural environment.

  Although she still jumped every time the telephone jangled, Arian did not find her job overly demanding. She told three callers Mr. Lennox was in a meeting, two that he'd left for the afternoon, and one unpleasantly persistent fellow named Hobbes that Mr. Lennox had a mild case of the plague, but would be happy to speak with him on the morrow.

  Sooner than she believed possible, the brass clock on the wall read five o'clock. She waited several minutes, but didn't hear so much as a murmur from the chamber's inner sanctum. She wandered to the window to discover the sun had dipped below the peaks of the tallest buildings, sending a premature twilight creeping over the city in muted shades of lavender and gray.

  "Excuse me?"

  Arian turned to discover a woman huddled in the outer doorway. The chaos in the offices beyond had subsided.

  The woman was nervously twisting the gold band on the fourth finger of her left hand. "I was wondering if I could speak with Mr. Lennox?"

  Arian opened her mouth, then closed it again. Tristan had given her no instructions regarding visitors. "I'm sorry," she finally said with genuine regret, "but Mr. Lennox is in a meeting."

  The woman sighed, her plump face revealing a trace of weary bitterness. "That's what he told you to tell me, isn't it? I guess I can't blame him. I never had time for him so why should he clear his busy schedule for me?" She squared her shoulders as she turned to go, visibly torn between pride and defeat. "Just tell him to call his mother when he can spare a moment."

  12

  "Wait! Oh, please wait! Don't go!" Arian cried, rushing around from behind the desk to seize the stranger's hands. "I had no idea you were Tristan's mother."

  The woman's hands were like ice, but she clung to Arian as if she'd been tossed a lifeline on a stormy sea. Knowing that Tristan had grown up in an orphanage, Arian was confused by his mother's existence. But there was no denying the resemblance. The years might have faded the gold in her teased hair to pale silver, but her eyes still glistened like pools of molten pewter. She was young, Arian realized with a faint shock, not much older than Arian's own mother would have been had she lived.

  The woman's skirt and blouse looked slightly shabby, but freshly starched. A defiant hint of red tinged her lips. The obvious care she'd taken with her appearance touched Arian in a way she could not explain.

  She squeezed the woman's hands, hoping to put her at ease. "Do come in and wait while I let Tristan know you're here. I'm certain he'll be delighted to see you."

  The woman laughed shakily. "I wish I could be so sure." She cast Arian's naked feet a glance that was puzzled, but not unkind. "I don't believe we've met, although I must say you're much nicer than the lady who usually works in this office."

  "I'm new around here," Arian offered, moving around the desk to tap the button Tristan had shown her. Clearing her throat, she announced with what she hoped was suitable pomp, "Mr. Lennox. Your mother is here to see you."

  Several seconds of ominous silence followed. Arian was beginning to wonder if he'd heard her when a terse "Just a minute" emerged.

  They waited in awkward silence, Arian struggling to keep her confident smile intact and Tristan's mother chewing her lower lip. When the door finally swung open, the first thing Arian noticed was that Tristan had donned his coat and smoothed back his hair. Not a strand was out of place.

  "Hello, Brenda," he said coolly.

  Arian recoiled. Had she dared to address her own mama by her Christian name, she would have gotten her mouth smacked for her impertinence.

  "Hello, Tristan." The woman's stilted reply baffled Arian further.

  Tristan consulted the calendar on his watch. "You're a little early this month, aren't you? It's only the twenty-ninth."

  "Please," the woman whispered, giving her ring a violent wrench. "Could we talk inside?"

  Arian held her breath, fearing that Tristan was going to be heartless enough to deny his mother's request. But he proffered her the door with a mocking flourish. Before he drew it shut behind them, he shot Arian a look of such icy displeasure she was surprised her hair didn't sprout icicles.

  She sank back into the chair, oddly unnerved, then shot straight up as Tristan's voice emerged from the box on the desk. "Would you care for a Scotch?"

  His mother's answering murmur was nearly obscured by the clink of ice cubes tumbling into a glass.

  Nagged by a twinge of conscience, Arian reached for the button, determined to silence the private exchange before it could progress. She might stoop to snooping through a man's personal belongings, but eavesdroppi
ng on his most intimate conversations was another…

  "What is it this time, Brenda?" Arian withdrew her hand, riveted by the note of world-weariness in Tristan's voice. "An overdue insurance payment? Too many trips to the track? Or did Danny flunk another sobriety test?" Leather creaked and Arian could visualize him settling back in his chair, a tumbler of Scotch dangling from his elegant fingers.

  Brenda's voice sounded suspiciously thick. "You don't have to be so cold. You might ask me how I've been."

  "Why bother when we both know the question isn't 'How are you?' but 'How much?' "

  His mother sniffed. "You could try to be a little more civil about it."

  "Sorry." Tristan's voice could have cut a diamond. "My mother didn't teach me any manners."

  Brenda's sniffling degenerated into heartrending sobs, muffled as if by her bare hand. Arian blinked back tears of her own and waited for Tristan to comfort his mother, as he had so tenderly comforted her when the hell-copter had frightened her.

  But when his voice came, it wasn't gentled by compassion, but edged with desperation. "Christ, Brenda, take my handkerchief. You'd think your allowance would at least be enough to keep you in Kleenex."

  Arian heard a scraping noise, as if a chair had abruptly been pushed back, then Tristan, his voice even bleaker at a distance. "Stop bawling and tell me what's wrong."

  Arian swiveled around in her own chair, imagining him staring out over that same lonely vista of passing strangers and city streets.

  "It's Ellen. She's pregnant." His mother's announcement was greeted by a silence so profound that Arian would have thought the box had malfunctioned if Brenda hadn't eventually scrambled to fill it. "She's my baby, you know – only seventeen. She won't even graduate until spring. And the boy… well, you know how boys that age are."

  Tristan's harsh laugh made Arian hug a shiver away. "Does she plan to simply drop it off on somebody's doorstep like you did or get rid of it by more permanent means?"

  "She wants to keep it. You don't know my Ellen, but she's a good girl, Tristan. She just made a little mistake."

  Arian was crying openly now, the tears trickling down her cheeks before she could swipe them away.

  "She'll be a good little mom, son, I know she will. If she just had some cash to make things easier… please… don't make me beg…"

  Tristan's only reply was the rustle of paper being pulled from a drawer and slapped on a desk, then the scratch of a pen across it. "Here. Tell her there's more where this came from. Tell her I'm proud of her for accepting responsibility for her… little mistake."

  Brenda's startled gasp revealed far more about Tristan's generosity than his terse instructions. "Oh, son, you're too good to us. Why, if you'd just let me bring my Ellen here to meet you, she'd throw her arms around you and give you the biggest – "

  Tristan cut off the passionate declaration without a hint of remorse. "Don't come back on the thirty-first. I'll have my assistant mail your check."

  Arian was still gazing out the window when Brenda emerged from the office clutching a narrow rectangle of paper. From her reflection in the darkening glass, Arian could see that the woman had gnawed the rouge from her lips, leaving them pale and trembling. The sight failed to evoke even a ghost of Arian's sympathy.

  "Good night, miss," Brenda shyly offered. "Thank you for your kindness."

  A stilted "Good night" was all Arian could manage.

  She remained curled up in the chair as true dusk fell, knowing she should retreat to the penthouse before Tristan emerged. She could only imagine how much he would loathe her if he knew she'd intruded on his private anguish.

  But when she rose, a force more powerful than fear for herself drew her toward those mahogany doors.

  Tristan hadn't lit a single lamp to shield him from the gathering darkness. He stood at the window, a lone shadow silhouetted by the city lights, a half-empty Scotch glass dangling from one hand, the other jammed into the pocket of his trousers. He'd shed his jacket and loosened his tie. His gaze narrowed on her reflection, forcing her to see herself as he must see her – as an insensitive stranger intruding on his solitude.

  "It blinks, you know."

  "What?" Arian had no idea what he was talking about.

  He pointed to the reflection of the little black box perched on his desk – a box identical to the one in the antechamber. A tiny green light on its top was flashing. "The intercom. It blinks when it's activated."

  A wave of shame passed over Arian, but there was no denying her guilt. She would simply have to brazen it out. "If you knew I was listening, why didn't you stop me?"

  He shrugged. "Why bother? You'd have to stand in line to sell my pathetic secrets to the press. I can see the headline now – boy billionaire bilked by own mother."

  Arian perched on the edge of his desk, more disturbed by his sarcasm than she cared to admit. "I read somewhere that you grew up in an orphanage."

  "So you assumed I was an orphan? Oliver Twist and all that romantic rot? Sorry to disillusion you, but orphanages take bastards, too."

  Arian winced, but Tristan's expression never changed. Perhaps the label didn't bear the same stigma as it did in her own time. She could still remember the unkind remarks, the cutting slights, the pitying glances when the other children at Louis's court had learned she had a mama, but no papa.

  "Your mother must have been very young," she said gently, wanting to pity the woman, but finding it nearly impossible in the face of his unflinching candor.

  "Seventeen. Just like her precious Ellen." He took a sip of the Scotch. "I'm sure she convinced herself she was doing the best thing by giving me up. She couldn't have known there wouldn't be much demand for shy, brainy kids with stringy hair and Coke-bottle glasses. Most of my potential parents never got past the photo."

  Arian wanted him to stop. He might be able to relate such a tale without betraying even a trace of emotion, but his passionless confession was flaying her tender heart to ribbons.

  "I hated the ones who made it as far as the interview the most. They were all polite, of course. Painfully polite. But somehow that only made it worse."

  She inched closer to him without realizing it. "What happened to your moth – to Brenda after?"

  "Shortly after she left me on the orphanage steps with my name pinned to my shirt, she dropped out of high school to marry a construction worker, moved to a three-bedroom tract house in Newark, and raised three kids with good solid blue-collar names like Bill and Danny… and Ellen."

  Arian had always longed for a sibling to ease her loneliness. "So you have brothers and a sister?"

  Tristan swung around. She recoiled from the virulence of his expression. "No. My mother has other children."

  Arian's fingers trembled with the urge to touch him, to comfort him. But before she could, his mask of icy indifference slipped back into place, warning her she would earn nothing for her foolishness but frostbitten fingers.

  She clasped her hands in her lap to keep them from betraying her. "How did you and your mother come to be reunited?"

  He propped his hip on the corner of the desk opposite her. " 'Reunited.' Such a touching word." His scathing smile implied the opposite. "Since I was never adopted, my name never changed and it wasn't that difficult for Brenda to trace me. She called three years ago to request a meeting. I canceled all of my appointments for the afternoon, put on my most expensive suit, my finest cologne, and waited for her to arrive."

  "She didn't come?" Arian breathed, fearing the worst.

  He lifted the glass to his lips for a long draw before answering. "Oh, she came. At two o'clock on the dot. Things were a little awkward at first, as you can imagine, but we managed to carry on a civil conversation. You see, I'd already decided to forgive her. Convinced myself that she didn't deserve to suffer any more than she already had. After all, she was just a girl when she gave me up. A 'good girl' who'd made a 'little mistake.'"

  Arian's hands curled into fists as anger surged through her, an
ger toward the woman who'd dared to make this man feel as if he were nothing more than a careless blunder to be regretted for the rest of her life.

  "Brenda chattered on and on about her second family. About her husband Earl, who'd been forced to go on disability after he suffered a back injury at work. About her oldest son Bill, who desperately wanted to attend an Ivy League school, but lacked the grades to snag a scholarship. About sixteen-year-old Danny, whose multiple DUI's had earned him a court-ordered stay at an expensive rehab center."

  Arian could too easily imagine Tristan sitting behind this very desk, growing colder and colder as each of his mother's words drove an icy wedge of betrayal deeper into his heart.

  "By the time she'd confided her own particular weakness – afternoon trips to the horse track to bet on the daily doubles, I knew she didn't want me any more than she ever had. She only wanted my money."

  It was Arian's turn to rise and seek the window. Her turn to stare out over the lights of the city so Tristan wouldn't see the tears glistening in her eyes. She knew instinctively that he would scorn her pity. All she had to offer him was her rage.

  "I wouldn't have given her an allowance," she said bitterly.

  Tristan rose from his own corner of the desk, stunned by the ferocity of Arian's passion. He'd never had anyone to defend him before. Never even expected it. He'd always been content to stand on his own, as he had since the day he was born.

  Yet there Arian stood, little more than a wraith in black leggings, black turtleneck, and bare feet, ready to do battle with any dragon who dared to cross his path, even his weak and calculating mother. Something irresistible and dangerous coiled through his belly.

  "What would you have done? Put a curse on her?" Tristan spoke the words lightly to douse the tension smoldering between them, but when Arian spun around to face him, her wrath was still hot enough to strike sparks.

  "I'd have thrown her out on the street. I'd have told her never to darken my doorstep again. Her or any other member of her rotten brood."