The assistant elbowed Arian aside. "I'm terribly sorry, Mr. Lennox. I tried to stop her, but she wouldn't listen."
Tristan raised a hand. "That's all right, Mrs. Flanders. I'll take care of it."
The woman lingered, nearly licking her sparse lips in anticipation of Arian's comeuppance, but a pointed glance from her employer sent her scurrying for the door with an offended huff.
Tristan consulted his watch, his tone as mercilessly pleasant as Arian had known it would be. "Forgive me, darling. Did we have an appointment I forgot?"
Arian parried his bland smile with a tender one of her own. "No, precious. We didn't have an appointment. We had an engagement."
Alerted by her honeyed tone, Tristan cocked a warning eyebrow. "Is this something we could discuss later?" He indicated the eager faces that lined the table, the files and papers scattered across its gleaming surface. "As you can see, we're in the middle of something important."
Arian unfurled the prenuptial agreement. "What could be more important than protecting your ass – " She stumbled over the unfamiliar word, eliciting several poorly concealed smirks of amusement and one scandalized gasp from a blue-haired woman. "Your assets?"
Tristan's own lips twitched as if torn between a smile and a sneer. "This is neither the time nor the place, dear," he suggested gently, as if addressing a child. "I really think you should go."
Arian slammed both palms on the table in blatant challenge. "And if I don't, what are you going to do, sweetheart? Make me disappear?"
22
Arian's words lingered in the air like an echo of thunder. The board members slunk away one by one, leaving her to face Tristan down the long, empty length of the conference table.
Meeting his frosty gaze, Arian felt a flicker of genuine fear. She wouldn't have known her eyes had betrayed her had he not risen and gone to the window, as if he could no longer bear to look at her. She sank into one of the chairs a board member had vacated.
Tristan stared blindly down at the fountain in the courtyard below, his hands jammed deep in the pockets of his trousers. "I should have known it was only a matter of time. So who got to you first? Lize or Hobbes?"
"Lize," Arian said, crumpling the prenuptial agreement without realizing it. "He wanted me to go to the police with him. To convince them to reopen the case."
Tristan turned to face her, his expression weary. "Then why are you here instead of there?"
Arian swallowed a pretty lie. "I don't know. Lize was at the Halloween party. He showed me the photograph of you being taken away by the police. I saw the blood on your clothes… your hands…"
Tristan's eyes took on a predatory glint. He prowled around the table, each step measured by dangerous grace. He was stalking her, but Arian refused to cringe. Not even when he slipped his hands beneath her hair to cup her throat from behind, not even when his fingertips grazed the fragile pulse below her jaw that sought to throb a warning.
Her eyes fluttered shut as he leaned over and pressed his mouth to her ear, his voice a hoarse pun – that sent a shiver of pure reaction down her spine. "You saw the blood, yet you let me touch you, let me put those same hands on you? A murderer's hands?"
He never denied it, you know. Not even to his own attorney. Oddly enough, it was Wite Lize's damning admission that gave Arian the weapon she needed.
"Where did you hide the body?" she whispered.
Tristan withdrew his hands as if her flesh had scorched him. She spun the chair around and faced him.
"Did you bury it in the basement of the old brown-stone?" He backed away, but Arian bounced to her feet, stalking him as mercilessly as he had stalked her. "Or did you have his bones ground into mortar and poured into the foundation of the Tower?" She danced over to the wall and began to tap on it at irregular intervals. "Is his corpse rotting somewhere between these very walls? I've heard of murderers hiding the bodies of their victims within the hull of a ship, but legend has it that the ship will remain eternally cursed. Do you feel cursed?" she asked brightly. "Doomed? Damned perhaps?"
He was eyeing her as if she were his own personal Chanelclad demon, sent from hell to prod his most painful scars with her pitchfork. "Damn you," he murmured. "How did you know?"
"That you were innocent?"
He nodded.
She favored him with her most winsome smile. "I didn't. Until just now."
Tristan took a step toward her as if he were seriously reconsidering the notion of strangling her.
Arian danced out of his reach, putting a chair between them. "Oh, I suspected all along that you couldn't have murdered Arthur. He was your friend. You loved him."
Tristan's bleak chuckle contained little humor. "That didn't stop him from trying to murder me."
Arian's smile faded. Sweeping a stack of papers out of the way, she propped her hip on the edge of the conference table. "Why?"
Tristan sank into a chair, shrugging carelessly. "I made a pizza." At Arian's baffled frown, he continued. "We'd been working day and night on my Warlock project, not eating, barely sleeping. Our nerves were frazzled, our tempers short, but we both felt we were too close to a breakthrough to quit."
"Your Warlock project? Wite Lize implied that Arthur devised the theory."
Tristan snorted. "He would. Arthur was nothing but a two-bit hacker. When I met him, he was earning beer money by breaking into the university's computer systems and changing grades. I was the one who convinced him he was wasting his talents."
"Go on," Arian urged.
"We were about to collapse from hunger so Arthur went out to get us a pizza. I stayed at the keyboard, inputting combinations of data strings. I was so damn tired." He rubbed his brow in remembered fatigue. "The numbers were all starting to blur together so I laid my head down next to the keyboard, thinking I would just steal a quick nap before Arthur got back. Right before I drifted off, I remember thinking how delicious the pizza would be, how steam would be rolling off the melted cheese, how the pepperoni would be just a little crisp around the edges. It was so real, I actually began to smell it. Then when I opened my eyes, the pizza was there, right beside my nose." Not even a decade of cynicism had completely erased the echo of delight from Tristan's eyes.
"At first I thought I'd slept longer than I meant to, but at that very moment Arthur came whistling through the door, pizza box in hand. He thought I was playing a joke on him. That I'd called and ordered a pizza while he was gone. It took me a long time to convince him that we'd finally done it – invented a computer program with the ability to convert thought energy into matter. A virtual tool for wish fulfillment."
"Magic," Arian whispered, her own eyes shining with the thrill of his discovery. It might be a different sort of magic than hers, but that didn't make it any less miraculous or worthy of wonder.
"Magic," he echoed, bitterness tinging his voice. "We toasted our success with enchanted pizza and a bottle of cheap Chianti, then dove right back into the work. I wanted to perform studies and trials, test the limits and quirks of the program, but Arthur insisted our first project should be installing Warlock into a microprocessor no bigger than the tip of my thumb. We were both giddy, nearly drunk with excitement, but by the second night, I was already beginning to have doubts."
"What sort of doubts?" Arian asked, leaning toward him.
Tristan's crystalline eyes clouded. "What if Warlock should fall into the wrong hands? What if it were to be used to fulfill the twisted wishes of a madman or a serial killer? How could such unlimited power not corrupt? I tried to discuss my fears with Arthur, but he just laughed and told me to stop being such a wuss. It was near midnight, but he encouraged me to go for a walk. He said some fresh air might clear my head."
"That was when he must have made the call to his father," Arian deduced. As she met Tristan's unflinching gaze, dawning horror tingled through her veins. "You! You were the virus! The virus he planned to exterminate!"
Tristan nodded. "The police forced me to listen to that message over and
over. I still hear his voice in my head sometimes, late at night when there's no one around." He rose and wandered back to the window. The shadows of impending twilight offered his profile sanctuary. "He was waiting for me when I walked in the door."
Arian wrapped her arms around herself to stifle a shiver, wishing they were Tristan's. She didn't have to ask what Finch's motivations had been. Greed. Ambition. An insatiable hunger for power. The very failings Wite Lize had attributed to Tristan. She wondered if the old man had suspected his son's treachery all along.
Tristan's mouth curved in a grim parody of mirth. "When I saw the knife in his hand, all I could think to say was, 'Shit, Arthur, why not a gun? You know how you hate to mop the kitchen.' He just lifted a finger to his lips, winked at me, and said, We wouldn't want to wake the neighbors, now would we?' "
But they had awakened the neighbors, Arian remembered. With angry shouts and the sounds of a brief and violent struggle. As Tristan gazed into the gathering darkness, Arian wondered if he saw Arthur's teasing smile or the mocking monster who had come at him from the shadows.
When Tristan finally spoke, his voice had been stripped of all passion. "We fought. He underestimated me. I hadn't watched Captain Kirk kick all those Klingon asses for nothing. The knife ended up embedded in his stomach. I tried to catch him as he fell and we both went down. There was blood… so much blood." Tristan drew his hands from his pockets, studying them as if he still expected to find a coppery stain beneath his manicured fingernails. "I tried to staunch the flow with my hands, but it just kept coming, welling out from beneath my palms, trickling between my fingers."
A tear slid down Arian's cheek and splashed on the prenuptial agreement. It chilled her to the marrow to realize Tristan might have been the one buried in the basement of the old brownstone. Arthur must have known that Tristan had no family and few friends other than Finch and his father. He must have believed that Tristan would never be missed. A fresh shudder rocked her to realize he had probably been right.
Tristan's hands curled into fists. "When his body started shaking, I thought he was coughing. Then I realized he was laughing. He flashed me his old cocky grin and said, 'Hell, Tristan, it was your turn to mop the kitchen anyway.' Then he opened his palm to show me the tiny microprocessor. I realized he had already programmed some sort of failsafe into Warlock – to help him escape in the event of a mortal injury. But before I could snatch the damn thing away, he disappeared. Right there in my arms."
"And you've been searching for him ever since, haven't you?" Arian asked softly, suddenly understanding his obsession with magic.
"How could I not?" Tristan spun around, his face ravaged by all the anguish and remorse he normally kept hidden behind his aloof exterior. "I'm the one who unleashed him! I'm the one who invented Warlock and placed such terrible power at his corrupt fingertips. I've had an army of detectives combing the world for nearly ten years, but it's as if he just vanished off the face of the earth."
"Does Copperfield know?"
Tristan shrugged. "I think he suspects that Arthur's alive. He never once asked me if I'd done it, not even when he convinced his father to take my case."
"You couldn't even defend yourself." Arian's heart ached anew as she realized how helpless and isolated he must have felt.
"No one would have believed me anyway, and I'd have spent the rest of my life in prison before I'd have told them about Warlock. I couldn't take the chance that some other madman might force me to re-create my work. I thought the magic competition might lure Arthur out. Not because he would need the money, but because he wouldn't be able to resist the urge to flaunt his survival in my face. Hell, if he hadn't been so damned arrogant, he'd have just stabbed me in the back while he had the chance and been done with it."
Tristan threw himself into a chair, running a hand through his hair. His expression reflected the same vulnerability that had shadowed the face of that bloodied boy in the Forbes photograph. Arthur hadn't stabbed him in the back; he had plunged that knife straight through Tristan's heart. A heart that had been seeping blood ever since.
Tenderness washed over Arian. For the first time, she understood what set her apart from her mother and what set Tristan apart from all the men her mother had bedded. Her mother had loved none of them, not even Arian's father, but Arian knew she would love this man until the day she died.
She circled the table, coming around to drop to her knees at his feet. She gazed up into his eyes, desiring nothing more than to banish the shadows from them forever. "Let him go. Arthur Finch is gone, maybe even dead. You can't spend the rest of your life atoning for his sins." She cupped his wary face in her hands before whispering fiercely, "Forget Arthur and love me, Tristan. Here. Now. Tonight." She pressed her lips to his, sealing her plea with a kiss. His lips parted in astonishment, allowing her tongue to slip between them and caress the delectable warmth of his mouth.
Tristan groaned his delight against Arian's lips. His first instinct was to seize what she was offering as ruthlessly as he'd seized everything else he'd wanted since Arthur's betrayal had drained the decency from his soul. He longed to lay her down on that triple-padded carpet and partake of her body's tender absolution.
She was yielding everything, yet asking nothing in return – no ring, no marriage license, no pious priest to pronounce them man and wife.
Arian's generosity proved just how wrong he'd been. She was no mercenary con artist peddling her body in exchange for his name. She hadn't rejected him out of malice or greed, but out of a genuine desire to save the gift of her innocence for her husband. It shamed him to remember how he had mocked her dearest principles. Principles she was now willing to compromise just to provide him with a few precious hours of solace and forgetfulness.
She relinquished his face to gather his hands in hers. Hands that had once been stained with a friend's blood. She pressed a fervent kiss to each of his palms, then kissed each finger in turn before resting her cheek against his knee. Tristan reached to stroke her bowed head, then hesitated, gazing at his trembling hand as if it belonged to someone else.
A lance of pain stabbed his chest, but this time he recognized the crushing ache for what it was. He was surprised Arian couldn't hear the crack of his heart breaking wide open to free all the love he'd been hoarding for a lifetime. A love that mocked his cynicism and dared him to believe in happily-ever-after and till-death-do-us-part.
She made a soft sound of protest when he gently disengaged himself from her embrace and moved to the table. He rescued the prenuptial agreement from the scattered papers and methodically ripped it into bits.
Arian nibbled on her lower lip as she watched him, her eyes dark and tremulous. She was petrified, Tristan realized, but no less willing to welcome him into her arms.
He thought his heart might stop altogether when she rose to her feet, drew the engagement ring from her slender finger and held it out to him. "Here. I won't be needing this."
He frowned down at it, having forgotten that he'd told his personal shopper to pick out the most expensive, most ostentatious ring in all of Tiffany's. It was even more hideous than he had anticipated – a garish mockery of the pledge it represented. But he supposed it would have to do.
He took the ring, closing his fist around it. "I wanted to believe you were nothing but a heartless gold digger, that you were only marrying me for my money. Well, I was wrong." Her expression brightened, then dimmed when he added, "My money's not enough for you."
Arian took a step away from him, as if to brace herself for a coming blow.
He ruthlessly closed the distance between them. "You're nothing but a greedy little witch who isn't going to be satisfied until you've stolen my heart, my soul… and my love. And now that you've succeeded, you have no choice but to marry me and make me miserable for the rest of my life."
Arian opened and closed her mouth with a reply that was half squeak, half squawk.
Tristan grinned and slipped the ring back on her finger. "I'll take th
at as a yes."
"But the p-p-prenuptial agreement," she sputtered. "You destroyed it."
"Damn right I did. And if you dare to divorce me, I'll take you for everything you're worth." He cupped her cheek, the breathtaking intensity of his gaze warning her he wasn't entirely joking. "If you break my heart, Arian Whitewood, you'll find yourself wandering the streets penniless, wondering where your next dish of caviar is going to come from."
"Bully," Arian whispered before flinging her arms around him with a cry of pure joy.
Clucking with mock dismay, Tristan threaded his fingers through her curls and gently tipped her head back. "You simply must make an effort to restrain your passions, Miss Whitewood. How else am I to cling to my virtue until you've made an honest man out of me?"
Her shining eyes blinked up at him. "But I thought you wanted – "
Backing her against the wall, he indulged her mouth with hot, wet, deep kisses until she thought the red Chanel suit just might burst into flames and sizzle right off her body.
"What I want," he finally muttered into her hair while she was struggling to catch her breath, "is for tomorrow night to hurry up and get here."
23
The exquisitely wrapped package arrived at the penthouse while Arian was still struggling into her wedding gown. Sven was already tipping and dismissing the messenger when she stumbled into the living room with the lacy waterfall of her train slung haphazardly over one arm.
"That lying wretch! He promised me he wouldn't buy me any more extravagant gifts." Arian heaved an exasperated sigh, but discovered it was impossible to even pretend to be angry at Tristan with the memory of his kisses still tingling on her lips.
She snatched the enticing box from Sven's hand. Perhaps Tristan had made good on his vow to replace her engagement ring with something half a dozen carats or so less obnoxious.
"That's odd," she said, examining the box from all sides. "It seems to have holes in it. Do you think the messenger dropped it?" She lifted it to her ear, giving it a tentative shake. Her eyes widened as she met Sven's bewildered gaze. "That's even odder. It's rumbling at me."