Moving Target (14 page)

She showed him a double row of hard, bright teeth. “Some things don’t require thought. For you, being difficult is one of them.”

He took a grip on his fraying patience and got back to the point he was pursuing: names. “Your grandmother bought this house under an assumed name, is that correct?”

“She bought the land. Everything else you see is her work. She built this with her own hands.”

Erik turned and examined the small house with new eyes. He went to one of the ragged, remaining walls and looked at it closely. Native rock, cement, and sweat had built the wall. But Serena’s grandmother hadn’t been a nutty ascetic who found bliss in self-made ugliness. She had searched out iron-rich rocks and incorporated them into the walls. The rusty red of those rocks made a pleasing pattern against the common pale granite. The result was rather like a very simple weaving.

“She must have been quite a woman,” he said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Obviously she lived close to the bone, yet she spent a lot of extra time and effort making the walls of her home more than just a support for the roof.”

Serena looked at the pattern he was tracing with long-fingered hands, the hands of a poet or a priest or a pianist. Yet she knew just how quick and strong those deceptively graceful hands were. He had grabbed her, stopped her fall, and braced her against hard stone until she could move safely on her own once more.

The stone hadn’t been all that was hard. The memory of unexpected sexual intimacy made her skin hot. She wasn’t a saint, but she wasn’t a party girl, either. Her deep, female reaction to a strange male made her nervous and curious by turns.

“My grandmother loved patterns. That’s why she loved weaving. She created beauty from a handful of threads.” As Serena spoke, she stroked the cloth nestled around her throat, as though she found comfort in its presence. After a few moments she stepped over the threshold of the cabin for the first time since Lisbeth had been murdered. “She kept a loom here, in this corner, where there was light from the north window. She called it smart light, learned light.”

Erik went still, but before he could say anything, she was talking again.

“When I asked how light could be educated,” Serena said, “G’mom just kept on weaving.”

Serena knelt in the grit and charred fragments that had once been her grandmother’s loom. So many memories . . . kerosene lamps turning night to gold, the cool gush of water when she worked the long pump handle, the smell of bread baking, a dazzling torrent of stars at midnight, dawn in a land brimming with black velvet and silence, the white-hot weight of the summer sun at noon when even shadows burned.

“That’s all she ever said about the Learned?” Erik asked finally.

Serena’s hand hesitated in its slow stirring through the ashes of her childhood. Her fingers curled around one of the burned stone bobbins that had once held bright yarn for the loom. She shivered as though someone had walked on her grave. But it was her grandmother’s grave, and she was the one disturbing it. Her fingers opened. She left the stone bobbin where she had found it, scattered among other bobbins in the ashes of what had once been life.

“Learned?” Serena asked in an aching voice.

“She said something to you about Learned light.” Despite his impatience Erik spoke gently, for her eyes were like twilight, haunted by increasing darkness.

“Learned light,” Serena murmured. Then she remembered. “The Book of the Learned.” The book her beautiful pages were supposed to have come from—unless they were forged, or the whole book was forged, or a lot of other things were lies that she didn’t even suspect. “You asked about it before.”

“Yes.”

“You believe my pages came from it.”

“Possibly.” Almost certainly, Erik amended silently. But that, too, was something he wasn’t ready to talk about.

“G’mom believed that they did. She called the Book of the Learned her heritage. The heritage she told me she lost. The heritage she tried to get back before she died.”

“How long before?” Erik’s voice was sharper than it should have been, but he couldn’t help it. An ugly pattern was emerging around Ellis Weaver’s life and death.

Serena didn’t answer his question. She was wondering if a handful of forged pages would be worth killing for. It wasn’t the first time she had wondered since she had read her grandmother’s note. It wouldn’t be the last.

And it would always chill her.

The midafternoon wind blew down the slope, over the remains of the cabin and Lisbeth Charters, known as Ellis Weaver to the outside world.

Despite the warmth, cold deepened in Serena. Her fingers rubbed soot from the stone bobbin against her jeans, rubbing so hard that a false warmth was created. Somehow it was worse to believe that her grandmother’s murder had been a deliberate act tied to the Book of the Learned rather than a random act of madness.

Because if it was true, then she would be next in line to be murdered.

Bitterly Serena wished that her grandmother had left behind something more useful than a warning and a false name.

S
erena?” Erik asked, kneeling down beside her on the cold stone floor. “Are you all right?”

She tried to answer. Her mouth was too dry. She swallowed once, twice, but it didn’t help. If she opened her mouth to speak she felt like sand would fall out.

His palm touched her cheek. The chill of her skin shocked him. “What’s wrong, honey?” His voice was calm, gentle, the way it had been when one of his sisters woke up crying in the night and he went to her room and held her until the nightmare passed.

Serena closed her eyes and let the heat of Erik’s hand sink into her, freeing her from fear. “This is her grave. I don’t want it to be mine.”

He barely recognized her hoarse voice. “Why would it be yours?” he asked reasonably.

“Why wouldn’t it?” Tension ripped through her. She took a harsh breath and touched the ancient fabric that was also her heritage. “Never mind. I’m just . . .”

Erik waited, wondering if she knew that she was leaning into his hand as though it was fire and she was freezing. “You’re just what?” he asked when she stopped.

Just an idiot
, she thought roughly.
The more I learn, the more I believe that G’mom’s death was deliberate. And here I am, kneeling on her grave in a strange man’s arms. A man who knows about the missing Book of the Learned.

I wonder if he knows how to make gasoline bombs, too.

Serena shot to her feet and away from Erik with a speed that told him they were back to square one when it came to trust. He came to his own feet with a surge of power that was just short of anger.

“Was it something I said?” he asked sardonically.

“What are you talking about?”

“You. Me. Trust.”

“I don’t know you well enough to trust you.”

“And vice versa,” he pointed out.

She looked startled, then shrugged. “Of course. But you’re a lot bigger than I am and your grandmother wasn’t murdered.”

Silently Erik absorbed the implication that Serena hadn’t put into words. “Why do you keep going back to that?”

She gave him a disbelieving look. “That you’re bigger than I am?”

He made an impatient gesture, sweeping aside what he sensed was a red herring. “You’re acting as though your grandmother’s murder a year ago directly threatens you now. Why?”

“Like I said, I’m jumpy.” She folded her arms across her chest. What good was a warning if she ignored it? “I’m leaving. There’s nothing for me here.”

“All right. You look like you could use a cup of Irish coffee and a long soak in a spa.”

“The place I’m staying doesn’t have a spa.”

“Mine does.”

“Lucky you.”

“Do you have a cell phone?”

“No.”

Hoping she wouldn’t realize that they were beyond cell range at the moment, he pulled his communication unit from its leather case at the small of his back. “Here. Dial 911 and tell them my name and license number, and if you don’t call back every fifteen minutes they can send in the SWAT team.”

She couldn’t help it. She laughed.

“I’m serious,” he said flatly. “I want you to know that you’re safe with me. The quickest way to do that is to spend time together.”

His eyes were intense, tawny, and far too intelligent for her comfort. He was a man who was used to getting what he wanted. Like Norman Warrick.

Oddly, the comparison made Serena feel better. Erik might be every bit as determined as Warrick, but he wasn’t a tyrant. And he had tried to comfort her with a gentleness that she was only now appreciating. Despite her ingrained wariness, she found herself wanting to know more about this particular, impossibly familiar man.

“Why?” she asked. “Do you think I won’t let you look at the pages until I trust you?”

“That’s part of it.”

“What’s the rest?”

“I want you—”

“To trust you,” she cut in. “You already told me that.”

He shook his head. “I want you. Period.”

Her eyes widened.

“The look on your face . . .” He threw back his head and laughed. “Do you think I get a woody every time something female rubs against me? Let me assure you, I’m well beyond that stage.”

Heat burned Serena’s cheeks. Even as she cursed the complexion she couldn’t control, she held her ground. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”

“We aren’t. I am.”

“I don’t know you well enough for this.”

“Whose fault is that?”

“Fate’s,” she retorted. “We’ve known each other for less than an hour.”

“And in that time I’ve saved you from a nasty fall, gotten so hard my gut ached, and found out you’re afraid of being murdered the way your grandmother was. How much better do we need to know each other to talk about something as normal as sex?”

“You left out the part where you followed me up a cliff and scared me to death.”

“Details.”

Serena bit her lip. “You’ve got a quick mouth.”

“Give me a reason to go slow.”

She blew out a breath that was close to a laugh and even closer to surrender. The longer she was with Erik, the more she was certain that she had seen him before, met him before, known him before. Yet each time she pursued the feeling, trying to nail it down as to when and where and how, it vanished. It was like an idea for a weaving condensing in her mind—very real and absolutely irrational.

So she would do what she did when a half-formed pattern haunted her. She would let it happen at its own pace, in its own way, and wait for the result.

If she didn’t like what developed, she could always walk away.

“How about a get-acquainted truce?” she suggested.

“Interesting. You see us as being at war.”

She started to say no. The part of her that insisted she knew Erik wasn’t so certain. That hesitation was as startling as the groundless feeling of familiarity he evoked in her.

“Ask me after we know each other better,” Serena said finally.

He wanted to push for more. Then he thought about a relentlessly self-sufficient old woman raising a granddaughter alone in the middle of the beautiful, desolate desert. Suspicion was probably built into Serena as deeply as bone and blood.

“I’ll do that,” he said. “Can I trust you to follow me to my home, or should I follow you?”

“You’re pushing me.”

“Then start leading the way.”

“What if I said I’m not interested?” she asked.

“I’d say you were out of touch with your body.”

“You’re arrogant.”

“See, we’re getting better acquainted all the time. Your house or mine?”

“What if I didn’t have pages from the Book of the Learned?” she asked before she could think better of it.

“We wouldn’t have met and that would be a damned shame. But you do and we did and the only thing left is to go forward.”

“I followed that. Scary.”

“We’ve already established that you’re easily frightened.” Erik smiled crookedly. “Tell you what. I’ll show you my leaves if you’ll show me yours.”

“Leaves?”

“Pages. As in illuminated manuscripts.”

“You have some?”

“A few,” he paused, then added, “hundred.”

Her eyes widened. “I keep forgetting.”

“What?”

“That you’re an expert on illuminated manuscripts. You really don’t look like one.”

“No gold foil on my forehead?” he asked dryly.

“No thin shoulders and scholarly stoop.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

She ignored him, which was better than saying she wasn’t disappointed at all. “Your house,” she said, deciding. “It’s closer than mine.”

“How do you know?”

“My grandmother’s lawyer told me.”

Erik almost asked if that was where she had left the pages—with the lawyer—but he decided not to push her.

Yet.

M
anhattan wrapped around the House of Warrick’s headquarters like a concrete anaconda. The cry of sirens and the impatient, illegal blaring of taxi horns announced that everything was normal outside the building. Things were pretty much normal inside, too. Garrison Warrick was sitting back in his gray leather chair and watching his oyster-colored telephone as though it was ticking rather than ringing.

One red light on the phone blinked as steadily as a healthy pulse. Another light blinked in triple time, as though to say, “Okay, fine, you’re deaf. Are you blind, too?”

The intercom on his desk buzzed. Since his grandfather hadn’t come to New York with the rest of the family, Garrison assumed it was safe to answer the intercom.

“Yes?” he said.

“Excuse me, sir.” The supposedly British assistant’s tone was unbelievably plummy, probably because Sheila hadn’t been any closer to Jolly Old England than the map on her office wall. “You have a call on line—”

“Grandfather?” he cut in curtly.

“No. Mr. Warrick is still on line two. Rather, his assistant is.”

The rapidly pulsing red light winked off. Garrison let out a sigh of relief; the old bastard’s assistant had gotten the hint and hung up. The remaining light blinked lazily. “Who’s left?”