Nancy Herkness (23 page)

She arched up from the bed like a bow, driving his fingers deeper. “Oh God, Jack!”

He slowly withdrew his fingers, only to slide them in once again. And again.

Her hips rocked upward and she groaned, “Yes, yes. Again.”

As he left the inside of her body, he flicked the outer nub and laughed triumphantly when an orgasm ripped through her. The silk ties bit into her wrists and ankles as her inner muscles clenched like a fist, then spilled a pool of warm release which spread in ripples from her center outward.

She lay limply with her eyes closed, a few quivers of leftover sensation rippling through her. How had that happened?

“I see you’ve been thinking about me,” Jack’s voice drawled from above her.

Charlie forced her eyes open. He was standing right beside the bed, and as she looked upward, she noticed that the black wool of his slacks was pulled taut over his arousal.

“All day,” she managed to rasp out. “And all last night too.”

He laughed again, and sat down on the edge of the bed. His weight rolled her toward him slightly, and he splayed his left hand across her belly and left it there.

Suddenly, all the laughter left his voice. “Care to tell me what this is about?”

“It’s a metaphor,” Charlie said.

He slid his hand up to cup her breast. “You know, I have a hard time seeing a naked woman tied to my bed as a literary device.”

She wished he would stop circling her nipple with his fingers. It made it very difficult to explain her message. “It’s a metaphor for trust. I want to show you I trust you. That I have no fear that you’re like your father.”

“Trust.” His fingers stilled. “Here I was thinking it was a metaphor for ‘Take me, I’m yours.’”

“It is,” Charlie whispered. “I trust you to do anything you want with me. I am yours.”

His expression darkened at her last sentence. Then he looked down at his hand resting on her breast. “So you wouldn’t have a problem with it, if I just lay down on top of you, unzipped my fly and drove myself inside you right now?”

“No problem. Do it,” she said, her eyes locked on his. “Whatever you want.”

He shifted his hand to her other breast, stroking it softly so that she had to swallow a whimper of pleasure. He was no longer looking at her. Instead, he stared toward the curtained window for a long moment.

When his gaze shifted back to her, she smiled at him, knowing her heart was in her eyes.

He got up abruptly and walked over to the wall of knives. Drawing a curved dagger from its silver-and-leather case, he turned and sliced through the necktie holding her left ankle with such swiftness that she jumped.

“Now you’re afraid?” he asked, walking to the right side of the bed. He scythed through the second necktie.

“No.” Charlie drew her knees together.

He quickly freed her two hands, then unhooked a dark blue silk bathrobe from his closet door and tossed it to her. She pulled the bathrobe on, and stripped the remains of the neckties from her wrists and ankles.

“What are you trying to prove?” he asked, crossing his arms with the dagger still dangling from one hand.

What was she trying to prove? Charlie took a deep breath.

“I’m trying to prove that when I didn’t tell you about Don’s threats, I did it because I thought you had enough to worry about. I knew if I told you, you’d drop your own concerns and come racing to help because that’s the sort of person you are. You’d already done enough; I didn’t want to be a further burden to you.”

Jack uncrossed his arms and put the dagger down on the bedside table.

Charlie swallowed and went on. “But that doesn’t work. If you love someone, you can’t choose when to let him in and when not to. You have to trust him enough to let him decide. I wanted to prove I trust you enough to do that.”

She had never seen anyone go so still. If Jack was breathing, there was no outward sign of it. Suddenly, he dragged in a long draught of oxygen, and spoke. “Did you just say you love me?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes, I love you.”

He laughed.

Charlie flinched inwardly. But Jack had turned away to pace across the room to his closet, and didn’t see the hurt in her expression.

“You can’t love me,” he said, spinning around. “You don’t know me.” He laughed that ugly laugh again.

Charlie pushed herself off the bed. He stalked to within three feet of her and said, “Sit down. I’m going to tell you what I really am. Then see how much you trust me.”

She stood for a moment, her eyes locked with his, before she sank back down. What made Jack believe he was so far beyond the reach of the most powerful of human emotions?

“I told you my father was an abusive husband when he drank,” he began, shifting his gaze back to the window. He seemed to be conjuring up a past so awful he couldn’t stand to look at it straight on. “My mother did her damnedest to keep me out of their battles but as I got older, my father got drunk more often. Once I knew what was happening, I tried to defend her. My father was a big man so he’d just slam me against the wall, and go back to beating Mama.”

Charlie felt tears sting her eyes.

“When he finally gave me a concussion, my mother went to a lawyer and filed for divorce. She even had a restraining order put on him. But we all know restraining orders aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on if no one’s there to enforce them.”

Jack stopped. Charlie watched him gather his breath and strength for the rest of the story.

“I came home from school one day, and found my mother unconscious on the kitchen floor. Her face was covered with blood, her clothes were in shreds, and I could see a bone in her arm sticking out through her skin. I called an ambulance and as soon as she was in it, I went back inside the house. I got a shotgun from my father’s gun case, and I went from one bar to another until I found him.”

“Oh God …” Charlie gasped.

“I told him I was going to kill him for what he’d done to my mother. He laughed. He was so drunk he laughed. I shot him right in the chest.”

“Did he die?”

“Yes. A shotgun blast at three feet does a lot of damage. So at age fourteen, I murdered my own father.”

“That’s not murder, that’s self-defense!”

“It was premeditated murder.” He leaned down and gripped her shoulders hard. “Do you understand? I took that gun and went looking for my own father with the sole purpose of killing him. I didn’t want to scare him. I didn’t want to hurt him. I wanted him dead.”

He let go of her and straightened to pace over to the dresser. Bracing his hip against it, he shoved his hands in his pockets and continued. “I got a lot of sympathy. The lawyer bargained it down to manslaughter. I was a juvenile so I went to a juvenile prison. But it was prison.”

“Is that where you saw the meteor shower?”

“Yeah. My first night there, I was lying in bed staring at the bars in a tiny window seven feet above me, when the sky exploded. It made an impression.”

“Those meteors saved you. They gave you something to focus on while you were shut up in jail. No wonder you’re so passionate about your work.”

“I’m so passionate, I want to retire from it,” he pointed out.

“What happened to your mother? Is she still alive? Do you ever see her?” Charlie said, brushing aside his interjection.

“Mama recovered. She even had a baby nine months later because along with beating her, my father had raped her.”

“Oh no!”

“Oh yes, I have a baby brother. Not that I ever knew him. When I got out of prison, I went to say good-bye to Mama. Then I never went back home again.”

“So you haven’t seen your mother or your little brother since you were a teenager?” Charlie could not conceive of having a mother and a sibling and choosing to cut them out of your life.

Jack’s shoulders moved in a sort of half-shrug. “As often as I can persuade her, I fly my mother to some nice hotel and meet her there. But I can’t stand the sight of Molena, Georgia. And I don’t include my brother because I don’t think he needs to know the convicted murderer in the family.”

“But your mother understood why you had done what you did?”

“She understood and she blamed herself.”

“That’s a lot of blame to shoulder.” Charlie pulled the robe tightly around her, trying to imagine a household where fear of physical injury was the prevailing emotion. It made being an orphan seem almost easy. “It seems to me your father is the only one who was guilty. You and your mother were his victims.”

“The law frowns upon individual citizens deciding who’s guilty and then carrying out a death sentence,” Jack said.

“But the law didn’t protect you or your mother, so what other choice did you have?”

“At the time, I didn’t think I had any.”

She could see in his eyes he had gone away to his own private hell. But she refused to leave him there. She got up and slowly walked over to him. With equal deliberation, she wrapped her arms around his unyielding body, and laid her head against his chest.

His heart beat loudly against her ear. They stood motionless for a long minute. Finally, he slipped his hands out of his pockets and circled his arms around her back, pulling her tightly against him. She thought she felt him feather a kiss over her hair. Then he slid his hands to her shoulders and moved her away from him. He walked to the door before he turned. “Thanks for the sympathy … and for the … ‘show of trust.’ I enjoyed it.”

Charlie blushed.

“But none of it is necessary,” he continued, smiling without warmth. “You were quite correct about Hollinger being involved in stealing Sahara-Mars. When we confronted him, he admitted his guilt pretty quickly. Unfortunately, he no longer had the meteorite in his possession, so now we’re going to pay a visit to Vandermade.”

Charlie couldn’t have cared less about Sahara-Mars just then.

“You forgot to mention one other thing I offered you,” she said quietly.

He thrust his hands back into his pockets but looked straight at her. “Sugar, I’m very flattered by your sentiments, but I don’t return them. You’re looking for something I haven’t got.”

By the time Charlie walked into the living room, her head was high and her shoulders were back. Jack was standing in front of the empty marble fireplace.

“Good luck with Vandermade,” she said. “Let me know how it goes.”

“I will.”

She looked at him full on for just a moment. “If I were you, Jack, I’d get in touch with your brother. He might actually be proud to have you as a member of the family.”

“I don’t think so,” he said with implacable conviction. He accompanied her to the door. “Drive carefully.”

After Charlie walked out of the apartment Jack’s eyes never left the security monitor as her image progressed from hall to elevator to lobby. He watched the empty lobby long after she was gone, then dropped into the nearest chair, his elbows on his knees and his palms pressed hard against his eyes.

Twenty-Four

Two guards swung open enormous wrought-iron gates, and Jack gunned the Land Rover through them. “Why doesn’t Vandermade invest in electronic gates?” he asked Miguel, in the passenger seat.

“Because having human beings manning the portals reinforces the Master-of-All-I-Survey image he has of himself.” Peter Burke spoke from the backseat.

Jack had reluctantly agreed to let the scientist come because he had gotten them in to see Hollinger. Now he had to admit Burke would add to the intimidation factor; the professor wore a charcoal-gray suit with a brilliantly white shirt and red tie, and he wore it with the arrogance of the CEO of a multinational corporation.

The Land Rover ate up the long winding road to the Vandermade mansion, and the three men were ushered into the billionaire’s library. Books climbed the walls for two stories, interrupted only by one immense leaded glass window. A mahogany desk the size of a ping-pong table dwarfed the man who rose from behind it.

“Jack!” Curt Vandermade said, walking around the desk, hand outstretched. “I was devastated to hear about the theft.”

“You know Miguel,” Jack said, gripping Vandermade’s hand for a split second. “And this is Dr. Peter Burke.”

“The eminent bio-astronomer,” Vandermade acknowledged. “And your nemesis, Jack. How strange for you to come calling together.”

“We’ve joined forces in the interest of science,” Peter said.

“Oh?” Vandermade cocked an eyebrow. “Gentlemen, have a seat.”

No one sat. Vandermade couldn’t conceal the flush of color on his face at their blatant disregard of his command.

“We paid a visit to Dr. Hollinger yesterday,” Jack said. “He made a surprise appearance on some videotapes from the Museum of Natural History, and we thought he might shed some light on the disappearance of Sahara-Mars.”

Vandermade’s color intensified but he didn’t move.

“It turned out he was quite well-informed on the subject, and we have a very fine recording of our discussion, thanks to Miguel’s camera work,” Jack continued.

Miguel nodded in mock appreciation of the tribute, and pulled a slim plastic case from the inside pocket of his jacket. Leaning forward, he placed it on Vandermade’s desk. “I made a copy on DVD for you, in case you’d like to see it.”

Now Jack sat down in a large leather chair.

He rested his elbows on the overstuffed arms and crossed his legs, the very picture of a man in control of the situation. Miguel and Peter remained standing, flanking him. “We believe you would prefer not to have that recording find its way into the hands of the police and the press, and we’re prepared to offer an exchange.”

“I can discredit Hollinger in an instant,” Vandermade said, snapping his fingers. A vein was pulsing in his temple. “Nothing he says will stand up in court.”

“You blackmailed him into stealing the security codes,” Jack said. “As a scientist, he had access to the staff at the Museum, and he used your money to bribe them.”

“I can make your life very unpleasant,” Vandermade jabbed a finger in Peter Burke’s direction. “Princeton’s always looking for large donors. I’ll insist on some personnel changes in exchange for my donation.”

“Don’t waste your time,” Peter said coolly. “I’ve got tenure.”

“And we all know it’s impossible to get rid of a professor with tenure,” Jack said.

“I’ll make sure you never get a graduate degree at any university in this country,” Vandermade hissed.

“There’s always the University of Djibouti,” Jack shrugged.

“What about me?” Miguel asked. “I feel neglected.”

“You’re just a damned Spic,” Vandermade spat. “I’ll have you deported.”

“I was born in Union City, so that’s as far as you can deport me.” Miguel laughed. “Although I think that’s the worst threat you’ve made so far.”

Jack and Peter chuckled.

“What about that beautiful blond wife of yours?” Vandermade sneered.

Jack was out of his chair and across the five feet between them in an instant, his face mere inches from the other man’s. “If you hurt Charlie in any way, all the security guards you can hire will not stop me from killing you,” he said through clenched teeth.

“Hurt her?” Vandermade laughed nervously. “I’ll buy her. Every woman has her price, and it’s generally surprisingly low.”

For a moment, Jack leaned in even closer, and Vandermade involuntarily shifted back. Miguel took one step toward the two men, then relaxed as his friend straightened.

“I’d like to see you try,” Jack said as he strolled back to the chair and sat down. “This conversation has become a waste of my time. Let’s make the exchange. Get the meteorite.”

“Where’s the original video?” Vandermade said, folding his arms across his chest.

“In a safe-deposit box. Where else would it be?” Jack asked, raising his eyebrows.

“You expect me to give you the meteorite before I get the original? And how many other copies are there?” Vandermade asked. “I’m not a fool, gentlemen.”

“Perhaps I didn’t make the terms of the exchange clear.” Jack stared at Vandermade for a long moment. “You give us the meteorite you stole, and in exchange, we will promise not to release the video to the police or the media. However, the original recording will remain in my possession.”

The billionaire stood abruptly, his fists clenched, his face almost purple. “You’ve made a very powerful enemy today,” he said, his voice shaking with rage. He twisted and stabbed his finger on a button set into the mahogany surface behind him. “Bring the meteorite to my office,” he barked.

As they waited, the only movement in the room came from the pulsing vein in Vandermade’s forehead. Finally, the paneled double doors swept inward, and two men in dark suits side-stepped into the room, carrying the glass and steel cube between them. They took it to a round, leather-topped table and lifted it carefully onto the smooth surface. Vandermade flicked his fingers at the men, and they went swiftly out of the room, pulling the doors shut behind them.

Peter strode over to the table. “At least your goons had the sense to steal the meteorite in its case. You didn’t open it, did you?” he asked sharply as he searched for the light switch.

“They’d have to use an acetylene torch,” Miguel said. “I built that case, and they’d never figure out how to open it.” He walked to the table and ran his fingers along one edge of the cube. The interior light came on, and Sahara-Mars gleamed darkly in its frozen flight.

Jack watched the scientist devour it with his eyes, and a sympathetic smile played around his mouth. “Well, gentlemen, we have what we came for. Miguel?”

Miguel swept the case off the table and walked to the doors Peter held wide.

“Curt,” Jack said, turning back toward the desk, “I hope I never again have the misfortune of being in the same room with you.”

Then he strolled through the doors, leaving them gaping open behind him.

The Land Rover rolled up to the glass doors at the entrance to the Rose Center.

A phalanx of security guards met it, but Miguel refused to hand over his precious burden, so the three men entered the sleek, modern foyer surrounded by a cordon of uniforms. Museum-goers turned to watch the silent procession as it passed under the giant silver sphere of the planetarium and up the steps to the Hall of Planet Earth.

Another group of guards stood at the top of the steps to keep visitors out of the hall, parting to let the meteorite and its escort through. Miguel walked to the pedestal and set the case on top. Pulling a small set of tools from his pocket, he made several adjustments, punched a series of numbers into a keypad and stepped back.

Sahara-Mars once more spun glittering in the brilliant light of a simulated sun.

“Let ‘em in,” Jack said to the guards holding back the considerable crowd.

As the curious onlookers formed a line between the velvet ropes, Jack and Peter stood and watched. One young boy read the plaque aloud to his older brother, “‘Inside this meteorite could lie the answer to the question: is there life on Mars?’ How cool is that?”

“It’s an alien egg,” his brother said, flapping his hands like jaws. “It’s going to hatch and eat us all. Watch out!”

“You dork,” the younger boy said, scornfully. “It’s not that kind of life. It’s like amoebas or something.”

Jack watched the boys examine his meteorite. “I have a brother,” he said, after taking a deep breath.

“I do too,” Peter said. “He likes to pretend I don’t exist, so I go out of my way to annoy him whenever possible.”

Jack turned to stare at the man beside him.

“Yeah, I know you’re my brother,” Peter acknowledged. “I figured it out years ago.”

“Why the hell didn’t you say so?”

“Why the hell didn’t you?”

Jack’s gaze shifted back to Sahara-Mars. “Because who would want a brother who’d murdered his father?”

“That’s ancient history, and the bastard got what he deserved,” Peter said. Suddenly he grinned. “Besides, you dork, I want a brother who catches stars.”

“What?” Jack glanced sideways.

“That’s what Mama told me my big brother did. She’d take me outside for every meteor shower we could see and tell me that my brother was out there catching all those stars falling to earth. For years, I visualized you as some sort of cosmic baseball player.”

“I don’t believe this! Why didn’t Mama tell me you knew?”

“Because I wasn’t going to force myself on you.”

“We’re both dorks,” Jack said, a matching grin lighting his face as he grabbed his not-so-little brother and wrapped him in a bear hug.

Miguel strolled up, his eyebrows arched in inquiry. “Are we celebrating the return of Sahara-Mars or something more private?” he asked.

The two men turned toward him. “It’s a family reunion,” Jack said.

“It’s about time,” Miguel said, shaking Peter’s hand. “Jack would never admit this, but he’s been following your career with brotherly pride. Even when you were complaining loudly about his commercialization of scientific materials.”

Peter shrugged. “I didn’t get to break his toys when we were young, so I had to find ways to make up for it when I got older. By the way, where did you get the name ‘Lanett’? It makes you sound like some shady cardsharp.”

“The bus I took out of prison passed through it. Population 7,897. It seemed pretty snappy to a juvenile delinquent.”

“Let’s go have lunch and celebrate,” Miguel said, chuckling.

“Great idea! Especially if Jack’s buying.”

“We have a lot of lost time to make up for, little brother,” Jack said, his tone serious as he gripped Peter’s hand. “And we’ll do it, but there’s something else I have to make up for first.”

Miguel locked eyes with his old friend. “Would that something have happened last night?”

Jack nodded. “I owe her an apology…and a thank-you,” he added, glancing at Peter.

“I’m glad you’ve come to your senses, amigo,” Miguel said, smiling. “Go mend your fences. I’ll take care of your hermanito here.”

“Remind me to tell you to stay out of my business the next time I see you,” Jack said. “In the meantime, I owe you a thank-you too.”

As Jack cut through the shifting crowd of meteorite gazers, Miguel said to Peter, “I think your brother has finally decided to rejoin the human race.”