Storm Over the Lake (8 page)

“Are you going to call Jack in the morning?”

She tried to focus her mind. “I'd like
to, if you don't mind. He was…he was very good to Mama, and to me.”

“I don't mind, honey.”

She burrowed closer. “Adrian, she's better off, isn't she?” she whispered, feeling the pain come back. “Isn't she?”

“You know that already.” He drew her up closer, cradling her, rocking her gently in his warm embrace. “Now go to sleep. Just go to sleep. I've got you, and nothing can hurt you. Sleep, my…”

His voice faded into nothingness in her mind.

 

She called Jack and had him meet them for breakfast at the hotel before they left. She was calmer now, the mask firmly in place over her raw emotions, coping.

“I'll never be able to thank you enough,” she told him while Adrian went to pay the check. “Never.”

Jack looked vaguely embarrassed. He fingered his coffee cup. “You know when you come back, your job'll be waiting, don't you?” he asked. He darted a glance toward Adrian's broad back at the counter.
“Meanwhile, maybe he'll keep your mind busy. You needed a break before. You need it even worse now. This business can be hell without periodic absences.”

She managed a smile for him. “The phone rings and it's for him, now. I'm enjoying that. Nobody calls me to tell me about bank robberies. Or threatens to blow up my car. Except him,” she added with a hint of a grin.

“He isn't what I expected,” Jack said.

“What did you expect?” she asked.

“We'll go into it another time. Say, remember that flying saucer nut I was having fits with when you were here?”

She nodded. “Don't tell me he got kidnapped by little green men?”

“He says he did. Had the wire services all over us last week,” he laughed. “You'd have loved it.”

“Loved what?” Adrian asked, rejoining them.

“A story I was telling her,” Jack grinned. “The newsroom sure is quiet these days. I kind of like it. Phyl doesn't threaten to stock my pool with guppies and
give my unlisted number to high school journalism students.”

“It was only once,” Dana reminded him.

“He had friends,” Jack recalled. “All would-be poets. ‘I hear the gut-pounding rhythm of the slippery slimy surf slobbering…' Remember, Miss Meredith?”

“This shy, retiring, dignified little girl?” Adrian asked curiously. “My God, I'd never have believed it. She's sedate and efficient, but I didn't realize she was that dangerous.”

“Sedate?” Jack had the expression of a man who'd been hit between the eyes with a scoop of ice cream. “Dana?”

Adrian studied her in a long silence. His eyes narrowed thoughtfully, and they didn't leave her as Jack launched into more reminiscing. It kept her from thinking, and that was what she needed most of all.

 

The graveside service was held at the small cemetery of a Methodist church out in the metropolitan area of northwest At
lanta. A rolling, green slope of land with trees and tiny bronze markers instead of tombstones. A prayer was said. The minister took her hand and murmured words of comfort. The few Miami staffers who'd flown up for the funeral patted her on the back. Jack hugged her. And it was over. Adrian hustled her into the back seat of the Lincoln and held onto her hand as if it were made of gold while Frank turned the big car and headed it for the manor.

Dana closed her eyes and felt the last of the tears easing away the grief. It was over. It was over.

T
he nights were long at first, and there were occasional tears when she let herself remember. But Adrian wasn't shouting at her so much anymore. Lillian was kindness itself, and the grief was slowly fading.

“What the hell is this?” Adrian asked late one afternoon, his leonine face scowling blackly at something he saw on his appointment calendar. He traced it with a long finger and glanced at Dana. “You've got me down for dinner with Mendolsen
Thursday night. You know I hate Mendolsen's guts, how the hell do you expect me to eat?”

“But, you said…” she protested.

“I said, I wanted to talk to him, not that I wanted to wine him, dine him, and sleep with him!” he returned. “Get me out of it.”

“But, he's out of town until Thursday afternoon,” she exclaimed, her slender hands going out in a gesture of impotence.

“Then call him Thursday afternoon.”

“But…”

“If you ‘but' me one more time…” he threatened darkly.

She sighed. “All right, I'll do it. But, if I were you,” she added with a hint of her old self, “I'd look under my pillow before I laid down on it.”

Both dark brows went up. “What am I supposed to find?”

“I won't say,” she replied, turning away. “But if you hear a hissing, rattling sound…”

“I thought you were afraid of snakes.”

“Only male snakes,” she qualified,
“with blue eyes. Actually, I'm very fond of female snakes. Especially,” she added with a grin, “when they're dead.”

He threw back his head and roared. “My God, how did that newspaper survive you?”

“I'm very sedate, remember?” she reminded him.

“Sedate, hell, you're going to give me a nervous breakdown,” he replied with a chuckle.

“Give?” She shook her head. “I charge for those.” She flipped her steno pad shut. “Am I through for the night?”

“As far as I'm concerned, you are. I'm taking Fayre to a concert,” he added, flashing a glance her way.

She kept her expression unruffled. “Then I think I'll have an early night. I've been on the phone all day.”

“Like old times, wasn't it?”

“Yes.” She sighed.

“Miss it?”

She nodded with a smile. “I've been doing it for a lot of years.”

He frowned thoughtfully, one hand
jammed into his pocket. His eyes swept over her slender body, the youth that made her cheeks soft and flushed, gave the soft brightness to her eyes. “Honey,” he said softly, “you haven't lived a lot of years.”

The tone of his deep voice made ripples down her spine. “I…I have to…”

“…help Lillian,” he finished for her in a harsh growl. “God, I know, don't you always. Go ahead!”

She left him standing there, wondering silently at the harsh whip of his voice.

 

She went to her room after dinner and spent several restless hours there, until the walls started to close in. She remembered some typing she'd left until morning, and decided to finish it. At least it would keep her mind from wandering to Adrian and the dragon…

Her long hair loosened, dressed in the royal blue jersey dress she kept for casual wear, she closed the door of the den behind her and settled down at the typewriter.

The big chair that swallowed Adrian's
husky form left plenty of room around hers. Her hands touched the leathery arms, feeling it grow warm under her fingers, and she leaned back, her mind full of Adrian. If only she was sophisticated, like Fayre, and bright and gay and desirable. If only she hadn't ruined him. If only he wanted something from her besides vengeance—but, she sighed, that was the only reason he was keeping her here, and she knew it. Even though he'd been kindness itself since her mother's death, she knew it was always there, nagging at his temper, causing those frequent periods when he sat and stared at her, his dark eyes burning in that broad face. She had to be on her guard every minute. He might even stoop to making her love him…. Her eyes closed as if in pain. What an unbearable punishment, to have him know how she really felt! It would give him the most malicious pleasure to chide her for it, to ridicule her, if he found out. Nothing, nothing, would be worse than that!

She gathered her hastily scribbled shorthand notes, and began to type.

She was so intensely involved in what she was doing that she didn't hear the disturbance outside, or the front door open, or the whisper of the den door as it slid open to admit a familiar dark, husky form.

He stood there for a moment, his eyes sliding over the silky long hair, the unguarded vulnerability of that young face, the slender, flowing curves of her body, so graceful in the way she sat. He leaned back against the door, his eyes soft in that instant; watching her like some great, dark cat might watch its prey unobserved.

Something, a tingling awareness, made her glance up. She jumped, seeing him there unexpectedly. “You startled me!” she gasped.

“You startled me the first time I ever saw you,” he replied obscurely. He loosened his tie and pulled it off, tossing it to the couch. His fingers went to the buttons of his immaculate white shirt after he'd shed his jacket, unfastening it halfway down that massive dark chest with its covering of black hair.

“God, I'm tired,” he murmured. He ran
a hand through his hair, rumpling it, and sank into the deep, soft armchair by the fireplace, crossing his legs. “I don't give a damn about Wagner, and I had to sit through a program of it that nearly drove me to drink. Do you like Wagner, Meredith?” he asked, pausing to light a cigarette before he looked at her.

She shook her head. “I like Debussy and Dvorak.”

“The romantics.” A smile touched his chiseled mouth. “I might have known.”

“You don't like them, either, I suppose?” she fished.

He studied her quietly. “I like Debussy, Neil Diamond, Kenny Rogers, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and Alice Cooper. Does that answer your question?”

She laughed softly and her eyes widened. “Alice Cooper?”

“Don't knock it, honey,” he grinned. “Music is music, and I like it all.”

“Really?” She darted a mischievous glance at him. “I thought you older people only liked waltzes and fox-trots.”

“Older
people?” He stood up, the cig
arette smoking in his hand and moved lazily to the desk, perching himself on its edge beside her. “Would you care to elaborate?”

“Well,” she replied, the proximity making her nervous, the scent of his expensive cologne drowning her in sensation, “you just don't look like a man who'd like hard rock,” she replied.

One darkly masculine hand, with its sprinkling of hair, reached out and touched the curve of her throat, coaxing her face up. His eyes met hers, dangerous, deep, holding her gaze until she thought her heart would jump out of her chest.

“Your heart's racing,” he murmured, his fingers playing havoc as they traced the throbbing vein in her neck.

“I…Is it?” she managed in a strange, husky voice.

He leaned down until his breath was whispering across her trembling mouth, until his dark eyes filled the room.

He drew back as she swayed helplessly toward him, chuckling like the devil he was. “Don't worry, little girl,” he said
softly, “I don't rob cradles.” Taking a long draw from his cigarette, he stood up with a taunting smile at the nervous wreck he'd left in the chair before him. “Come on, Dana, let's get some coffee and cake. I barely touched my supper.”

“C…coffee and cake?” she faltered.

“Aren't you hungry, honey?” he asked with one raised eyebrow. “God knows I am. Have coffee with me, at least.”

“All right.” She tugged her calm mask back in place, unaware of the mischief in the dark eyes she couldn't see, and followed him to the kitchen. That he wanted her company was enough to kindle a glow in the pit of her stomach.

She made coffee while he sat quietly at the kitchen table and watched her.

“I never thanked you,” she murmured, pouring water into the automatic coffee maker.

“For what?”

“Going with me. Staying with me. Easing the hurt,” she replied, glancing at him past the silky curtain of her long hair.

“I'd have done that for my worst en
emy, didn't you know?” he asked with a hint of smile. His eyes narrowed. “Don't credit me with too much compassion. I never make investments without a guaranteed return.”

“What did you get out of it, then, except a lot of expense?” she asked. “And I'm going to pay you back, every penny,” she added firmly.

“You can work it out,” he told her, not bothering to argue. He leaned back in the chair, his darkness, his broadness tantalizing in the silence and the privacy of the kitchen. Her eyes were drawn against her will to that spray of black hair peeking out of the unbuttoned white shirt, and she was remembering how it had felt under her hands that night she danced with him at the lake….

“You're staring, Persephone,” he taunted.

Flushing, she drew her eyes back to the coffee maker. “I wish you wouldn't call me that.”

“Why not? It fits.”

“You wouldn't like it if I called you Pluto.”

“Damned straight, and I wouldn't advise you to try it. I like mine with cream,” he added as she poured coffee into the two big, thick mugs. She paused to lace his with cream before she set it in front of him.

“You always pick on me,” she protested, dropping into the chair across from him, vulnerable in the soft blue dress with her hair spreading like yellow satin onto her shoulders, her eyes huge and brown and wistful. “Why can't I hit back?”

“Honey, you've got a foolproof method for getting at me, and you don't even know it.”

She stared at him blankly. “What?”

But he only shrugged. “Forget it.” He sipped his coffee absently. “What were you doing up—waiting for me?”

She blushed furiously. It had never occurred to her that he might put that interpretation on it. “I…I just couldn't sleep,” she hedged. “And I needed to finish that…all right, I was thinking about Mama
and I needed something to do,” she admitted finally, wearily.

“It passes, Dana,” he said quietly. His fingers absently stroked the coffee mug. “I remember when Janine died…”

“Your…your wife?” she asked gently.

“My wife.” He stared down into the shimmer of light that reflected in the deep mug. “It was a merger more than a marriage—her family had cloth mills, mine manufactured clothing. But I'd lived in the same house with her long enough to miss the scent of her perfume in a room, or the sound of her humming when she dressed for a night on the town.” He chuckled. “God, I even missed the nylons she left strewn across the floor. Neatness wasn't one of Janine's better points. She was the unhappiest woman I ever knew. She laughed all the time, but her eyes died before she did.”

“You loved her?”

He studied the softness in her eyes, the vulnerability. “At that point in my life, little girl, I didn't really know what love was.” He watched her quietly, and there
was in his expression something totally adult, masculine and provocative. “Dana, you're so very young,” he said in a tone that made her blush.

“Try to burp me, and it's going to be a free-for-all in here,” she warned quietly.

A swarthy grin cut across his face. “Honey, if I ever take you on my lap, it won't be to burp you.”

She lifted her face defiantly, ignoring the heat in her cheeks. “You only just got through saying you don't rob cradles,” she reminded him.

He chuckled softly. “I have to keep your age in mind. Occasionally I forget that you're eighteen years my junior.”

“Seventeen,” she corrected him. “I'll be twenty-three the day after tomorrow.”

He held her eyes in the silence, looking his fill while her heart shook. “I was already a man when you were just born, Dana,” he said gently.

Her gaze slid over the lines in his face, his broad, chiseled mouth, the darkness of his skin…touching it with her eyes. “Adrian…”

“What is it…something you're afraid to ask?” he mused. “I don't bite.”

“Did you…I mean, most men…” she trembled over the words. “Did you ever want children?”

Something—brown sunlight, an explosion of autumn leaves, a burst of brown flame—touched those dark eyes and dilated them. “Why did you ask that?” he queried gently.

She dropped her eyes, afraid that he might see the answer. “I just wondered.”

He put out the stub of his cigarette and finished his coffee. “You'd better get some sleep, little one. It's very late. No, leave the cups, let Lillian get them in the morning.” He held the door open for her. “I never did get my cake.”