An Imperfect Process (13 page)

She raised her hand and stroked his beard, enjoying the texture and tickle of it. Sexily male. His mouth was strongly shaped, a soft contrast to the beard when she brushed her fingertips across his lips.

He touched her hair, twining a springy red lock around his finger. "I love your hair. It's so completely alive, just like you are."

"Countercultural hair. It makes a political statement just by existing." The brush of his fingers on her hair sent tingles through her. What did she want? A partner. A man who could be a trusted friend and lover—the kind she had dreamed of but never found. Rob was in many ways a mystery, yet he had depth, kindness, and intelligence. To hell with the potential complications.

Rising on her toes, she kissed him. His stillness ended and he kissed her back, his hands going to her waist to draw her close. Warm lips, textured beard, a faint, pleasing bittersweet tang of coffee on his tongue.

At first the kiss was tentative, two strangers exploring, but attraction crackled when Val slid her arms around his neck. Her breasts tingled as they pressed into his chest and her blood began to dance with the animal chemistry that addled adolescents. She leaned into him, murmuring, "This is probably a really bad idea."

"No question about it." He began kneading her back, his strong hands caressing and energizing her tired muscles as his kiss deepened.

She tugged him over to the sofa and they went down in a sprawl of arms and legs. Her legs bracketed his as she lay across his hard-muscled working man's body. She felt like a teenager necking on the front porch after a date. She had forgotten how delightful such sessions could be.

No, "delightful" was too frivolous a word. They were communicating on a deep non-verbal level. Under the distracting tides of passion, she sensed a vast, almost frightening need at the center of his being, a hunger he was rigorously controlling. She yearned to dive into those depths, explore his mysteries.

Common sense reasserted itself barely in time. She was reading way too much into a kiss. Reminding herself that she was trying to change her life and relationships, she broke away from Rob, sliding from his lap to the other end of the sofa. "This really is a bad idea," she said shakily.

He checked his instinctive reach toward her and took a deep breath. "I know you're right, but remind me why."

She looked away, struggling to order her tangled thoughts. "I don't know anything about you, Rob, except that you're interesting and attractive. I don't know where you were born, what you've done with your life, why you feel such a powerful desire to help Daniel. You're the mysterious dark stranger, except that you're not dark."

Without moving a whisker he became distant, his expression turning to stone. After the length of a dozen heartbeats, he got to his feet. She thought he was going to walk out. Instead, he began pacing the room, tense with stress and indecision. She sat very still, wondering what internal demons he was battling.

"I don't want your soul," she said quietly. "But I need to know more about what makes you tick. Though I've made my share of mistakes about men, I try not to make the same one twice. This works both ways. You might want to know more about me."

"Harvard Law Review," he said promptly. "Youngest partner ever at Crouse, Resnick. Your father is Bradford Westerfield III, a senior partner at a top New York law firm, and you have two blond half sisters with perfectly straightened teeth. Your mother, Callie Covington, is a textile artist and board member of the American Visionary Art Museum. You are utterly loyal to your friends, a soft touch for stray animals, and your not-so-secret vice is hot fudge sundaes."

She stared, thinking he had just proved his credentials as an investigator. "How did you learn all that?"

"Mostly from the Internet. Some from Kate Corsi when I called her about your interest in renting the church. Of course, the things she said about you were pretty innocent. She would never talk about the really interesting stuff."

"Thank heaven for that. Old friends know way too much about each other to dare dishing dirt." Val wondered if he was trying to change the subject away from himself. He looked as if he would rather be anywhere in the world except here.

But he hadn't run away yet. "Not that there is anything terribly interesting about me. I've always been too busy with school or my job to get into much trouble."

His pacing stopped at the fireplace and he stared into the gilt-framed mirror as if not recognizing the reflection. "I've been hiding for four years," he said brusquely. "But if we want to have any relationship beyond the superficial, you need to know the truth."

Val felt as if ice water had been poured over her. "Are you a... a fugitive from justice?" The name Robert Smith sure sounded like a pseudonym.

"Nothing criminal on my part, though for a couple of years I saw way too much of the justice system. I walked away from my old life because... because..." He stopped again. She hardly breathed, not wanting to spook him.

When he spoke again, he took a different tack. "Do you recall hearing about an environmental terrorist who called himself the Avenging Angel?"

"Jeffrey Gabriel, self-righteous destroyer of projects built on coastal wetlands," she said promptly. "Started with simple arson and moved into fire bombs. Four people died in his fires and a dozen more were injured, along with millions in property damages. He was torching developments for something like eight years before they caught up with him in Texas. I saw him on television. He had the coldest eyes I've ever seen."

Rob pivoted sharply away from the fireplace. "It's time to quit before things get ugly. I'm sorry, Val. I should have kept my interest to myself."

She was off the sofa in a shot. "You can't walk out in the middle of this! Were.. were you involved in setting those fires? A co-conspirator who wasn't caught?"

"It would have been easier if I had been." He looked down at her, his pale eyes like ice. "I'm the Avenging Angel's brother."

She gasped, riveted by Rob's eyes, which were so like those of the man she'd seen on television and in newspapers. Dear God, no wonder he was haunted.

"You're Robert Smith Gabriel," she breathed. "The man who turned him in."

Chapter 9

Rob tensed at the sight of Val's shocked expression. He should have known she would be familiar with the whole sordid story. "Right—the cold-hearted computer tycoon who blew the whistle on his own brother. Cain slays Abel. There was quite a media feeding frenzy at the time." He turned the doorknob. "Good night, Val. Let's pretend I left right after packing my files and forget anything else happened."

She caught his wrist in a light but tenacious grip. "You must carry a world of guilt about this, but you did the right thing. When the story broke, I was awed by the incredible courage it took to do what you did. I've wondered sometimes how much it cost you." She studied his face, then shook her head. "I saw pictures of you then, but I would never have recognized you under that beard."

"Which was the point. To eradicate Robert Smith Gabriel. Easy enough to drop the Gabriel and become generic Robert Smith. It worked, until tonight."

"Now that you've started, why not tell me the whole story?" Her voice was very gentle. "A nightmare shared is a nightmare tamed."

He hesitated, torn between a desire to bolt back into the rabbit hole where he had been living since Jeff's arrest, and an equally powerful desire to talk with Val, who had no judgment in her eyes, only acceptance.

"Come sit down," she said. "You can tell me as much or as little as you want."

Her words tilted the balance toward talking. Val was the first person he'd met who made it possible to imagine a life beyond paralyzing guilt and betrayal, so maybe it was time to bare his soul. She already knew the essentials; he wondered how she would handle the grim details that had festered inside him for so long.

When he gave a jerky nod, she tucked a hand in his elbow and guided him back to the sofa, taking the chair opposite herself. "You weren't kidding about the media feeding frenzy," she said. "They loved that you were a Silicon Valley honcho while your younger brother was burning down marinas and expensive condominium projects."

He lifted a figurine of a Chinese dragon from the end table, rolling the silky, polished wood between his hands. "Jeff was always kind of an oddball—very bright, with a mind that worked differently from most people. He had lousy social skills, but he never hurt anyone. Mostly he just wanted to be left alone.

"He used to talk about how he should have been born in the time of mountain men like Jim Bridger, so he could live in the wilderness and never have to see anyone. Looking back, I can see the signs of what he became, but at the time, he was just my smart, eccentric little brother." His little brother, now dead. "He... he looked up to me."

"You and your family lived in Baltimore when you were young, didn't you? The local angle was always mentioned in the newspaper."

He nodded. "That's why I came back after Jeff died. It was the one place where we had been happy. After our father left and my mother married a guy called Joe Harley, we moved to Florida and life went to hell. Harley was a vicious drunk and couldn't hold a job, so we moved around a lot. I had terrible fights with him. It's a wonder we didn't kill each other. As soon as I finished high school, I enlisted in the Marines. I told myself everything would be better if I wasn't home to piss Harley off, but the real reason I enlisted was to escape. The first and worst betrayal of my brother."

"It's not a crime for a young man to grow up and move away."

He set the figurine down. "I was older. I should have stuck around and stood up for Jeff. It never came out at the trial because Texas doesn't much care about mitigating circumstances, but Jeff's lawyer learned that after I left, Harley started beating on Jeff. He was a skinny kid and couldn't defend himself except by running away. That went on until Harley died in a fire."

She caught her breath, understanding instantly. "Did your brother do that?"

"In hindsight, it seems likely. The fire was caused by a smoldering cigarette in Harley's favorite armchair. He smoked and drank himself into a coma every night, so his death was ruled an accident. But... I don't think so."

"If Jeffrey could arrange that kind of fatal accident in cold blood, he was probably well beyond any help you could have offered." Her face was pale, but she didn't look away. As he'd seen in the SuperMax, she was tough. "He may have been mentally ill from the time he was very young."

"I think he was, but his behavior was normal enough that he was never diagnosed. Moving through different school systems meant he wasn't in one place long enough to attract much attention." Rob had spent endless hours digging through his memories, thinking of times when he'd covered up for his brother. If he hadn't, maybe Jeff could have been helped.

"I used to take him on camping trips along the coast or in the Everglades. He loved that. He'd talk about the two of us living in the woods when we grew up, but I never took that seriously. I went from the Marines to college to being a hotshot computer wizard and didn't see my family more than once every year or two.

"In the process, I failed Jeff. While I was having a fine time working twenty-hour days and having people say how smart I was, he was getting sicker and sicker until he began torching coastal developments. If I had stayed in closer touch, had seen how things were going, I could have prevented the worst of his excesses. I'm sure of it."

"Maybe you could have, but maybe not," she said quietly. "If he was incapable of empathy, it might have been impossible to fix."

"He wasn't completely callous. He cared about wildlife and nature, and about me. That's why I'm the only one who might have made a difference." And Rob cared for Jeff. Despite his younger brother's cool, warped intelligence, he hadn't been a monster, at least not when they were kids. That had come later.

"He might have looked up to you, but he still stole that security device you were developing. You might have been arrested for your brother's crimes."

The damned security detection device had led to Jeff's downfall. "I hardly ever heard from Jeff, just an occasional e-mail, so I was tickled when he showed up out of the blue at my office in Menlo Park. It was great to see him, but I was about to leave for Japan so there wasn't time for much more than a tour of the company and a lunch. He asked about the different products I was working on, but didn't show any special interest in the security device. I didn't notice that he stole one of the prototypes.