Betina Krahn (26 page)

“I’ve had enough of upstart financiers for one day,” he declared, turning to his fellow commissioners. “I can’t rule on anything until I’ve had a bite of supper and a glass of port. We’ll recess until ten o’clock sharp tomorrow morning.”

As the committee rose with him and filed out the side door, Connor turned to Beatrice with emotion boiling up inside him. All he could think about was getting her someplace private.…

“Have you gone completely mad?” he whispered as they exited and headed for the lobby.

“It worked, didn’t it?” she answered quietly, though he noted that her hands trembled when they weren’t gripping the portfolio she carried.

“He threw the damned thing on the floor, for God’s sake!” He grabbed her arm and turned her around to face him. “Do you honestly think he intends to give you a hearing of any kind?”

“Yes, I do.” She pulled her arm free and scowled up at him. “He took the proposal with him and will probably read it over supper tonight. By tomorrow he’ll have a few—”

“
Thousand
good reasons not to recommend a charter. You’re dead in the water, right now.”

She stepped back and looked at Alice, who had stopped several feet away trying to pretend she wasn’t hearing every word.

“No, I’m not,” she said with a determined tilt to her chin. “He’s going to go over it with a fine-toothed comb tonight and will grill us mercilessly tomorrow … after which—I’ll give you odds—the committee will vote to give us a charter endorsement.”

“Oh? And how do you know?”

She tapped her cheek just below her eye. “I saw it in his eyes.”

“In his—
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph
—she saw it in his blessed eyes!” He rubbed both hands down his face, as if trying to wipe the thought from his mind. But when he raised his head, it was clearly still there. “You and your precious female intuition—you honestly think you can read the old bastard that easily? All right—fine—put your powers to work again.” He lurched closer, shoved his face into hers, and pointed to his eyes. “What do you see in these?”

Beatrice refused to retreat and in a heartbeat found herself engulfed in that searing blue gaze and fighting her way past the suspicion, irritation, and disbelief that he insisted she acknowledge, to another, deeper set of feelings and responses … raw and shockingly naked emotions … things she had never imagined she would see in a man’s eyes.

Riveted by that overwhelming intimacy, she was suddenly awash in estrangement, childhood wounds and hunger, a furious struggle for personhood, and fierce conflict that had never been resolved. Each brief impression
found a corresponding niche carved by experience in her own heart. She was looking at her own struggle, her own past in his eyes, and that moment of stark, intense self-confrontation left her momentarily without words.

He felt it too, she realized as he withdrew and fell back a step. For the first time in memory, she couldn’t re-close those protective inner doors that had shielded her from the world for so long. With one molten blue stare he had bared all of his inner secrets to her, but it was she who now felt exposed.

“So … what do you see?” he said, his voice constricted.

“Loss. Confusion. Disappointment. Battered hopes.” Her voice grew hushed. It felt more like a confession than an observation.

“He’s responsible for all of that.” He swallowed hard, shaken and clearly struggling for control. “He’s a master of manipulation and deception. He’ll have it his way or die trying. And believe me,
his way
won’t even leave you room to breathe.”

She was staggered by the depths of his resentment and the pain he hid so completely beneath layers of glib talk and easy Irish charm. It was a moment before she could recover herself and respond.

“I know it seems crazy, but you have to trust me on this. He may be a hard man, but he’s not impossible. I believe we can still get our charter.”

“You mean, if you bat your eyes, giggle, and flatter him some more?”

She blanched and fell back, stinging and embarrassed by her hurt.

“I’m in dire need of some fresh air, Alice.” She
wheeled, put her arm through her secretary’s, and headed for the front doors. “It’s getting hard to breathe in here.”

Connor was in turmoil as he watched her walk away from him. Should he abandon the entire project with a vehement “good riddance,” or haul her back and sit on her if necessary to make her see reason?

After several deep, calming breaths that allowed him to find his bearings, he thought of the supper invitation he’d received earlier from the legislature’s Democratic party leadership. He headed through the lobby under a full head of steam. It would feel good to be back in the relatively sane and predictable company of politicians. At least they could tell when they were swimming in water filled with sharks.

On the pavement outside, as he looked up and down the street for a hansom cab, he turned and came unexpectedly face-to-face with none other than Hurst Eddington Barrow. For a moment, Connor felt like he’d been punched in the gut. He could hardly draw breath.

“So you came crawling back,” the old man declared, “just like I knew you would.”

Connor reminded himself he was not twelve years old and his grandfather was no longer his omnipotent guardian. When he managed to focus his thoughts beyond the emotion roiling in him, he was jolted by the old man’s appearance at close range. His skin was sallow and waxy, there were dark circles beneath his eyes, and his cheeks had begun to sink. His eyes, once a simmering silver gray, were now age-dulled and flat, and his hands were thin-skinned and bony. There were still remnants of the titan he had once been, but in truth, Hurst Barrow looked old and surprisingly frail.

“I am not crawling. Nor am I ‘back,’” Connor responded
in savagely controlled tones. “I am doing my duty … practicing my profession … the same profession you chose and prepared me for.”

“Still ungrateful and defiant. And still got your nose stuck in a bustle, I see.” The old man produced a smirk. “But at least your taste is improving. Old Furstie’s widow. Who’d have thought it? Tell me, boy”—the smirk was replaced by a sneer—“what the devil does she see in
you?”

“Something you never did,” Connor said as he turned away. “A man.”

THAT EVENING AS
Beatrice and Alice were being seated for dinner in the hotel’s fashionable restaurant, Alice asked her opinion of the day’s events.

“Do you think that we have a chance?”

“I doubt the wine is from France,” Beatrice responded absently, her eyes fixed on the centerpiece and the menu limp in her hands.

Alice frowned and tried again.

“Do you think there will be problems with that old man?”

“Old ham? I don’t believe I see any ham.”

In truth, Beatrice wasn’t seeing or hearing much of anything just then. Her air of distraction only hinted at the massive internal dislocation she had suffered in her encounter with Connor that afternoon. Every part of her felt disconnected and out of joint—missing the mundane linkages that permitted the power of speech, hearing, and simple verbal comprehension. Alice gave up and concentrated on her meal.

Later, in their room, under Alice’s concerned looks,
Beatrice tried reading. The words may as well have been little black bugs scampering across the pages. She tried making an entry in her diary and had difficulty producing a coherent sentence. By ten o’clock, she was relieved to prepare for bed … putting on her night clothes, brushing her hair, and making one last trip down the hall.

The gaslights in the passage had been dimmed, making the austere, painted walls seem a bit less stark. But there was no source of heat to reduce the chill in the hallway as she stood waiting outside the occupied bathing chamber. She heard a noise behind her and turned.

Connor stood several yards away with his arms crossed, leaning a shoulder against the door to his room. His tie and collar were undone, his hair was slightly rumpled, and his face looked dusky in the lowered light. As he strolled closer, she caught a whiff of spirits.

“You’ve been drinking,” she said, looking past him down the hall and finding it empty.

“Of course,” he said with a lazy grin. “I’ve just had dinner with my fellow graft-mongers and influence peddlers … the Democratic party leadership of our fair legislature. We always have a wee bit o’ the ‘Irish gargle’ after we finish our nefarious plotting and dividing up the spoils of office.”

“Well, I hope you made good use of the time and liquor,” she said, pulling her dressing gown higher and tighter around her neck, to cover her thudding heart, “and got your precious democrats to agree to support our charter.”

He seemed a bit startled, then laughed.

“Damn me. You are something.” He paused four feet away and looked her up and down. “You never let up, do
you? You never take time off. You never forget for a minute that you’re a living, breathing corporation.”

“I’ve made it a policy,” she said breathlessly.

He took in her ruffle-trimmed dressing gown and the way her hair was brushed into a thick fall down her back, and remembered what lay beneath those soft tresses and that frothy silk. When he raised his gaze, her eyes were emerald-dark and luminous. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to close the distance between them and pull her into his arms.

“Make a new policy,” he growled as he lowered his head.

The minute his lips touched hers, some disengaged part of her slid back into its proper slot. And with every shift of his mouth over hers, with every new combination of touch and movement, another connection was reestablished in her fragmented self. He was healing, making whole, rejoining parts of her she hadn’t realized had been separated. She lapped both arms around his waist, embracing both him and the changes happening in her. Then without a single thought of surroundings or consequences, she gave herself up totally to his kiss.

Walls swayed and light and darkness blended as ordinary reality retreated to the edges of her consciousness. After a time, the sound of a door slamming in the distance brought her back to her senses and she looked up to find that it was the door to a room. His room. She pulled back enough to look at him.

In the moonlight coming through the window he seemed made of silver and shadow, with shimmering eyes and desire-darkened features. He seized his tie and pulled it so that it unwrapped slowly, sinuously from his neck, without his eyes ever leaving hers. It was a simple
movement that expressed a complex question. She could stay or she could go. And if she stayed …

The impact of what she was about to do descended on her. She stiffened, looking at the four-poster bed. The moonlight slanting across it created a sharp line between darkness and light … a line as defined as the one she must now cross in her mind and in her heart. And for the life of her, she couldn’t have said whether at that moment she was already standing in light, yearning for the darkness or standing in darkness, longing for the light. All she knew was that everything in her, even the well of her fiercest yearnings, resonated with a simple truth: She had never wanted anything as much as she wanted him.

He waited, watching, sensing the decision she was making and knowing that it was hers alone to make. And choosing, she had never felt freer. When she held out her hands to him, there was moisture in her eyes.

He took her hands with a grin and used them to pull her fully against him. She raised her mouth for a kiss, but he paused to look at her first.

“Beatrice fits you in a boardroom, but in a bedroom … Bea? Bets?”

“Bebe?” she offered. “It was something my sister used to call me.”

“Bebe.” He grinned. “I like it.” He began to nibble his way down the side of her neck, peeling back her dressing gown. It fluttered into a pool around her feet and she responded with goose bumps and a shiver. He felt tension rising in her and paused.

“You haven’t done anything like this in a long time, have you?”

She stiffened. “I’m not certain I’ve done anything like this … ever.”

When he chuckled softly and raised her chin, she had difficulty meeting his gaze. Despite her knowledge of the way of men with women, she felt embarrassed and awkward. Her occasional contact with her aged husband had given her little confidence in her ability to give pleasure to a man. And she wanted so badly to please him.

Connor noted the embarrassment darkening her cheeks.

“Well then, lass”—that emerald satin entered in his voice again—“we’ll have to do something neither of us has done before.” He shed his coat and then unbuttoned his vest.

“This wouldn’t involve whips or ropes or a ship’s wheel, would it?” Her eyes widened as he slid his suspenders from his shoulders.

“Will you be disappointed if it doesn’t?”

“I think I can cope.”

He pulled her toward the wardrobe at the edge of the window, positioning her so that she could see her reflection in the aged mirror on the front of the door. Then he stood behind her and placed his hands on her half-naked shoulders. “Rest yer mind, darlin’. This won’t hurt a bit.”