Masquerade (31 page)

When he pulled her into his arms, Remy pretended to resist, protesting, "Foul. Clinches aren't allowed."

"Can you think of a better way to feel out an opponent?"

"I think you mean feel
up,"
she said in mock reproof as his hand cupped her bottom. "Or is that called going below the belt?"

"That's
hitting
below the belt."

"Like this?" She punched him low in the stomach.

He grunted, more in surprise than in pain. "Now you've done it."

When he caught her up to him, she smiled in satisfaction, but a second later she was squealing with laughter. "No! No! Don't tickle me! Don't!"

She twisted, turned, pushed, trying to elude the tickling fingers that had her convulsing with laughter, but there was no escape from them, not even when she collapsed on the chocolate-colored shag rug, too weak to stand. They rolled around on the floor until she was laughing so hard she could barely breathe.

"I give up," she cried between shrieking giggles. "Uncle. Uncle!" Mercifully, he stopped, and she drank in air, each breath a sigh as she relaxed against the floor, gradually becoming conscious of the pinning weight of his leg hooked over hers, an arm propping him up alongside her. She saw his grin and accused, "You don't fight fair."

"Who's fighting?" he countered softly. "I think I went down for the count at your hands weeks ago."

She caught her breath at the simple declaration so freely made, and lifted a hand to run her fingers through one side of his thick hair. "Are you as happy as I am, Cole?"

The laughter went out of his gray eyes, a sudden and serious intensity claiming them. "Every time you walk into a room, Remy, every time I see you, you"—he seemed to momentarily hesitate over the words—"you make my heart smile."

"It's that way for me too," she said, his words describing exactly the swell of buoyant, happy feeling inside her each time she saw him. She ran a finger down the side of his cheek to his lips. "Who was she, Cole? The one who hurt you— the one you always think I might be like?" She felt the tensing of his muscles, that move to withdraw from her both physically and mentally, and slipped a hand behind his neck to prevent him from rolling away. "You were in love with her, weren't you?"

"I was nineteen. I was in love with who I thought she was."

She ignored the curtness of his answer, recognizing that he used it to hide an old hurt. "Tell me about her, Cole."

"There's nothing to tell." This time he succeeded in pulling away from her as he rolled over and sat up, his back to her.

"I think there is." She sat up too, but made no attempt to touch him. "How did you meet?"

There was a long pause, and she thought he was again going to refuse to discuss her, but then the words came. . . grudgingly, tersely. “She like boxing —the blows, the blood, the bodies glistening. She saw me box. Afterward—she was outside waiting for me. . . .
 
She had so much class—not like anyone I'd ever met— I guess I was blinded by it.”

“You started seeing each other,” Remy said, quietly prompting him to go on.

“Not all that often. I was going to college, holding down a fulltime job to pay for it and boxing on the side to earn some extra money. I didn't have a lot of free time for dating. Mostly she came to see me work out at the gym. Then forward we'd go somewhere for a beer. Correction—I'd have a beer; she'd have a glass wine. She didn't seem to care that I didn't have the money to take her out to Antoine's for dinner. It was enough that we were together—at least, that's what I thought.”
 

“But you found out differently, didn't you? Remy guessed. “How?”

“I made the mistake of going to her house one afternoon to see her—one of those cozy little mansions uptown near Audubon Park,” he added with more than trace of sarcasm, then paused again. “The shock on her face when she saw me standing in the foyer—I'll never forget that . . . or the anger that followed. I remember she said, ‘How dare you embarrass me by coming to my house!' I turned every shade of red there is, and walked out.” He tipped his head back and gazed at the ceiling. "It's funny, but the thing that hurt the most was knowing I'd told her about my father. I'd never been able to talk to anyone about it before. I ..." He shook off the rest of it and lowered his head.

"Your father?" She frowned curiously. "He died when you were eight, isn't that what you told me?"

"Yes." Again his answer was clipped. "How?"

With a turn of his head, he looked at her, something hard and unforgiving in his expression. "In a head-on collision with another car, driven by a very eminent—and very drunk—former state senator from
your
district."

Remy breathed in sharply, realizing that she knew exactly who he meant. The senator had been one of her grandfather's closest friends, a man whose political career had been cut short by an automobile accident that had left him paralyzed. She'd heard the story a dozen times as a child. "But I had always understood—"

"—that my father was the one who'd been drinking?" Cole inserted. "That was a lie. I know. I was there."

"You . . . were in the car?"

"Yes."

She stared at him, remembering the shock, the panic, the terror she'd felt that day on the lake when she'd seen her fiancé, Nick Austin, overturn in his speedboat. She'd waited with her heart in her throat for him to surface and wave that he was all right. He hadn't. And the search had begun, a search that lasted four agonizing hours before his body was recovered. The shock of witnessing the accident, of discovering how tenuous life was, how insecure—she'd had trouble coping with it. It was part of what had driven her back to the family home—the solidness, the security it represented. That was three years ago; she'd been twenty-four. How much harder it must have been to lose someone you loved at the age of eight.

"Cole," she murmured, feeling the fear and pain he had to have experienced.

"He'd taken me to the zoo. My mother was working. She couldn't come with us. We were on our way home. It had started raining. Suddenly there was a glare of headlights right in our eyes. I remember my dad yelled something. Then his arm was across me, pushing me back against the seat. Then there was a lot of noise of glass breaking and metal. . . ."He paused and drank in a trembling breath. "My dad was lying on my lap, and there was blood all over. I knew he needed help, but I couldn't get the door open, so I had to climb out the side window. The police came and I grabbed one of them and took him back to the car to help my dad. Then his partner calls to him— 'Jesus Christ, Hudson, get over here quick! You aren't gonna believe who's driving the other car!' The cop grabs my hand and shoves a bloody handkerchief in it and tells me to hold it against my dad's neck to stop the bleeding. I remember hearing the cop say, 'My God, it's the senator,' and the other cop said, 'Yeah, and he's drunker than a sailor.' After that all I can remember is crying and holding that handkerchief on my dad's neck, but I couldn't make the blood stop. It was all over my hands ... on my arms ... I was too little. I couldn't do it, and the cops never came back to help me. They were too busy saving the senator."

And Remy knew that along with the senator's life, they'd saved his reputation, placing all the blame on the other driver, the one who wasn't alive to deny it.

She didn't say anything. She simply put her arms around Cole and held him tight.

 

Reliving the scene in her mind, Remy felt the same pain all over again. She released a long sigh and discovered she was gripping the back of the sofa. As she lifted her head, her gaze happened to fall on the television's blank screen. Instantly she stiffened.

"We watched television another time, but it— it wasn't a movie." Frowning with the effort of recalling it, Remy turned to Cole, then remembered in surprise, "It was you! You were interviewed by one of the local news stations. Why? Wait—" She broke into a smile as it came back to her. "It was because of the annual Christmas party for the company employees. You'd arranged for it to be held on board one of our ships. And you had Christmas lights strung on all the decks all over the ship. The whole thing was so unique that the television station sent its anchorwoman out to cover the story."

Remy turned to stare at the television again, seeing the interview—Cole standing on the deck of the ship, casually dressed in a turtleneck and navy blazer, a breeze playing with the ends of his hair, the camera gentling his hard-edged features and imbuing them instead with a quiet strength and character.

"This is festive and fabulous, Mr. Buchanan," the anchor, a stunningly attractive black woman, had declared. "What gave you the idea of holding your employee Christmas party on board one of your ships?"

Cole flashed her one of his rare smiles. "With as many attractions as our city has to offer, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that the port of New Orleans is second in activity only to that of New York City. And there are years when our export tonnage has surpassed New York's. The company has always been proud of the fact that New Orleans has always been the home port and the headquarters of the Crescent Line, ever since its founding more than one hundred and fifty years ago. Ships and shipping have always been our business. But when you spend most of your time behind a desk in an office, you tend to forget that. Recently I realized how few of our employees— not to mention any of their families—have ever had the reason or the opportunity to set foot on the deck of one of our ships. . . . When it came time to plan our Christmas party this year, I saw this as the perfect chance to correct that situation and remind everyone what the Crescent Line is all about."

"Approximately three months ago, you lost one of your ships. Did that play any part in your decision?"

"It's true one of our tankers sank in the Gulf during a storm—fortunately with no loss of life or any damage to the environment. Which means we have that much more reason to rejoice in this holiday season."

With that statement from him, the reporter concluded the interview, and Remy turned on the sofa to hug Cole in delight. "You handled that question perfectly. But how quick and clever you were to brag about New Orleans' status as a port
and
work in a plug for the company at the same time. And here I always thought Uncle Marc was the expert at dealing with the media," she said, then poked him in the ribs. "But I'm not sure I liked the way you flirted with that reporter."

"I wasn't flirting—merely turning on the charm," he replied, with a faintly smug smile. "In all business, there's a time to play hardball—and a time to play it soft."

"You've never played it soft with me," she retorted in mock complaint.

"I should hope not," he chuckled, the glint in his eyes giving an entirely different meaning to the word
hard.

She poked him again. "That isn't what I was talking about."

Remy couldn't remember what had happened next, though she could guess. But it didn't matter; the memory had prompted her to wonder about something else. "Did we spend Christmas together?"

"Christmas Eve," Cole replied.

"What did we do?" She crossed to the leather recliner where he stood.

"We drove up to St. James Parish and watched them light the bonfires along the levee—"

"To light the way for Papa Noël," Remy inserted, recalling the tradition, allegedly begun by early settlers in the area, of building giant bonfires along the Mississippi River to help Papa Noel find his way to their new homes. She smiled to herself, remembering the little boy—no more than seven years old—who had scoffed at the whole proceeding.

"Don't you believe in Santa Claus?" Cole had asked.

"No!" the boy had responded emphatically.

Cole had crouched down to the boy's level. "It doesn't matter . . . because Santa Claus still believes in you. He always will."

When Cole had stood up from the boy, she'd marveled aloud, "You still believe in Santa Claus, don't you?"

"Of course," he'd replied with a perfectly straight face. And she'd suspected he really did.

Realizing that Cole was talking, Remy forced herself back into the present.

"—came back to the apartment and exchanged our gifts, then we went to midnight Mass together."

"What did you give me?" She had the feeling it had been something special. "An antique brooch."

Remy frowned, certain there'd been some sentiment attached to it. "Had it belonged to your mother?"

"My grandmother."

She breathed in sharply and unconsciously pressed a hand to her throat. "It was set with topaz, wasn't it?" Even before Cole nodded affirmatively, she knew it was the brooch she'd been wearing that night in Nice. "Cole, why did we break up? What did we argue over?" It was suddenly imperative that she know.

"The same thing we always argue about—your family and their destructive greed. Now—" He cut off the rest of it, a grimness thinning his mouth. "Look at you. You're already bristling."

It was true. She didn't try to deny the flash of temper his words had sparked. "What do you expect, Cole? They're my family."

"And we're at another impasse," he observed curtly.

"That wasn't your attitude when we were in Nice, at the hotel," she reminded him. "Why? Why have you changed since we came back? This morning at the dock—and later, at your office— it was like you were pushing me away from you. Why?"

He studied her for a silent moment. "Last night ... at the airport . . . seeing you wrapped again in the bosom of your family, I realized you'll never love me enough to trust me and believe in me over them."

"How can you say that? I love you."
 

"In your way, yes."

She covered his mouth with her hand, wanting to cut off the things he was saying. "That isn't true. I love you in
every
way."

He dragged her hand from his mouth, his fingers gripping it. "Don't make this any more painful than it is, Remy. You don't know how much I want to believe you."