Partners in Crime (28 page)

Jane began pounding again, not bothering to cover her mouth. “Uncle Stephen, you get the hell back here,” she shrieked through her spasms of coughing. “You can’t leave us to die in here, damn it. Unlock the door! Unlock the damned door!”

Her furious voice faded in a paroxysm of coughing, and she sank against the door in defeat.

“Maybe I can break it down,” Sandy muttered. “Move out of the way.”

“For God’s sake, Richard, help him!” Jane pleaded.

Richard looked up from the abstract he was perusing. “Let your fiancé be a hero,” he said. “Stephen will relent eventually. If he doesn’t, there’s nothing we can do about it. I had the door installed to keep everything out. Your young man won’t be able to do a thing about this.” He coughed a bit, then lifted his glasses from his streaming eyes. “And I must say, Jane,” he added sternly, “I blame you for all this. If you hadn’t doused the place with kerosene I doubt Stephen would ever have thought of burning us. He never was the creative sort—he worked best in a managerial capacity.”

“I’m not interested in Stephen’s talents!” Jane shrieked between fits of coughing. “I’m interested in getting out of here.”

“Just wait,” Richard said, replacing his glasses as Sandy kept hurling himself at the door.

“Just wait?” Jane echoed in a furious croak. “Wait for
what? For hell to freeze over? That’s where you’re going to
be in a few minutes, brother dear, and I can’t think of any
one who deserves it more.”

“Wait a minute.” Sandy stopped his useless assault. “Someone’s unlocking the door.”

A moment later the door opened, filling the tiny room with acrid, blinding smoke. Someone took her hand, it had to be Sandy, and together they stumbled out into the snowy night. She landed in the snow, on top of his large, warm body, and she just lay there, taking deep, wonderful lungfuls of cold night air.

It took a moment for her eyes to clear. Stephen Tremaine was standing over them, an expression of extreme self-disgust on his face. “I couldn’t do it,” he said, his voice rich with regret. “I’m afraid I couldn’t kill you. Just don’t have what it takes after all.”

“I hate to interrupt this soul searching,” croaked Jane, looking around her, “but Richard’s still trapped inside.”

“He would be,” Tremaine said gloomily. Without hesitation he dashed through the sheet of flames obscuring the doorway, and moments later came back out with Richard’s semiconscious body slung around his shoulder. He dumped him in the snow, rubbing his hands together in the age old gesture of one getting rid of a nasty project.

Richard lay in the snow coughing for a moment, then managed to pull himself to a sitting position. “I didn’t finish the article,” he said accusingly. “Now it’s in cinders. You’re going to have to get me another copy, Stephen.”

“Richard,” said Stephen Tremaine, “you always were a pain in the rear, and you always will be.”

Richard only waved an airy hand at him. Tremaine turned his back to look at Jane. She still hadn’t moved. Sandy felt too good, too strong and solid and comforting beneath her, for her to be noble. “I suppose you want to call the police,” he said in a resigned voice. “I won’t fight it. There’s not much I can do—this was a last-ditch effort and it failed. It appears,” he said wearily, “that I am simply too damned civilized for murder.”

“It’s quite a failing,” Sandy agreed from beneath Jane.

Reluctantly she got to her feet, her knees still a bit wobbly in the aftermath. “Are we going to call the police?” she asked Sandy, giving him a hand to help him up and wincing in sympathy as she realized his back was soaked with melted snow.

“We might be open to other possibilities,” Sandy agreed, correctly reading her tone of voice.

“Police?” Richard roused himself from his perusal of the burning lab. “I don’t want the police involved. Come back to the house, Stephen. Hazel has plenty for dinner, and you deserve to spend some time with my stepchildren. I’m sure we can come up with something mutually agreeable. Something not involving Salambia.”

“Your stepchildren?” Stephen echoed. “The twins? I think I might prefer jail.”

“Your preferences are not the issue right now,” Sandy said. “I’m feeling cold and wet and quite angry, and I would love to take out that anger on someone who richly deserves it. Get back to the house. Now.”

Richard pulled himself upright, strolled over to Stephen Tremaine and took the gun that was resting loosely in the older man’s hand. “Nasty business,” he said, tossing the weapon toward Sandy. He missed, it landed in the snow, and Sandy left it there, stepping over it and taking Jane’s arm in his. “You know, Stephen,” Richard said in a musing voice, “I can think of two things responsible for your aberrant behavior. First, you must have been given war toys when you were a child to encourage this hostile streak of yours. And you eat too much red meat. It messes up the bowels and makes people quite savage. Less animal flesh, Stephen, that’s the ticket. Do you like carrots?” They wandered off, Richard chattering a mile a minute in his inanely cheerful voice.

Sandy and Jane watched them go. “I don’t suppose we can just go home?” she questioned hopefully.

He shook his head. “Tremaine might murder them all in their sleep.” He reached down and picked up the gun, tucking it in his pocket.

“With someone like Richard, who could blame him? Is he really going to stay for dinner with us?” Her voice was still raw from the inhaled smoke, and Sandy’s beautiful gray eyes were puffy and red.

“Probably the night, too, if I read Hazel’s hospitable tendencies properly,” Sandy said.

“Let’s go to bed early.”

“Sounds like an excellent idea. I love you, you know. Even with your demented brother, I still want to marry you.”

She cocked her head to one side, looking up at him. “I won’t bother telling you anything you already know,” she murmured. “Besides, you’re no prize yourself. You may not have a loony brother but you’re a pathological liar...”

“Jane...”

“You’re going to have to earn it,” she said fiercely. “You took my declaration of love before I offered it, so you’re just going to have to wait until I’m ready.”

“Jane, I’m freezing. Couldn’t you... ?”

“No. But I can take you back and strip off your clothes and warm you up.”

He smiled down at her, and there was nothing but heat between them. “I’ll settle for that. For now.”

It was late when they finally got to bed. Hazel put them in an old Victorian sleigh bed up under the eaves. The mattress sagged, but the sheets were ironed, the blankets wool, and the quilts were made by hand. Jane was wearing an old flannel nightie of Hazel’s, the sleeves drooped over her wrists, the hem hit the floor and the neckline floundered around her shoulders, but it was soft and warm and much more welcome than a negligee.

Sandy had to make do with long winter underwear. When Richard had first presented him with it he’d refused, but five minutes in the icy confines of the upstairs bedroom and he changed his mind.

“This isn’t what I had in mind for tonight,” he said, climbing into the high bed, his teeth chattering. “I don’t think I’ll ever get warm again.”

“You should have stayed up with Richard and Stephen. When I left they were taking off their sweaters.”

“There are two reasons for that,” Sandy said, pulling her into his arms and wrapping his shivering body around her. “One, they’re sitting by the wood stove hogging all the heat that doesn’t seem to get much farther than the kitchen. Number two, they’ve polished off one bottle of Scotch and they’re well into their second.”

“They were very drunk, weren’t they?” Jane said, rubbing her face against the soft thermal cotton covering his shoulder. He still smelled faintly of smoke, despite the icy shower he’d insisted on suffering, and she felt a momentary apprehension. “They’re safe down there, aren’t they? Uncle Stephen isn’t going to murder us all in our beds?”

“Dear old Uncle Stephen has given up. He managed to agree to our terms in writing, and there’s not much he can do about it without the whole mess coming out in the open. Whether he likes it or not he’s going to have to sell the process to a peaceful, emerging nation of Richard’s choice. He won’t make much money on it, neither will your brother, but at least it’ll be used for the good of mankind.”

“What I particularly like,” Jane admitted, sliding her hand up under the thermal shirt, “is the mess Uncle Stephen made of his future. Here he thought he was safeguarding the company by putting it in Elinor Peabody’s hands, and she goes behind his back to the board of trustees and stages a palace coup. Uncle Stephen gets kicked
up-
stairs and Elinor takes over. It serves him right—he always thought the trustees were just a formality.”

“He shouldn’t have underestimated Elinor,” Sandy said, emitting a small groan of pleasure as her hand moved across his chest underneath the shirt. “I could have told him she was a man-eater.”

“Humph,” said Jane. “Why don’t we lie here and
not
talk about Elinor Peabody?”

“Sounds good to me,” he said, moving a thick strand of her hair away from her neck and nuzzling her ear. She shivered, and he knew for a fact she wasn’t cold. “What do you want to talk about? Your godfather’s future travel plans? Around the world with his long-suffering wife?”

“She’ll probably push him overboard somewhere in the Orient,” Jane said, letting her hand run down his flat stomach. “Maybe in Australia, where they still have great white sharks.”

“I’ve tried to curb this bloodthirsty streak of yours,” he said with a long-suffering sigh.

“I’m impossible to curb.”

“Thank God.”

Her hand slid beneath the elastic waistband of the thermal long Johns, but before she could reach her destination his hand shot out and caught hers, stopping her.

“Wait a moment,” he said with mock sternness.

“Don’t worry, Sandy, I’ll respect you in the morning,” she assured him with an impish smile.

“It is the morning,” he pointed out. “It’s after two, and I’m exhausted.”

“Too tired for me? That doesn’t sound like a promising beginning for our life together. Maybe I’d be better off with the real Jimmy the Stoolie.”

“Come here, Jane,” he growled, “and stop teasing me.” He released her hand, caught her shoulders and hauled her up so that her face was level with his.

“It’s fun to tease.” She kept her voice light, waiting.

“Not at two-something in the morning, after we’ve been through hell and back at the hands of that drunken old man downstairs. You owe me, lady.”

“What do I owe you?”

He caught her face between his hands, his thumbs smoothing her taut cheekbones and he looked into her eyes. “Anything you want to give me,” he whispered. “Whatever it is, I’ll take it.”

She couldn’t play games anymore, she couldn’t summon up any lingering vestiges of outrage or hurt pride, she couldn’t feel anything more except what she had to tell him. “Okay, you win,” she said. “I’m in love with you.”

He shook his head. “We both win, Jane,” he said softly, placing his lips on hers in a featherlight kiss. “We both win.”

It was after midnight two days later when they arrived back at the Park Avenue apartment. Sandy insisted on carrying her over the threshold, even though they weren’t officially married yet, and Jane went willingly, losing her shoes in the hallway, dropping pieces of clothing as she headed for the master bedroom. She stopped halfway down the hall, wearing nothing but a pair of lace bikini panties and her glasses, and turned to look at Sandy.

His shirt was off, his pants were unzipped, and he was hopping on one foot while he was trying to take off his other sock. In the background the phone rang and his answering machine clicked on.

“Are your calls more important than me?” Jane demanded. “Whoever it is can wait.”

“You’re right,” he said, reaching to turn it off, when Jimmy the Stoolie’s nasal tones stopped him.

“Listen, pal, you owe me. I’m calling from the twelfth precinct. They’ve got me on a charge of grand theft, auto, and I need you to bail me out of here, pronto. There’s an old friend of mine in here who’s got no reason to feel too friendly, and a person of indeterminate sex who’s fallen in love with me. Get me out of here, Caldicott, and I won’t say a word to the little lady about who you really are. Come on, what’s a car between friends? The MGB was a piece of crap, I’m sorry I totaled it, but you owed me for getting you in to see Jabba. Save me, pal.” The answering machine clicked off.

Jane just looked at Sandy. “Are you going to leave that poor man rotting in jail? After all, he brought us together.”

Sandy pulled off his other sock and stripped off his pants. “Does that mean he gets to be best man?”

“At least we don’t have to leave the church in an MGB,” Jane said brightly. “We wouldn’t have gotten two blocks in that car.”

“Don’t speak ill of the dead,” Sandy said, stalking her down the long dark hallway, “or I’ll buy another.”

“How about an Edsel? Or maybe a nice little Chevy Vega? Mavericks had a certain
je ne sais quoi
... or we could—”

He caught up with her by the door, scooped her up in his arms and carried her into the bedroom. “We’ll use taxis,” he said. “Or walk.” He dumped her on the king-size bed and followed her down.

“Or maybe,” she said, “we’ll stay right here and not go anyplace at all.”

“Now that sounds like the best idea I’ve heard in a long time,” Sandy said.

“And if I get bored I can always burn down the apartment. I still haven’t had my chance to commit a crime. You were always so repressive.”

“Someone has to keep you in line. That’s what a partner in crime is for.”

“I thought it was for aiding and abetting.”

“There’s that, too.” He ran a string of kisses down her neck. “And at least I’ll give you a discount on my fees if I have to defend you on a charge of arson.”

“Big of you.”

“Indeed.”

“You’re indecent, you know that?”

“I try my best.”

“And you get spectacular results,” she said fervently.

“What can I say?” He was all modesty.

“Say good-night, Sandy.”

“Good night, Sandy.”