Raven on the Wing (7 page)

“Raven—”

“I mean it. I know it’s a lot to ask, that—that everything looks and sounds bad, but you’ll just have to decide if you trust me. And that’s all.”
A lot to ask!
her mind sneered at her. With the evidence all around him, no man would trust her as she asked. No man could trust her.

Josh looked into those steady, beautiful, hurting violet eyes and knew right then, in that moment, that no matter how bad things appeared, he did, in fact, trust her. Doubts and uncertainties faded away. “All right.” He smiled crookedly. “I think I forgot to mention it, but I love you.”

She was shaken, and looked it. “Josh, don’t say that. Everything is so complicated right now. I can’t even think.”

“I have to say it.” He leaned forward to kiss
her gently. “But I won’t say it again until you’re ready to hear it.” He released her, then reached into his pocket and withdrew a business card and a pen. He turned the card over and jotted a number quickly, then handed her the card. “This is my phone number at the hotel. Will you promise to call me as soon as you’re back in the other apartment?”

She nodded, unable to do anything else.

He rose to his feet, then hesitated as he looked down at her. Dear Lord, he couldn’t bear to leave her! “Will it be very long?”

Raven met his look as steadily as she could. “Days. I’m usually here for days at a time.”

His jaw tightened, but he nodded. “I’ll wait.” He headed for the door, pausing when he reached it to turn and gaze at her. “No one will know I was here; I came up the back way, and that’s how I’ll leave.” Then he was gone.

Raven stared at the door for long moments, still aware of the warmth of his touch, still seeing the sudden gentleness of his eyes. She was vaguely conscious of the music that had played
steadily while he was with her, the machine automatically restarting itself after playing one side of the tape. And in the back of her mind, a small voice spoke up wryly.
No wonder Hagen said I’d be no good to him once I fell in love
.

She had taken that step; there was no going back. None of her painfully won defenses had been able to stand against him; she couldn’t fight what she felt. And Raven wondered what—and whom—she might have sacrificed to love a man.

“No more cavorting in parks,” Kelsey told her cheerfully when they met quietly two days later. “You seemed a bit distracted, so I thought you might have needed reminding that we’re on a tight schedule.”

“I’m glad you did.” They were in a museum, and Raven was gazing at the large abstract painting on the wall near the bench on which they sat. The huge room was deserted except for them.

Kelsey sent her a thoughtful look. “I couldn’t help but wonder who he was.”

“Don’t give me that. You ran his license plate.”

He chuckled. “So I did. Car’s a rental.”

“Yes. So?”

“So,” Kelsey said softly, “I got back a lot of gibberish from the computer.”

Raven turned her head slowly and stared at him. “The rental company would have had an agreement—”

“You’d think. But I couldn’t trace that plate. Oh, the company acknowledged the car was theirs, but they said it was being serviced, not rented.”

The hollow feeling inside Raven grew. “His name is Joshua Long,” she said quietly. “At least that’s what he told me, and I saw an ID.” She remembered then, and added slowly, “Just a business card with his name and a phone number. A New York number, I think.” He’d given her a card, but Raven didn’t have it with her and couldn’t remember the phone number.

“Rings a bell.” Kelsey frowned. “He’s not from L.A.? Where’s he staying?”

She told him. She was simultaneously close to
laughter and tears now that it was her turn to suspect Josh of being something other than he seemed. She didn’t like the uncertainty. She didn’t like it at all.

“How’d you meet him?”

“He’s the man I knocked down in the hotel.”

Plainly worried, Kelsey ran fingers through his hair. “I’ll check him out. Meantime, I hope you sent him on his way.” When she remained silent, his voice sharpened. “Raven?”

“I’ll see him only at home,” she said softly, not about to tell Kelsey that Josh had found her in Leon Travers’s penthouse.

Kelsey felt faint surprise, but only because it hadn’t happened until now; he’d always known Raven would fall hard when she finally did fall. “I’ll check him out—quickly,” he said.

“I still don’t understand what I’m doing here,” Rafferty Lewis complained to Zach as they sat in the den of Josh’s suite. “I’m an attorney, not a detective.” His humorous brown eyes flicked a
glance at the third man in the room, a rather strikingly handsome gentleman with a leonine mane of blond hair and sharp blue eyes. “Lucas is the detective.”

“You’ve got to remember,” Lucas Kendrick told the lawyer in his curiously compelling voice, “that the boss didn’t send for us. Zach did. And though I’ve been here only a day, I agree with him. There’s something very fishy going on.”

“Well, what?”

Zach, never stirring from a deep chair where he somewhat grimly contemplated the remainder of the brandy in his glass, told the newly arrived lawyer everything that had happened up until that day, finishing with, “Lucas has been following the lady; he’ll tell you the rest.”

The chief investigator for Josh’s empire took up the story. “I asked questions about her at the apartment building where the manager denied to Josh that lady lived there; she made the same denial to me. Claimed the place was empty. Then I checked out the other apartment, and it
is
leased to Travers, not sublet. The staff wouldn’t talk.

“She left the penthouse this morning, did a quick-change routine in a garage, and met a man at a museum. If I hadn’t known to look for the Pinto, I would have missed her, because she looked that different. It was definitely a prearranged meeting, maybe for some kind of exchange of information. I couldn’t go into the room to overhear them. I would have been too obvious; the room was empty except for them.”

Rafferty’s normally humorous face was sober, as was his voice. “And then?”

“Then she returned to the garage, changed back to her glamorous self, and went back to the penthouse.” He shook his head, frowning. “I managed to find a talkative maid in the cleaning service for the building—not easy, believe me. Their security is pretty tight. But the maid said Raven Anderson is very quietly known as the Ice Maiden. She’s been there only a few weeks. None of the staff believes she’s Travers’s mistress; they think he’d have more luck with a glacier.”

“And domestic help usually knows that kind of thing,” Rafferty observed almost to himself.

“Damn right they do.” Lucas sighed. “So it looks like the boss was right about that, anyway.”

Zach stirred a bit and looked at the other two. “Maybe he’s right about the rest. When he came out of the penthouse the other night, he
believed
her. Somehow, she’d convinced him. And we all know how many women have tried to con Josh in one way or another through the years. He’s nobody’s fool. I think he’s right about her background being fabricated.”

Rafferty looked at him sharply. “Because Josh believes in her? Or was there something that finally turned up in her background? You said it checked out.”

“Oh, it did.” Zach nodded morosely. “On the surface. We dug deeper, and it checked out. Then we kept digging—and a funny thing is happening.”

“Don’t keep us in suspense,” Josh drawled from the doorway.

The three men watched as he came out of his bedroom and moved to lean against the desk.
None of them got to their feet, but only because Josh disliked formality. Besides, their respect for Josh needed no outward signs to be apparent.

Rafferty, the newest arrival, blinked when he saw his friend and employer of several years. Josh had lost weight, he realized, and there was something different in his eyes, something almost haunted. “Hello, Josh.”

“Rafferty.” Josh smiled a little. “Come to keep me out of jail, or what?”

“You been ignoring your parking tickets?”

“No.”

“Well, then, I’m just here as an advisor. I think.” He looked at Zach, who nodded.

“I thought he should be here, Josh. Things are beginning to look damn complicated.”

Josh crossed his arms over his chest and laughed faintly with no humor. “I might have known I couldn’t even conduct a private courtship without trouble of some kind.” His life was a public one, and Josh had learned over the years that nothing could be simple for him. Then he shot Rafferty a quick look. “In case
they didn’t convince you, that dossier on Raven is a bundle of lies—or some awful mistake.”

“They convinced me.”

“Fine.” Josh looked at Zach. “So what’s funny?”

“Well, as I said, we dug deeper. And all of a sudden, people aren’t talking to us. With a vengeance. And Lucas’s contact in the intelligence community just closed down tight as a drum.”

“I couldn’t get the time of day from him,” the investigator confirmed. “It smells, Josh.”

Josh, who knew quite a bit himself about intelligence games, frowned. “A cover-up?”

“No, just dead silence. And my instincts are yelling that we’re about to be warned off. Somebody doesn’t want us digging into Raven Anderson’s background.”

“Travers?”

“The odor doesn’t drift from that direction. Federal, I’d say.”

Josh thought of the keen intelligence in violet eyes. “You think it’s possible she might be an operative for one of the agencies?”

“It’s possible. It’s also
possible,”
Lucas said evenly, “that they’ve got an eye on her and don’t want us mucking around and screwing up their game plan.”

“No.”

Lucas slid a glance toward Zach, then said very softly, “I lifted a few prints off the car this morning. They match the file.”

“The file’s fabricated. I don’t know why, but I know it’s fake.” Utter certainty.

Glances were exchanged between the security man, the attorney, and the investigator and a decision silently reached and affirmed among the three of them.

“All right,” Zach said. “We go from there. And working from that premise, Josh, I say we back off. Now.”

“I agree,” Rafferty said, and Lucas nodded.

It took Josh only a moment to realize why the suggestion had been made, and he went cold all over. He should have seen it,
would
have seen it except that he’d been too involved, too bent on finding out what was going on.

“If we keep digging—” he murmured, breaking off.

Rafferty spoke quietly. “If she’s undercover—the only logical explanation for a fabricated background like hers—and we work like hell to expose that cover as a fake, we could put her in very great danger. Especially with a man like Leon Travers involved. Whatever’s going on, he’s at the hub of it.”

“Look at it this way,” Lucas said. “It’s been rumored for years that Travers is very heavily into white slavery, but nobody’s been able to pin a thing on him. Now, within the last few weeks, a lady enters his life. A lady with a rock-solid criminal background and a CIA report that she represents international interests in that area. If that background and that report are false, then there’s only one good reason for it. I think somebody’s setting Travers up. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“And if we poke our noses in …” Rafferty mused.

“He could turn on Raven,” Josh murmured,
his face gray, fear for her twisting his guts and sending ice through his veins. “Smell a setup and decide to cover his tracks.”

Josh had seen the results of evil minds at work far too many times in his life, and the thought of Raven trapped unsuspectingly, at the mercy of one such as Travers, filled him with agony. There were so many things a brutal man could do to a woman, so many ways to hurt her, scar her inside and out for life … even to the point where death would be a welcome release.

“You’re at risk too,” Zach said, going on even when Josh gestured dismissively. “Travers has his own intelligence network, and from all reports it’s damned good. We’ve taken the usual precautions in checking into her background, but we didn’t know what we were up against. If Travers got suspicious, he’d find out quick enough that you’re behind it. And he knows damned well who you are, Josh. He knows you’ve helped law enforcement and intelligence agencies before, and he knows how you feel about criminal activities on his grand scale. He could decide to go after you.”

“I would, in his place,” Lucas said flatly. “You’re more than just a threat to him, Josh. You’re a deadly danger. You have very powerful friends, and you could make a hell of a lot of trouble for him if you decided to.”

It was Rafferty who added the clincher. “And if Travers should discover that your interest in Raven is personal, he’ll have a lever to use against you.”

“I have to see Raven,” Josh said hoarsely, reaching for the phone. “Warn her. I have to tell her what I’ve done—”

“What we’ve done,” Zach said.

Across town in a shabby apartment building, and roughly an hour before Josh and his lieutenants had reached their conclusions, Kelsey hunched forward, staring at a computer screen. His eyes widened as information scrolled past for endless moments, then he swore softly and reached for the telephone.

“Hello?” a cool voice answered.

“Is Susan there?” Kelsey asked cheerfully.

“You have the wrong number,” the cultured voice of Raven told him.

“Sorry.” He hung up, knowing that this had been as good a time as any to use their emergency, one-time-only code; he had to see Raven, and quickly.

He reviewed the information his computer offered, shaking his head unconsciously. Damn. Double damn. How in
hell
were they going to deal with this mess? Trust Raven to go and fall in love with the one man who could ruin everything.

It was only a matter of time, he thought, until Travers found out from his intelligence network that Joshua Long had been digging into Raven’s background.

The
Joshua Long, dammit, known far and wide as an extremely brilliant, powerful, wealthy … and
honest
man.

What could they do? Bluster it out, find some reason for Long’s interest in Raven that wouldn’t send Travers berserk? Recruit Long and somehow make the situation reasonable and
no threat to Travers? Push up the timetable and trust to blind luck that they’d have the job done before Travers knew anything at all?