Tempted by a Dangerous Man (7 page)

“She was French?”
 

“Yes. Well, a quarter Algerian.”

No wonder I hadn’t been able to find anything about her. Wrong country. Countries. Hell, wrong continents, wrong languages. I could see her now, though. Probably a tall, small-boned, dark-haired beauty with luminous eyes. Like Audrey Hepburn or that French actress whose name I could never remember. She would have a charming accent and be flawlessly dressed all the time.

Except when fixing scooters. Or adjusting her bra. Ok, so maybe she sounded human and perfectly likable, but the gnawing worry didn’t want to hear it.
 

“We started dating, and we both knew it wasn’t just a fling. She was a year younger, and when I finished school, I stuck around. Did two years at a technical school while I worked for a chef, a friend of the family who encouraged me to pursue the culinary arts.” He glanced at me. “Everywhere we had lived, I learned the local cuisine. Roger, the family friend, was quite impressed by what he had thought was some uncanny aptitude but was really the result of a childhood spent in kitchens around the world. He used his leverage to get me a job as a sous-chef at one of the top restaurants, which ruffled quite a few feathers. When I had the chance to open my own restaurant in New York—a fresh start—I took it. I was twenty-three then, and Audrey and I had been married for a year.”

“Why can’t I find anything about you online? Surely there should be something if the restaurant was so popular.”

“There were a few articles, but I’ve always prized my privacy. I never joined social media, and I always used my initials for business dealings. But you won’t find anything. It was erased.”

“So you’re officially dead?”

“No. More like a ghost.”

“I heard that drug dealers and pimps have to pay taxes, so you must, too.”

“Nice parallels. And yes, I do pay taxes. I’m a private chef.” He stretched and stood. “Speaking of which, I should rustle up dinner.”

As I followed him down the steps, I cursed myself for jumping in with so many questions. I really did want to know about his wife, the mysterious other Audrey, but I was terrified. I knew he wasn’t over her yet, or not over her death at least, and it was clear from the way he talked that he missed her.

The cabin had grown quite warm in our absence. “Not bad work for a little stove,” I said as I pulled off my boots and coat. I also removed the snow pants because they made too much noise when I walked. Long underwear served quite fine as pants. “Guess there’s not so much space to heat.”

Corbin raised an amused eyebrow. “Electric heat. I switched it on when we arrived.”

“Electric…” But there
were
lamps, and the stove and refrigerator. Hell, there were appliances everywhere. I just hadn’t thought about it. “Thought we were in the middle of nowhere.”

He looked even more tickled.

“What?”

“You’re going to be surprised tomorrow.” Whistling, he started pulling out pans.

“Why surprised?”

That made him laugh. “Don’t want to ruin it.”

I narrowed my eyes as I coiled myself into one of the chairs so that I could watch him. “I don’t get the sense that it’s a
good
surprise.”

“I know I’m going to enjoy it.” Corbin grabbed a red onion, removed the ends and the skin, and began chopping it coarsely, his large hands nimble.

“So what happened? To your wife? Was she sick?”

“No. She… later. Another time.”

Damn.
Who knew if I’d be able to get him talking again? Me and my big, interrupting mouth.

Still, I could take solace in one thing: Corbin had once had a nice, normal life.
 

If he didn’t want to talk about his wife, there were plenty of other mysteries that he could solve. “Whose cabin is this?”

“Mine. Paid cash for the cabin and everything in it. It’s completely off the radar. There’s a woman who owns the surrounding land. If anyone showed up asking questions, she’d play the sweet old grandmother on them. If that failed, she’d probably unload both barrels. Though there’s no reason for anyone to come here. I pay her yearly for utilities. Safe haven.” He grinned. “You should feel special.”

“Oh, believe me, I do. Just being in your presence is like winning the lotto.”

“Can’t hear sarcasm when I’m cooking, so thank you.”
 

I was about to ask more questions about the houses and vehicles, but there was something I’d been thinking about a lot. “What was the thing in your wallet that you almost showed me?”

Corbin poured oil into the pan on the burner. A moment later, he added some orangish powder, then scraped the onions in. “I promised myself that I would answer all your questions from now on, but it’s not so easy,” he admitted somberly. “I dislike talking about the past.”

“Promised yourself when?” I asked, hoping to lighten his mood a bit. “Come on, that’s an easy question!”

He shot me an aggrieved look. “While we were walking. Though I can always change my mind again.”

I held my hands up in surrender.
 

“Several things in my wallet. You’re still welcome to look, but the most important is my wedding photo. No matter how far undercover I am, I have it on me.”

And that was another kick in the gut, much harder than the first one. He had flat-out told me that he was still dealing with losing her, but I had buried that fact. Convenient… until it wasn’t.

I realized that I needed to respond. Since I absolutely didn’t want to see that picture, I asked, “What did she do for a living?” There. An easy, neutral question.

“Thought she was a journalist, but she was a spy.”

“That… I didn’t… Really?”

He laughed, a brief snort. “It’s not so uncommon for diplomats’ kids who grow up like we did, living all over the world and speaking multiple languages. These days it’s more multinational corporations spying on each other, all in the name of national security, of course.”

“Corporate spy?” I frowned. “Doing what?”

“A corporate spy is something else entirely, a legitimate business that operates in daylight. You could open up a browser and submit an application to do that. She wasn’t that kind of spy. And to answer your question, we never talked about it. I didn’t want to put her in the position of having to lie to me outright.” His tone had turned darker.

It seemed he really didn’t like being lied to. He was all about trust and respect. Funny virtues, considering what he did for a living. “Trying to imagine what that’s like, you know? Pillow talk at the end of a long day.”

“She never lived in New York. We had decided that when I turned thirty, we’d find a way to be in the same place. But of course that never happened.”

He was thirty now. That must have been a particularly difficult birthday, knowing he was supposed to be building his life.
 

“She was kidnapped in Nigeria.”
 

Corbin’s words snapped me to the present. “Kidnapped?”

“For ransom.” His voice had gotten rough. He pulled the pan off the stove again, set it on an unused burner, and turned to face me. He had pushed up the sleeves of the skintight black shirt, and when he crossed his arms over his chest, his muscular forearms bulged. “We—her parents and I—sent it, of course, even though we were advised not to.”

I felt I might pass out. I couldn’t imagine. “That’s terrifying.”

“Yes.” A single word to encompass unbearable grief. “It wasn’t about money. That was a pretext.” He stared at me, but said nothing. It was completely disconcerting. Couldn’t tell if he was looking at me or if he was lost in the past.

“Guess you wish you’d talked her out of it,” I said nervously when his blank stare started to make my skin crawl.
 

He blinked slowly. “No. I don’t.” He turned back to the stove and resumed frying the onions. “It was her life to live as she chose. Do I wish I had been in Nigeria with her? Yes. Would I have given my life to keep her safe? Of course. But tell her what to do?” He shook his head. “What keeps me up at night isn’t that she’s gone. I’ve made my wretched peace with it. It’s how things were handled. What happened might have been unavoidable, but that’s far from a foregone conclusion. The governments didn’t want to get involved. France dragged their feet through red tape until it was too late. Algeria said she was French, and it wasn’t their problem.”

I could tell that I was losing him, and I sensed it would be some time before he would want to talk about this again. But he hadn’t even answered the question that most confused me. “But you weren’t a spy while you were a chef, were you?”

“Revenge,” he said. “Audrey was headstrong, and she was her own person, but she was also mine. My best friend, my wife. My life. In some ways, it was a very immature sort of relationship, two workaholics as married to our careers as to each other. But we were strong. That she died, I can accept it. I’ve had to. But I still want her back. To bury her next to her father and grandparents.”

“You didn’t get the body?” I blurted. “How do you know she’s—”

“No. Oh, I hoped that for the first year. Prayed that she’d met someone else, that she was alive and happy. But I always knew better. She was very close to her father, who had been in poor health for years and in fact died the year after she did. She would never have abandoned him. Never.”
 

He pulled a large jar out of a cupboard, wrenched off the top like it had insulted him, then dumped the contents into the pan with a jerk of his arm. The warm scents of curry filled the air, but I had completely lost my appetite.
 

“There’s a bottle of wine in the refrigerator, and I need a drink,” he said.

~~~

I split the last of the wine between our glasses. I had a nice buzz going and didn’t want to lose it.
 

As we ate, Corbin had told me about how he’d gone through his wife’s email. After that, he had called in favors from friends. He spent a month in Nigeria and eventually tracked down the interpreter who had tipped off the kidnappers to his wife’s whereabouts.

“I killed him.” He wiped his lips on a cloth napkin. “And before you ask, murder wasn’t my goal when I went down there, but at the same time, I wasn’t surprised when I did it. By the third time, it had become a pattern.”

My stomach knotted up, gurgled. I could taste bile.

“Not claiming that’s a good thing. In fact, I now think the opposite. That it was bad for me. But I was crazed with grief. I wasn’t myself. And I’m different now.”

“Well that’s good,” I muttered.

“You wanted to know.” He tossed back the rest of the wine. “It didn’t take long for my activity to catch the attention of a few people who thought they had a better way to channel my… newfound talents. Are you ok?”

I had clutched my stomach. “Yes,” I said. I just wanted him to get the confession over with.

“My actions were causing trouble. People who were important for greater purposes were disappearing. And anyway, I had dealt with everyone except for four men, the people who would surely be able to lead me to Audrey’s remains, but I wasn’t making any progress in finding them. The deal that was offered to me was a chance to make a difference in exchange for help. The truth is that the men I had found were unsophisticated thugs. Easy to find and kill. I would need more than luck to locate the last four. Please try to eat.”

I pushed away my plate.
 

Corbin sighed but didn’t press the issue. “That’s what I’m closing in on now. The last two. The end. I didn’t start this fight, but it was brought to my doorstep. The day I chose revenge, I gave up my right to a future. For every man I’ve killed, there are several others who now want to kill me. It’s like a bloody Ponzi scheme.” He rotated the empty wine glass, twisting the stem between his fingers. “Some nights I think that if I could kill them all, I would. Every murderous scumbag on the face of the earth. These are the ones dealing in human trafficking. Raping children. Letting entire villages starve. They are the most despicable people imaginable. You know what I like about you?”

The sudden conversation shift left me reeling. “No, actually.” I hadn’t meant to speak so bluntly, and my face heated as Corbin stifled a laugh. “It’s ok,” I said, smiling weakly. “It’s funny.”

Corbin shook his head. “I would never laugh at you. With you, only. There are many things I like about you, but what always amazes me is the way you see the world. Whenever I think you’ll do A, you do B. A little impetuous, yes, but you’re intelligent and inquisitive. Jaded, but not really. Not deep down. You’re a lot like I was before I let the blackness eat me up inside. I became calculating. Cynical.”

My face had gotten so hot that the potbelly stove and electric heating were completely superfluous.
 

“I won’t allow blackness to devour you, Audrey. You’re my light. God, you have no idea. You fell into my life at the right time. The weekend that I saved you, I was about to cross a line I never had before. And don’t ask what it was because I’m so ashamed to admit it. And there you were, a frozen lump in the road. Someone I could help instead of hurt. I felt my humanity, which I had thought extinguished. It hasn’t been easy thinking about the things I did, the things I would have done. A murderer who has rediscovered his empathy. You saved me. And all that before I even got to know you.”

As he talked, I felt my eyes filling with tears, and I stared at the food so that Corbin wouldn’t see. Knowing, of course, that he would. He noticed everything.
 

I grabbed a fork. “The curry’s kinda spicy,” I mumbled even though I hadn’t taken a bite in half an hour.

“You deserve better than this,” Corbin said.

That made me laugh, and Corbin sent a curious look my way. I could tell that he wasn’t going to ask, but after he’d confessed so much to me, it felt petty to withhold something so trivial.

“It’s just funny that you say that, because you’re…” I waved my hand.

He frowned. “I’m what?”

“Gorgeous. Smart. Attentive. I’ve always seen you as the perfect guy.”

 
Unexpectedly, he chuckled. “No, baby. If you knew, you wouldn’t stay in this cabin another minute with me.” He leaned forward. “Despite my best intentions, look how much I’ve complicated your life.”