The Alexandra Series (97 page)

“And what does she want from you?” he asked.

“To arrange for a money wire. She needs to hire an attorney.”

“She wouldn’t call Reggie?” Will asked.

“No. She said not to tell him.”

“That’s a reasonable decision. I suppose if you need to, you can take care of it in the morning.” He walked away from her seemingly indifferent. Going into the bathroom Alex flicked on the light so she could see the pale pink tiles and the wet puddle on the floor, and recall for just an instant how she’d spent the last hour dangling there. Only then did the ache in her behind crawl into her conscious thoughts. Between that ache and Jocelyn’s frightened voice, she figured she wouldn’t sleep much that night. Even so, Will held her close to him for a long time as he drifted off, the warmth of his body a soothing comfort.

***

In the morning, Alex found Reggie at his office at eight o’clock.

“He is in, isn’t he?” she asked the secretary.

The woman looked at her doubtfully. “Mrs. Kozak, he’s preparing for a meeting that should be starting in about 60 seconds.”

“This is a matter of some urgency,” Alex said.

The eternally professional woman wasn’t easily swayed, even by someone as close to Reggie Harold as Alexandra Kozak.

“It’s about his wife,” Alex added seeing the woman hesitate.

“Jocelyn?”

“Yes.”

“Humph.” There was clearly judgment in her reply. “I’ll see what I can do.”

When Reggie looked up at the lovely blonde, he was typically cool but not annoyed.

“So early?” he asked. “How kind of you to grace me with your beautiful presence. I hope the cure’s still working.”

“The matter’s important,” she replied.

“Things going all right with Will?”

“Yes, very,” she answered. Her own state of grace or disgrace wasn’t of concern to her. Her night had ended thinking solely of Jocelyn and what had become a worse debacle than the one that caused her best friend’s departure months before. “But that’s not why I’m here,” she said. “You do still love Jocelyn?”

“Jocelyn?” He was startled hearing her name. “Love? I don’t know. Why do you ask?”

“I got a call from her last night, Reg.”

“Really? Nice of her to surface. If you can give me an address my attorneys can take care of the legalities.” His manner had turned painfully cold.

“Yes, I’m sure that would be a help,” Alex returned. “Don’t worry, she won’t be hard to find and she won’t be going anywhere soon. She’s been arrested. She’s in a Paris jail. The man she’s been with has been accused of theft, extortion, smuggling and drug dealing. Jocelyn’s being held as an accessory.”

For an instant there was no response. Then there was an ashen look about his refined features, a twist in his expression that suggested a wince. Reggie being Reggie didn’t give off much more in body language.

“I wired her some money for an attorney early this morning. Though she told me not to tell you, I thought you should know.”

Chapter Sixteen

Even in nondescript clothes without a trace of make-up Jocelyn Killian was a stunning woman. The firebrand spirit of rebellion and seductiveness bewitched him still. While she stared into the vacant spaces of the bare interrogation room, her back to him, he could for a moment wonder how their marriage had unwittingly disintegrated, even when they were conscious of the fact and trying hard to prevent that. He still loved her. He knew that because of the pain that burned on the surface of his beating heart and then deep within.

Trying to substitute the pain with another woman only caused that other woman hurt. Gwen, a little sparkling jewel of submission, had done her best to win his heart, but Alex’s appearance at his office the day before only reminded him how impossible it would be to replace the woman that owned his heart.

Such tears Gwen had shed. How she tried to hold them inside.

“I had a feeling she’d walk back into your life, Reg,” she’d said. “And when she did I’d be out on a limb with it getting sawed off right behind me.”

“I’m not good at this, Gwen,” he’d told her. “And I’m sorry about that. Usually I don’t bother dealing with things of the heart, but with you…”

“I know. I know if all the stars had been right in the sky, and moon was in the south in its second phase, and the winds were blowing from the west, and hell was about to freeze, there’d be a chance that this would work. But I’ve been living in the shadow of her…and the other one.”

“The other one?”

She tried to smile. “Someone told me at that party a few weeks back that I looked just like Alex Kozak? When I met her a few days ago, I thought I’d suddenly gained a sister I never knew I had.”

“Oh, but there are a lot of stunning differences,” Reggie reminded her.

“But that really doesn’t matter. You’re not in love with Alex, and you’re not in love with me.”

“I guess I don’t have that big a heart,” he conceded.

“But you tried.”

“I did.”

“If Jocelyn had only stayed away longer,” Gwen mused.

“If only.”

He didn’t know he had the power to break a heart having figured he’d always been far too aloof from his own. But he could see Gwen’s falling apart despite her efforts to keep it tacked together. He was genuinely sad.

That conversation was only hours ago. Reggie remembered it in the split seconds before Jocelyn realized that he was in the room. Approaching her quietly, so she didn’t hear him until he was right on her, he wasn’t surprised that she cried tears when she first turned to see his face.

“Oh Reg…” She was as white as a pale ghost in the ugly florescent lights.

Her body rose from the wooden chair as though it could barely move inside the rough jail clothes. She fell into him sobbing. She was shivering at first, but warmed inside his embrace. They were locked heart to heart and groin to groin as minutes ticked by. When he finally let her go and sat her back on the chair, her body temperature was noticeably heated.

“I have my international attorney working on your release,” he told her. “Whatever bond necessary will be posted. I’m not sure of the international ramifications. But I read your statement and have involved the State Dept. We’ll see if they’ll intervene. I’m not sure how well all that will fly, since you spent so much time with the man. But we’re going to give that a try.” From warm to expedient and judicious, Reggie’s cool returned.

As Jocelyn gazed into his steely eyes, the shivers resumed, a new flood of fear to join the powerhouse of concern she’d nursed since the arrest. She imagined herself languishing for years in a foreign prison for crimes she had no knowledge of.

“I think testifying against him will be your best course, but we’ll consult with the attorneys when they show up this afternoon.”

“I can’t testify,” Jocelyn protested meekly.

Reggie’s eyes flashed anger.

“Don’t turn virtuous all of a sudden, Jocelyn,” he snapped. “You’ve got your ass in a ringer and it’s about to get squeezed.”

“But I don’t know anything,” she replied honestly. “For a smart woman, I haven’t been very smart these last few months. I never once connected Ian’s weird habits with anything illegal.”

“Maybe so. But you’ll figure out enough to make the gendarmes happy.” That was nothing less than an order.

Neither spoke for several minutes, each scrutinizing the other, both realizing how strange it felt to be reunited under these conditions.

“Reg?” she was the first to speak.

“Yes.”

“We are still married, aren’t we?” she asked.

“Only because I couldn’t find you to serve the papers.”

Her heart sank.

“The fact is I’ve been unofficially engaged to another women for the past couple of weeks.”

“You what!” she exclaimed, breathless.

“Gwen and I are compatible in a lot of ways, especially sexually. I was hoping to find you so I could end our relationship properly.”

“You can’t be serious!”

“You seriously left me,” he reminded her.

“But that’s not you,” Jocelyn objected, more tears beginning.

“What’s not?”

“You, you Reggie Harold falling in love so quickly.”

“I surprised a lot of people. And I suppose myself.”

“But when you first came in…” she was thinking back to the hug. “That means you’re only here to…”

Reggie let her linger in that bittersweet moment, suspended between the present and the future while Jocelyn’s heart determined that her unexpected reason for joy just the moment before was now a reason to grieve.

“No. My plans have changed,” he admitted at last.

“In what way?”

“We’re going to work this out, Jocelyn,” he said, sounding like a stern father and a concerned husband.

“We are?”

“Do you still love me?” he asked.

“Oh, my yes I do!”

“Then we’ll work it out,” he repeated. He paced the room with hands in pockets, pensive, then sat down opposite her, the table between them. “I never knew what it was like to hurt someone until yesterday when I broke off the engagement with Gwen. Of course, I never knew what it was like to be hurt until you left. I’d always stayed out of that game, remaining happily aloof. I fought off dozens of women. Good god, I fought off Alexandra. But you? You I couldn’t resist. You made me join that game of love and war. You made me love, you made me hurt and you made me love again. And as long as I’ve made a commitment to you, we’re going to see it out.
You’re
going to see it out,” he emphasized. “We still have a marriage by the skin of our teeth. It’s still a binding contract, and we will not throw it away easily. You may have shown your willingness to toss our marriage out with all your other problems, and I may have been too proud to set you straight. But there is still love, and you will be repenting, and if I can take a lesson from an old friend…” He recalled Will’s determination to forgive Alex. “…there is nothing so serious that cannot, with a little forgiveness and ingenuity, be resolved in a relationship built on love. We just need to begin being honest.”

The fact that Reggie Harold could make such a passionate speech about love and forgiveness brought a fresh burst of tears to Jocelyn’s eyes.

Chapter Seventeen

Reggie paid for two rooms in a small though very elegant Paris hotel, hardly like anything Jocelyn had stayed in with Ian. The two rooms were a deliberate choice. Reggie wasn’t ready to fuck her, let alone make love. At least until he knew everything.

Once she was released to him on bond, they spent their days with lawyers trying to undo the vast legal entanglement knotted around her. When they weren’t with lawyers and Reggie wasn’t trying to conduct his business via phone, fax and the Internet, they took silent walks around Paris streets and parks to breathe fresh air. When there was nothing else to occupy their time, Reggie listened to her tell him of her months away with Ian Pennywhistle.

It was common for him to sit at a small table in her room, nursing a cup of coffee, maintaining a remote attitude, the best way for him to take in all the painstaking details. Occasionally he asked questions and demanded answers, especially when Jocelyn was afraid to go on; but mostly he listened because Jocelyn needed to talk.

“…We were on the beach in France, Ian planning to fuck me when Andre joined us… Andre took me to a club later and I was with him all night. But when Ian found us about dawn, he was furious. He spanked me hard with a belt, then took my ass, even when I told him I was sore because Andre had used me there. When he was finished screwing me, he scrubbed me down like I had the plague…

Reggie heard the details with a dispassionate cool, and said nothing despite the difficulty of her confession. It was painful pulling herself from the past to the present, but with feet dragging, heart heavy and labored breathing, she continued.

“We stayed in a German bordello. Ian told me it was just a hotel but here were too many single women there for me to believe that. The owner’s daughter Dagne came to me one morning and seduced me, or maybe I seduced her. She was as good as ice cream melting in my mouth. Once I smelled her, I had to taste her. We groped each other in my bed before I finally fucked her …with my fist…and she practically put hers in my ass.”

“Did Ian watch?” Reggie asked.

“No. At least not until the very end. But he’d set up the scenario. He’d deliberately marked Dagne’s breasts and caned her ass to see if that would arouse me.”

“And did it?”

“You know it would.”

“I know only what you tell me,” Reggie replied curtly.

“Yes, it did arouse me. I was thinking of you.”

“How sweet.” His dry wit was accompanied by the trace of a smirk.

“Ian realized that it turned me on.”

“He’d never dominated you before, when you were younger?”

“Not the way you have.”

“How did he dominate you then?”

“Then it was all mental. I was young and just moved with him thoughtlessly like an unbridled kid, until he finally got a little too crazy and I tried to pull away from him. When he resisted, I had to just split in the middle of the night.”