The Fall of Lucas Kendrick (7 page)

For long minutes the only sound in the small cabin was the crackle of the fire. Then Lucas sighed and shook his head. “I don’t believe in coincidence,” he said. “Has anyone suggested Rome may have wanted that truckload of art just because the mask was one of the pieces?”

“It seems incredible,” Kyle said. “You told me he’d paid for the artwork with a shipment of illegal arms. That sounds like an awfully complicated way to get his hands on the mask.”

Rafferty said dryly, “Well, here’s the kicker. Zach found out where Ryan was being held and went to see him this morning. Ryan,” he added to Kyle, “was the ringleader of the art thieves. He and Zach have an odd sort of enmity. If it weren’t for Zach and his new wife, Teddy, Ryan would probably still be running around loose, but he talked to Zach this morning.”

Musingly Kelsey said, “We really should use Zach to interrogate prisoners more often. He scares me when he smiles.”

Lucas gave him an impatient look, then asked Rafferty, “What did Ryan say?”

“He said—off the record—that he’d been commissioned to take everything in a certain room of the museum. Just for the hell of it, he took more, then upped his price. Originally he was supposed to be paid in cold, hard cash. He decided he wanted guns instead and demanded them.”

“And got them?” Kyle asked, intrigued.

“Actually
we’ve
got them,” Kelsey answered absently. “Thanks, I regret to say, to these clowns.”

“I should have left you in jail,” Rafferty told him.

“I wasn’t in jail. I was being held incommunicado as a political prisoner.”

“In a room with bars on the windows. That wasn’t jail?”

“Just a highly security-conscious hotel.”

Rafferty said something impolite.

“Can we get back to the point, please?” Lucas asked with awful patience.

“Gladly.” Kelsey frowned at him. “What was it?”

Kyle choked back a laugh. Since Lucas seemed too irritated to respond, she murmured, “Um, I think it was that Martin apparently wanted just the mask.”

“Well, he kept it all,” Kelsey told them, serious again. “He hasn’t moved anything larger than his car keys out of that house in weeks.”

“Sure?” Rafferty asked.

Kelsey winced, as if the mild question had jabbed a sore spot. “Yes, dammit, I’m sure! Three agents have had the place under surveillance around the clock since the shipment got there.”

“Don’t you two get started again,” Lucas warned the men.

Instantly transferring his attention to the blond man, Kelsey said, “You know, I’ve never seen you like this, Luc. Who licked the red off your candy?”

Kyle choked on a laugh.

Kelsey looked at her. “Have you been irritating
our Lucas?” he asked sternly. “He’s usually such a cheerful soul.”

“Dammit, Kelsey!” Lucas snapped.

Undeterred, Kelsey said to Rafferty, “You’ve known him longer than I have. Is it the mountain air, d’you think?”

With a wary eye on his fuming friend, Rafferty said, “You’d carry a torch into a room full of gunpowder, Kelsey. Kyle, the only real talent Kelsey can claim is the ability to make coffee. I think we could all use some, if you wouldn’t mind?”

“Of course.” She rose and led the way into the kitchen, curious but a bit wary of the sudden undercurrents in the room.

When they were out of earshot, Lucas murmured, “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.” Rafferty’s voice was equally low. “He’s right, though. You seem a little frayed around the edges.”

Lucas didn’t say anything for a moment, then sighed a bit roughly. “Ever have something from your past come back to haunt you?”

“We all have, I think.” He studied his friend’s suddenly haggard face, then said softly, “So Kyle’s the one. I always thought there was someone you couldn’t forget.”

Lucas grimaced. “My great poker face.”

“No, not your face,” Rafferty told him. “Something in your eyes, maybe. This isn’t going to be easy for you, is it?”

Gazing off toward the kitchen, Lucas murmured, “No more than I deserve.”

“Can I help?”

“No.” He shook his head. “But thanks.”

In the kitchen, Kyle found that she was entirely comfortable with Kelsey, as if she’d known him forever. And that, she decided shrewdly, was probably a part of the man’s effectiveness as an agent. He had the instinctive knack of putting people at ease, which made his behavior toward Lucas all the more surprising.

“Do you always needle Luc like that?” she asked, too curious to avoid the subject.

Kelsey was measuring coffee into the percolator and didn’t answer until he’d finished. Then he leaned back against the counter and smiled at her. “Who, me? I was just making an observation.”

She realized quite suddenly that despite his cheerful demeanor and his mischievous personality, this man was dangerous. She wasn’t afraid of him but began to feel a bit wary because a part of his danger, she decided, lay in perceptiveness. She had the uneasy feeling that he saw people much more clearly than they would find at all comfortable—including herself.

“I’m harmless,” Kelsey murmured.

Kyle started, then managed to hide her surprise. “That isn’t the word I would have chosen,” she said slowly.

He made a slight grimace, a bit wry but otherwise cryptic. “Maybe not. Doesn’t fit you, either. You’ve got poor Lucas tied up in knots.”

She stiffened. “That isn’t your business.”

Coolly he said, “I’m a government agent, Miss Griffon, and I take my job very seriously. I do my homework.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that I know very well you and Luc have a history. Now, that is none of my business, except where this assignment is concerned. There’s just one thing I wanted you to be aware of. He probably made it sound simple, but for Luc to go into Rome’s house is one hell of a risky proposition. If Rome finds out who he is and what he’s doing there, things are liable to get just a little ugly.”

Quite suddenly Kyle felt cold. “What do you mean?”

“He could get killed.”

“Martin’s civilized,” she objected instantly. “He wouldn’t kill a man just like—”

“He has before.”

She stared at him.

Kelsey nodded. “Oh, yes. We can’t prove it in court, you understand—no evidence. And he didn’t dirty his own hands with murder; he had
it done, which, to my mind, is the same as pulling the trigger himself.”

“Why did you tell me?” she asked after a moment.

“Because I knew Luc wouldn’t.”

“Does he know?”

“Of course he does.” Kelsey smiled just a little, but his eyes were steady. “He’s very protective of those he cares about—and uncommonly gallant about ladies. He’ll spare you the harsh realities whenever possible.”

He didn’t before, she thought. Or had he? She just didn’t know anymore. Tightly she said, “I don’t need protection or chivalry.”

“No, I didn’t think you did.” His voice was quite cool and calm. “Unlike Luc, I’ve had the great good fortune to work with a number of women in dangerous situations over the years, and I’ve learned that toughness comes in all shapes and sizes. You see, I happen to believe you’ll be a greater help to him if you know just what he’s involved in.”

“So now I know.”

“Now you know. You don’t entirely believe me about Rome, of course, but you’ll be more alert than you would otherwise have been, and that always counts for something.”

She looked at him, a little puzzled. “And you don’t think—because of what I may believe now—that I’ll alert Martin that something’s wrong by behaving differently toward him?”

“Hell, no.” Very dryly he explained, “It didn’t take me five minutes to realize you don’t give away anything.”

Kyle couldn’t protest that, as much as she wanted to. And though she didn’t ask Kelsey, she had to wonder if she appeared as frozen as she felt. It wasn’t a nice thought. It wasn’t a nice feeling.

“I like your friends,” she told Lucas late that afternoon when the other two had gone. She sat watching him as he knelt at the hearth building up the fire.

“Do you?” He remained where he was,
brushing his hands together and gazing at the flames.

“They seem as though they’re very unusual men.”

Lucas rose but continued to gaze into the fire. He seemed far away.

“So do you,” she added.

He turned his head to look at her and his mouth twisted. “We both know what you think of me.”

“No, we don’t, not really. Why didn’t you tell me that Martin was dangerous, Luc?”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, just continued to look at her. “Kelsey,” he muttered finally.

“You wouldn’t have told me. He knew that. He thought I should be prepared, and he was right.”

“There was no need for you to know.” Lucas returned his gaze to the fire, frowning.

Abruptly she asked, “Why did you have my father send me to Europe, Luc?”

“What makes you think I did? I don’t know your father.”

“And Josh Long doesn’t know me. He’s something of a humanitarian, I hear, but ten years ago he was also a playboy. So why did he concern himself then with a seventeen-year-old girl he’d never met? Unless someone asked him to.”

After a moment Lucas said, “Josh is a good friend. He didn’t know me very well at that time, but he didn’t ask questions.”

She heard the tacit admission and sighed. “Did you want an ocean between us, Luc, was that it?”

He closed his eyes briefly. “I wanted you off that campus, away from the drugs.”

Kyle thought about that for a moment. He had left her to preserve an illusion between them, and yet he had done his best to protect her. He had destroyed evidence that would have taken her to court, if not to jail, had had her sent far away to a school where drugs were
more rare than dinosaurs. It seemed a contradiction in character, and yet she felt it wasn’t.

“I don’t understand you,” she said.

“Do you want to?”

“I already—”

“I know what you said.”

She met his steady gaze, her own unwavering. “I meant it. I do want to understand you. I have to, Luc, or the past will never be—well, just the past.”

He nodded, but she couldn’t tell from his expression what he was thinking or feeling. He smiled suddenly, that faintly crooked, charming smile she remembered so well. “Then we go on from there, don’t we?”

“I guess we do.”

It was two days before she began to feel more natural around Lucas. She knew he was aware of her guardedness, just as she was aware that he watched her often. But gradually she began to feel less tense. It would have been too much
to say that she forgot her wounds, but the past seemed to be retreating in importance, day by day.

The situation was helped in part by her preoccupation with discovering just who Lucas Kendrick really was. Instinct told her he was a good man, whatever had motivated him in the past, but she found it difficult to trust her instincts where he was concerned. So she watched him, asked questions, and listened.

Her one legacy from her father, given to her in the childhood days when she had tried to win his affection, was an ability to understand and play chess, and she recalled that her father had often said a man’s chess game spoke much about the kind of man he really was. So she played chess with Lucas, unsurprised to find that he did play, and played well.

He had a strong instinctive grasp of tactics, she discovered, and the ability to make seemingly reckless intuitive leaps virtually guaranteed to take his opponent off guard. He was a gracious winner, a cheerful loser.

In the following days she found out other things about him. He didn’t mind silence. He enjoyed walking in the light covering of snow, chopping wood, listening to music. He could cook, and did, and he did more than his share to help keep the cabin neat. He could stand so still sometimes that a wild bird would alight and eat bread crumbs from his hand with perfect trust.

He had nightmares.

Kyle awoke twice that first week, hearing mutters and muffled groans from downstairs, hearing him toss and turn on the couch. The sounds haunted her, disturbed her deeply. But she didn’t go to him then and said nothing about what she had heard.

The third time, halfway through their second week together, she did go to him.

The first rasping groan woke her, and she was out of her bed and moving lightly down the stairs before she had time to think or question her action. She hesitated for just a moment at
the bottom of the stairs, wondering why she had to do this.

The room was dim, lighted only by the dying flames in the hearth, and outside the wind whined with a lonely, fretful sound. Kyle bit her lip, undecided, and would have returned to her bed but for the soft, unsteady groan that reached her ears then. She crossed the room on quick, bare feet, and knelt on the rug beside the couch.

A half-burned log broke apart in the hearth just then with a shower of sparks, and the flames jumped higher. She could see Lucas more clearly. The covers had fallen to his waist, leaving his muscled chest bare, and his body was so tense, it trembled slightly. A fine sheen of sweat beaded his face. One forearm was thrown across his eyes, fist clenched; his other arm lay at his side, and his fingers held the covers in a white-knuckled grip. His throat worked as if sounds or words or some darkness inside him struggled to escape, but only the low groans were released from his sleeping prison.

Kyle looked at the strong hand gripping the blankets, then hesitantly covered it with one of her own. It felt like iron, she thought, burning iron, and feeling that made her hurt oddly. She bent closer, uncertain but driven, unwilling to allow him to go through whatever this was all alone.

“Luc? Luc, wake up,” she said softly.

“Behind the building,” he muttered suddenly, urgently. “He ran behind—Oh, dear Lord! The dumpster. He just threw her in there.
Why can’t I stop this?
Why can’t I—”

“Luc, wake up!”

He jerked suddenly, and his hand turned beneath hers, long fingers closing tightly around hers. He was still for a moment, and then the arm over his eyes lowered. He looked at her, disoriented. “You aren’t a part of that,” he said thickly.

“Luc, it’s just a dream,” she whispered.

His eyes cleared slowly but continued to move over her face almost searchingly. “No.
No, it happened. It happened and I couldn’t change it.”