Deep Purple (37 page)

She looked out the window. The office buildings had given way to occasional adobe homes as the car ate up the road toward the Santa Cruz River and the Tucson Mountains. “
I thought you knew everything!”

There s
he went again, letting him get her all upset. Just being around him ignited her burners, so that her anger always seemed to get the best of her.

He ignored her sarcasm. “
You said you never wanted to see me. I thought it would be easy enough. After all, I know what kind of a mercenary, sex-hungry female you are.”

“
Sex-hungry!” she screeched. “That’s enough! Let me out! Here! Now!"

He grunted impatiently. “
Not until I’ve said what I have to say!”

He eased the car off the pavement that paralleled the Santa Cru
z River bed, which was as dry as dust, into a grove of cottonwoods that clumped precariously along the perpendicular banks. Outside the car the sandstorm isolated them from the rest of the world.

He sat looking straight ahead, but his knuckles were white o
n the steering wheel. “I thought I could forget you. But I see you in every woman, hear your rum-smooth voice at the most crowded party. My God, when I’m in bed at night, I sometimes think I can even smell that exotic perfume you wear.”

What Nick was sayin
g, the angry way he confessed it, as if she were some sort of demon he wished to exorcise, shook her—even more than his abhorrent kisses. “Are you certain it’s not your wife’s perfume that haunts you?” she snapped, trying to summon the image of the cool, delicate blond beauty as a defense to put between them.

“
Danielle and I stopped sleeping together over a year ago. She doesn’t want to be bothered with children.”

Amanda didn
’t know what to say. After the moment of surprise passed, she retorted, “You two seemed made for each other—the Beauty and the Beast!”

But that wasn
’t completely true. Danielle seemed as cold and fragile as ice crystals, and Nick—he would burn like dry ice. At that moment she felt icy cold on the outside, with a fever raging within. “What do you want from me?” she whispered.

His smile was roguish. “
I want you.”

“
That’s something you’ll never have! The Godwin name, all its money, all your political connections can’t buy me.” Perspiration broke out at her temples and on her upper lip. For all her defiance, she was shaking. If Nick reached out and touched her, she was certain she would shatter.

“
I wonder,” he said softly. “Everyone has a price, Mandy.” He shrugged. “But that will come in time. Right now it is sufficient to enjoy the pleasure of your company.”

She wanted to slap that mocking smirk off his homely face. “
And what makes you think I’d give you even that?”

“
You mentioned revenge once—I can think of no sweeter revenge of a woman on a man than to tempt him with what she’ll never give him. Can you?”

Yes, she could. The idea took root to grow in the darkness of her soul. She was not sure how she would achieve it, but it was enough that she had at last found a path to that end.

“You mean you want to see me, be with me—and yet demand nothing more?” she asked with arched brows.

“
Oh, I want more. I want you totally. But that is something you’ll give on your own—tomorrow, next week . . . one day.”

She knew it was a dangerous game she was playing. But the risk was worth it. “
It doesn’t bother you that my father’s Japanese?” she asked, recalling her earlier conversation with Larry.

“
Your father could be Hitler for all I care.”

He revved up the engine. “
I’ll drop you by your house on my way back to City Hall.”

During the tensely silent drive
back, her gaze involuntarily strayed to Nick's hands, the deft way they handled the steering wheel. She could imagine the way they would manhandle her! Paws!

Nick caught her furious glance. “
Good Lord!” he grunted. “What a relationship we’re going to begin—you hell-bent on revenge and I intent on seduction. It’ll be interesting to see which one of us wins.”

CHAPTER 49

S
he did not know exactly what she expected from Nick. If the previous encounters were any indication, she could probably expect to be mauled. On the other hand, Nick had too much finesse for outright rape. He would enjoy the Machiavellian tactics of a chess master. She imagined him toying with her, leading her through his wily maze and, when she was most lost, maneuvering her into surrender.

After Nick let her out, she went into the house almost dazed. Thinking back over their conversation, she realized it seemed preposterous. No man calmly warns a woman he is going to seduce her and then sets about to do it.

Nick would.

She recount
ed the impossible conversation to her father. He continued to iron, saying nothing, until she finished. The steam drifted chimerically around him. “Play with passion, daughter, and you will get burned.”

Startled, she broke off petting Trouble, who licked a
t her hands as if they were candy. She looked up at her father. Only in the last year had he really begun to age, and, watching him, she saw the tiredness in those eyes that were usually such a lustrous black. His shoulders were permanently stooped now. “I thought you would at least lecture me about seeing a married man.”

He hung the suit jacket he had pressed on the hanger. “
It is too late for me to lecture on that. You are old enough to know what you are doing. But to play at passion as if it—as if it were a game of mah-jongg . . . more experienced people than you have played and lost. There are no winners in such a game.”

“
I’m not playing, Father. I’m very serious.”

That night at eight a knock at the door brought her face to face with Nick. For a moment s
he was too stunned to say anything. She never expected him to actually come to her house to see her. But there he stood—imposing, dominating the doorway.

His gaze raked over her, taking in the petal-pink kimono she wore. “
I’ve come to call on your father,” he said casually, as if it were the Old World and not America, 1941.

She stepped back and opened the door. Dumbfounded, all she could think was that if seeing how a poverty-level Japanese family lived did not change his mind about wanting her, then her ch
ances of gaining her revenge were better than she imagined. “You’ll have to remove your shoes,” she told him, trying to keep the derision from her face.

He slid off his wing-tips with indifferent ease and followed her into the back room. Her father, who sa
t before the
kotaku
drinking his tea, said politely, “Mr. Godwin, please come in and share some tea with us.”

Nick folded his solid frame into the cross-kneed position of her father with a little more difficulty than a small slender Oriental would have had
. “Thank you, Mr. Shima. I am honored that you will see me, and especially since I assume Mandy has told you already of my proposition.”

Her father nodded solemnly before turning to her and saying, “
Daughter, tea, please.”

Conditioned to serve her father,
she bowed and slipped through the screened-off kitchen for the tea service. From the outer room she could hear Nick saying, "I meant Mandy no dishonor by my proposition, Mr. Shima. I want to see her. If I were not married, people would find nothing to talk about. But I am married. A fact I cannot and will not change.”

She went back into the living room and, kneeling between her father and Nick, set out the teacups, pouring fresh tea for each man. Her father tasted the tea, and Nick did likewise, seeming not
at all discomforted by the silence between him and her father.

At last Taro said, “
You have told me of your intentions. And I am honored that you have come to me. But if I were to tell you that I don’t approve of what you intend, would that change your mind?”

From beneath lowered lids she saw Nick look at her before meeting her father
’s questioning gaze. “No. There is nothing this side of life that will keep me from your daughter.”

Her father took another sip of tea. “
My daughter—she has told you her intentions?”

Nick smiled. "It would seem we are at cross purposes.”

"It would seem," her father said sadly, "that there can be then only one unhappy solution."

An entire week passed without Amanda's hearing again from Nick, and she often wondered if she had not fabricated the whole affair in her mind. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday she looked for him at the Casablanca, but he did not come.

Then Sunday she found herself looking at a newspaper photo of him and Danielle at what
was supposed to be a private dinner party for the state’s leading Democratic politicians. There had to have been at least fifteen or twenty reporters present by the coverage the party received. Governor Stanton was even quoted as saying he would back Dominic Godwin if the Tucson mayor agreed to run in the next senatorial race.

She wadded up the newspaper and hurled it against the dividing screen that separated the kitchen. At once Trouble pounced upon the balled newspaper. Her father poked his head around t
he screen. "Ahh, so you saw the articles?”

“
Does he think he'll manipulate me so easily?”

“
My daughter, you accepted his challenge with eyes wide open. He hasn’t deceived you, has he? Did he promise you to give up his wife or his career for you?”

"You soun
d as if you're on his side!”

“
No, I'm on yours. But if you expect to win, you can’t let your emotions overrule logic.”

Then Monday afternoon, crossing the campus, she saw Nick's sleek white Pierce-Arrow. "See you later,”
she called to Kathy, a brown-haired, pudgy girl who was the only other female in the law class.

Opening the door. Amanda slid inside the car. "I presume you wanted to talk to me?”

He creased a wicked smile. “Until your father gets phone service, this is the only way I can let you know I want to take you out—or have you changed your mind about engaging in a duel of wits with me?"

"You mean you want to take me where we'll be seen in public?" she asked sarcastically.

“I want to take you—period,” he growled. He looked away from her as he steered the car through the traffic, saying, "And one day I will—'cause you can’t wait for me to. You swish that tail of yours like a heifer in heat.”

“
Your arrogance is insufferable!”

"For now,”
he continued, smiling, "I’ll settle for your charming company. If you think you can mange to act charming.”

"With you it
’ll take a great deal of acting!”

He disregarded her biting retort. "Can you skip your classes tomorrow? I thought we'd go to the horseraces at Santa Anita.”

"The Santa Anita Race Track?” she asked stupidly. "The one in California?”

“
The same. We can fly up tomorrow morning and be back in time for a meeting I have at four-thirty.”

Slowly she nodded her acceptance. It was difficult enough to try to outguess Nick. She certainly would not have thought that a
stadium of forty thousand people would have been the place to choose for the first attempt at seduction.

The fact that Nick did not even bother to kiss her when he let her out at her house only infuriated her more. Apparently he thought he had all the tim
e in the world to work his way with her!

It was an eerie feeling she had about the abominable man, and she indirectly asked her father that night about her feeling
—if, like the Japanese Buddhists, he believed in life before birth or after death.

Her father, in his usually perceptive way, said, “
Do you think you knew Nick before this life?”

She tied the sash of her kimono before replying, searching for her words. "No, not exactly. But I feel what
’s between us is bound by the past.” She looked up at her father. "It all sounds absurd, doesn’t it?"

"Quite.”
He smiled, and she glimpsed a vision of what a handsome man he must have been when he met her mother. “But then life is absurd. I set out from Japan for the West and my fortune. I found it, but it was not measurable in coins.”

She heard the sadness in her father
’s voice and saw the terrible hunger in his age-ravaged face for the love that had passed beyond him. It was too powerful to look at, and she turned away to roll out their bedmats.

Nick showed
up the next morning dressed in brown slacks and a sports jacket. Accustomed to seeing him in expensively tailored business suits or elegant dinner jackets, she found her gaze lingering longer than necessary. She could see above the open neck of the silk shirt where the dark hair cropped up. She was right; he was nothing more than an animal.

His sunglasses hid his eyes, but nevertheless she could feel the sweep of his gaze taking in her brown linen skirt that sheathed her hips and the tan blouse beneath the
matching linen jacket that she purposely left open at the neck so that the slightest suggestion of cleavage showed. She wanted to see the same hunger in his face as she had seen in her father’s for her mother. She wanted to see Nick suffer.

As usual, Nick
surprised her. She expected to catch a commuter plane out to Los Angeles. Not so. At the Tucson municipal airport he had his own private plane, a Cessna.

“
Ever been up?” he yelled above the roar of the engines as he ran them up, going over the preflight checkout of the instruments.

She shook her head. She had never set foot in a commercial plane, much less a private one. Aloft she lost all her fear as she gazed at the beauty of the tawny desert and brown mountainous terrain speeding by below her.

There was in the constriction of the tiny aircraft an enforced intimacy. It was difficult for her and Nick to speak above the engine's roar. He sat relaxed behind the half-wheel, yet she knew his eyes scanned the horizon constantly. And she knew he was very much aware of her, the way her skirt hiked just above her knees, so close to his; the way perspiration, brought on by the plane's heated cabin, sheened the valley between her breasts; the way the exotic rose and chrysanthemum attar she wore faintly scented the cabin.

The plane glided into a small dirt-strip airport outside Los Angeles that was only minutes to the racetrack by taxi. The stadium was already full when they arrived, and Nick ushered her directly to the Turf Club at the top, where there was a restauran
t and bar—for private members only, of course.

“
Ever bet on horses?” he asked as they slid into their seats and he pulled out a program.

“
Another first.” She leaned over his arm when he opened the program and checked off the horses as they passed by below.

“
Some place their bets according to the horse’s lines—the conformation,” he explained.

"And you
—how do you render judgment?”

He passed her the binoculars. "By the jockey. Look at their faces. Nervousness, fear, anticipation
—all the human elements are stamped there. I look for the one stamped with greed. It's the one element that will win a race nine times out of ten.”

"Oh, does that apply to politicians as well?”

He pocketed the race form and took her hand in his big one. Her breath sucked in at the mere contact. Dear God, if he had this kind of power over her, what would happen if she were ever foolish enough to let the relationship go beyond the simple limitation she had imposed—the flirtatious glances, a casual touch of hands or knees, perhaps even a kiss when she knew Nick was irrevocably hers?

"Yes, Mandy. There's a kind of greed in all of us. Without it, we wouldn't be driven to accomplish what seems the impossible.”

The bright, gaudy colors of the jockeys, the auctioneer-like voice of the announcer blaring above the roar of the stadium, the precise beauty of the landscaped track—she stored away these assaults on her Oriental-trained senses for later.

The afternoon passed too swiftly. Nick and she placed their bets, and she had to laugh as she won almos
t as many times as Nick. Every so often a waiter in a red jacket would come by their box to take their order or refill their glasses. Three boxes away Carol Lombard held hands with Clark Gable, and one time Amanda glimpsed Cesar Romero passing by with some beautiful young woman.

Throughout the afternoon Amanda was constantly aware of covert gazes trained on her and Nick. Sometimes she would turn her head to catch women, heads together, talking, as they stared. And a reporter snapped a picture of the two of
them when they went down to the winner’s circle.

The sun was rocking on the Tucson Mountain tops by the time Nick circled over the airfield and delivered her home. The day had been pleasant
—but only because Nick had not put his lust- crazed hands on her!

H
owever, by the time she reached the door, the tension she felt strangled her nerve endings so that her emotions were jagged-sensitive. Nick reached across her to open her door, and his arm brushed her breasts. She shivered, and he said softly, “Not yet, Mandy. It’s not the right time.”

“
Not ever!”

He straightened, the corners of his mouth quirking a crooked smile. “
I’m gambling you’re wrong.”

That night she lay silently on her mat, unable to sleep. She played back the mental tape of
the afternoon, enjoying the flavors, sounds, and scents of the racetrack, believing she would never have the opportunity to see Santa Anita again.

She could not know she would be there within six months under conditions too horrifying to believe.