Tempting Fate (24 page)

Now Dani had another Mattie Witt to bring into her understanding of her grandmother, the young woman who'd freed herself from her strict, unbending father. She tried to imagine Mattie's childhood in the stifling, repressive household of Jackson Witt, to imagine her leaving behind her eleven-year-old sister. Had that been an act of courage or selfishness—or simple desperation?

Because Mattie had left Cedar Springs, Joe and Zeke Cutler had gone to Saratoga, and now, twenty-five years later, Zeke was back.

Tucking her feet up under her on the big comfy chair, Dani lowered the volume with her remote. Zeke was standing at her living-room window, looking down at the courtyard.

“There's so much I didn't know,” she said.

He glanced back, his eyes reaching hers, but he said nothing. In trying to imagine Mattie's life in Cedar Springs, Dani had also tried to imagine his. But she and Zeke were from two different worlds, brought together by the life of a woman Dani loved but no longer was sure she understood. And where did her mother fit in? Where did Zeke's brother?

She had to know.

On the television screen, the Mattie Witt of fifty years ago smiled, the red ostrich plume in her hair.

“Mattie never mentioned the book on your brother to me. It won a Pulitzer, but I'd never read it—I'd never even heard of it.”

“You were just a kid when it came out.”

“Fifteen. It didn't seem so young then. I don't know, I've always half believed my childhood ended when I was nine. After my mother disappeared, I thought I could take anything. I guess I thought that was what everyone else believed, too. But now I see there were those who tried to protect me. My Chandler grandfather, for one. And Mattie.” She pulled her gaze from her young, dazzling grandmother and turned it on Zeke. “Did Nick know you and your brother were in Saratoga?”

“You should talk to him about that.”

“It breaks one of your rules?”

“More than one, I imagine.”

She dropped her feet to the floor, her impatience instantly reignited. “Zeke, you know more than you're telling me.”

He didn't even turn his head from the window.

“I have a right to know—”

He faced her. “It's not a question of rights.”

It was as if someone had wiped the humor and fatigue and gentleness from his face, the qualities she'd seen over dinner that drew her to this complex man more than the muscles in his shoulders—which were impressive—and the sexy figure he cut in a pair of jeans. Now he looked distant and professional.

Her muscles tightened against another onslaught of shaking from anger and frustration—and fear.

He didn't react. “Dani, there are just some things you'll have to discuss first with your family.”

“Fine, then.”

She jumped up, banged off the television, so aggravated she could have pulled books off the shelves and thrown them in handfuls at the too-controlled, too-appealing man who'd invaded her space. “I'll find out the rest on my own. I don't need your help or your cooperation.”

She headed for the kitchenette and dumped dishes into the dishwasher, put the cap on the olive oil and tucked it back on the appropriate shelf. Zeke continued to stare out the living-room window. He wasn't like Ira, who talked all the time, or Nick or her father, who'd try to sneak off when she was irritated. He wasn't like any of her male business associates, who treated her with reserve, and he wasn't like the men who worked for her at Pembroke Springs, and he wasn't like—he was nothing like—the men she'd dated over the years, who'd talk her out of feeling miserable and take the credit when she was feeling happy.

They'd just stand there when they knew she was mad.

But Zeke didn't work for her and he wasn't a business associate and he wasn't a relative and he wasn't a date.

So what was he?

A complication, she thought, shutting the dishwasher. A man who scared her just for the very questions he presented and the doubts he created. Not just about her mother, Mattie, what was happening in Saratoga. About herself.

She hit the start switch on the dishwasher and wiped off the counter. She had no intention of letting him clean up after he'd cooked dinner.

“You're welcome to stay.” Her tone wasn't exactly invitational. “Talk to the pigeons all night if you want. I'm out of here.”

He hadn't moved a millimeter. “Where are you going?”

She made it all the way down the hall to the elevator.

Then he was there beside her, silent and so controlled.

She couldn't not look at him. If the rest of him wasn't giving away a thing, his eyes were. They told her he did care. They told her he, too, was afraid of what he'd stirred up by coming to Saratoga—of what he'd find there.

They were so different, she and this man from Cedar Springs, Tennessee.

“You need to rest,” he said. His tone was neither patronizing nor demanding, but simply observational. Probably it didn't take any great insight into her character to notice that she was ready to collapse. She could feel the exhaustion curling up her spine, dragging her down. Only tension kept her on her feet.

She banged the down button. Somewhere within the bowels of the building, she could hear the elevator creak and groan. “It's so frustrating.”

“Keep your focus on the present.”

“Is that your professional advice?” she asked, not meaning to sound so sarcastic.

“My personal advice. I've had a few extra days to adjust to asking the kinds of questions you're asking.”

His eyes had become distant again, a closed window to a part of him she could no longer deny she very much wanted to see and understand. What was he like inside?

“I want answers, Zeke.”

“So do I.”

“Talk to me.”

But he merely stood there.

The elevator clunked to a stop at her floor, and the doors slid open. “I should get back to Saratoga and see my father—and I need to apologize to Mattie. I was pretty hard on her. I've never gotten mad at her like that.”

“Maybe she's relieved you finally did. Now she's merely mortal in your eyes.”

The elevator doors were closing. Dani reached to stick her arm in and stop them, but Zeke touched her wrist, just below her slowly healing bruise. Awareness sizzled inside her. She forced herself to remember the stolen key, ransacked room 304, her father. They weren't coincidences.

“You wouldn't get to see your father until morning.” Zeke's voice was raspy and low; he rubbed the soft, sensitive skin on the inside of her wrist. “Hospitals do have their rules.”

She pulled in her lower lip and bit down hard. “Zeke, I wish I knew—”

“I know.” His mouth lowered to hers, his lips brushing hers, soft and so damn sweet, promising nothing but the moment. He smiled into her eyes. “Will you stay?”

She tried to laugh. “Another minute and I'll be a pile of warm Jell-O.”

The humor returned to his dark eyes. “Not me.”

Zeke had intended to read her the riot act about being reckless and hotheaded and thoroughly Pembroke when they got back to her apartment. He'd intended to tell her to let him do the heavy lifting—which would surely set her off—and go tend her mineral water and mud baths. He would be cool, distant, professional. Then he'd get out of there.

But there was no lecture, no getting her steamed and he didn't leave.

At least not so far.

“I'd like to take a shower,” she said. “To calm down as much as to get clean. I don't know when I've spent so long on edge.”

“Good idea.”

She looked at him with those big black eyes, and her skin was so pale, her lower lip pulled in a little under her top teeth, and she said, “You want out of here, don't you? You're getting—we're getting—” She stopped, straightening her spine and going high-minded heiress on him. It was as good a defense as any. “Leave whenever you wish. I'll be fine on my own.”

But in her fierceness he saw not only strength and character, but also vestiges of the little girl who'd had no choice but to be fine on her own. He sensed her pride and toughness and the twenty-five years of battles she'd had with herself not to show the parts of her that weren't so proud and weren't so tough. He was from another world, one without trust funds to throw in people's faces when he got mad or prestigious hundred-year-old parties to skip, but he thought he understood. They'd both loved people who in the end had left them to face the world alone.

“Take your shower,” he said. “I won't sneak out on you.”

While she was in the bathroom, he contemplated his next move, whether he at least should tell her that her father hadn't tripped in the woods, something she already seemed to suspect. Should he tell her he'd posted Sam at her father's hospital room? Those were the kinds of things he could legitimately tell her, if he were in the habit of telling anyone anything. He talked to Sam because they worked together, because they were friends. He didn't know what he and Dani were.

“I forgot my robe,” she called.

He fetched it from the bedroom and hung it on one finger through a narrow opening in the doorway. It was a thin little scrap of fabric. She'd have had more covering in a good bath towel.

“Does this make me an official white knight?” he asked.

“It does not,” she said, a hint of amusement in her voice as she snatched the robe. “I'm just not used to having someone around when I'm taking a shower.”

He only got a glimpse of her dripping hand. Stifling an image of her parading around her claustrophobic apartment stark naked, Zeke noticed one of hundreds of photographs, postcards and posters on the hall wall, which she used like a giant bulletin board. It was of her and her grandmother in the basket of a hot-air balloon. Dani must have been fourteen or fifteen. Her smile reminded him of her mother. It struck him that Dani was older now than Lilli had been when she disappeared. She wasn't a kid anymore. Neither was he. They'd both survived loss.

“We've been on our own for a long time,” she said, as if reading his thoughts. She'd come up beside him. He could feel the heat and dampness of her skin. The robe, he observed, was as flimsy as he'd expected. “It's been good for me—I've been happy. I don't want to lose that independence. I don't want anyone to have to feel responsible for me, to hurt because I hurt.”

“It's not always possible,” he said carefully, aware Dani Pembroke had just exposed a bit of her soul, which had to be a rarity for her, “to tell people what to feel and what not to feel. Someone can hurt for you not out of a sense of responsibility, but out of love.”

“Kate keeps telling me the only true love is between independent people. She says intimacy isn't about dependence.”

“A smart woman, your friend Kate.”

The filmy robe matted to the places where her skin was still damp, outlining the soft shape of her breasts. Water dripped from her tangled hair. Zeke told himself to leave. They'd both said too much, revealed too much. But instead he moved closer to her, close enough that he could smell the fresh scent of soap and see the lines at the corners of her dark eyes, sense the desire that stirred inside her. He damn well knew what was stirring in him.

“Don't leave yet,” she whispered.

In her bedroom they opened the window to the breeze and the flutter of pigeons. The tie on her robe had come loose, dangling to the tops of her bare feet, revealing her small breasts and smooth, flat stomach. Zeke inhaled deeply. He wanted to go to her. He wanted to strip off his clothes and make love to her now, here, anywhere. But he waited. She needed to be certain. There were questions yet to be answered—even asked—about the places where their pasts had intersected. They mattered. But they didn't, Zeke understood, determine how much he wanted Dani Pembroke, how much this slim, black-eyed woman had come to mean to him.

She stood next to him at the window as he pulled the shade. One side of her robe had fallen off her shoulder and caught in the crook of her elbow. As small and feminine as she was, she was strong for her size, and athletic. And sexy, Zeke thought. He wondered if she knew how sexy.

Hesitating only slightly, she slipped her hands around his lower back. Her touch was light but not tentative, igniting a desire within him so hot it burned his soul. She pressed her breasts against his chest and tilted her head back, dampening her lips with the tip of her tongue, inviting him.

“Don't hold back,” she said. “Not for my sake, anyway.”

He kissed her then, a long and searching kiss, not an end, he felt, but a beginning. There was much more yet to come between them.

In the midst of it, her robe fell to the floor. He couldn't have said the precise moment, but became aware that she was naked, that his hands were coursing up her smooth, trim bottom. Their kiss had taken on an urgency and hunger that quickly sensitized and electrified every inch of his body, every fiber of his soul.