The invitation came back into her eyes, and her voice went soft, alluring. “Isn’t it, Roarke?”
“It is.”
“Well. Oh, well. I suppose she might be thinking history repeats, and I admit I was hoping it would. I don’t suppose I should apologize to her?”
“It wouldn’t be necessary. Or wise. I wish you well, Maggie, of course, but if you’re looking for contacts, connections, and friendships through me, I’ll have to disappoint you. It annoys my wife.”
“Oh.” Her eyebrows shot up, and her lips trembled into a faint smirk before she controlled it. “If you were anyone else I’d have to say she’s certainly tamed you.”
“Rather than rise to that, or sink to it, I’ll just say she makes me happy. I’m on my way out, Maggie.”
“Yes, so you said. I’ll just apologize again for causing trouble, thank you again for helping me on a business level.” Her voice trembled, just a little. “I shouldn’t keep you.”
She walked over to pick up her coat. “If you’re really on your way out, maybe I could walk down with you.”
“Of course.” When she held out her coat, he helped her into it, then retrieved his own. “Do you have a car, or do you need one?”
“I have one, thanks. Roarke…” She shook her head. “I guess I just want to say, again, that I’m sorry. And admit, just here, before we go down and that’s the end, that I can’t help being sorry it’s never going to be me again.”
She squeezed his hand, stepped away.
He used his office ’link, told his admin he was leaving for the day and escorting Ms. Percell out of the building. Then he moved to the side of the room, pressed a mechanism concealed in the molding with his thumb. The wall opened into his private elevator.
“Handy.” Magdelana laughed, as a woman does when she’s fighting to be careless. “Gadgets, they were one of your things. I’ve heard your home here is spectacular.”
“We’re very comfortable there. Ground floor,” he ordered, and the elevator slid smoothly down.
“I’m sure you are. Your wife must enjoy the…comfort.”
“Actually, it’s taken some adjusting for her.” The warmth shifted over his face. “And sometimes yet, it embarrasses her a little.”
“I’ve heard of an embarrassment of riches, but can’t imagine being embarrassed by them.”
“Money doesn’t mean to her what it does to either of us.”
“Really?” She looked up at him, liquid eyes. “And what does it mean to us?”
“Freedom, of course, and power and that comfort. But under it all”—he looked down at her, smiled a little—“it’s the game, isn’t it?”
She smiled back, her face mirroring regret. “We always understood each other.”
“That we didn’t, no.” He stepped out, automatically taking her arm to lead her across the marble expanse of the lobby with its moving maps, its busy shops, its banks of live flowers.
Outside his limo, then hers, slid smoothly to the curb. When he walked her to her car, she turned. The dampness in her eyes shone now in the sunlight. “Maybe we didn’t understand each other. Maybe that’s true. But there were good times for us, weren’t there? There were good times.”
“There were.”
She lifted her hands to his cheeks. He curled his fingers gently around her wrists so they stood a moment in the cold and the wind. “Good-bye, Maggie.”
“Good-bye, Roarke.” Tears glimmered on her lashes as she slipped into the warmth of the limo.
He watched it pull away, a sleek white whip through the ocean of traffic.
Then he got into his own car to go to his wife.
11
EVE WAS DRAGGED THROUGH THE STATION BY A peppy little assistant named Mercy. Eve decided she had none as she bounced along the corridors, whipping Eve through checkpoints and keeping up a rapid-fire monologue as she all but skipped along in zippy black skids.