“Simple equation,” she said. “You and I fight all the time. Are we in love?”
He almost fell the rest of the way down the flight of stairs. He looked at her surreptitiously and found her face completely expressionless. “No,” he said, halting on the first-floor landing. “Real love, if it exists, is selfless, generous, warm, and tender. Isn’t it?”
She was thinking of Pulaski. He could tell by that damnable little half-smile. “Yes,” she said.
“And if I loved you, I would have wanted to do anything to save you pain. I would have ached for you when your husband was murdered. I would have done anything to spare you that. That’s what real love is all about.”
“Yes,” she said.
“You know what I felt when I heard Pulaski was killed?” he continued in a ruthless voice, knowing what it was going to do to her, unable to stop himself. “I thought of you, alone and free, and I wanted to celebrate.”
Her face went very still and cold. There’d be no snuggling in a king-size bed tonight, or for many nights to come, and he wondered why he’d told her. She’d hated him enough already—why did he have to give her more ammunition?
Maybe it was because he knew things couldn’t get any better until she knew the worst. And although he’d kept one tiny thing back, the one thing he knew that was cruel and horrible, at least she now knew the bulk of it. He waited, for the imprint of her strong hand on his face, for her to push him down the stairs.
She’d caught hold of the banister, her hand strong and tanned; Pulaski’s damned wedding ring was still on her finger. Slowly, she pushed away, stood upright, and in her cold, still face her eyes were alive, furious, and slightly startled. That look of surprise mystified him. “Interesting,” she said in a cool drawl. “You are a very strange man, Randall. Let’s not keep my mother waiting.” And she continued down the stairs, dismissing him and his topic of conversation.
He stared after her for a long moment. No, she didn’t bore him. She infuriated, astounded, confused, and aroused him. It would take a long time to understand her, a long time to grow tired of her. That time would come—it always had before. But it would be glorious until then. And he moved after her, feeling oddly lighthearted.
* * *
“You’re coming in.” Randall’s voice didn’t allow for disagreement. Maggie nodded. She had no desire to sit in the confines of his Jaguar and wait like a dutiful Moslem wife for her lord and master to return.
“I hope you’re not going to spend hours primping,” she said, following him through the lobby of the elegant old hotel. “I hate to sit around waiting while someone gets compulsive. I’m not going to twiddle my thumbs while you try to match your socks and cufflinks. My sister Holly’s bad enough.”
“Maggie, dear, everything always matches anyway,” he said, stepping into the elevator.
“I’m sure it does.” She wished she could get rid of her feeling of uneasiness. Why did he even care, one way or the other, about her life these last six years? That’s the question she couldn’t answer. Randall Carter had never been one to give a damn about women, or any particular woman. She knew that because, whether she’d been interested or not, someone had always been eager to tell her the latest gossip about him. He’d divorced his wife sometime after he’d returned from Gemansk, with all the care someone would use to fire a trash collector. He’d gone through beautiful, intelligent women at a sedate, genteel rate, collecting and discarding them like works of art. Except that he didn’t discard his works of art, she reminded herself. It had actually surprised her that he even remembered her—there’d been no doubt in her mind that what to her was a devastating experience had been all in a day’s work for Randall.
But apparently she’d made some sort of lasting impression. Maybe as the one who’d got away. Except that she hadn’t gotten away—he’d thrown her away. So why was he here again? What did he want from her? It couldn’t be sex—Randall wasn’t the sort who repeated himself. Maybe it was wounded pride? But it was her own pride that had been wounded, not his. Not to mention her heart, her soul—God, the very memory still tightened her nerves.
Thank God she no longer cared. Thank God for Mack, who’d taught her what real love was all about, so that she would never again have to mistake obsessive craving for the real thing. Thank God that she could look at Randall’s tall, elegant body, his thin sexy mouth, and his dark, tormented eyes, and not feel a thing. Not a tiny little thing at all.
“What are you looking at me like that for?” He’d stopped in front of his door and searched through his pockets with uncharacteristic abstraction before coming up with his room key. “Are you afraid I’ve lured you to my room to have my wicked way with you?”
“Randall,” she said sweetly, “I’m not afraid of anything. Least of all you.”
He opened the door and ushered her into his elegant hotel suite. The French doors were open to the bedroom beyond, and fresh flowers scented the air-conditioned air. Lilies, Maggie thought. The flower of death.
She turned her back on him, strolling toward the windows. “Hurry up, will you? Mother hates to be kep
t waiting. She won’t make her grand entrance until everyone is there.” There was no reply from him, and she turned. “Randall?”
He was standing very still, staring at the flowers. There was a note propped against the crystal vase. He moved very slowly and picked it up in one long-fingered hand. “Go back to Washington,” he read aloud in an expressionless voice. He stopped reading, crumpling the paper in his hand. “A secret admirer, I suppose.”
“Is that all it said?” There was more to it than that—her instincts were too well-honed not to notice his sudden hesitation.
“That’s all.”
“No threats? No ‘or else’? Pretty tame, if you ask me,” she scoffed, moving across to him. “Surely they don’t expect us just to slink away at the first sign of trouble.”
“Maybe they thought it would be worth a try,” he said abstractedly.
If he’d been expecting it, she never would have made it. But he was thinking of other things, and it was child’s play to grab his arm, bring it down over her knee, and force him to release the paper. Maggie was across the room and out of reach before he even realized what she’d done. The crumpled paper was spread out before her eyes.
“Go back to Washington,” she read, “or it will be Gemansk all over again.” She raised her eyes to meet Randall’s angry, impassive ones. “All right, Randall,” she said. “What happened in Gemansk?”
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