Czytaj książkę: «Trial By Seduction»

CHAPTER ONE

IT WAS the last silver hour before dawn, and Mark Connelly did not want to spend it indoors at another of his cousin Edgerton’s interminable, idiotic meetings. But he’d skipped the last three meetings, and for the sake of Edgerton’s blood pressure, he supposed he ought to show up.

But, damn it, he really wasn’t in the mood. He’d been up most of the night. He just wanted to go fishing and forget the whole thing.

No such luck. If he didn’t show, Edgerton would probably die of apoplexy, and then Mark would have to run the Moonbird Hotel himself. God forbid. He shuddered at the thought of spending the rest of his life indoors behind a desk. He’d rather ride hungry sharks bareback for a living.

He paused at the door of the hotel bar, his black leather jacket dangling over his shoulder from one hooked forefinger. He took a deep breath and held it, as if he could analyze the room better by smell than by sight. But his eyes were busy, too—scanning, appraising, sizing up the quality of the darkness and the mood of his two cousins who waited inside.

Just last night his girlfriend—ex-girlfriend, he amended—had accused him of entering every room as if it were a minefield. She hadn’t been joking—she had been angry, defeated, leaving him. He might have a sophisticated collection of bedroom tricks, she’d said bitterly, but he didn’t know a damn thing about real intimacy.

She had been right, of course. She wasn’t the first woman who had begun by viewing his emotional in-accessibility as a challenge—and ended cursing it through her tears. But, as he had told her from the first date, he couldn’t change.

Wouldn’t, she had insisted acidly. He wouldn’t change.

Whichever—did it really matter? Caution was an old friend, and it had served him well. He couldn’t shake it now—not even here, at the hotel that had been his home for twenty years. Not even now, when his life had long since ceased to be a war.

Besides, there might be a battle yet this morning. Edgerton and Philip, his cousins and business partners, stood with their backs to him, but he could read the rigidity in the tall man’s shoulders, the slight tremor in the shorter man’s hands.

Mark swallowed an exasperated sigh. Not dawn yet...could Edgerton already be in a temper? Was Philip already drunk?

They were studying something out on the darkened beach and they didn’t hear him come in. As he moved past the huge central aquarium, the strange, bright little fish swarmed toward him in synchronized curiosity. He tapped the glass with his knuckle, an apology for having no food.

Edgerton heard that. He swiveled his head slightly, shot Mark a disapproving glance and tilted his head back to drop a pill into his mouth. Antacids by the fistful.

Poor Edge. Must be tough to be sixty years old at only thirty-five.

“You’re late,” Edgerton said tightly, chewing with short, irritated snaps.

Mark dropped his jacket on the nearest table and wandered toward the gleaming teak bar. “Sorry, boss,” he said politely, leaning over to extricate a bottle of spring water. “I didn’t notice you’d installed a time clock.”

Edgerton snorted. Boss indeed, the snort said. They both knew better. “You don’t have on a suit, either, damn it. You knew I wanted you to wear a suit. You look like a—” he fumbled for a word “—a hoodlum movie star.”

Mark twisted off the cap and drank deeply, the water sparkling in the light from the fish tank. “Gosh,” he said, drying his upper lip with the back of his hand, “I must have missed your memo on the dress code, too.”

Philip turned around for the first time and patted Edgerton’s arm consolingly. Though Philip was younger, his expression sweeter, anyone could have known the two were brothers. They shared the same blond-over-blue surfer good looks.

Mark, on the other hand, had hair so black even the Florida sun couldn’t bleach it. He’s the Connelly cousin, people had observed sotto voce, watching as the three boys roamed wild over their tropical island. The poor relation You know the story. So sad.

“Give it up, Edge,” Philip said, smiling the crooked smile that was his hallmark. “Everything’s under control. Besides, Mark doesn’t own a suit, and you know it. So what? He’ll charm the socks right off every female guest in the place anyhow.”

Mark grinned back. “I think that’s what Edgerton’s afraid of.”

Edgerton adjusted his tie irritably, but Philip wiggled his eyebrows and cocked his head toward the window. “Speaking of which...Edge and I were just trying to decide how long it would take you to part this particular specimen from her bikini.”

Edgerton sputtered. “I was not—”

“Well, I was.” Philip moved to make room. “Come see. I know you don’t usually hunt beach bunnies, but this one is...well, she’s different. Kind of a cross between a librarian and a lollipop.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Edgerton’s voice sharpened, and he stalked away from the window. “We’ve got three hours—three hours—before this hotel is overrun with people. Reporters. Critics. Politicians. Opinion-shapers. Not to mention about a hundred paying guests. Do you think you can get your mind off women long enough to help me here?”

Philip ignored him as usual, but Mark, sensing that Edgerton was about to overload his circuits, grabbed another bottled water and ambled toward the two men. “Here,” he said, handing the drink to Edgerton. “See if this will put the fire out.”

He joined Philip at the window and peered into the silver mist.

“Show me,” he said cooperatively, though he didn’t really expect to see anything of interest. Philip’s taste in women ran to the type whose IQs were as skimpy as their bathing suits. Unfortunately, Mark required more than a D-cup to engage his attention. In fact, he couldn’t imagine what it would take to interest him anymore....

“Darn, she’s moved out of the light.” Philip sighed, and Mark’s jaw tightened at the whiff of blended whiskey that floated over him. God—Philip was really tossing it back.

Somehow Mark fought down his annoyance, trying to feel sympathetic. Edgerton’s plans for today’s grand reopening festivities were a maze of social and political intricacies. Philip was probably scared blue. But why, just once, couldn’t he think of some less destructive way to stiffen his spine?

“Wait—yeah, there she is, just beyond the light now, heading for the water.” Philip clutched his cousin’s forearm. “Oh, my God, took—she’s taken off her shoes.”

“Easy boy,” Mark said calmly. “You have seen feet before.”

But as his gaze focused on the woman’s slim figure, his carefully cultivated cynicism began to peel away like an old coat of paint under a bright sun.

By God, this wasn’t just another of Philip’s over-endowed bimbos. This one actually was different. She was... beautiful.

Yet it was so much more than that. Beautiful wasn’t enough to account for this tightening of his gut, this startling sense of recognition. No, it wasn’t just beauty—it wasn’t even the way the wind blew her white shirt back against her breasts, outlining their feminine swell with a curve of silver mist. Bathing beauties were as common on Moonbird Key as coquina—his eyes saw them, but they had long since lost the power to stir him.

So what was it? What kept him here at the window as silent as an awestruck schoolboy? He let his shoulder drop to rest against the wall, trying to affect a casual air while he studied the vision before him, trying to pinpoint the difference.

Her hands were clasped demurely behind her back, dangling white sandals, and her shoulders were bravely squared. She had reached the water’s edge now, and as the incoming waves licked at her toes she cast one last look back at the hotel, seemingly watching for someone.

Philip was still chattering stupidly. “Was I right or what? Isn’t she a babe?” His tone was proprietorial, as if he had not just discovered but actually invented her.

A babe? Perhaps... Mark nodded mutely. She was so small, so heartbreakingly delicate that her sensual perfection of form was somehow surprising, like the tiniest fluted turbonilla that had ever escaped the pounding of the sea. Next to her, the Gulf of Mexico seemed clumsily dangerous.

Philip shivered comically as the wind lifted her full white skirt, exposing a slim, pale and graceful thigh. “Ooo-weee, man, is she hot,” he said, exhaling a liquored breath.

For one hot black instant, Mark thought he might shove his cousin, thrusting him from the window, denying him the right to watch. Shut up, he wanted to shout. He hated the tone, the bawdy, half-drunk lechery...

Somehow he checked himself. Philip didn’t understand. How could he? He saw only the high, rounded breasts, the long blond braid...

Mark saw more, felt something completely different from Philip’s lip-smacking lust. And yet lust was part of it. His fingertips pulsed with a burning awareness. He wanted suddenly, almost painfully, to touch her. She needed to be touched—he felt it as keenly as if she had cried her need out loud.

She might have been a little girl, lost and afraid, except for the somber, self-possessed quality of her slow march toward the water. Not lost, he thought, the clamps tightening in his gut. Exiled, rather. Sent out unarmed to meet the demon.

“Goddamn it, you two voyeurs knock off that gawking and get to work.” Edgerton’s voice cut through the strange, tingling fantasies like a cold dousing, and Mark looked at his cousin, oddly surprised to remember that Edge was in the room.

Good God. He squeezed his eyes, trying to clear his vision. What the hell was the matter with him? He needed a new woman in his life about as much as he needed sunstroke. He must be more tired than he’d thought. Yes, that was it. The gauzy silver-blue mist was playing tricks with his tired brain.

“Somebody has to meet the temps.” Edgerton was shuffling papers irritably. He flicked on the light over the bar. “And this timeline just doesn’t work. I don’t know who we’re going to get to staff the pressroom.”

Mark bit back his irreverent response. He might as well cooperate—the Moonbird Hotel’s grand reopening was also designed to kick off Edgerton’s campaign for a seat in the state legislature, so the poor guy was doubly uptight. He wasn’t going to rest until Mark and Philip were marching in lockstep, alongside the army they’d already hired.

Mark straightened, turning away from the window, ignoring the stupid pinch that felt like the snapping of a psychic cord. Nonsense. There was no such thing.

But as he crossed the room toward his cousin, hand outstretched to accept the typed agenda, he couldn’t help looking over his shoulder, just once, to convince himself that he had been seeing things.

It was merely another woman. Gorgeous admittedly, but ever since he’d turned eighteen Mark had been littering the beaches of Moonbird Key with beautiful women, lovers who had foolishly dreamed of possessing him—or perhaps his money. He had buried those dreams without regret, like so many pirated jewels smothered under the thick, wet sand.

Yes, he’d been around far too long to start spinning Andromeda fantasies about a total stranger. It had to be the mist. One last look...

But, God help him, the one last look was fatal. While he watched, the woman bowed her head and, as if someone had cut the strings that had been holding her erect, suddenly crumpled to her knees at the water’s edge.

He could hardly bear to watch. She was, somehow, the personification of pain. Incoming waves frothed around her legs, lifting her sodden white skirt, then sucking it down into the sand, but she was oblivious. She lowered her face into her hands, and her shoulders began to shake softly, as if her heart was breaking.

Mark made a low noise in his throat and, without a word, strode past Edgerton, who stood frozen in disbelief, his hand full of typed agendas thrusting at empty air.

“Hold on there, buddy. Where do you think you’re going?” His words were aimed at Mark’s back like buckshot. “After that girl out there? For Pete’s sake, man, you don’t even know who she is! You don’t even know if she’s a paying guest.”

Mark hadn’t intended to stop, hadn’t meant to respond, but he found himself pausing once again in the doorway. What an officious hypocrite the man was! The only thing Edgerton liked better than a pretty blonde was a pretty blonde with money. Twenty years of repressed anger surged to the fore, temporarily subduing twenty years of kinship.

“You may find this hard to believe,” he said as calmly as he could, though his hands had folded into involuntary fists, “but I really don’t give a damn.”

Glenna McBride hardly knew why she had arrived at the Moonbird Hotel so early. She wasn’t due for another four hours—and Purcell Jennings, the photographer she would assist on this assignment, wouldn’t arrive until dinnertime tonight.

So why was she here now, prowling this empty, seaweed-strewn beach in the half-light of dawn? Wasn’t this gesture a little too melodramatic for a woman who prided herself on her practicality and emotional control?

Morbid, that’s what it was. And she did not do morbid—except perhaps in her dreams.

She should at least have brought her camera. This haunted landscape would make wonderful pictures—especially her kind of pictures. Purcell Jennings might be the acknowledged king of lush, colorful coffeetable books, but Glenna was getting fairly good with black-and-white film.

She checked her watch, making an automatic note of the time. Five forty-five. Dawn was only a pearly promise on the horizon. The water was gunmetal gray, and the shore was a ribbon of silver, dotted blackly with bits and pieces of seaweed, shells and driftwood. Playthings of the sea gods, dropped carelessly like toys at bedtime when the tide receded.

But what difference did it make what time it was? She wasn’t going to return some other morning to take photographs no matter how interesting the lines and shapes of this monochromatic landscape.

She hated the Gulf of Mexico. She had no desire to capture its undulating malevolence and hang it on the living-room walls.

Look at it now... Like a patiently crouched jungle beast, it hardly moved, the rhythmic breathing of the tide its only sound. Its surface was calm, giving no hint of the strange creatures that peopled its depths or the blind currents that blew across its floor, stronger than any human could imagine—or withstand.

But she knew. God help her, she knew.

Glenna shivered though it was not cold. Try as she might, she couldn’t rid herself of the fantasy that the water was waiting for her. It was as if, in her long years of hating it, she had made herself its enemy. Now it recognized her, and it was deciding what to do with her.

“Hogwash.” Embarrassed by her lapse into melodrama, she spoke aloud. She had always rather liked that word, which was used frequently by the son of her neighbors back in Fort Myers. She had heard him say it to his boastful friends and had admired the succinct but encompassing disdain it conveyed. “Hogwash,” she repeated, but it didn’t have the same authority out here in the strange, misty dawn. She shivered again.

She’d been standing too long in one place and she felt the soggy sand give slightly under her heels. She pulled her sandals off and held them behind her back, but that didn’t help much. The ooze of the sand between her toes was disturbing, too, and she had to will her legs to start walking.

If she kept going, she thought, she would soon walk right into the Gulf. Would the water recognize her? Would it associate her with Cindy? Or would it even remember Cindy? Had it perhaps swallowed her so greedily it hadn’t taken time to know her?

A bird burst suddenly from the mangrove trees just behind the hotel, its wings beating the air noisily. Her heart beat, too, with great, swollen thumps, and she had to fight the urge to run back toward the hotel. She’d been running for ten years, damn it. It was time to face the enemy.

Somehow she held her ground. But what, she asked her stabbing heartbeat, had she hoped to accomplish here, at this ungodly hour, ten years after Cindy’s death?

Had she thought the ocean would speak to her, giving up its secrets?

Was she trying to vanquish her nightmares by reliving them? Did she really expect to see Cindy floating here now, her blond hair matted with seaweed, her blue eyes wide with dead horror, the way she floated through Glenna’s dreams? .

Cindy...

Touching her face, she realized that salty tears were running down her cheeks, dropping to endless anonymity in the sodden sand. She looked at her damp fingertips, confused. She had never cried over Cindy, not even ten years ago, when as a scared twelve-year-old kid she had been told that her glamorous, golden sister was dead.

But maybe, she thought in numbed surprise, that was what she had come for. To cry. To let go.

Surrendering with a strange sense of relief, Glenna fell to the sand, lowering her face to her hands. She doubled over tightly, almost unaware of the small shells that dug into her forearms. Cindy...

And then suddenly she was sobbing openly, harsh, desperate sounds that rang through the misty air. It was as if ten years of tears had been magically preserved, waiting for this day.

She wept for Cindy, who had been so willful. If only she hadn’t been so determined to snare one of the wild and sexy Connelly boys. The boys flirted carelessly with all their pretty guests. But only one of them had died.

She wept for herself, too, for the loneliness and the guilt she’d held inside so long. If only she had called out the moment she saw that darkly tanned male hand reaching in through the window, balancing Cindy as she climbed over the sill.

“I’m awake,” she should have cried. “Don’t go.”

She buried her face deeper into her hands, trying to shut out the visions. Her sister’s blond hair in the moonlight, the man’s hand....

On the inside of the wrist was a small tattoo, just two inches long but unforgettable. The moonlight gleamed on the design, and Glenna had recognized it instantly—the legendary moonbird, its outstretched wings undulating eerily.

The moonbird. Only three people wore the moonbird tattoo—Edgerton, Philip and Mark Connelly.

For years, the bird had flown through her dreams every night. Strange and ghost white, silent and menacing, its wings pumping up and down slowly, beating with some primitive rhythm that was both sensual and dangerous. Oh, God, Cindy... If only they had both been a little older, a little wiser.

The flood of tears had finally begun to slow. She rested her forehead on her knees, not caring that her hair was mopping the muddy sand. How long had she been crying? Her chest hurt; her eyes burned. She felt as limp as a strand of seaweed. No wonder she had postponed this emotional storm for so long. It hurt. It hurt like hell.

Lost in the pain, she didn’t hear the footsteps approaching. The cool hand on her back was a shock, and with a gasp she lifted her head, peering with swollen eyes into the glimmering dawn light.

A man knelt beside her, hovering protectively, the way he might have bent over a wounded bird. His faint scent of clean masculinity mingled with the musky smell of the mist. He smiled, just a little.

“You know,” he murmured softly, skimming his fingers lightly across her shoulder blades, “an old Indian legend says that the ocean was created from tears. And all mankind will have to share in the making of it.”

She blinked at him, bewildered, half-mesmerized by the gentle touch, the unexpected words. His voice was low, sensual—but somehow casual, as if he was merely continuing a conversation they had begun a long time ago. As if he was completely comfortable with both legends and tears.

“But surely,” he went on, drawing aside a strand of hair that had stuck to her forehead, tucking it behind her ear, “no one heart should have to contribute so many.”

She didn’t speak. She couldn’t. His eyes were impossibly green, she noticed irrelevantly, fringed with the blackest lashes she had ever seen. And his hands were strong. Masculine. Deeply tanned. Hands that women dreamed about...

Her gaze fell slowly to the inside of his wrist. His white shirtsleeves had been rolled back almost to the elbow. She knew what she would see. She had known ever since she had heard the first mellow syllable of his hypnotic voice.

And there it was. Like fear made visible, like the mark of Cain. The outstretched wings of the moonbird tattoo.