“So soon? You are crazy! I don’t even know if she is in town!”
“Invite her to see the jewelry,” he urged. “It would appeal to her.”
“And have that Santarini slut know all of the secrets of the pieces that I buy? She will tell everyone! What is the point of it?”
He clenched his fists. “Ti prego,” he said softly. “Please. For me.”
She made an irritated huffing sound. “I am going to Paris for a week to shop,” she announced. “You will join me there?”
“I cannot wait,” he said through clenched teeth.
“The entire week? Prepare yourself. It will be strenuous.”
“Have no fear,” he assured her. “Send me a text message with the meeting time and location with Santarini, va bene?”
Donatella paused and made a little clicking sound with her tongue. “Anxious, Valerio?” she purred. “What’s going on? Are you in trouble? Tell Donatella all about it, bambino mio. Maybe I can help.”
A muscle in his jaw started to twitch. He was in a bad way if even an empty-headed vacca like Donatella was tuning in to his nervous tension. “You already are helping me,” he said softly. “My angel.”
“February seventh, in Paris,” she reminded. “Mark it on your calendar.” There was a thread of steel in Donatella’s voice.
“Certainly. A dopo, dolcezza.”
A tedious back-and-forth of stupid endearments, and finally he managed to close the telephone. He released a long, controlled sigh.
Three steps back. A week of stud service in a luxury hotel in Paris was not too much to pay for Imre’s life. He would do it if he had to. But a sour, wrong feeling clung to him. It made him want to take a bath.
Ah, well, what the fuck. He might be dead by February seventh anyway. That was the best he could do to cheer himself up.
He headed back to the hotel, preparing himself for disaster. Steele had probably fled in the time it had taken to do this infernal errand.
But when he peered into the ballroom, she was there, wrestling a whimpering, protesting Rachel into her coat, bulging black diaper bag dangling on her other shoulder. She was deep in conversation with Erin McCloud. Now the other woman talked earnestly, looking worried. Tam shook her head in response. The McCloud woman patted Steele’s shoulder. Tam nodded, hoisted the child onto her hip, and headed toward the exit. Her pale face was set in stark lines, her eyes haunted. She looked so different with her hair down, shining and loose, brushing her perfect ass. Everyone stared as she passed.
She ignored the swathe of speculative murmuring in her wake.
He backed into the lobby and positioned himself carefully, waiting only until the direction she was going to turn was clear before he melted around the corner and into a stairwell.
Relief made his knees weak. She was not going out the front, to the parking lot. She was going out the back toward the breezeway that led to the guest houses. She was not running from him. Not tonight.
He was grateful. He did not have the strength to chase her again. He had no more cards to play, no more tricks. He was all out of ideas. If Steele ran now, his choices were brutally simple.
Steele or Imre. One of them would have to die, badly.
He followed at a safe distance, took note of the door she and Rachel disappeared into, and then strolled along the herringbone path.
A wrought iron bench sat in the shadows of a huge tree roughly opposite her guest room door. He sat down, bone weary. A thousand years old. The cold of the hard metal bench penetrated his clothes, burning into his flesh. He would have to get his coat if he meant to sit here any length of time, he thought, but he did not move.
He could not take his eyes off that door.
He didn’t like being compelled by anything, whether the forces originated from inside himself or out. Being manipulated by Novak, Hegel, even Donatella, was bad enough. Being jerked around by the shadow parts of his own fucked-up psyche was intolerable.
Yet there he sat, rooted to the bench, his ass turning to ice. Guarding her door but not to prevent her from escaping. On the contrary, he wanted to fend off the dangers that lay in wait for her.
He was cast in the wrong role in this fucking Greek tragedy.
People passed by without noticing him lurking motionless in the dark. Then a couple came ambling by. The tall, fair-haired man’s face was revealed in a beam of light slicing through the tree boughs. Sean McCloud and his wife, Liv. Sean spotted him and turned off the path. He guided his wife across the frosted grass until they stood before him.
The man’s piercing eyes made Val squirm. The picture he made revealed too much. Him sitting like an asshole with no coat outside a woman’s closed door. Hands filled with a bristling array of Steele’s deadly hair ornaments. A whining, hungry dog hoping to be let in.
Begging for scraps.
“What are you doing out here in the cold?” McCloud demanded.
Val’s long exhalation made a vaporous cloud in front of his face. “Standing guard,” he said.
His wife, a luscious, buxom brunette, gave him a polite but suspicious look. “If there’s any woman on earth who can look out for herself, it’s Tam,” she said.
Val acknowledged that with a shrug. “Overkill.”
McCloud grunted. “Well, then. You’ve got your work cut out for you.” He hesitated, looking puzzled. “Good luck,” he added. “I think.”
Val inclined his head. The couple turned and walked on. McCloud threw a troubled glance back over his shoulder. The low murmur of their voices faded into the darkness.
He was good at telling lies. The trick was to enter so completely into whatever role he was playing, he practically believed them himself even as he told them. But what he had said to Steele was not a lie. He had blurted out the raw truth to her. More truth than he’d ever told to anyone, even Imre. Braided together with half-truths, yes, but even so.
I’ve never wanted anything the way I want you. The truth of those words reverberated through him, an explosion from within. It blasted his whole relationship to the world out of alignment. A dangerous secret.
Dangerous secrets are beautiful, don’t you agree? He had taken Steele’s words in Shibumi as meaningless banter, but now, they rang in his head, as a fundamental truth. Imre had always been his dangerous secret. A treasure that he had to hide just so it could survive.
Most people had to hide their ugliness, their shame. With him, the situation was inverted. He had to keep the beautiful things secret.
Or else risk finding them dead on the bathroom floor.
Ironic. A man like him compelled by an irrational longing to protect Steele, instead of exploiting her. A dangerous secret, indeed. Like her jewel-studded pendant earring bombs. Her taser necklace. It was an urge he would have to keep secret even from her.
He sensed very strongly that she would not welcome it.
The key rattled in the heavy metal door, jolting Imre out of his deep contemplation. He had been mentally walking through the rooms of the Uffizi Gallery, looking at all the pictures he could call to mind. Which was to say, all of them, though his favorites were the clearest.
The mental construct disintegrated. Waves of faintness and dread washed over him.
Another visit. It pleased Gabor Novak to check upon Imre’s progress, or degeneration, to put it more clearly. The man liked to prod and pry for weaknessess, to inflict all the psychological torment that he was able. He was fiendishly talented at it.
Imre’s defenses were limited to silence, but it was a poor