CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
By three o’clock in the morning Jared was ready to decapitate the cuckoo in Thomas Blackburn’s parlor clock and maybe strangle R.J.’s cat, Sweatshirt, who insisted on pawing his afghan and climbing over his face. Jared had counted off midnight, one o’clock, two o’clock, and every half hour in between, and now, pushing the cat off him one more time, he waited for three to sound.
There it was: “Cuckoo…cuckoo…cuckoo.”
He threw off his afghan and sat up on the couch. His mind was spinning with images and questions, with R.J.’s still-beautiful smile. They had walked past sundown, trying to sort things out, but often talking about nothing—the little old lady who used to run the chocolate shop on Charles Street, whether that was really Mrs. Caldwell’s silver in the antique shop window and had she gone broke, this year’s citrus crop in Florida, the backless dress in the Newbury Street boutique window. Rebecca had shoved the Jupiter Stones into her handbag, which she slung cavalierly over her shoulder.
“Aren’t you worried about getting mugged?” he’d asked.
“That’d solve all our problems, wouldn’t it? We could send Gerard after some poor mugger.”
Thomas was still in the garden when they’d gotten back, and Jared hadn’t liked how he’d looked: ashen-faced and a million years old, knowing things he wouldn’t tell.
Knowing things both he and Jared knew and hadn’t told anyone, including Rebecca.
Seeing her again hadn’t made the lie he’d let her believe any easier to bear. But he had felt he had no choice.
In 1975, still weakened from his weeks in the hospital in Manila and then Hawaii, Jared had come to Thomas for advice. He hadn’t known who else to go to, who else would understand Quentin and Rebecca and Tam and a man’s responsibility to an innocent child in the way Thomas would.
“Do what you feel you must,” Thomas had counseled him. “It’s all anyone can ask of you.”
So he had. And in so doing, he’d lost R.J. Already burned by two men in her life—a father who’d promised to come home and hadn’t and a grandfather who’d ruined her family’s good name—she hadn’t been easy on a lover who’d admitted he’d fathered a child by another woman.
He raked his hands through his hair. The hell with this. He pulled on his jeans and tiptoed upstairs to Rebecca’s room on the third floor, half expecting Athena to streak out of her room with a carving knife.
Light angled through her cracked door. Jared knocked, softly.
“It’s open,” she said.
Rebecca stood in her window, looking down at the street, and Jared’s stomach clenched at the sight of her, draped in a silk satin nightgown that probably had set her back as much as she’d used to make summers working in the O’Keefe citrus groves. It was cream-colored with tiny yellow flowers embroidered along the neckline, softening the stark expression on her angular face. She was tough, this woman he’d once loved. Tough on others, tougher on herself. “Cut yourself some slack,” he used to tell her during their too-short time together. “It’s okay to be human.” And let me be human, too, he’d wanted to say. Let me make mistakes.
In her book, he had.
Seeing her in the expensive, feminine nightgown highlighted how she’d changed. Fourteen years ago, every time she’d spent a nickel on herself she’d thought about her college expenses, her five younger brothers, the starving, the homeless, the poor. Jared wondered if she’d agonized over buying the nightgown or had accepted it was okay to spend a few bucks on herself.
“I thought you might be Grandfather,” she said.
“Not old enough. Mind if I come in?”
“Of course not—have a seat.” As she moved away from the window and climbed onto her childhood bed, she caught his look and laughed. “I know it’s ridiculous, my living her like an eight-year-old, but it’s been good.”
Jared pulled up a chair and sat down. He noticed the light scent of the powder she’d used after her shower and could see a dusty streak on her throat. With her hair hanging down and her cheeks flushed and that damned nightgown, she looked like a beautiful virgin princess, but he thought better of telling her so.
“Your bruise doesn’t look so bad now,” he said.
“It’s fine. You couldn’t sleep?”
“No.”
She leaned back against the headboard. “I’ve been up here pacing and thinking and—I don’t know. Sometimes I think I was too hard on you, Jared. It was easy just to blame you for what happened between us instead of looking at myself, as well. It was so long ago. We were in such different places in our lives.” She caught herself and smiled suddenly. “Never mind. You don’t want to hear this.”
“No, go on. Please.”
She talked for a long time, exposing herself to him in a way she never had before. Coming to Saigon and witnessing the collapse of South Vietnam had had an impact on her that he’d been too blind or stupid or just too convinced of her indomitability to have noticed at the time.
“I looked around that devastated country and realized my father had died there trying to do some good and it all amounted to nothing. Zero, Jared. People were still fighting and suffering and what could I do about it? I was overwhelmed. I’d set some fairly tough goals for myself. I had years of school ahead of me. I was going to set the world on fire and clear the Blackburn name—and when I was in Saigon, all that seemed so selfish and useless. There were people running scared for their lives, people without homes or food—little kids with no one to take care of them. I looked around and realized that I could work the rest of my life and maybe—maybe—make a small difference. So why bother at all?”
Her eyes were huge and glistening in the soft light, and she explained that even without Tam and Mai, she didn’t know what she’d have done when she finally came home from Saigon. Finally, she quit school, got a flunky job as a designer while taking art classes, and worked on Junk Mind.
“It took me a while,” she said, “but now I’m really glad I made my fortune coming up with a game that brings people together for a few laughs the way Junk Mind does. I’ve shot a man, Jared, and I’ve seen people suffer and die violent deaths. It doesn’t bother me a bit to know something I created entertains millions of people. And the design work I do doesn’t make any great artistic statements, but that’s okay.” She grinned at him. “Me, I appreciate a nicely designed restaurant menu.”
“Are you sorry you didn’t finish your degree?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Sometimes I think when I settle down I’ll get back to it. In case you haven’t realized, I’ve moved around a lot. And here I always thought you’d be the wanderer. That was another thing that worried me, you know. Not only are you half Winston and the Winstons and Blackburns haven’t exactly gotten along the past quarter-century, but you’re half-Sloan—and an architect on top of it. You father hasn’t set any records for lasting relationships, and you know what they say about architects—don’t get attached too soon. You were just twenty-five, Jared. Never mind the rest of it. We just weren’t ready for each other.”
She winced at her choice of words, as if after fourteen years things might have changed. But that was the hard part of the past few days, of seeing his picture and having him turn up in Boston. She was discovering how much she still cared about Jared Sloan.
“You’ve settled down though, I see,” she said lamely.
Jared smiled. “It’s not easy to pick up and go with a kid.”
“I suppose not. Do you like San Francisco?”
“Sure.”
“Ever miss Boston?”
“Occasionally. It’s where I grew up—I have memories here.” His gaze rested on her. “Some are tougher to forget than others.”
Rebecca shifted, suddenly feeling awkward and exposed, and she asked quickly, “Do you think you’ll ever bring Mai here?”
“She’d give her eyeteeth to come, but it’s not going to happen.”
He got up and went to Rebecca, sitting on the bed next to her, knowing he had to tell her. Maybe that was why he’d come up to her room. Not because he couldn’t sleep or because he wanted her to explain why she hadn’t given him a chance after Saigon, but simply, because he needed to talk.
At last.
He brushed her hair behind her ear and grazed her bruised cheek with one finger. “Rebecca,” he said, passing over her nickname, “I want you to promise you’ll hear me out.”
Her brows furrowed, and the Blackburn incisiveness was there in her gorgeous eyes. But she said, “All right.”
“I never slept with Tam.”
* * *
“So Quentin Reed is Mai’s—what? Her biological father?”
The shutters banged in a gust of wind. On the end of Rebecca’s bed, Jared shut his eyes and nodded. It was the first time he had ever heard those words spoken aloud: Quentin is Mai’s father.
“And Mai doesn’t know?”
He listened for it, but there was no hint of accusation in her voice. Did Rebecca sympathize with the hard choice he’d made? He had told her everything: Quentin’s secret affair with Tam, his stupid involvement with the drug-smuggling scheme, his return home. Jared could still remember the disgust he’d felt toward his cousin, who’d suddenly treated Tam as if she had never existed. Jared couldn’t understand why she continued to believe in him, but she did. And he’d kept his promise to her not to tell anyone—not even Rebecca—about the affair she’d had with his cousin. Hothead that Rebecca was, she never would have kept her mouth shut, killing Jared’s hope for Tam to begin a new life after her baby was born.
“No, Mai doesn’t know,” he said, and he looked at Rebecca. “Do you think I want her knocking on Quentin’s door so she can see what her real dad looks like? At the very least he abandoned Tam and made it clear he didn’t want to have anything to do with their baby. At worst, he had Tam killed and tried to have Mai killed.”
As she listened in rigid silence, Jared explained how, the night Tam had died, he’d come to realize she’d contacted Quentin and had cajoled, begged, bribed or threatened him to get her out of Saigon and back into his life. Maybe she’d presented him with an untenable ultimatum, or maybe he was just a coward who couldn’t face up to what he’d done. Either way, two assassins had shown up at Jared’s Tu Do Street apartment to murder Tam and try to murder Mai…and had almost killed Jared and Rebecca, just because they were there and in the way.
“Now I don’t know,” he went on heavily. “I don’t know if Tam’s translation of what the Vietnamese told her through the door was accurate—or if she was hearing what she wanted to hear. She was exhausted and scared. She just couldn’t believe Quentin would abandon her and their baby. But that doesn’t explain the gems in Mai’s diaper, Jean-Paul Gerard, Le Chat, Baroness Majlath—” He broke off with a tired huff. “I don’t know anymore. There must be a link here we’re missing.”
Rebecca hugged her knees against her chest and nodded at him, white-faced. But she didn’t speak. She was thinking about Quentin leaving a young woman pregnant and alone, and only because she knew Annette Reed could she understand, if never condone, what he’d done.
Mostly she was thinking about the colored “marbles” she had found in Annette’s bedroom thirty years ago, and how much they’d cheered up Tam.
Was that their link?
She shook off the thought. It was something to save for later, when she didn’t have Jared’s warm blue-green eyes searching her face for secrets and answers and maybe a little understanding.
“You told my grandfather everything about Quentin?”
Jared nodded. “R.J., I was scared to death. I didn’t know if Quentin had gone completely off the deep end and would try again to kill Mai—or even me. He knew I’d found out about the smuggling. He knew I knew about him and Tam. Maybe he’d decide he couldn’t live with the prospect of me blabbing and would have me killed. The point is, I didn’t know what he’d do.”
“And Grandfather advised you to take Mai and go?”
“No. That was my decision. He supported it. I’d just signed my name as Mai’s father so it’d be easier to get her and Tam out of Saigon. That kind of stuff went on all the time those last few weeks. But I had the papers—they were legal.” He couldn’t go on; his throat was tight, his stomach aching with tension, and he could see Mai at two years old climbing into his lap, saying Daddy. “She’s my daughter in every way.”
Rebecca stretched out her legs, her toes grazing his thigh, and he sensed her confused, raw emotions. “You did what you had to do under the circumstances.”
“I ran,” he said.
“You saved a child from a father who didn’t want her and may have tried to have her killed. I don’t think that’s running.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling myself for years. For months after we got to San Francisco, I’d hear a noise and wonder if it was another of Quentin’s assassination teams come to claim us.” He sighed, trying to release some of the pent-up tension. “But what if I was wrong? R.J., what if Gerard and that Vietnamese were after a fortune in gems that had nothing to do with Quentin? When I saw him this morning, he acted as if I’d stolen Tam from him and he believed I did father Mai.”
“A rationalization?” Rebecca suggested.
“Maybe. He’s always been good at believing what he wants to believe.” Jared laughed suddenly, sadly, at the complexity and sheer incredibleness of it all. “Murderers, orphans, thieves, secrets, a fortune in gems—all we need now is a monkey to collect nickels to see the show. But we’ll sort this mess out, R.J.”
“Together,” she said. It wasn’t a question; it was a demand.
Jared gave her a long look, and he wasn’t surprised to discover that despite fourteen years apart, he still knew R. J. Blackburn. “Okay. What’s eating you?”
She pulled her knees back up under her chin. “Nothing.”
“Like hell. You’ve been trying to be nice and understanding, but that’s not your way, R.J. Tell me the truth. You think I should have come to you after I got out of the hospital instead of to your grandfather.”
“Not necessarily,” she said.
“You’d already left Boston,” he pointed out.
She flashed him a look that told him his guess was right on. “So? I was in Florida. You could have flown there from Hawaii just as easily as to Boston. You didn’t trust me to have enough sense to help you work things out.”
“You were twenty years old.”
“We all have to grow up sometime.”
“I was afraid Quentin would have you killed, too.”
She faltered, a little of the color going out of her face. “You were protecting me,” she said, flattening her legs again, practically kicking him off the bed. “We could have figured something out. Talked to the police. Hired bodyguards. Something.”
“There was no proof. No trail, Rebecca. Nothing—”
“I was the good guy with a gun that night in Saigon. I managed to shoot that Vietnamese assassin and kept him from killing Mai while you were writhing on the floor with two bullets in the shoulder.”
Rebecca, he recalled, had never been one for false modesty or sulking. “Yeah, and you and Mai still would have been killed if it hadn’t been for the Frenchman.”
“Only because I ran out of bullets—and my aim was off because I was worried about you.”
“You know what they say, sweetheart—close don’t count but in horseshoes and hand grenades.”
She wasn’t impressed. “I’m the oldest of six kids. My father was killed by Vietcong guerrillas when I was eight. My grandfather’s an outcast. I grew up in a part of Florida that isn’t all beaches and air-conditioning and Disney World. We had poisonous snakes, mosquitoes, lizards, giant cockroaches, spiders, the occasional alligator. I dealt with all of that, Jared.” She crossed her arms under her breasts and gave him a scathing Boston Brahmin look that she could have patented. “You could have told me about Quentin.”
“And how could I have justified it? ‘Oh, R.J.’s had so much thrown at her in her life, what’s a little more.’”
She scoffed. “Letting me believe you and Tam had had an affair wasn’t exactly sparing me.”
“What about the fortune in jewels you neglected to mention?”
“That’s different.”
“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” Sitting back, he searched her eyes, and the past fourteen years melted away. “The minute you hit Saigon you knew I was in love with you. If you’d really loved me, you could have forgiven me a fling with Tam.”
He could see her swallow, but she wasn’t one to back down. “And then what? Gerard would have shown up on our doorstep, and you’d have said, ‘Oh, well, I neglected to tell you this back in 1975, but Tam and I never slept together.’”
“Think we’d have lasted fourteen years?”
Her jaw set hard. “You shouldn’t have lied to me.”
“I didn’t. You asked me if my name as Mai’s father was a mistake, and I said no.”
“The intent,” she pointed out, “was deception, and that’s the same as a lie.”
“The intent,” he said, rolling onto his knees and moving in on her, “was to spare you from having to suffer for choices you didn’t make. The intent, I’ll have you know, was to keep the twenty-year-old woman I loved from getting killed because of something I’d seen and done.” He put a hand on the headboard at either side of her, trapping her between his arms. “There’s a nobility of purpose in what I did that you fail to see.”
“You made a choice for me that wasn’t yours to make.”
His face was so close to hers he could feel her breath and the fire of her eyes. “Okay. What would you have done if I came to you in Florida after I got out of the hospital and laid everything on for you?”
She thought a moment. “You wouldn’t have gotten the chance. I’d told Papa O’Keefe and my five brothers what a heel you were, and we had the shotguns loaded, the driveway booby-trapped, the sheriff on alert—”
Jared was laughing, amazed at how good it felt. “I loved you, R.J.” And he suddenly grew serious, taking in the sight, smell, closeness of her, and he whispered, “God help me, but I still do.”
* * *
The memories that had been haunting Rebecca for hours receded, and there was only the present. For a change, it was all she wanted. Jared shut the door and she switched off the light. In the darkness, she listened to the wind and the sound of a siren in the distance, heard the bed creak when Jared sat back down, his bare feet on Eliza’s old Persian carpet. She was stretched out on her side so that his hip pressed against her thighs.
“We’ll figure out this business with Quentin and Gerard and the Jupiter Stones,” he said softly. “We’ll figure us out.”
She put a cool hand on his arm. “I know we will.”
Turning toward her, he rubbed the outer curve of her hip through the soft, silky fabric of her nightgown. She saw that his arms and chest were still well-muscled. There was a no-nonsense toughness to Jared Sloan often belied by his nonchalance and teasing nature. He was willing to make difficult choices; he had made them.
His hand slid over her hip to her waist, stopping just under her breast. “I don’t want to rush you into anything.”
She smiled and rolled onto her back, so that his hand fell onto the flat of her abdomen. “Rush me.”
It was all he needed to hear.
He peeled off his jeans, and when he turned around, she was sitting up with her back to him, holding her hair up on top of her head. “I’ll go nuts trying to get these buttons,” she said. “Would you mind?”
There seemed to be fifty thousand of the tiny, pearl-like buttons.
“I’m liking this nightgown less and less,” he muttered. “It looks like something Queen Victoria would wear.”
“She might have, for all I know. I never really thought of buttons as a deterrent, but you only have to unfasten about ten of them. Then I can just pull it over my head.”
“Can’t I just tear it off?”
She glanced around at him with one of her scrimy Blackburn looks.
He undid the buttons. They were small and many and the job was pure torture, but the reward—
She gave him the honor of lifting the nightgown over her head and tossing it onto the floor. His breath caught at the creaminess of her skin, the softness of her breasts with their pink-pebble tips. How the hell had he gone on without her?
“R.J…”
“I know.” Her voice was hoarse, and she brushed one finger along the edge of his sandpapery jaw. “It’s been forever.”
The curtains at her windows billowed in a breeze that cooled her overheated skin and made her shiver, until Jared came to her and they fell back together onto the narrow bed. She felt hot and light-headed and very aroused. She could sense his hunger in their kiss, in the searing wetness of his tongue. And with the taste of him, the heat of his body against hers, she knew she’d been wrong; it hadn’t been forever.
It had, it seemed, just been yesterday.
He smoothed his hands down her sides, all the way to the middle of her thighs and back again, sliding them over her breasts, murmuring how beautiful she was, how much he wanted her. They kissed again, slowly, deliciously. He moved his hips against her. Rocked, swayed. Every movement was titillating and sexy.
She raked her fingers through his hair and pushed his head back so that she could see his eyes and he could see hers. “I can’t stand it anymore.”
“Good.”
His voice was ragged, his eyes were dusky, and she knew he was perilously close to the edge himself. In the next instant, he thrust into her, and she pulled him in deep, crying out as they fell together.
It was a long, sweet, frantic fall.
Just before dawn, Jared eased out of bed and left Rebecca twisted in the covers, sleeping. And by the time he got downstairs, the cuckoo was counting out five o’clock.
* * *
He still didn’t sleep, but it was just as well. By five-thirty Rebecca was sitting cross-legged on the rug in front of the couch, Sweatshirt curled up placidly in her lap. Jared watched jealously.
“I’ve got a new theory,” Rebecca announced.
“Go ahead—shoot.”
“Gerard never knew Tam had the Jupiter Stones the night she was killed. He wasn’t there because of them, he was there because of Quentin. He knew what Quentin was up to, tried to stop it, and at the same time figured it was something he could use as leverage with Annette.”
Jared frowned. “With Annette?”
“Right.” Rebecca stroked her cat’s soft ears. “She and Gerard must have known each other in 1959 when he was stalking the Riviera as Le Chat. Maybe he was in love with Annette, so he gave her the Jupiter Stones as a present.”
“And then she fingered him as Le Chat.”
“Nice of her, huh?”
“You want to explain how you know all this?”
She shrugged, then told him about the colored marbles she and Tam had found at the Winstons’ mas on the Mediterranean Sea all those years ago.
“Mai’s picture brought Gerard out of the woodwork,” she went on thoughtfully, “because he was in Saigon the night Tam was killed and knew Quentin was responsible for her death—and nearly yours, mine, and Mai’s, as well. His leverage with Annette—to get her to give him the stones—is what he knows about Quentin.”
“Why does he want the stones so much?”
“They’re incredibly valuable.”
“Are we talking millions?”
“I should say. I’m sure he’d also like to nail Annette for turning him in thirty years ago.”
The cat crawled out of Rebecca’s lap, did one of his ugly cat stretches, and jumped onto the couch. He warily eyed Jared, then pounced, claws bared.
“You’re in his spot,” Rebecca informed him.
“Uh-oh.”
Surrendering, Jared joined Rebecca on the floor. As it turned out, he liked it better that way. “So why does our Frenchman have a soft spot for you?”
She grinned. “You don’t think it’s just my big blue eyes?”
“Could be—”
“Oh, stop. I guess it’s just because he and my father were friends and he doesn’t want anything to happen to me. Who knows? He’s an ex-jewel thief and a blackmailer, not a murderer.”
“How much of this would you guess dear Aunt Annette knows?”
Rebecca sighed. “She’s not a particularly sympathetic victim, is she? I would say, though, she must be aware of what Quentin did. That’s why she hasn’t asked anyone’s help in dealing with Gerard. She’s covering for Quentin.”
“It makes sense,” Jared said. “I wish I knew whether or not to talk to her about it—and your grandfather. There’s no telling how much of this he’s figured out.”
On that, they both concurred. “We should get some sleep,” Rebecca suggested, “and go at this again with clear heads. You okay?”
He laughed, kissing her lightly. “I’m fine.”
“I’ll take Sweatshirt back upstairs with me.”
“No, let him have the couch. I’ll just lie here on the floor and go to sleep knowing I’m going to dream about you.”
“You’re such a romantic,” she said, but he could see he’d cut through her Yankee Blackburn reserve. My God, he thought, is there hope for us, after all?