My Heart's Desire (48 page)

If Nina Worth had been a cat, she could only have been Siamese.

Hollis's broad shoulders lifted as he touched the rim of his glass to Nina's. Gaslight was reflected in the highly polished wainscoting of the study and refracted in the cut glass facets of the tumblers. He sipped his drink, then offered his arm to Nina and escorted her to the loveseat. They sat in unison, turned slightly toward one another. Her nearly black eyes never left his face. Her small bow mouth was damp with Scotch.

"He's alive, isn't he?" she asked. Her voice was coldly elegant, like chilled crystal. There was no resonance to her speech, little nuance of passion or conviction. "That's what you want to tell me."

That she had guessed astonished him. He nodded. "How did you know?"

She shrugged. The narrow black and fitted lines of her mourning gown further emphasized the sleek, graceful line of Nina's figure. "How long have you known?"

"Less than an hour. I came as soon as I heard. He's returning to New York." Hollis examined his pocket watch. "In fact, he will be here in just under thirty-six hours. No. 448 is scheduled to arrive in the middle of the night."

Nina gave no evidence of surprise. "So soon," she said calmly.

He nodded. "I believe it was meant to be a secret. He's been traveling for days it seems. He was recognized by a dispatcher in Pittsburgh who sent the information on to me. I imagine he thought I would want to make a celebration of it."

"Your wife's with him?"

"Yes."

"You should have killed her." She offered the rebuke with the same tone one would offer a practical suggestion. There was no hint of malice. "Her shares would have been yours then, and she wouldn't have gone looking for John."

It amused Hollis that Nina never called her husband Jay Mac. She was of the opinion that it was a vulgar name. Hollis finished his drink. His dark brown eyes studied the cool, poised features of his lover's face. "I don't think it could have been done without bringing suspicion to me. Anyway, we both thought her trip to Juggler's Jump would be fruitless. He should have died in the wreckage. Others did."

"Perhaps there is a mistake."

"There's no mistake."

"Do you think he saw Queen's Point?"

"I don't know. Even if he did there are ways to explain it. It would have been better if he had died, but I'm not completely vulnerable there."

"Do you think he knows about us?"

"Rennie wouldn't tell him. She didn't before he left. I doubt she would later."

"She's very protective of him, isn't she?" asked Nina.

"Very protective."

"It will be difficult to kill him."

"Nina. I told you before. It isn't absolutely necessary." She did something she had never done before. She picked up his large hand and laid it over her breast. "I think it is." She let him take her on the floor of the study.

* * *

Thirty minutes later she was saying goodbye to him. He's so easy, she thought, watching him walk through the gate. He glanced once over his shoulder, grinned. She didn't miss a beat, raising her hand as she raised a perfect smile. She waved. Nina didn't step back from the threshold until he was out of sight.

After shutting the door, Nina returned to the study. She poured herself a drink and sat down, staring at the floor where she had seduced Hollis Banks. How surprised John would have been, she thought, if he had come upon them, even more surprised to discover she had initiated the encounter. She had never done that with her husband. It would have made him suspicious. He would have wondered what she wanted. Hollis didn't even ask.

Nina sipped her drink. Her hands were steady, her features placid; but a fire burned at the center of her belly, and alcohol fanned the flames.

It was difficult to accept that John was alive. She had planned for so long, accounted for every possibility—except that he would live. The plan had blossomed when she met Hollis Banks, but the seeds had been sown when the whore Moira Dennehy had become her husband's mistress.

It was a succession of insults that helped the plan take root. Moira was an Irish Catholic servant, so far beneath Nina's notice that it still took her breath away to realize she had been usurped by a peasant. John then made his mistress the mother to five daughters while Nina had never conceived even once. From the first he had made no attempt to be secretive about his affair. And still, Nina thought, she could have forgiven him all of that, could have quelled the rage that roiled her stomach now and ate at her insides like a cancer, if it hadn't been for the final insult.

What she could not forgive, would never forget, was that while he had given her a name, unlimited wealth, and a social position that was enviable even among the city's elite, John MacKenzie Worth had given Moira Dennehy his heart.

Nina finished her drink and set the glass aside. She waited until the liquor settled and the burning sensation in the pit of her stomach passed. The rage that was like a living thing inside her never flickered in her eyes.

She rang for a maid to draw her a bath. She needed to wash Hollis's scent off her skin. That would not have surprised her husband. She had always suffered his touch, much the way she suffered Hollis's. John had seen through her almost immediately and stopped coming to her bed after only a month of marriage. Hollis Banks, her lover of several years, still didn't know what hit him.

Nina rose slowly from the sofa. There was no question of stopping now as Hollis proposed. There was only the question of how to go on.

* * *

Rennie sat beside Jarret on the narrow bench seat of the railway car. Across the aisle from them was Jay Mac. He was leaning against the side of the car, his cheek pressed flat to the window and his arms folded in front of him. His spectacles had slipped almost to the end of his nose. His eyes were closed. He had been sleeping for the better part of thirty minutes, oblivious to the rough jostling of the moving car.

Rennie envied her father's ability to sleep. She felt as if she were a single exposed nerve and had felt that way for the length of the journey. Jarret's presence didn't help. Against her wishes Jay Mac had offered Jarret a position as a bodyguard, and again against her wishes, Jarret had accepted. Jay Mac may have felt protected in Jarret's company, but Rennie felt vulnerable.

Her head lolled to one side as her eyes fluttered closed. When her cheek brushed Jarret's shoulder Rennie sat up abruptly. "I'm sorry," she said stiffly.

"You can lean against me, Rennie." He spoke quietly so that his voice wouldn't carry in the crowded passenger car. "I won't think less of you for needing a little sleep. You've hardly closed your eyes since Denver."

She leaned away from Jarret. Her head wobbled against the window. Outside it was dark. The countryside was cloaked in the opaque shadows of night, ink blue and black colored the sky and silhouetted the Pennsylvania hillsides. Occasionally pale rectangles of light would illuminate the windows of distant farmhouses.

"You're a stubborn woman," Jarret said. He turned slightly toward her and placed one arm along the back of the bench seat behind her shoulders. "What are you proving by forcing yourself to stay awake?"

"I'm not trying to prove anything. I can't sleep." She could feel the heat of his arm behind her. The simple gesture of support was too much and not enough. "We're slipping into New York like criminals ourselves. Aren't you the least concerned about what's going to happen?"

"Your father's paying me to worry, Rennie. Not you. We've done what we can to keep your father's arrival a secret. There's certainly not going to be a welcoming party of family at the platform to greet him."

"I wish Mama knew he was coming home," she said wistfully. She pointed to Jay Mac. "He looks older, don't you think? These last days have been hard on him."

Jarret's eyes slipped from Rennie's careworn profile to her father's. There were shadows beneath Jay Mac's closed eyes, and the broad arc of his cheekbones was more pronounced. The side-whiskers were more gray than ash, and even in sleep there were tiny white lines of strain at the corners of his mouth. Jarret turned back to Rennie. "They've been hard on you, too," he said.

"If they have been, then you know the reason," she said. "I didn't want you to accept my father's offer."

Jarret was not entirely successful at keeping the bitterness out of his tone. "You would rather have had Ethan accompany you and Jay Mac from Denver."

"That's what I said then and what I still wish had happened."

"Because you think I can't protect you."

Rennie's eyes dropped to where Jarret was flexing the fingers of his right hand. "I never said that," she said softly.

Jarret removed the arm that was cradling her shoulders and faced forward. He propped his long legs on the bench across from him. "You didn't have to, Rennie. There are some things you don't have to say at all."

She wanted to tell him he was wrong, but her own pride kept her silent. Let him think he was the cripple instead of her. He didn't have to know how the arm at her back had tortured her, how his presence was a constant, painful reminder of what they had shared and what he no longer wanted from her. She had been rejected, not the other way around, and Jay Mac's offer to Jarret and Jarret's acceptance had been further proof that her feelings were of little importance. To Rennie's way of thinking, she had been betrayed by both the men she loved.

Perhaps if they had had the opportunity to speak of Jay Mac's offer privately, Rennie thought, she might have been able to convince Jarret to stay behind. She may have risked telling him that it would simply hurt too much to have him as a companion and not a lover. Instead, when Jay Mac and Jarret returned to Mrs. Shepard's boardinghouse, Rennie was presented with a
fait accompli.
There was nothing she could say to change the mind of either man.

When they reached Denver she had tried again. Ethan had been willing to travel east with them, Michael had been willing to let him go, but Jay Mac had thwarted her, pointing out Ethan's responsibilities to his wife and daughter. Did Rennie want it on her conscience, he asked, if anything happened to Ethan?

How was she supposed to have answered that? she wondered. That she would have preferred Ethan to be hurt rather than Jarret? That she would have preferred her own father's life to be at risk rather than Jarret's? Solomon hadn't been called on to make those judgments, and Rennie didn't try to. She didn't want anything to happen to anyone. She wanted it to be over.

Jay Mac, though, wanted Jarret Sullivan, and as usual, he got what he wanted. It was left to Rennie to stoically endure the pain of her strained partnership with Jarret.

Looking through the sweep of his lowered lashes, Jay Mac studied first the grieving eyes of his daughter, then the impassive features of the man at her side. Love had made them so very foolish, he thought. He wished he were with Moira now. She would know what to do.

* * *

Northeast Rail's No. 448 arrived at the New York station minutes ahead of schedule. The platform was a hub of activity even at four in the morning. Well-wishers had come to see off friends and family; others had arrived to greet the incoming hoard. Porters were busy collecting and distributing baggage, and there were lines at both the ticket and telegraph windows. Station officers patrolled the platform, greeting passengers with a jaunty salute and swinging their nightsticks to match the rhythm of their stride.

Rennie, Jarret, and Jay Mac waited on the platform for their bags and trunks. Rennie spoke quietly to her father while Jarret stood off to one side, his eyes scanning the length and breadth of the station. He was not looking for anything in particular, merely looking. It was force of habit more than expectation that kept him studying the scene, but it was experience more than luck that kept his gaze returning to one man.

He was slightly built. His clothes were expensive but ill fitting. The seams of his stylish jacket drooped over the set of his shoulders, and his trousers were cuffed in opposition to the current fashion, as if they'd been too long. Borrowed? Jarret wondered. Stolen?

Large side-whiskers and a full black beard compensated for a narrow face. A mustache dropped over the man's upper lip. A bowler was tipped forward, cutting across the man's brow.

He sat alone, moving once when he was joined on the bench by a fellow traveler and carrying his carefully folded newspaper with him. He obviously relished his isolation—which made Jarret wonder why he was spending his time in the train station. He appeared uninterested in the comings and goings of the passengers, so it was unlikely that he was waiting for someone. He showed no interest in the departure board, which posted delays at regular intervals. It was doubtful the man himself was going anywhere. He made no attempt to read the bulky newspaper he kept folded on his lap. Occasionally he took an interest in his polished shoes, brushing the toe free of an imagined bit of dust or soot, but mostly he stared straight ahead, his head tilted to one side, the perfect picture of a solitary man lost in solitary thought.

And Jarret knew there was something wrong.

"Let's go," he said, stepping closer to Rennie and Jay Mac.

Rennie protested. "Our bags... my trunks."

Jarret placed his hand at the small of Rennie's back. "Now," he said tightly. "We'll get the baggage later. Jay Mac, you stay between me and the train."