Tasting Fear (32 page)

Dread lay heavy in Duncan’s gut. Something precious was slipping away from him, and he didn’t know how to stop it. He massaged the muscles in her shoulders and back, but she couldn’t relax. He didn’t blame her.

Duncan coaxed her over to his bed, stripping off what remained of her clothes, and turned off the light, dragging her close to him. She hid her face against his chest, and he cuddled her, stroking her back in long, soothing passes of his hand over the perfect fine texture of her skin, all the way down to the curve of her ass. His dick rose up, hot and hard, prodding her thigh, but he gritted his teeth and ignored its insistent, throbbing demands.

Patience.
This time was all about Nell.

He slid his hand down the cleft of her bottom. She didn’t recoil or stiffen up, just nuzzled her face to his chest with a wordless murmur, and parted her thighs, letting his hand slide lower, delve deeper.

He slowly, tirelessly apologized for what he didn’t have to offer her by showing her what he did have. His other hand joined the action, caressing her clit from the front while he thrust two long fingers into her slick, hot little pussy from behind, petting and stroking in ways he knew she liked. Long and slow. No hurry. He drove her higher, until she was squirming, panting, thighs clenching, fingernails digging into him.

Finally, a little shriek, and her cunt pulsed greedily, hungrily around his hand. She flopped onto her back, limp.

He put on a condom he’d left on the bedside table, rolled on top of her, and filled her with a powerful, relentless thrust. He wanted to chase the pain and unease of their last conversation away. This was the only way he knew to do it, to lose himself in the heavy rhythm of his body jolting against hers, her gasping cries, his harsh breathing. Somehow he managed to wait for her climax again, and his own release followed a split second after, her hot pulsations prolonging his pleasure.

And then she burst into tears.

Duncan was appalled. She disentangled herself and curled up with her back to him, sobbing. He wrapped his arms around her from behind until her sobs quieted. She fell into an exhausted sleep.

He lay there with her for what felt like hours, until the pressure inside him built up to the boiling point. He crept from the bed, tucked the comforter around Nell, and got rid of the condom, then he slipped on some sweatpants and wandered into the living room. He felt scared, shell-shocked, and the ache of impending doom in his gut was growing. He went out onto the terrace and stared out into the endless skyscrapers while the chill made his hairs rise up on his naked skin. It was almost dawn. The city below would wake up soon. But chill or no chill, he just stood out there, staring. Thinking, and feeling.

He was losing her. He could feel it. He put his head into his hands, tried to think it through. The weirdness had started when he’d asked her that stupid, ill-considered question about marriage, kids.

Marriage. He examined the concept. Was that what she wanted? Because if it was, the more he thought about it, the more he realized that it wasn’t such a terrifying idea. It wasn’t actually so crazy, either.

He ticked off the positive aspects. Protection. He would have a God-given reason to stay stuck to her like glue, if they were newlyweds, and that was fine with him. Then there was work, too. If they were married, their relationship would not be fodder for rumor and scandal in the office. No one would have any right to judge or criticize them. He would have a further claim upon her undivided attention and expertise for his company. He could easily pay enough so she could quit her other work, and have more free time. Hell, he had plenty of money. How much he paid her wasn’t necessarily relevant, once they were married.

She was so smart and imaginative, he would never get bored with her, as he had with other women he’d dated in the past. Sex was an important element of marriage, and they certainly had no problems in that area. And he would be faithful. No question about that. At all.

He would wake up every morning and find her there, beside him. That gave him a wonderful, spine-tingling sense of rightness.

Yes, marriage was the logical culmination of a partnership that worked. It was a win/win situation. So logical, he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before. He could hardly wait for Nell to wake up, so he could tell her what an excellent idea this was. He hoped it would make her feel better. That she would see that he was trying to meet her halfway, as far as he possibly could. And it was pretty damn far.

Marriage, for Christ’s sake. How much further could a guy go?

The cold ache in his gut had entirely vanished at the idea. He went back inside, with the intention of creeping into the bedroom, lying down beside her, and watching as she slept. Then he saw the eerie blue glow of a computer monitor emanating from one of the couches.

Nell sat there cross-legged, wrapped in one of his bathrobes, tip-pity-tapping on her laptop. She must have felt the breeze from the door, but she did not look up. She just worked on, utterly absorbed.

He must have stared for ten minutes before she took notice of him. Her smile was wan. “Hi. I woke up. Couldn’t get back to sleep.”

He stepped in. “What are you doing?”

“I had an idea for the last level of the game,” she said.

The freaking game was the last thing he wanted to talk about, but he wasn’t sure of a smooth way to shift topics and get from here to there. And a proposal of marriage had to be a segue as smooth as oil.

He swallowed, closed the door, strolled across the room toward her. “What’s the idea?”

Her voice was strangely businesslike. “As it is now, the player rescues the princess only if he garners sufficient points and collects all the magical weapons necessary to defeat the Sorcerer. If the player is clever and ruthless and forgets nothing, he gets the princess. It’s a very simple, banal, mercantile sort of exchange. It’s cold.”

The tension was back in his gut again. This was one of those dangerous conversations with undercurrents, where a phrase like “pass the butter” could blow up in his face and kill him. “Hardly simple,” he muttered. “You have to sweat blood to make it through all those levels.”

“I propose something different,” she went on. “These tricks should get the player through the Sorcerer’s defenses and to the door of the enchanted tower, but no farther. I propose one last barrier. To win the game, the player must make a leap of blind faith. Go against everything his senses and past experience tell him. To break the last spell, he has to leave his weapons and spells behind, and do something crazy. Dive headfirst into a pit of snakes. Jump into the mouth of a dragon. Walk into a wall of flames. He has to…to sacrifice himself for love.”

Duncan’s fingers bit into the top of the couch. She was still pissed. And fucking with his head. Brutally. He fought with his anger.

“I’ve been playing with a short text that could be inserted,” she went on. “Something like ‘only empty hands and a full heart shall pass through the wall of flames unburned’. This way, it’s not just cleverness that wins the game. It’s faith, and courage. And love.”

“It would make the game impossible to win,” Duncan said.

“That’s not true for everyone,” Nell replied. “Just for you.”

A muscle pulsed in Duncan’s jaw. “What are you saying, Nell? No symbolism, no bullshit. Could I have it in plain English, just this once?”

Nell wrapped her arms around herself, shivering. “I think we understand each other perfectly,” she said quietly.

He circled the couch and sat down next to her. This was probably futile, given her unapproachable mood, but he had to get it off his chest. “You’re cold,” he said, grabbing the afghan off the couch. He wrapped it around her. “I don’t want to talk about the game right now. We need to talk about us. I’ve been thinking.”

“Me, too,” Nell said quietly.

“I’ve decided that the best thing would be for us to get married.”

Dead silence greeted that statement. Her eyes were huge and startled. “What?” she squeaked.

Duncan cracked his knuckles uneasily. “I was thinking about the situation after you went to sleep. And I decided that—”

“You
decided
?” Her voice was deceptively calm.

Duncan paused, sensing a pitfall. “Well, uh, of course your agreement is crucial to the plan,” he said cautiously.

“So I should hope,” Nell murmured.

“After I explain my reasoning to you, you’ll see that it would be the best thing for both of us.”

“Oh, really.”

Nell’s voice sounded strange, almost strangled.

“Yes. Let me explain.” He presented his analysis, during which Nell was ominously silent. The chill in his gut was a lump of ice by the time he concluded his well-balanced, watertight, foolproof argument.

Nell tugged the afghan around herself and looked into his eyes. “Do you love me, Duncan?”

He closed his eyes, sighing. Aw, fuck. She had to say it. She just had to insist. “Goddamn it, Nell,” he snapped, “that’s not the point.”

Nell shook her head. “I think it is the point,” she replied. “In fact, I think it’s the only point.”

“Marriage is about partnership. Trust. The long haul. Not a bunch of stupid platitudes that don’t mean a goddamn thing! If I had you on staff full-time, we could—”

“Duncan, I’ve studied for years for my advanced degree. I want to teach literature,” Nell said quietly. “It’s what I’ve always wanted.”

Duncan threw up his hands in disgust. “You’re being deliberately difficult. Tell me what you’d make as a professor. I’ll top it.”

“If I wanted money, I would’ve gone to business school.”

“We’re straying from the issue,” he ground out. “We’re good together. If you would let go of your lofty romantic ideas—”

“Marriage is not a merger. Love is not a stupid platitude. If I was as detached and cool as you are, it might work. But I’m not.” Her voice faltered for a moment. “I’m in love with you,” she finished, softly.

Love.
Jesus, all he wanted was to be honest with her, to be fair. Not to lie or manipulate her with falsehoods. And this was what he got. His chest felt like it was in a trash compactor. Getting squished, smaller and smaller, into something as cold and hard as a diamond.

Nell rewrapped the afghan around herself. “And the worst part of this is that I think you love me, too, but you can’t or won’t see it.”

“Don’t tell me how I feel. I’m not talking about feelings. I’m talking about real things, concrete things. Commitment, fidelity, protection, everything I have. And children, too, if you want them. I thought that if you cared for me at all, you’d be pleased.”

It took her a while to respond to that. “I don’t ‘care for you,’ Duncan,” she said, her voice small. “I love you. Greedy Nell. Always asking for more. And besides, feelings are real. Mine certainly are. What would it cost you to admit that you love me? Is it just a control thing? You have to have the upper hand? You can’t give in to a strong feeling?”

“They’re not necessary,” he retorted. “None of this drama is necessary.”

“This is about your father, right? You hated him for calling what he did love. You have to be his opposite. No matter what.”

That deep-froze him. “Don’t talk about my father,” he said.

The tone in his voice made her lean back, her eyes big.

“Sorry,” she whispered. “I can’t marry you. Not on these terms.”

“I figured that out by myself, by context and inference,” he said. “I’m not as intellectually stunted and backward as you seem to think.”

“Don’t be sarcastic,” Nell snapped, dashing away tears. “It’s one thing to wait around for a lover to admit to loving you. It’s entirely another to wait around for a husband to do it.”

Duncan stared at her. “You would have waited a long time,” he said. “I’ve offered you more than I’ve ever dreamed of offering anyone. If it’s not enough, then there’s nothing more to be said.”

Nell straightened up, stiff and dignified. “I understand.”

A phone began to ring somewhere. He recognized the muffled ringtone of the cell he’d given to Nell. It was in her purse, which she’d left on the floor next to the couch. She made no move to get it.

He leaned over, fished it out, and checked the display. “Upstate area code,” he said, handing it to her. “Maybe one of your sisters.”

She stared down at the ringing phone in her hand, a perplexed frown between her brows, as if she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

That was his cue to get the hell out of the room. He walked back out onto the terrace, and pulled the sliding door firmly shut behind him. Letting her take her goddamn phone call in privacy.

Since her affairs were no longer any of his fucking business.

I
t took a ridiculously long time to find the right effing button to push, since Nell could barely see, her eyes were so blurred with tears.

She finally got it, and held the phone to her ear. “Yes?”

“Nell? Finally! It’s Nancy. Sorry I’m calling so early, but I couldn’t stand to wait. I hope I’m not interrupting anything, you know, delicious?”

“No,” Nell forced out, after a pained little pause. “You’re not.”

Nancy was silent for a moment. “Um…is everything okay?”

“Fine.” Nell forced false brightness into her tone. “So what’s up?”

“I just got off the phone with Elsie.”

Elsie was Lucia’s sweet, kind, nosy next-door neighbor since decades before any of the sisters had come to live there. Nell was surprised to hear her name spoken. “But I thought Elsie went down to the Jersey Shore to live with her daughter after the burglaries!”

“She did. She just spent a full half hour telling me the horrors of sharing a bathroom with her teenage granddaughters. Alison brought her home last night. Elsie had the key Lucia had given her years ago, so this morning she decided to go over and check the place out for us.”

Nell sucked in a breath. “Yikes. Did you ask her to do that?”

“Hell no! I told her not to do it again. Could be dangerous. But you know how she is. Anyhow, she found a letter under the mail slot, from Elisabetta Barbieri, in Castiglione Sant’Angelo. Elsie opened it—”

“Good God,” Nell muttered.

“I know, but I wasn’t inclined to criticize, and besides, it didn’t matter because it’s in Italian, and Elsie’s Polish. So she called me.”

“I’ll go up there right away and get it,” Nell said.

Nancy made a suspicious sound. “With Duncan, right?”

Nell squirmed, pressing against the ache in her middle. “We’ll see,” she hedged.

“You be careful,” Nancy scolded. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine,” she lied. She closed the call, trying to sound cheerful, and stared through the glass doors at him, leaning over the railing.

He’d asked her to marry him. She’d said no. She was nuts.

Could she risk it? She knew he had feelings for her. He just couldn’t admit them or articulate them. Could she accept a cool, practical “partnership”? With protection and money and lots of hot, excellent sex? Just hoping that someday he’d finally recognize his feelings for her as love?

No.
She wasn’t made that way. Maybe she would always be alone. Maybe she was unrealistic. Or just plain dumb. Letting her one chance at true love and passion go by. For the sake of stupid semantics.

But she wanted her man to love her. With an open heart. That was not too goddamn much to ask.

She opened the door, and stepped out onto the terrace. A gust of wind blew the terry cloth bathrobe open over her legs. She yanked it closed. She was nude underneath. Nudity that had abruptly become inappropriate. In fact, it had become an agony of embarrassment.

“I, um, have to go,” she quavered to his rigid, muscular back.

“Why am I not surprised,” he said, without turning.

She told him the story of Elsie and the letter. Duncan stared out at the city. “I’ll take you up there,” he said, his voice stony.

“No,” she whispered.

“No?” He turned, and the fury in his eyes knocked her backward, like a punch. “What the fuck am I supposed to do? Nothing has changed. You’ve still got criminals prowling the city waiting for your guard to go down. Am I supposed to cut you loose? Let you get wasted?”

She shook her head, helplessly. “It’s not your responsibility anymore, Duncan,” she said. “It never really was.”

“What a crock of high-minded horseshit,” he snarled. “I get the message, Nell. You can’t stand to be with me—”

“That’s not it!”

“—so fine, I’ll arrange for a car service and a professional armed escort to accompany you. When you get back with your letter, you’ll check into a suite at the Hilton. Twenty-four-hour bodyguard coverage. No more Sunset Grill shifts. Just your university work.”

Her mouth dangled, and her head shook helplessly back and forth. “Duncan. But…but that’s insane.”

“I’ll finance it until you’ve written your fucking thesis and gotten your precious Ph.D. At which point, we’ll reassess the situation.”

“But I—”

“Consider my position, Nell. Cold and detached as you think I am, I don’t want you to die. Even if you’re blowing me off, even if I’m not fucking you, I don’t want you to get hurt. If you got hurt, or dead, that would suck. Is that clear? Are we on the same page here?”

She scrubbed her eyes with the back of her hands, and nodded.

“Good. Then stop arguing. I am sick of it. And I no longer need to bother trying not to piss you off. What a fucking load off my mind.”

Cold. Hah. He was anything but cold, standing there like some sort of raging, thunderous pagan god in the chill morning air, the towering cityscape as his backdrop. His face was rigid with fury.

He made a sharp gesture for her to precede him inside. “I’ll make the calls. Come on, let’s get this thing moving,” he said. “This shit is killing me. Go get dressed and packed. Fast.”

She scrambled to do so and dragged her suitcase out of his room into the living room. She overheard snippets of Duncan’s conversation with someone named Braxton as he arranged for the bodyguard. He turned, frowning. “What’s the address of this neighbor?”

“Twenty-one thirty-one Fairham Lane, in Hempton,” she said.

He repeated the address to Braxton. “Put this one on my personal account, not the corporate account,” he said into the phone.

His personal account? She’d be in debt to this guy for the rest of time. Well, hell. In essence, she already was. For her life.

Duncan escorted Nell down to the parking garage, where the car service was waiting, and bundled her into the vehicle. He lectured the bodyguard, a burly guy with long arms and a low, bulging forehead, about the mortal danger Nell was in for about fifteen minutes before he let the guy get into the car, still rolling his eyes. Fucking jerk-off.

He watched the car pull out of the garage, turn, and disappear.

It felt wrong. He wanted to run after the car, screaming and waving his arms. Something had been wrenched out of him. It left a bleeding hole.

He stumbled upstairs like a zombie, dropped onto the couch.

The sun got higher. His landline phone rang. His mother, for sure. Calling to give him hell about Ellie. The machine got it. His mother talked for five minutes onto the machine, her voice shrill. Not a word of it sank in. The square of sun on the floorboards inched along.

His cell rang. He checked the display. Bruce, wondering what the hell was going on. Nell had stood him up. He tossed the thing back down onto the couch, still ringing. Later for Bruce.

The only reason he didn’t turn it off altogether was because Nell was out there in the world without him. With just some jerk-off clown bodyguard to protect her. That phone was his last and only link.

Some time later, the phone rang again. This time it was Braxton. He pushed “talk.” “What happened?” he barked. “Is she okay?”

Braxton was taken aback. “Ah, yes. As far as I know,” he said carefully. “I haven’t heard from Wesley, so I assume things are fine.”

Duncan’s lungs released, allowing him to inhale. He felt stupid and hysterical. “Oh. Good. So, uh, what’s up?”

“Just letting you know that Teiko and Sam just presented their report about the apartment they bug-swept yesterday.”

“Yeah? What about it?”

“It was riddled,” Braxton said. “High quality, foreign made. Amazing stuff. There were cameras behind both air vents, and bugs and traces everywhere. Teiko’s convinced that they didn’t find everything.”

“Did you have them deliver the material to Gant for the evidence techs to look over?”

“As promised. One question. Did she bring any stuff with her when she came to your place? Suitcases, electronics?”

“Who told you she was at my place?” he snapped.

“Word gets around,” Braxton said patiently. “So? Did she?”

“She brought a suitcase,” he said. “But she took it away with her again. It’s in the car, with her and Wesley.” A cold chill began to prickle up his back. “Oh, my God. Oh, shit.”

“Probably tagged,” Braxton said. “So they know where she is.”

His eyes fell on her laptop, which lay where she’d forgotten it on the couch. The chill transformed into an icy cramp, squeezing his guts. “Fuck me,” he whispered, his voice a thread. “Her laptop. It’s still here.”

“Check it,” Braxton said.

He grabbed it. It was a big, clunky dinosaur of a thing, at least eight years old. He found a screwdriver and pried the case open.

There it was. A listening device. It had its own battery and a powerful microphone. It was transmitting in real time, as he watched. Everything they had said had been heard, clear as a bell. Including the address where Nell was headed right now.

Where she might have already arrived. It had been over an hour.

He yanked the thing out, detached its power source with a brutal yank. “Bugged,” he said. “They know where she went.”

“I just tried Wesley.” Braxton’s voice was grim. “He didn’t answer.”

“Fuck,” he hissed. “Call the cops for me, right now. The local ones. Have them check the place out. I’m on my way.”

“Wait! Dunc, don’t go alone. I’ll organize a—”

He clicked “stop.” No time. He shoved the phone into his pocket, sprinted for the bedroom. Tossed on a T-shirt, a pair of army-issue pants, shoes. Shoved his gun into the back of his pants, buckled on his ankle sheath and knife. Dug out the drug-treated throwing stars from his weapons stash, filled his side pants pockets with them.

Grabbed the laptop with the software to triangulate the GPS signal implanted in the cell phone he’d given her.

And ran like holy hell on wheels.

Nell kept her face averted in the car, so she didn’t have to see the bodyguard Wesley’s sympathetic glances. Her stores of dignity and restraint had been exhausted by the last scene in Duncan’s apartment. Now all she wanted was to crawl into a hole and stay there.

Funny. That was exactly the scenario she had in store for her, once she collected this letter, if she accepted Duncan’s help. Huddled in a hole. Cloistered in a hotel suite with the blinds drawn. She supposed she should be tough and brave and loftily refuse to do it, but that would mean fleeing New York, starting over. Abandoning everything she’d worked so hard for in the last decade.

But once she got her degree, what could she do with it, if the Fiend was abroad? Even if she changed her name and ran, she would still be barred from teaching literature. Colleges and universities would be the first place any fool would look for her. The Fiend was no fool.

No, it would be waitressing for her, with her new Social Security number, or being a cashier or an office temp. She’d survive, of course. She had so far. But oh, God. All those years of study. All that work.

Nell snorkled back her tears. She had to be practical. Break this problem into pieces, and tackle the pieces one at a time. She could not control the future, but she could do something useful right now.

Finishing her thesis, now. That was within her power. Maybe this awful mess could be an inspiration. After all, the poets she studied were all heart hungry, lovelorn. Bleak despair was the very stuff of creativity. Look at Emily Dickinson, the Brontës. There was a long, noble literary tradition of hunger for love and sex being sublimated into deathless art.

Perhaps, like them, she could salvage something from the wreckage. Transmute pain into useful activity. She was unemployed, homeless, rudderless. Too scared to walk out on the street by herself. Her days would be long, silent, boring. What excuse did she have now not to hunker down and write a kick-ass thesis?

She grabbed her big black shoulder bag and unzipped the central pocket where she kept her laptop. It was not there. She’d forgotten it.

Shit, shit, shit.
She blew out a shuddering breath through trembling lips at the idea of having to face Duncan’s rigid face and blazing eyes and cutting remarks again in order to retrieve it.

Maybe she could have it sent over by courier. Uh-huh. With what cash? The cost of that courier would go right onto Duncan’s personal account. Ka-ching, ka-ching. And her debt to him was already crushing her.

Her laptop was gone, but the cell phone he’d given her was there. She picked it up, turned it off. He wasn’t going to call her on it. She slid it into the side pocket of her pants.

Onward. She dragged out the folder where she kept her tattered notes, outlines, and ideas. She pulled a fresh sheet out of her notebook and dug out a pen. She could just scribble. The old-fashioned way.

By the time they pulled up in front of Elsie’s house, she’d roughed out a pretty acceptable main thesis paragraph for
“Sex, Desperation, Despair, and Death in Nineteenth-Century Women Poets.”
She was even feeling a little bit better, after some useful activity. Hey. If she had to have a broken heart, at least let it be broken to good purpose.

Wesley got out and opened the door for her, peering around the deserted block. Nothing moved on the narrow lane. They climbed up Elsie’s stoop, which was identical in every particular to Lucia’s. She rang the bell, and waited. And waited. She rang again, and then knocked. “Elsie?” she called. “Are you in there? It’s me! Nell!”

Still no answer. Wesley muscled her behind himself, holding up a very large and businesslike-looking pistol.

“Nell?” It was Elsie, all right, though her voice was muffled behind the door. It sounded higher and thinner than usual.

“Elsie?” Nell knocked again. “Is everything okay?”

“Ah…yes, honey, everything’s fine,” Elsie quavered. “Come on…come on in. The door’s unlocked.”

Nell reached for the door handle, but Wesley gently pushed her hand away and pushed the door open himself. She stood on her tiptoes and looked over his bulky shoulder as he peered into the dim interior, through the foyer.

Elsie stood across the room, in the entryway to the kitchen. Wesley started inside just as Nell registered the look on the old lady’s face. The pallor. The stiff, frozen expression. The staring eyes.