The Devil and Ms. Moody (19 page)

“Should be good for business.”

He swung off the bed, grabbed his jeans, and slipped into them. “Now, what’s the story?” he said, turning to her. “I figured you were some sort of emissary from my uncle, sent to bring the wayward offspring home. He’s tried that before.”

“This
is
about your uncle.” Even as she said it, Edwina realized she had no idea how he might take the news of his uncle’s death. From appearances, they hadn’t had a close relationship, but that didn’t mean there might not be some emotional knots to untangle. Estranged relatives were often the most strongly affected by the death of a family member.

“When’s the last time you spoke with him?” she asked.

“The night I walked out, fifteen years ago. You could call it bad blood. Very bad.”

“Maybe you ought to sit down,” she suggested.

He remained standing, and by the expectant set of his jaw she knew there was nothing to do but tell him what had happened. “Your uncle had a heart condition, although you probably knew that. He hadn’t been well for years. I believe it was the stress of his business—”

She hesitated, wary of the tension that had crept into Diablo’s features. “You didn’t know he was ill?” she said, sitting forward, talking faster in her concern. “Oh, I’m sorry, I really am. There was nothing anyone could do. It was a coronary, but you should know that he didn’t suffer. He died instantly, in his office.”

The information seemed to hit Diablo with almost physical force. His eyes narrowed to slits and the bones of his face jutted through his skin as he stared at her.

“Oh, Lord—” Edwina hardly knew how to respond. She slid off the bed and wrapped the sheet around her, but he held up an arm as though to keep her away.

Edwina’s intuition told her to leave him alone, and this time she listened to it. As he turned to face the door, she quietly picked up her clothes from the floor and began to dress. He would need time to come to terms with the news, she told herself. Perhaps she ought to leave and give him some time alone or at least wait until he was ready to talk.

But even as she dressed, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something irreparable had just happened, something that would affect them in ways she couldn’t even imagine. The premonition crept into the room’s atmosphere like a chill draft of air.

He stood facing the door for so long that she finally spoke up. “There’s an estate,” she told him. “You’ve inherited a stock-brokerage firm, money, property. That’s why I’m here. I work for an agency that locates missing heirs.”

He made a half turn and looked her over. “You like that kind of work? Hunting down people? Profiting from a man’s death?”

His eyes were so cold, she felt a shock of alarm run through her. “It isn’t like that,” she explained. “I’m not profiting by your uncle’s death. I’m carrying out his last wishes. He wanted you to inherit, and if I hadn’t found you, everything would have escheated to the state. Would you have preferred that?”

“Yes, I would have. The state can have it. I don’t want anything of his.”

His voice was unnaturally flat, with a disquieting quality that Edwina might have caught under other circumstances. In this case, she was more than a little dumfounded by his answer. She needed money desperately to hold her family together. It seemed impossible to her that he’d just inherited a fortune and was throwing it away. “But he left everything to you, Diablo, everything he had! He obviously cared about you—”

“What do you know about my relationship with my uncle?”

It sounded almost like an accusation. “Very little,” she admitted quickly.

“Then spare me the Pollyanna crap. My parents died when I was a kid, and my uncle got stuck with me. I rarely saw him except to endure his lectures on upholding the family name and doing what was expected of me—a Braxton ‘scion.’ He always seemed to forget that my name was Holt.”

Edwina remembered from her research that Chris’s mother was a Braxton, the uncle’s only sister. His father, Wiley Holt, came from “outside the family social circle,” according to a newspaper account of the wedding.

“I know you’re upset,” she said, approaching him, “but letting the state have everything? What would that accomplish? Surely you won’t let a dispute—an
ancient
dispute with your uncle—stop you from claiming your rightful inheritance. Even if you don’t want the money for yourself, you can dispose of it in some responsible way. Charities or whatever. Otherwise—”

He breathed an obscenity that made her flinch.

“I don’t give a damn about ‘otherwise.’ Can you understand that, Ed?” His eyes hardened, frighteningly impenetrable as he turned to face her full-on. “I made sure of that when I walked out of his house fifteen years ago. His death doesn’t change anything, not for me.”

Edwina could hear the edgy inflection beneath his cold anger. On some level she knew it was pain fueling him, and she responded to it. His childhood must have been so much more difficult than she’d realized. She wanted to tell him that she understood how rough it could be, that she felt his inner struggle and sympathized, but she sensed the futility. If she offered consolation now, he would almost certainly deny the pain, and then he might even reject her.

She felt a wave of helplessness as his eyes flicked away, as though he had just dismissed the issue from his mind. There seemed only one safe way to reestablish contact at the moment, and that was by asking questions. “What happened?” she pressed, softening her voice.

“What do you mean?”

She wet her lips as his eyes returned to her. “Between you and your uncle. Something must have happened. It’s in your voice—the hurt, the anger.”

“You don’t want to know what happened, Ed.”

“Yes—I
do
want to know. Of course I do. I
care
about you.” Even as she said it, she realized her feelings for him had gone well beyond the caring stage. Her feelings were staggering, but she couldn’t deal with that now.

He turned away and jammed his hands in his back pockets, furious at something—at her, probably, for forcing the issue. She watched a darkness move through him, and the intensity of it frightened her. She had touched something explosive.

“Diablo—”

“My uncle did something I couldn’t forgive him for,” he said softly, savagely. “He told me the truth about my father.”

“Your father? ...” Edwina remembered coming across a series of old newspaper articles about Gillian Braxton’s marriage to Wiley Holt over her family’s violent objections. There’d been a tragic car accident a few years later, and both Gillian and Wiley had died. “What about your father?”

“He was a murdering bastard, according to my uncle.”

“What do you mean? What did he do?”

A muscle in his jaw twitched violently, and Edwina was sure it was an echo of the pain he was denying. “I know it must hurt,” she blurted. “Diablo, please—”

He brought himself under control then, erasing the sudden fury before her very eyes. His shoulders lifted and froze. His jaw set implacably. And what lingered in his eyes as he turned to her was icy and crystalline and frightening. She could almost imagine a molten anger that had hardened and cooled so swiftly that it had crystallized like the volcanic rock of the mountains they’d camped in. Whatever had happened in his past, she realized, he had buried it as deep as the tortured fissures in Carbon Canyon.

“I think maybe you’d better get out of here” was all he said.

Edwina stared at him, stunned. A desperation rose inside her as she realized that he meant it. He wanted her to leave.
He was throwing her out.

“I can’t leave,” she told him, her voice grainy with disbelief. “Not until this is settled. I’ll understand if you don’t want to talk about your past, and I won’t press you, I promise. But there’s still the other thing—the inheritance.” She was grasping at straws, anything to keep him talking.

“I settled that when I walked out fifteen years ago. It’s done.”

“No, it’s not done.” She implored him softly. “Your uncle owned a company. He had employees, men and women with families. What’s going to happen to those people?”

He turned away from her. “That’s not my problem.”

Edwina went still then. For all her anguished sympathies, her responses were also tempered by the other concerns building inside her. Her own dreams had been shattered by the irresponsible actions of her father. The emotional devastation Donald Moody had left in his wake had convinced her that certain bonds had to be honored, no matter what. Family came first.

It was Diablo’s attitude—or Chris Holt’s—that she didn’t understand. By his own admission, he honored no one but himself. No matter how badly his uncle might have hurt him in the past—no matter what his father might have done—Edwina believed there was a time when you had to set family feuds aside and handle your obligations. It was a conviction she felt strongly. It was a conviction she lived, but she didn’t know how to express it to him.

“Will you go back, at least, to Connecticut?” she asked finally.

“No.”

She caught back her rising frustration and her pride, and made it a personal request. “I live in Norwalk. You could fly back with me.”

He didn’t even bother to turn around. “Get off it, Edwina,” he warned. “You did your job just fine. You found me, and now you can get the hell out of here. If you’re worried about your fee, don’t be. I’ll see that you get paid whatever’s coming to you.”

The utter contempt in his voice stunned her. Did he really believe she was pressing him because of the money? After everything they’d been through together? “Oh, that’s right,” she said, deeply stung. “You asked me about my job, didn’t you? You wanted to know if I enjoy profiting from dead men?”

He turned then, tossing back his hair like a restless animal. His blazing eyes told her to stop, to leave it alone, but she paid no attention. Her heart was too full of things that had to be said.

“No, I don’t like what I do all that much,” she told him, “but it earns me a living. I have responsibilities, but that’s something you wouldn’t understand. What would you know about sacrifice, about putting your own life on hold to take care of other people?” Her eyes sparkled with tears. “I was going to be a gerontologist once. I was going to run a day-care facility for kids and senior citizens, Pollyanna as that may sound to someone like you.”

His voice dropped to a harsh whisper. “Don’t, Princess,” he warned, raising his hand. A tremor seemed to shake his body. “Don’t cry, dammit. And for God’s sake, don’t lecture me. You don’t know anything about me.”

She turned away from him, her mouth trembling. What had happened to them over the last few minutes? Where had the sweetness gone? She barely recognized the man in the room with her. He was cold and cruel. The harshness in his voice tore at her heart. No, she didn’t know anything about him, not about this man. But she remembered the man who was passionate and fiery and tender. The man who saved her life and made love to her as no one else ever had. Or ever could.
Where was he?

The tears welled again. Hot and stingingly sharp, they burned through all her attempts to hold them back. It hurt to reveal her own pain, even to admit that she was suffering in any way. She was so used to being the strong one, the caretaker. It was Edwina who’d held her baby sister and let her cry it out. It was Edwina who’d sat up nights with her distraught mother. Ed, the steady one. Eddie, the aspiring saint.

Her cheek muscles burned as she fought to control the emotion jolting her. She knew it was more than Diablo that had triggered the tumult inside her. It was everything he represented—adventure, freedom, life on one’s own terms. She hadn’t known she craved those things until now, until him. She hadn’t known they could be so important. It had actually been wonderful to depend on someone else for a short time, someone as strong as he was, or seemed to be.

“What the hell are you waiting for?” he grated.

The tears spilled over as Edwina closed her eyes. Her throat tightened, refusing to let her speak or even swallow. Of course he was right. What the hell
was
she waiting for? There was no longer any reason for her to stay. Nothing more to be said, given how he felt. What woman in her right mind would allow herself to become involved with someone as selfish as he was, a man who felt no responsibility to anyone but himself?

The room was silent when she opened her eyes a moment later. All she could see at first was stained and peeling wallpaper. Even the floor tiles seemed to have yellowed and cracked beneath her feet. The tiny motel room that had blazed with their passion moments before was now cold and lonely, an ugly, alien place. She glanced down at the tight top and cropped jeans she wore and shuddered. She felt almost as naked as she had the first morning she’d put them on.

The incongruity of her situation crept into her awareness like a thief who’d stolen into the wrong house. How had Edwina Moody ended up in a small sordid room with a man she’d only known a few days? A man who sought out danger and wanted no ties to anyone. A man who had just proven he could be brutally cold and frightening.

“Go, Princess,” he said. “Get out of here.”

She looked up, her heart pounding.
Princess
. Why had he called her that now? It took her several heartbreaking seconds to realize that she was doing it again, grasping at straws. He wasn’t even looking at her. He was staring off at nothing, waiting for her to leave, his face set in harsh brooding reflection.

But he
had
called her Princess, and she’d heard the break in his voice. Her feelings seemed to rip and tear at her like talons, promising heartbreak no matter what she did. The crazy side of her wanted to be with him, whatever the consequences. The rational side knew it was impossible. Even if he wanted her, which he quite obviously didn’t. All at once she felt overwhelmed with the need to escape the bewildering situation, and him. To escape the claws that were ripping at her heart.

“Yes, maybe I should leave,” she said with a jerky glance around the room to see if there was anything she’d forgotten.
Edwina, the efficient one,
she thought. Her voice sounded brittle and distant as she spoke. “No need to drive me anywhere. I’ll call a cab from the office.”