Twisted Shadows (15 page)

“
Once you see him, you'll be on the FBI radar.
”

That brought her thoughts back to McLean and his offer. She hadn't taken his card, but a call to the FBI would probably locate him. The intensity that seemed so uniquely his remained clear in her memory, as did the questioning gaze of striking green eyes.

Then she heard the door open, and Nicholas was back. “Learn anything from Pop?”

“No. He didn't say why he wanted to see me, other than I'm ‘unfinished business.' He didn't seem very moved at seeing me.”

“He isn't moved by much,” Nicholas said. “Maybe we'll learn something at dinner.”

Sam shivered slightly. Her gaze traveled around the richly furnished room. It seemed even colder, more inhospitable than before. Everything in this house seemed purchased for show.

“Would you like to see the gardens?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied. She hoped he didn't hear the gratitude in her voice.

He led her through what seemed an endless hall to the back. Formal gardens lay in perfect symmetry. He led her down a path edged by manicured shrubs and stopped at a clearing dominated by a white gazebo. Roses climbed the columns.

“It's—”

“Perfect.” He finished the sentence.

They looked at each other and grinned simultaneously.

Perfection lacked spontaneity. Passion. Creativity.

His smile faded. She wanted to bring that expression back. For a moment they'd shared feelings. Something very nice had moved between them.

Too soon, that mask had slipped over his face again.

“Tell me about you,” she said. “What do you like? What sports? What books? Where did you go to college? How did you start your business? I feel like I've missed so much.”

“There wasn't much to miss.” He moved away from her, putting both physical and emotional distance between them. “I went to military school, then to college where I bombed out and finally the military. After my tour, I went back to college and started a business with a friend.”

“And who's the friend?”

“Cal White.”

“I would like to meet him.”

He shrugged. “I thought you would be leaving.”

“Is that what you want, Nicholas?”

“Nick. Everyone calls me Nick, and yes, it would be better for you, for both of us. You'll stir up trouble. Perhaps if you leave now, the FBI might forget about you.”

She remembered McLean's eyes. She didn't think so. Neither, she guessed, did Nick.

Sam turned away, tortured by doubts again. The house and the garden were illusions of perfection. Was Nick's concern also an illusion?

“He's really dying, isn't he?”

“His doctors say so.”

“You don't sound convinced.”

“I've learned never to trust anything to do with my father. That wisdom was made only too clear when you appeared. I recall his crocodile tears when I asked about my mother. A saint she was, he said.” Sarcasm rippled through his words.

She studied him. “Are you sorry I appeared?”

“No. But I worry about you. You still don't know what you've gotten into. I want you to leave. In the morning.”

“I haven't learned what I wanted to.”

“You probably won't. He's playing games with you. A clue here, a clue there, until he has you enmeshed in a web.”

“What could he want?”

“He could use you to get to your mother. My father never lets anyone go. Not without a battle. Your mother must have something he fears. Or wants. You could be the leverage to getting it.”

Uncertainty tugged at her again. And fear, but not for herself. Despite her continued anger toward her mother, she didn't want to be the instrument of pain. Or betrayal.

She nodded. “Will you keep in contact with me?”

“Samantha … you don't know what you are asking.”

“Sam,” she said. “My friends call me Sam.”

“I'm not your friend,” he said.

“Not yet. I hope you will be.”

“You don't take rejection readily, do you?”

“No.” She smiled. “Particularly when it seems to be motivated by concern for me.”

He sighed. “Is your mother as stubborn as you?”

“She's your mother, too.”

“No. She'll never be that.”

“She's a good person,” she said. “It was hell for her to leave you behind, but—”

“Don't go there,” he said, a muscle throbbing in his cheek. He had accused her of not taking rejection readily. Apparently he couldn't take it, either. Not where their mother was concerned. It gave her hope. If he was wounded by all this, then it meant he cared.

She wondered what it had been like for him growing up in Boston, knowing much of what was said about his father, his family. It must have been hard. Bewildering to a child. Had he really been able to throw all the baggage away?

Her mother had warned her. Something had frightened her badly. Was she—Sam—a fool for not listening?

They sat in the gazebo. A silence grew between them. Too many questions, too many guarded emotions. She wanted their relationship to be more. But did he?

“Go home,” he said, “and be grateful for what you had and still have.”

“How can I when you—?”

“I have what I want now,” he said. “I have never believed in playing ‘what if' games. They're useless. You deal with reality and choose your own path.”

“I want
you
on my path.”

“No,” he said simply.

She looked at him. His eyes were uncannily like her own, except there was a secretiveness in his she didn't think hers had ever had.

She turned away from him, her body stiff and tense and defiant.

“Go,” he said softly. “Go for your mother's sake, if not your own.”

She whirled around on him. “What do you mean?”

“I suspect you're meant to be the instrument of her destruction. It's the only answer that makes sense.”

Dinner was a nightmare.

Nicholas's words continued to ring in her head. “
The instrument of her destruction.
” And why did he keep urging her to leave and never look back?

A fortune?

A well-meaning warning?

“
You're in dangerous company … Don't wait to call us.
” Should she take heed of the FBI agent's warning?

Again Sam wondered why she had ever agreed to come, then to stay. Several members of the party had been thoroughly rude. Paul Merritta had been watchful, Nick silent. Only Anna, who had re-appeared, had tried to keep the conversation going.

Her aunt and her uncles and their wives were cold, looking at her as if she had come to rob them. Paul Merritta had been no help. He had introduced her as his daughter, then apparently decided to sit back as the lions tried to rip her apart.

Or perhaps nothing as noble as lions. They were more like jackals.

“I remember Tracy,” Victor said dismissively. “Flighty. Ungrateful little—”

“That's enough,” Paul Merritta finally interceded.

Victor—like Paul—might have been a handsome man once, but where Paul Merritta's illness had apparently drained life from him, his brother had allowed life to coarsen him. His face was red veined, probably from drinking too much, and his body was bloated. He had the blue eyes common in the family, except his were dull. They didn't carry the spark, the emotion that she saw in Nick's eyes, or even the embers that remained in her father's eyes.

“You look nothing like her,” Uncle Ricardo—Rich, everyone called him—added after a pause. The implication that she was a fraud was clear.

“Actually,” she said, “I do.” She stuck her chin out. “I also look like my brother,” she said.

Paul Merritta grimaced at that, or perhaps it was his attempt at a smile. He had limped in on the arm of Reggie, each step obviously painful. His face was pale from the effort, his eyes glazed over, probably by painkillers.

“I understand you have a little shop,” George said. She kept reminding herself that he was a half brother, but he had none of Nick's charm.

“It's more than a little shop,” she said with forced calm. “We have customers throughout the world.”

“Western art,” someone said contemptuously. “That's not art at all.”

She looked around the table at the hostile faces and paused first on Nick, then on Paul Merritta, still watchful. To see what she was made of?

She shrugged. “We make a good living.”

“You can always use more money,” one of the aunts said. Her meaning was clear. Everyone at the table thought she was a scavenger.

“That depends on how and where it comes from,” she replied evenly.

Her father chuckled. “There's no doubt that she's my daughter and your niece,” he said. “She's a member of this family and nothing more will be said about it.”

Silence fell around the table.

Her gaze lowered to the glass of wine that was continually refilled even if she'd taken only a few sips.

“We seem to like many of the same things,” Nick said, unexpectedly coming to her defense. “Skiing, for instance. And business.”

The latter provoked alarmed expressions. It was, she decided, akin to a shot across the bow. One of the games Nick had mentioned? Did he participate in those? She had thought not earlier, but now she wondered.

What was he playing at?

She felt like an alien in a world she didn't understand, a world where every word had a different meaning than the ones she understood, where danger lurked behind every shadow. The room was filled with twisted shadows.

Except for meeting Nick, the visit was a disaster, and even reuniting with her brother had not been very promising. Despite Paul Merritta's words, she'd felt no affection from him, and there was hostility from everyone else.

But she would never regret coming.

Perhaps now she could return home, to her own life. The image of her mother's pale face crept into her consciousness. Sam was beginning to understand just a small piece of her mother's fear. Why she had tried to escape this family. But how could she have left her son? Sam knew if she were a mother, nothing short of death would convince her to relinquish her son.

Had that been the choice her mother faced all those years ago—to leave or to die?

Paul Merritta suddenly stiffened—just as he had earlier—and clutched the table. Anna was the first up. She whispered in his ear, then held out her arm as he struggled to his feet.

He resisted for a moment and turned to Sam. “Tomorrow,” he said. “Tomorrow we will have a long talk.”

“I planned to go home tomorrow,” she said.

“I want to talk to you further,” he insisted. “There are things …” Agony crossed his face, then he stumbled from the room, leaving an emptiness and silence behind him.

Giving up on any pretense of having an appetite for the rich dessert in front of her, she put down her spoon. “I should go. Nick, are you ready?”

He stood. “Always at your command.”

It was stylishly said, though he didn't smile. The others became visibly anxious, as if worried about a possible new alliance.

Nick seemed to enjoy their collective concern. He walked over to her, pulled out the chair as she rose.

George stood and blocked their way. George, as impeccably groomed as the gardens, glared at her. “I don't know what you want or what you're doing here, but I'm warning you: You won't get what we worked so hard for.”

She stared at her half brother, seeing only contempt in his face. She was angry, angrier than she had been with her mother. It was as if a gaping wound had been torn open, one she hadn't known existed until a week ago. “I don't want anything from you. I don't want anything from this family. I wouldn't take it if it were gift-wrapped. I came because I was asked. I wanted the truth about my … heritage. Now I know and I wish to hell I didn't. I don't like it. I don't like you. And I'm going home.”

Tears of frustration, maybe even regret, threatened.

Her brother didn't want her here. Her biological father was obviously playing one family member against the other.

The instrument of her mother's destruction. Was that what she was?

All she was?

eleven

“Good girl,” Nicholas said as he gunned the car and drove toward the gate. For a moment, she thought it wouldn't open and she would be trapped here forever. But then the gates slowly yielded, and she relaxed.

“Why?”

“You held your own with them. My father respects guts. He may say otherwise and rant and rave, but it is the only thing he really does respect.”

“I don't care if he does or not,” she retorted. “I loved my father. At least he was my father in every important way. Paul Merritta doesn't compare with David Carroll. Not in any way—”

She caught herself. She was talking about his father. The only one he knew.

Nicholas shrugged. “Then forget the Merrittas. You seemed to have had a television-family childhood. Why spoil it?”

“I'm sorry, Nick.”

“Don't be.” His voice was hard.

She tried to change the subject. “He must respect you. You have a successful business.…”

Nick looked at her quickly, then shrugged. “Who knows?”

“Do you care?”

“I stopped caring a long time ago,” he said.

“But you still keep contact.”

“He's still my father, whether or not I approve of him.” He turned his gaze from the road and looked at her for a split second before turning back.

Sam looked ahead at the four lane road that wound through a neighborhood of fine homes. Dusk was falling. Traffic was light and everyone was moving fast, probably all exceeding the posted forty-five mile per hour speed limit. Nick was going fifty to fifty-five, and other cars were passing them.

She tried not to worry. Her law-and-order compulsion was working overtime. All she needed was to be arrested in a car belonging to a member of a crime family. Then she realized
she
was a member of the family, too.