Heart of the Dragon (21 page)

“Oh?” Sujima Nalinat retorted. “Ask your aunt for the truth again, Mayura.”

Rebecca stared hard into Kash’s troubled eyes. “
You
know too.”

“I didn’t want to discuss my suspicions about Madame’s motives until I had proof.”

“So you let me worry, and think that my father was a criminal. Did you make up that story about my father and the art thief?”

“No
. The man told me about your father and himself. I believed him. But”—Kash turned swiftly and looked at Madame Piathip, who coughed and fanned herself delicately with one hand—”I imagine Madame set up that interview for her own purposes. It was staged.”

“You’ve disgraced me, Aunt,” Mayura interjected in despair.

“Oh, you Vatans are so deceitful,” Wasun Nalinat said victoriously. “This proves it.”

Madame Piathip threw up her hands. “This has nothing to do with Mayura and your son. There was no engagement. You haven’t been deceived.”

Numbly Rebecca sorted through the muddled details. “Why didn’t you want to admit that I’m Mayura’s half sister?” she asked Madame Piathip. She avoided Kash’s
dark scrutiny, feeling too bewildered and hurt to risk looking at him. “What makes me such a threat?”

“Let Mr. Santelli tell you. He’s entirely too good at his work. ” Madame glared at him reproachfully.

Rebecca met Kash’s eyes again. “Tell me what was so important it was worth hurting me for.”

Denial and frustration darkened his expression. “I was protecting you.” He gestured for Traynor, who’d been waiting in a chair near the door. Traynor took a folded, yellowed document from an inner pocket of his sports jacket and brought it to Kash. Rebecca watched in bewilderment.

Kash, his face rigid, opened the document and placed it on the table in front of her. She read it with disbelieving eyes. It was a signed agreement spelling out her father’s investment of ten thousand dollars in the Vatan Silk Company.

Kash said brusquely. “Thirty years ago, when he was stationed in Thailand with the army, your father invested his life savings in the silk company his wife’s family had started. The family had almost no money and only a handful of employees.”

Rebecca looked up at him. She raised a hand to her throat. “My father bought stock in the company?”

“Yes.” Kash’s troubled eyes were riveted to hers. “Fifty-one percent.”

Her breath stalled in her lungs. “The controlling interest?”

“Yes.”

“But he didn’t have any stock certificates. And he never mentioned them.”

Madame Piathip exhaled wearily. “He was a very obstinate and proud man.”

“You mean he wouldn’t take bribes from the family who’d stolen his daughter.”

“Ungracious foreigner! Don’t speak to me that way!”

Mayura was staring at them all in shock. “You mean
I’m not the heir of Vatan Silk? I’m free to do what I want?”

“You are heir to almost half the company’s stock,” Madame told her proudly. “And your father’s other child, his
barbarian
child, will never take what’s yours. I swear it.”

“I don’t want my share of the stock,” Rebecca said, and shoved the document away. She felt bone-weary and defeated, even though she’d won everything and more. Kash had let her worry and grieve over her father’s story, when the truth—even a tentative truth—would have meant the world to her. His secrecy wounded her more than ever, because this time it hurt not only him, but her. She’d thought him incapable of hurting her. “I’ll give my stock to Mayura. All I want is to be accepted by her.”

“Oh, no, you must not do this to me!” Mayura cried. She reached over and grasped Rebecca’s hands. “I don’t want to be in charge. I only enjoy designing the artwork on the silks. I’m an artist, not a businesswoman. Please, please, don’t give the stock to me!”

“I think you should give it to us,” Somsak said pompously. “We’ll take it in payment for a broken engagement.”

Kash bent his head close to Rebecca’s ear. “Keep it,” he ordered. “It’s a small fortune. You can travel, meet exciting people, do whatever makes you happy—”

“I tried that already,” she told him in a low, icy voice. Her body was stiff with rejection. “It wasn’t all I’d hoped it would be. Someone took advantage of my faith in him. I’m ready to go back to Iowa and forget everything that happened here. Except for meeting Mayura.”

Choking back tears, she looked at Mayura. “Why don’t you come to Iowa and stay with me for a few weeks? I’ll show you our father’s mementoes, and you can meet his friends. You and I can get to know each other.”

Mayura’s eyes lit up. Madame slapped a hand on the table. “I forbid it.”

Mayura looked at her with ruffled dignity. “I honor you, and I love you, but now it’s time for me to undo the damage you’ve done. I want to know my other family. I want to see the world for myself. I’m going.”

Madame Piathip looked chastised as never before. “I will take this under consideration.”

“Thank you. I would appreciate your best wishes.”

“What about our honor?” Wasun Nalinat said hotly. “We have no wedding and no business merger.”

Rebecca shook her head. “You have a partnership with Vatan Silk. I swear it. No merger, but an alliance. I’m sure Madame Piathip will do business with you. I’ll give her the controlling share of stock, if she’ll agree to that.”

Madame looked stunned. “Why? Why would you do that for me?”

“Because I want to settle the feud. Because you’re part of my family, and I take that bond seriously, even if you don’t.”

Madame’s eyes filled with tears. She bowed her head over a respectful
wai
. “I will never call you a barbarian again.”

“It is done,” Wasun Nalinat announced. “The feud is ended.”

“And I’ll go to America to visit with my sister,” Mayura said happily.

Kash stood up. “I’d like to talk to Rebecca in private, please. Excuse us.”

Rebecca nodded to the group and left the cottage at Kash’s side. They walked beyond a curve in the forest for privacy, not speaking a word during the tense journey. He stopped her with a firm hand on her arm. “I was only waiting until I had proof, before I told you everything I knew about your father and Vatan Silk. The stock agreement was that proof. Traynor brought it to me when he brought Mayura.”

“You knew about the partnership,” she accused softly.
“You
knew
my father was no art smuggler and that I’m Mayura’s blood relative. But you kept it secret.”

“To protect you, dammit. I didn’t know enough to be certain. How many times do I have to say that? I didn’t want to see you get hurt or disappointed. How could I tell you that you might have inherited a fortune, and then find it out it wasn’t true?”

“You didn’t know me well enough to realize that my father’s honor meant more to me than a stock investment?”

“Your father’s story was intimately tied up with that investment.”

“That’s not a good reason.” Her throat was on fire with restraint, and her voice shook. “Not what I’ve come to expect from you.”

“I trust my instincts. I thought I knew what was best for you. I still think I did the right thing.”

“You always believe in your secrets. I don’t want to be protected like that. I want you to trust
my
instincts. But you won’t. That’s what hurts. Until you decide to trust me, really trust me, I’ll always feel like a stranger in your life.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, because you don’t understand what or who I am. It’s wise to remember that I’m no choirboy.”

“I don’t want your brand of wisdom, then.”

She pulled away from him, her chest aching with emotion. This was the hardest moment of her life, the hardest words she’d ever had to say. “You can’t believe how much I love you. If you had faith in me, you’d know. If you can ever bring yourself to say what needs to be said, you know where to find me. I’m going to leave you. ” Tears streamed down her face.

His expression was tortured as he stared at her. “I know what’s best. I’m trying to save us both some pain.” He held out his hands to her. “I can’t share everything you want. But I don’t want to lose you.”

“You said that you’d never leave me, that I’d leave you.
Dear Lord, I didn’t believe you. But you were right. You’re making me leave. You’ve never told me that you love me. You can’t even say it now, can you?”

“Would it make you stay? Is that all it would take? To hear something you already know is true?”

She pressed her hands to her mouth to keep from crying out loud. After struggling a moment, she managed to whisper, “You won’t admit it, because you don’t want to make any promises to me.”

“How can I?” he said in a raw voice. “Go home to Iowa. Remind yourself of your real life, the people you admire, the kind of world they share with you. Those are the promises you need.”

She hugged herself to keep from breaking apart. “I need you, but not your secrets. ” He made a move to take her in his arms, but she backed away. “Can Traynor take Mayura and me to Bangkok? I want to leave.”

His arms dropped to his sides, and his face tightened. “He can take you right away. Good. That’s the best thing to do.” Devastated, she gave him a look that made him wince. “I hurt too,” he whispered, touching the center of his chest. “My whole life is wound up inside me like a chain. You don’t know how hard it is to break that hold.”

Rebecca laid a hand over his. “I thought I could break it for you. But I can’t. I’ll never be able to.”

She walked away. But she knew the bond between them was also a chain. It would reach all the way home, and hold her for the rest of her life.

Clouds came up and the wind rose. The air carried the scent of rain, and scattered drops flung themselves past her windows. Rebecca felt as bleak as the spring afternoon. The temperature dropped, and she shivered. Without Mayura to help her keep her spirits up, she wandered around the house, ignoring the work waiting on the drawing board in her studio, restless, aching with loneliness.

After four weeks of having Mayura there day and night, always talking and laughing, it was time to face reality. Mayura had gone home to Thailand. There’d been no word from Kash since the day at the cottage. Audubon had called twice to ask how she was doing, the first time saying that Kash was working out of the country, somewhere in Europe, on a new assignment.

Rebecca slumped down in a comfortable old sofa chair by her living-room window and watched the wind whip the new green leaves of the oaks in her front yard. There were no cars on the quiet residential street, a place as pretty as a postcard, with neat little houses built not long after World War II. As with her home, each had flowers and large shade trees in the yards.

She aimlessly creased a fold in the skirt of her print
sundress. Audubon’s second phone call had come yesterday. She’d just returned from taking Mayura to the airport. She and her sister had made plans to spend time together again, within a few months. Audubon had been pleased to hear it.

“You went to a lot of trouble to find her, but it seems worth it,” he said.

“A million times,” she agreed.

“Even considering the problem between you and my son?”

“I’ll never regret knowing Kash. Well,
trying
to know him.” She had struggled with a catch in her throat, though she doubted Audubon was fooled by her casual tone. “Did Kash ask you to call?”

“Not in so many words. He’ll either call you himself or not at all. He believes in suffering alone with his misery. But when I told him I’d called you the first time, he asked me a hundred questions about everything you’d said.”

“And?”

“He thinks he did the right thing by letting you go. I’m calling to tell you that he finished his work in Europe yesterday.”

Her heart pounded. “Do you think he’ll come here?”

“I don’t know. What will you say if he does?”

“That nothing has changed. That missing him is the worst pain I’ve ever felt.”

“Why don’t you get on a plane and come to Virginia?”

“And confront him in his own home? I couldn’t. He’s too private. He’d only resent me.”

“You seem to think he’s made of stone. He’s not. No one has ever turned him inside out the way you have.”

“It’s mutual.”

“Come to Virginia. Stay with my wife and me. Our estate makes good neutral territory for a meeting with Kash.”

“I can’t. Not because of pride—I’d do anything if I thought he’d open up to me. But I won’t track him down
just to hear him say that we don’t belong together.” She was crying now. “I’ll always love him, and I’m not giving up. But the decision has to be his.”

Audubon had sighed and said something about watching Kash waste years on regrets. He had promised to keep in touch with her.

Rebecca’s mind wandered dully from that conversation to the windswept spring day again. She felt like a trapped animal in a neat, clean, respectable cage. Hugging herself, she went to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee, but decided it had no appeal. She tried to read a book, but her thoughts kept going to Kash. Every fiber of her body and mind called out to him. Finally she climbed into bed, fully clothed, and curled up facing an open window, staring into the rain, which now came down in a steady trickle. The air smelled like loneliness to her.

Lost in despair, she didn’t hear a car pull up by her front walk or the footsteps on her porch. The sudden sound of heavy knocking on her front door made her jump.

When she went into the living room, she looked through the door’s glass panes and halted, stunned. Kash.

She flung the door open and stared up at him. The wind billowed his long black raincoat and tousled his hair. The open coat revealed a sleek black pullover and black trousers. He even wore black shoes. His face was lean, sharp, and grim. His eyes were riveted to her from the moment she opened the door. They glittered with unhappiness.

“I waited until Mayura left,” he said brusquely. “Then I had to come to see you and tie up the loose ends.”

Rebecca realized that her hands had risen to her throat in shock. She was speechless, and when she finally found her voice, it was hoarse with disbelief. “You’ve been watching me?”

“Yes, my secretive black soul had someone keep track
of Mayura’s visit. I didn’t want to interfere with your time together. But now she’s gone, and I want to finish what you started in Thailand.”