Teresa Medeiros (32 page)

“You are aware that fraud is a crime. It would be well within my employer’s rights to call the police and have you arrested. If he should choose to press charges, Miss Whitewood, you could be facing not only extensive fines, but possible imprisonment of up to five to ten years.” He fixed her with a basset hound’s gloomy stare, looking as if his own heart were breaking beneath the burden of her noncompliance.

She didn’t even blink. “My name is not Whitewood. It’s Lennox. Mrs. Tristan Lennox.”

He smoked in silence for several minutes before stubbing out the cigarette in the bottom of his Styrofoam cup. “Perhaps I’m not making myself clear. When was the last time you made contact with Arthur Finch?”

She simply glared at him. Mascara mingled with the smudges of exhaustion beneath her eyes. Her tiara of silk blooms had long ago listed to the left, freeing limp tendrils of hair to spill over her face. Her wedding gown was crumpled and stained, her shoulders slumped with fatigue. Watching from behind the two-way mirror in the Security Command Center control booth, Tristan was forced to flip off the hidden microphone and close his eyes, no longer able to bear her fierce and unyielding beauty.

As his strength ebbed, so did his resolve. Behind his aching eyelids, he saw Arian as she had looked the moment after she’d hurled the lightning bolt at his head. Her hair had tumbled around her shoulders like a little girl’s and her crestfallen expression had captured his heart. He’d denied it to himself, but even then he’d known that the sweet, dark longing that quickened his pulse each time he looked into her trusting eyes could not be slaked with another woman. Sweet, tantalizing Arian, in his hands, but forever out of his reach. His dreams had been alight with her until the dawn.

But the dawn had brought with it an even more
bewildering set of doubts. He didn’t want to believe the worst of Arian, but experience had taught him that cynicism might be his only defense against crushing disillusionment. It was all beginning to make a sort of horrible sense. By respecting Arian’s privacy, he may very well have set himself up for the most vicious betrayal of all.

After all, she was a woman with no family, no past, and no legal identity. How difficult would it have been for Arthur to enlist her in his scheme? To outfit her with a disguised and enhanced version of Warlock and send her to infiltrate his camp? To arrange a clever little accident after which his grieving widow would inherit his entire fortune to be divided with her lover after a discreet period of mourning had passed?

His eyes flew open in an attempt to banish the taunting vision. Could he truly have been so blind? He had suspected Arian of conspiring with every lowlife in New York except the most obvious one. The one who knew he’d always been a sucker for a hard-luck story and a pair of big, brown eyes. Eyes that hadn’t shed a single tear since her husband had had her escorted away from her own wedding reception before the shocked eyes of their guests.

Praying that Arian would say something, anything at all, to prove him wrong, he reached down and flipped the microphone back on. The private detective had shifted from accusing to tender, pressing a fresh cup of coffee into Arian’s trembling hands before squatting down to peer into her chalky face. “Miss Whitewood, do you have any idea what would happen to a pretty little girl like you in a state correctional facility?”

“Shit! I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

The vehement oath reminded Tristan that he wasn’t alone in the narrow control booth. Copperfield, the author of said oath, sprawled on a stool at the end of the counter while Sven leaned against the back wall,
as stalwart as a California redwood. Tristan tried not to look at the exhausted kitten sleeping in his brawny arms.

“Maybe you’ve got something you’d like to confess,” Tristan suggested. “Have you been filching paper clips again? Forget to drop a quarter in the coffee-fund jar?”

Copperfield was no more amused than he was. “I’d confess to shooting Kennedy from the grassy knoll if it would shut Levinson up. How the hell can she stand it?”

“The door’s not locked. She can leave anytime she likes.” Tristan drained the cold coffee from the bottom of his own Styrofoam cup, savoring its bitterness.

“And did you bother to tell her that?” When Tristan averted his eyes, Cop said, “I didn’t think so.”

Tristan was thankful the booth was dimly lit. He’d allowed Cop to be the mirror to his soul for too damn long. He might be able to hide his own anguish behind an icy façade, but it would be reflected clearly in his friend’s eloquent face.

Cop watched the tableau beyond the glass with the helpless fascination of a driver slowing down to gape at the bloody aftermath of an auto accident. Unable to look away despite his shame.

“Do you now or have you ever had any contact with a man by the name of Arthur Finch?”

Arian folded her arms on the table, then dropped her head onto them as if it had simply grown too heavy for her slender neck to support. Someone behind them made a dismayed noise. Tristan had no way of knowing if it was Sven or the cat.

He jabbed a silver button, activating the intercom between the chambers. “That will be quite enough, Mr. Levinson.”

Arian didn’t even stir when the detective and his hangdog expression vacated the room, leaving her huddled at the foot of the long table.

Cop dragged a hand over his mouth. “What now?
Thumbscrews? The rack? Some other hired thug to play good cop to Levinson’s bad one?”

“Levinson
was
the good cop,” Tristan replied, the grim twist of his lips making Copperfield look as if he wished he had a spare pair of thumbscrews in his pocket. Tristan rose from the stool, confirming his friend’s worst suspicions. “Sven?”

“Yes, sir.”

Tristan could not tell if the Norwegian’s voice was laden with regret or reproach, nor could he afford to care. “Get that damn cat out of here.”

Arian cradled her aching head on her arms, wishing desperately for a hot bath, a soft bed, and the tender solace of her husband’s arms. A muffled groan escaped her as she reminded herself bitterly that wishing was as futile as longing for Tristan.

She possessed no supernatural powers. She was not, and had never been, a witch. Her magic had been nothing but a technological parlor trick, a cruel hoax that had preyed upon her childish dreams and deluded her into believing her own ridiculous fancies. A hoax that had stretched across three centuries to make fools of them all.

Beware the warlock
.

She had refused to heed Wite Lize’s warning until it was too late and now they were all paying the price. Her grief at losing her faith in magic paled next to the agony of knowing that Tristan believed she had deliberately betrayed him. Her breath caught in a strangled sob.

The door swung open with a muted click. She didn’t have to lift her head to know who was standing there, but she did anyway.

Her husband had erased all traces of their union, changing into a pair of jeans and a gray cable-knit sweater. The faded denim molded itself to his hips and thighs and the inviting weave of the sweater made Arian
want to bury her face against his chest and weep out her misery.

Copperfield slunk into the room behind him.

Tristan folded his arms over his chest, fixing her with a level stare. “Do you now or have you ever had any contact with a man named—”

“No!” Arian cried, coming to her feet. All the passion she’d kept suppressed during Levinson’s endless interrogation boiled to the surface. “I never spoke with him. I never met him. I never even knew he existed until Wite Lize told me about him yesterday!” Yesterday already seemed an eternity away.

Tristan tossed a glance over his shoulder at Copperfield. “Methinks the witch doth protest too much.”

“Don’t call me that,” Arian said fiercely, throwing herself back in the chair.

“What should I call you, then?” Tristan shot back, the rawness of his voice betraying both his desperate need to believe her and his fear of doing so. “Is Arian even your real name?”

Copperfield sank into a chair on the opposite side of the table in a futile attempt to stay out of the line of fire.

“Please, Arian,” Tristan whispered. “Convince me that I’m wrong.”

As Arian studied her husband’s imploring features, she realized she might have only one chance to acquit herself. One chance to salvage her dreams and prove him worthy of the hope she still clung to.

“My name is Arian Whitewood,” she said softly, adding “Lennox” just for the petty pleasure of watching Tristan flinch. “I was born in a small village in northern France in the year of our Lord sixteen sixty-nine.”

It was Tristan’s turn to sink into a chair. He chose the one farthest from her. “Go on.”

Arian did. Keeping her voice painstakingly free of emotion, she told him about the years she’d spent with her grandmama in that sylvan forest, the grueling voyage
across the seas to join her stepfather, those dark, lonely days in the Colonies. Her weary voice grew even more hoarse, but she pressed on, concluding with the persecution that had resulted in her exile from Gloucester and her haphazard flight across the centuries into his waiting arms.

When she’d croaked out the final word of her extraordinary tale, he sat in silence for several minutes, his face shielded by his hand. Arian sat up straighter, daring to dream, daring to hope. But the flicker of embarrassed pity in Copperfield’s eyes crushed that hope an instant before Tristan’s laughter came rolling out, black and mirthless in the sterile room. Arian realized too late that her improbable story had finally convinced him she was truly a fraud.

He rose to pace around the table, his scornful travesty of a smile wounding Arian more deeply than all the affronts that had come before it. “So now you’ve gone from bumbling witch to time-traveling Puritan. Was that the best alibi you could come up with? Your pathetic amnesia story was a hell of a lot more convincing and nobody believed it.”

Arian glared at him. The “bumbling” stung. Even now. “ ’Tis not an alibi. ’Tis the truth.”

He paced behind her chair, torturing Arian with a whiff of his aftershave. Wistful tears welled in her eyes, but she struggled to blink them back before he reentered her line of vision.

“Your charming fiction failed to explain one thing. How did Warlock end up three hundred years in the past? Plainly enhanced and embedded in an emerald necklace draped around your lovely little neck.”

“I don’t know! I’m just as baffled as you are.”

“Well, then, why don’t we start with the necklace?” He planted both palms on the table and fixed her with the unblinking gaze notorious for sending his business rivals scurrying under conference tables. “Where did you get it?”

Arian averted her eyes, troubled by a flicker of shame. “My mother gave it to me.”

Tristan straightened. “And who gave it to her?”

Arian twisted the crumpled folds of her train in her hands before mumbling, “An admirer.”

Copperfield sank even lower into his chair, his face shadowed by misery.

Tristan’s footfalls were utterly silent as he came around the table to stand behind Arian, near enough for her to feel the heat radiating from his body. She tried not to shudder when his powerful hands closed over her shoulders, bit her lip to keep from begging when his fingertips traced the delicate arch of her collarbone with unforgivable tenderness.

Copperfield stirred in his chair and Arian knew why he was there. Not to gloat, but to ensure that Tristan didn’t do anything he might regret later. Like strangle his bride on their wedding night.

Her husband’s voice did not so much threaten as beguile. “I know a little about these Puritans you claim as your contemporaries, my dear. I know that accused witches who chose to keep their silence were usually stripped and pressed to death with heavy stones.”

Arian closed her eyes. Levinson’s cruelty had been far easier to bear than Tristan’s. At least it had been overt, not couched in malicious endearments and taunting caresses that only served to remind her of all she had lost.

When she opened her eyes, they were bleak with resignation. “She stole it. My mother stole the necklace.”

Tristan paced to the other side of the table, looking grimly satisfied to have at least caught her in half a lie.

Arian forced herself to stop wringing her train. “My mother was a courtesan.”

“A whore,” Tristan amended dryly. “How fitting.”

Arian flashed him a smoldering glance, but his sulky mouth did not betray even a twitch of contrition. “When I was a child, she was the pampered darling of
many a nobleman at the king’s court, but in her younger days, she wasn’t quite as discriminating.” Arian lowered her eyes, stumbling over a truth she’d never confessed to anyone. “She accepted an assignation with a handsome, charming young actor only to discover after their liaison that he was penniless. They quarreled bitterly, but before she stormed off, she managed to filch the necklace from his purse and drop it down her bodice.” Since Copperfield’s was the only remotely amiable face in the room, Arian directed her defense at him. “She didn’t really consider it stealing. She truly believed he owed it to her.”

“For services rendered,” Tristan drawled. “A touching story, but that still doesn’t explain how the necklace came to be in your possession.”

“She caught me pawing through her jewel box one night when I was a little girl. By then she’d amassed quite a collection.” The bitter note in Arian’s voice left little doubt as to how Lily had earned her treasures. “Golden girdles, waterfalls of diamonds, ropes of pearls. When she came in and caught me fumbling through her things, I thought she was going to strike me. But she just laughed that tinkling laugh of hers, fished the necklace from the bottom of the chest, and tossed it to me.” Arian’s voice subsided to a whisper. “She said the worthless trinket was the only inheritance I’d ever receive from my father.”

Arian lifted her eyes to find Tristan gazing at her with breathtaking intensity. For an imperceptible instant, his façade cracked, granting her a harrowing glimpse of his own anguish. An anguish that tempted him to believe her, yet refused to let him do so. An anguish that made her ache to reach out to him, even knowing that he would only push her away before she could do his wary heart any more harm.