Teresa Medeiros (37 page)

Cop jerked his head toward the bathroom. “I’ll wait in the living room while you two shower.”

They both blushed at that neither wanting to be the first to meet the other’s eyes.

“That won’t be necessary,” Tristan growled. “We’ll be right there.”

Peeling back the sheet, he threw his legs over the side of the bed and staggered into the bathroom, as unabashed in his nakedness as Michelangelo’s
David
. Arian dragged the sheet
over
her head.

Cop beamed down at her shrouded form. “I really should have warned you. He’s an awful grump until he’s had his first eight cups of coffee.”

The inner sanctum of Tristan’s lab was exactly as Arian remembered it. White. Sterile. Deserted. She wryly noted that the hole she’d blasted in the floor with her amateur lightning bolt had been repaired.

She had forsaken the colorful suits Tristan had bought her when they were engaged in favor of black leggings and a black cowl sweater. If she was still on trial, then she wanted to look the part. The image of accused witch was complete, all the way down to the black cat nestled in the crook of her arm. Tristan’s stormy glower warned her that he wasn’t completely oblivious to her symbolism.

Cop thrust a cup of steaming coffee into Tristan’s hand before shepherding them over to a long counter built to double as an impromptu conference table. Arian was only mildly surprised to find Sven admiring his reflection in the shiny countertop.

Tristan scowled at him. “Didn’t I fire you?”

Sven snapped to attention, brushing back his silky mane. “Yes, sir.”

“Good. Then you’re hired.”

Arian sat, depositing the sleeping kitten in her lap. Tristan nursed his coffee while Cop paced around the counter, obviously too excited to sit still. It was precisely that excess of nervous energy that made Arian suspect he must have had even less sleep than she and Tristan in the past forty-eight hours.

“When I got back to my loft the other night,” he said, “I couldn’t concentrate and I couldn’t sleep. So I finally came back to the Tower and forced Montgomery to let me monitor his experiments on the amulet.”

Tristan took another sip of the coffee. “That’s what I get for not making you turn in your ID badge. I would have ordered Sven to toss you out on your ear, but he was too busy playing knight in shining armor to my runaway bride.”

They all three glared at him and he subsided, gazing sulkily into his coffee.

Copperfield slapped a thin folder down in front of him. “Here are Montgomery’s results.”

Tristan opened the folder and examined its contents. It didn’t take long. His disgruntled expression revealed his frustration. “There’s nothing here. The carbon dating on both the necklace and the broom yielded inconclusive results. My researchers in Massachusetts are being forced to sift through three centuries of obscure documents, most of them too fragile to be handled by human hands. There’s absolutely nothing here to prove”—he spared Arian a cautious glance—“anything.”

Cop leaned over his shoulder to tap the bottom of the page. “Except for this.”

Tristan read, “ ‘The microprocessor was encased in an unidentified alloy …’ ” He cast Copperfield a helpless glance. “So?”

“Gordon Montgomery has memorized the chemical
formulas of every alloy known to man. If he can’t identify it, then it hasn’t been discovered yet.”

Tristan rose and began to pace in a counterclockwise circle. Arian grew dizzy each time his path bisected Copperfield’s. She shifted in her chair, eliciting a sleepy grunt of protest from Lucifer.

“So you’re suggesting this alloy could only be from the future,” Tristan said.

“Precisely! And if Arthur Finch could travel to the future, then he could travel—”

“To the past,” Tristan finished for him. They both wheeled around, meeting face-to-face.

Arian’s heart began to whisper a melody of hope, but she still felt compelled to remind them of the theory’s failings. “That doesn’t explain how my mother could have stolen Warlock from Arthur Finch twenty years ago.”

Copperfield held up a finger, riveting them all. “Not twenty years. Three hundred and twenty-eight years. Use your imagination, Tristan. It may be a little rusty, but I know you used to have one.”

Tristan sank back into his chair, rubbing his unshaven chin.

Cop said, “Suppose Arthur traveled to sixteen sixty-nine ten years ago, lost Warlock to some irate hooker he’d stiffed for the bill—sorry, Arian—then spent the next twenty years searching for it.”

“Would it have taken him that long to locate this woman? Or her child?” Tristan asked.

Cop nodded. “Possibly. You have to remember that this was before the days of mass communication. He couldn’t exactly slap her picture on a milk carton. And at the time of their encounter, she wasn’t some renowned courtesan. She was simply a common—”

“Whore,” Arian gently provided.

Cop winced. “I sincerely doubt that Arthur wanted to draw attention to himself by reporting the theft to the local authorities.”

Tristan nodded, conceding the point and encouraging Cop to continue.

“Even if Arthur had found the necklace, that wouldn’t mean he would have had to return to the present exactly twenty years after he left. He could have programmed Warlock to deliver him right back to nineteen eighty-five. He’d be twenty years older, but you’d still be that same shy, gullible boy. Or he could travel back to nineteen sixty-three and prevent you from ever being born.”

Arian shuddered and Tristan reached across the table to take her hand.

Cop’s gaze drifted between the two of them, his voice losing its edge as if to lessen the impact of the coming blow. “If Arthur’s been stuck in the seventeenth century for twenty years, his daughter has had ample time to come of age.”

Daughter
.

The word had such a grim finality to it. Tristan kept hold of her hand while he studied her face as if searching for some elusive hint of his old friend. It was not a pleasant feeling. Although Arian had entertained frequent fantasies about the father she’d never met, she could derive little comfort at the prospect of being the daughter of a man her husband despised.

When Tristan drew back his hand, her heart did a painful little backflip.

He looked at Copperfield, then at Sven. “Would you please excuse us?” The men filed out quietly, leaving them alone.

Arian was the first to break the awkward silence. “Did you find a family resemblance? If you’d like, you can check beneath my hair for horns.”

Tristan offered her a ghost of a smile. “If you were hiding a forked tail, I think I would have noticed it last night.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

He simply gazed at her, all that had passed between them in that misty bathroom darkening his eyes.

She sifted her fingers through Lucifer’s silky fur. Keeping her voice light was becoming more of a struggle. “Copperfield failed to point out the obvious. If I am Arthur’s daughter, isn’t there a chance that I’ve been in league with him all along?”

“Have you?”

Arian had wanted Tristan to laugh, to scoff aloud at the ridiculous notion, not fix her with that level stare of his and ask her the one question she should never have had to answer.

She bowed her head, no longer knowing if last night had been about love, revenge, or magic. Even if she still possessed the amulet, there was no spell to make Tristan believe in her, no spell to erase the shadow of suspicion from his eyes. His trust would have to be given freely. She would not beg for it.

Scooping Lucifer into her arms, she rose to her feet.

Tristan’s face betrayed his bewildered anguish as he reached across the table and caught her hand, his grip rough with desperation. “I need time, Arian. Can you just give me a little time to get used to the idea?”

Arian smiled down at him through a veil of tears. “Take all the time you need. I’ve certainly got more than I can use.”

She gently withdrew her hand and slipped from the room, feeling Tristan’s tortured gaze follow her every move.

Arian huddled on the settee, her fingers buried in Lucifer’s soft fur, and watched the shadows of twilight creep across the living room. The salad Sven had sent up nearly two hours ago sat untouched on the coffee table.

She’d never felt more like a prisoner, not even when she’d been jailed in that tiny shed in Gloucester.
She could not bear to go into the bedroom with its rumpled sheets that smelled of Tristan’s cologne and the leisurely spell of loving they’d shared at dawn. The bathroom was even worse with its scattering of damp towels and evocative memories.

Cruel doubts spun and darted through her mind, torturing her. What if Tristan didn’t come? What if his loathing for Arthur Finch was stronger than his love for her? What if he would never be able to look at her without seeing the echo of Arthur’s sneer in her smile? Perhaps he feared spending the rest of his life casting her sidelong glances, wondering when she was going to plunge the knife into his back.

It would not be easy for him, she knew. He had never trusted anyone completely, not even himself. And she was asking him to trust her with a treasure so precious and fragile he’d been hoarding it ever since his mother had left him on the steps of that orphanage—his heart.

Arian reached automatically for the amulet as she had done so often in times of trouble. Her hand closed on empty air. The emerald was gone, but if she had learned anything in the past few weeks, it was that the world was brimming with magic.

Not the superficial sort of magic children dreamed of with wish-granting genies popping out of bottles and lonely beasts turned into princes by a kiss, but a magic born of true love and hope for the morrow and the grudging smile of a man to whom smiles did not come easily.

Bowing her head and squeezing her eyes shut, Arian wished, harder than she’d ever wished when she was a little girl. She no longer wanted to summon some noble prince to her arms, but simply a man with all of his flaws and strengths.

Her man.

The elevator chimed. Arian jerked her head up, almost daring to believe it the tolling of some celestial
bell. Her heart soared in anticipation as she settled Lucifer on the pillows and jumped to her feet.

She was at the elevator doors before they could even begin to part, wanting the first thing Tristan saw to be her welcoming smile.

She was still hovering there, that tender smile trembling on her lips, when Sven’s limp body rolled over her feet.

Tristan was standing in the courtyard when the feeling of utter calm came stealing over him. He had been standing there for a long time, hands in pockets, gazing at the ice-clotted fountain, yet feeling no cold. It was so quiet he could hear the snow falling, each flake muffled against the ermine cloak spread over the courtyard. The serene silence gave the desolate wonderland the air of a tomb, a paradise fallen.

One minute, he was trapped in a vise of indecision, the next, all his doubts were banished, his fears soothed. His spirits rose, free to soar for the first time in a decade.

He adored his wife. She adored him. They would work out the rest. It didn’t matter if Arian was a time-traveling Puritan or Vlad Dracula’s daughter. All he knew was that he wanted to spend the rest of his life proving his faith in her.

He threw back his shoulders, brushing the snow from them. He would bundle Arian into the limo tonight, he decided with a smile. He would offer his chauffeur the rest of the week off and drive her to Connecticut himself. He would book a room at some rustic country inn and give her the honeymoon she had always deserved. Perhaps if the snow thawed and their cozy bed didn’t prove an insurmountable enticement, they would even go out hunting for land. Surely together they could find a little chunk of heaven to build their dreams upon.

He turned toward the bank of glass elevators, desperately eager to join his bride.

Cop stood there, clutching a cordless phone in his white-knuckled hand. Tristan’s own heart seized up at the sight of his friend’s bloodless face.

Cop held the phone out to him. “It’s Wite Lize. He wants to trade Arian for Warlock.”

Ninety-six stories above the courtyard on the roof of the Tower lurked a far more brutal world with no gently falling snow or crisp winter breeze. The wind here was a roaring, battering dragon, whipping its tail so hard against the Tower you would almost swear you could feel it shifting beneath your feet.

As soon as Tristan burst through the fire door, he realized the truth. Hell wasn’t hot. Hell was standing on the roof of a New York skyscraper in a subzero wind chill with snow being driven into your eyes like slivers of glass. Satan was a dragon who breathed ice, not fire, and for a bone-numbing minute, as Tristan sucked that glacial blast of brimstone into his lungs, he thought he was going to die.

But with his next breath, he learned that hell was the sight of Arian standing there on the edge of that roof with no coat and no shoes, just Wite Lize’s frail old body to shield her from the dragon’s wrath. He would have almost sworn he could hear her teeth chattering.

His blood boiled with rage. He wanted to howl with
it. Wanted to march across the roof, snatch his wife from Wite Lize’s scrawny arms, and slap the old fool senseless. But the snub-nosed revolver pressed against Arian’s jaw froze him more effectively than any dragon’s breath.