The Saint (6 page)

And then she was gone, the tornado sweeping away as unpredictably as it had arrived.

Kieran looked at Claire and sighed.

“I don't think I can get out of it,” he said, finally getting around to tucking in the other side of his shirt. “It's one of those things. She's been a friend of the family forever, and when my mother died she pretty much took over raising me.” He began to work once more on his cuff link. “I promised her months ago that I'd act as host.”

Claire nodded. “Of course. I understand. I'll just go to the hotel, and we'll talk tomorrow.”

“No.” He put out his hand. “She's right. You should come with me.”

She frowned. He had to be kidding. “To Aurora York's party?”

“Sure. It's just the Ringmaster nomination foolishness. It'll be crazy, but we may get a few minutes to talk. Even if we don't, I can take you to the hotel afterward, and we'll have lots of time to talk on the way.”

“I don't think so.” She couldn't imagine herself there. It was the kind of high society snob-fest that no one would have dreamed of inviting her to two years ago. Poor young teachers from the wrong side
of the tracks were not considered for admission to the Ringmistress court. “We can talk tomorrow.”

“Claire, please. There's so much we haven't said, so much I haven't explained. I have a feeling I've expressed myself very badly. If you leave now, before you understand my position, you might—”

She laughed roughly. She understood his position, all right. He was dismayed that she was having his baby, horrified at her proposal that they cobble together even a short-term marriage. He couldn't have been much clearer than that. Tomorrow he might phrase it all more diplomatically, but she wondered if there was much chance that the underlying emotions would change.

Still, she couldn't give up yet. She had to believe that his conscience would be strong enough to overrule his emotions. He might eventually do the right thing—there was a reason they called him St. Kieran, after all.

He touched her arm. “I don't want you to be alone right now. I don't want to you to start feeling—to start considering—”

She knew what he was trying to say. “You don't need to worry. I intend to keep this child whether you agree to my plan or not. I won't run away, and I won't do anything stupid.”

He tilted his head and smiled at her. It was his first genuine smile of the evening, and it kicked off another bout of seesawing hormones. She swallowed hard and looked away.

“I know you won't.” He took her chin in his fingers and turned her face back to his. “But we have to start somewhere, don't we? If you can't spend a
single evening as my date, how can you possibly contemplate an entire year as my wife?”

 

“S
O IF YOU WERE TO ASK ME
,” Roddy Hartland said, grinning as he joined Kieran at the patio bar, “I'd say some sneaky old Heyday hound dog has been keeping secrets from his best friend.”

Kieran followed Roddy's gaze to the other side of the back yard, where Aurora was introducing Claire Strickland to several elegantly dressed middle-age ladies.

“I'll be careful not to ask you, then,” he said, plucking a beer from the white-draped table and walking to the edge of the sparkling blue pool. He didn't mean to be rude, but he wasn't in the mood for Roddy's irrepressible curiosity.

Practically from the moment they arrived, Aurora had confiscated Claire and trotted her around as if she were the new discovery of the social season. Kieran hadn't had a minute alone with Claire to talk about anything personal. Not that he was sure what he'd say anyhow. His brain felt like a downed electrical wire, twisting and sparking randomly, without making any useful connections at all.

It was a little like walking through a nightmare, although, if it were, at least he could hang on to the distant hope that maybe he'd wake up soon.

But it all felt real enough. The people buzzing around, talking and laughing. The musicians playing. The anxiety in the air as every eligible young man and woman wondered if they'd be nominated for the Ringmaster Court.

God, did things like that still matter to anyone? To Kieran, it all seemed like something happening on
another planet. As he stared down, a summer breeze smudged the pool's surface, blurring the reflection of tiki torches. He'd like to be under that water right now, where no sound could reach him. He'd like to swim laps until he was so tired he couldn't think.

Roddy reappeared with a beer. “Yessir,” he said playfully, “the boy's been keeping secrets. And a mighty pretty little secret she is, too.”

Kieran drank his beer silently. He didn't know how much alcohol he was going to need to take the edge off this irrational panic, but it was definitely more than he'd had so far.

Roddy leaned against the silver arch of the climb-out ladder. Claire was just across from them now, being entertained by two of Heyday's most courtly good old boys. She actually appeared to be laughing.

“So was she always this fine?” Roddy tilted his head. “Why didn't I notice her, you know, before? Was she always such a knockout?”

In spite of everything, Kieran had to smile. Roddy would always be Roddy, wouldn't he? On the elementary-school playground, Roddy, the science teacher's six-year-old son wearing hand-me-down Levi's, had walked right up to Kieran, the millionaire's seven-year-old son, and shoved him. “You may be rich, McClintock,” he'd said, “but I can set off a stink bomb that'll get us out of class for hours.”

They'd been best friends ever since.

Now Roddy was rich, too. Ten years ago, some plastic conglomerate had paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars for the rights to a couple of his nutty inventions—a leftovers bag shaped like a slice of pizza, and a paper plate with its own plastic wrap attached. They'd never put his ideas into production,
but Roddy had cheerfully invested their option money and turned it into millions.

But some things never changed. Roddy still noodled around trying to invent things, he still wore cheap jeans, and he still said whatever he thought. And Kieran realized that he was damn glad there was at least one corner of his world that wasn't standing on its ear.

“Yes, she was always pretty,” Kieran said. “But now she's…”

What was the word? She was so much more than pretty. Her hair had grown a little since he saw her last, and it swung softly against her pale, fragile shoulders, catching amber lights from the torches. She looked sexy, mysterious and infinitely rare.

He shrugged. “She's grown up a lot.”

“Hell, yes, she has.” Roddy growled appreciatively. He gazed at Kieran. “So come on, tell me. Are you two seeing each other, or what? I mean, back when Stevie died, things didn't look too friendly. As I recall, when you showed up at the funeral, it took three men to keep her from clawing your eyes out.”

Kieran took a swig of beer. “I shouldn't have gone. She had asked me not to.”

“My point precisely. So how exactly did we get from there to here?”

“I'll be damned if I know, Roddy.” Kieran put his empty beer bottle on a passing waiter's tray and grabbed another one. “I'll be damned if I know.”

Roddy had another good trait. He knew when to quit. He was silent a moment, dipping the toe of his shoe in the pool. Of all the men out here, only Rod had sneakers on under his tuxedo trousers. The re
flections of the fiery torches danced crazily and then died down.

“All right,” Roddy said cheerfully. “Watch the diplomatic young man deftly change the subject. What do you hear from the long-lost brother Bryce—or the suddenly discovered brother Tyler? Or is the subject of brotherhood off limits, too?”

Kieran shrugged. “I don't hear much. Neither one of them seems to be terribly interested in checking out the inheritance.”

Roddy nodded. “Waiting until everything's probated, no doubt. Easier that way to take the money and run.”

Only Roddy could get away with being quite that blunt, but Kieran knew that the crazy McClintock soap opera had been entertaining Heyday gossips for decades. Even so, the revelations in Anderson's will had been particularly explosive.

Everyone had always known that Anderson had plenty of wives—five to be exact. Bryce was Anderson's oldest son, the child of Anderson's first wife and indisputably the black sheep of the family. Anderson had divorced Bryce's mother when the boy was only about four and had married Kieran's mother before the ink on the divorce papers was dry.

With his embittered mother, Bryce had moved away from Heyday, returning sullenly every summer merely to demonstrate his contempt for old Anderson and his new half brother Kieran, too.

Finally, the summer Bryce was eighteen, he'd ticked off old Anderson for good, and no one in Heyday had seen Bryce since—about fourteen years now. So it was a mild surprise to discover that the eldest
McClintock boy hadn't actually been disinherited at all, as Anderson had threatened.

But the most stunning revelation was the existence of a third heir. Kieran had turned thirty this year, and so had Tyler Balfour, an illegitimate McClintock son no one, including Kieran, had ever heard of. Anderson had never married Tyler Balfour's mother—even though he seemed to marry just about everyone else he slept with—and Anderson's lawyer had dryly explained why at the reading of the will.

While divorcing Bryce's mother, Anderson had found himself with two pregnant mistresses at once, Charlotte Balfour and Colleen, Kieran's mother. He couldn't marry both of them, obviously. He picked Colleen, which left Kieran the golden, beloved son, and Tyler Balfour an unacknowledged bastard.

It had taken Kieran a while to get over the sense of confused betrayal. He had loved his father. They had been close. But apparently not close enough to learn all old Anderson's secrets. Not close enough to be told about his own half brother.

He looked over at Roddy now. Roddy never really looked shocked by Kieran's family, which was soothing.

“Bryce has at least telephoned,” Kieran said. “But the infamous Tyler Balfour seems to be taking his own sweet time getting down here. We're not even sure he's going to accept the inheritance.”

Roddy laughed. “Yeah, right. I'd like to meet the man who could turn down—how many billion is it?—and the chance to be lord and master of his very own town.” He tipped his bottle Kieran's way. “Except you, of course. You're the only saint I ever
knew who actually doesn't seem to enjoy being disgustingly rich.”

Kieran smiled. “It's okay. It's not as cool as knowing how to build a stink bomb or anything.”

They sat in companionable silence for a few seconds while Kieran finished another beer.

“You know,” he said suddenly, “it's damn strange what it does to you, growing up in a family like mine. Your sense of what's normal really gets screwed up, you know?”

Roddy looked over, eyebrows raised. But after he looked at Kieran's face, he hid his surprise and merely nodded, as if they had this kind of conversation every day.

Kieran wasn't quite sure why he had decided to confide in Roddy. Maybe it was thinking about those early playground days, when everything had seemed so simple.

Or maybe it was the four beers in forty-five minutes.

“My father was married five times.”

Roddy nodded. This was hardly news to him. “Salty old dog.”

“He traded in wives like other people trade in cars. I never knew what to call them. I never knew whether to bother caring about them, for fear they wouldn't stick around.”

“Yeah,” Roddy said. “And the last few were so hot, too. I'll bet that was weird. Although I have to tell you, having the same old mom-monster chewing on your ass all the time isn't much fun, either.”

Kieran smiled one more time. “Your mom is one of a kind.” Mrs. Hartland had always been involved in one environmental campaign or another. When
they were in middle-school, she'd humiliated Roddy by chaining herself to a building Kieran's father planned to tear down. It had worked. That building now housed the
Heyday Herald.

When Roddy got rich, he had put her through law school. She was a big-time environmental lobbyist in D.C. now, and she still sent Roddy lectures through the mail.

Kieran watched Claire talking to Mallory Rackham, who owned the local bookstore. He had forgotten they'd been friends, back in the old days. He'd also forgotten how beautiful Claire's smile was.

“Anyhow, I swore I'd be different. I vowed I'd never have a string of ex-wives. Or kids I didn't raise myself. A hundred times, a
thousand
…I swore I'd never, ever be like my dad.”

Kieran shut his eyes. Roddy knew all this already. Best friends heard a lot of things through the years. But it was almost as if Kieran were talking to himself.

“You know I loved him, but—one wife, one family, that was what I wanted, no matter what. I vowed my kids would never wonder who was sleeping in dad's bed this time. Or what stranger might show up at the door and say he was your brother.”

Roddy must have been getting a little sloshed himself. He nodded emphatically and pointed his beer at the sky.

“Hear, hear. Defy your fate, St. Kieran. Stand up and show them you care this much—” he snapped his fingers “—for the Curse of Old Playboy McClintock. No expensive treks to divorce court. No secret girlfriends with secret babies. No illegitimate children popping out of the woodwork—”

No one ever said Roddy was stupid. Somewhere during his silly monologue, he must have realized that Kieran wasn't playing along. He paused. The silence lengthened.

Suddenly he scowled, obviously thinking so hard it hurt. He lowered his beer and turned to Kieran.

“Oh, shit.”

Kieran didn't answer.

Roddy placed his beer carefully on the pool coping. “Oh, my God,” he said. “You're not. I mean she's not—”