Читать книгу Paper Rose - Diana Palmer - Страница 7

Present day

Washington, D.C.

Cameras were flashing all around Cecily Peterson. Microphones wielded by acrobatic television journalists were being thrust in her face as she walked quite calmly out of the fund-raising dinner that Senator Matt Holden was hosting.

Behind her, a furious tall man with a long braid of black hair was waiting for a tureen of expensive crab bisque to complete its trip down the once-spotless dress slacks of his tuxedo before he tried to move. The diamond-festooned blond socialite with him was glaring daggers at Cecily’s back.

Cecily kept walking. “Film at eleven,” she murmured to no one in particular, and with a bright little smile.

She didn’t really look like a woman whose entire life had crashed and burned in the space of a few minutes. Her life was like Tate Winthrop’s tuxedo—in ruins. Everything was going to change now.

She went to the big black utility vehicle that her date had driven her here in, to wait for him to join her. Her high heels were damp from the grass. She could feel her medium blond hair coming down from its high, complicated coiffure. The street and traffic lights were blurs of color to her pale green eyes because she wasn’t wearing her glasses and she couldn’t use contacts. She had on a black dress with tiny little straps, and the black shawl she was wearing with it didn’t provide much warmth. She couldn’t get into the vehicle without the key, but that didn’t matter. She was too numb to feel the chill of the night air anyway, or care about the busy Washington, D.C., street traffic behind her. She was furious that she’d had to learn the truth about her financial status and her supposed educational grant from that dyed blonde who Tate Winthrop was escorting around town these days. Her mind wandered back to a day two years ago, when everything had seemed so perfect, and her dreams had hovered on the cusp of fulfillment….

The airport in Tulsa was crowded. Cecily juggled her carry-on bag with a duffel bag full of equipment, scanning the milling rush around her for Tate Winthrop. She was wearing her usual field gear: boots, a khaki suit with a safari jacket and a bush hat hanging behind her head by a rawhide string. Her natural blond hair was in a neat braided bun atop her head, and through her big-lensed glasses, her green eyes twinkled with anticipation. It wasn’t often that Tate Winthrop asked her to help him on a case. It was an occasion.

Suddenly there he was, towering over the people around him. He was Lakota Sioux, and looked it. He had high cheekbones and big black, deep-set eyes under a jutting brow. His mouth was wide and sexy, with a thin upper lip and a chiseled lower one and he had perfect teeth. His hair was straight and jet-black; it fell to his waist when he wasn’t wearing it in a braid, as he was now. He was lean and striking, muscular without being obvious. And he’d once worked for a secret government agency. Of course, Cecily wasn’t supposed to know that; or that he was consulting with them on the sly right now in a hush-hush murder case in Oklahoma.

“Where’s your luggage?” Tate asked in his deep, crisp voice.

She gave him a pert look, taking in the elegance of his vested suit. “Where’s your field gear?” she countered with the ease of long acquaintance.

Tate had saved her from the unsavory advances of a drunken stepfather when she was just seventeen. He’d taken her to his mother on the Wapiti Ridge Sioux Reservation near the Black Hills, and there she’d stayed until he got her a scholarship and a grant and enrolled her in George Washington University, down the street from his apartment in Washington, D.C. He’d been her guardian angel through four years of college and the master’s program she was beginning now—doing forensic archaeology. She was already earning respect for her work. She was an honors student all the way, not surprising since she had no social life and could devote all her time to her studies. She didn’t need to date; she had eyes for no man in the world except Tate.

“I’m security chief of the Hutton corporation,” he reminded her. “This is a freelance favor I’m doing for a couple of old friends. So this is my working gear.”

She made a face. “You’ll get all dusty.”

He made a sound deep in his throat. “You can brush me off.”

She grinned wickedly. “Now that’s what I call incentive!”

He chuckled. “Cut it out. We’ve got a serious and sensitive situation here.”

“So you intimated on the phone.” She glanced around the airport. “Where’s baggage claim? I brought some tools and electronic equipment, too.”

“How about clothes?”

She stared at him blankly. “What do I need with a lot of clothes cluttering up my equipment case? These are wash-and-wear.”

He made another sound. “You can’t expect to go to a restaurant in that!”

“Why not? And who’s taking me to any restaurant?” she demanded. “You never do.”

He shrugged. “I’m going to do penance while we’re out here.”

Her eyes sparkled. “Great! Your bed or mine?”

He laughed in spite of himself. She was the only person in his life who’d ever been able to make him feel carefree, even briefly. She lit fires inside him, although he was careful not to let them show too much. “You never give up, do you?”

“Someday you’ll weaken,” she assured him. “And I’m prepared. I have a week’s supply of Trojans in my fanny pack….”

He managed to look shocked. “Cecily!”

She shrugged. “Women have to think about these things. I’m twenty-three, you know.” She added, “You came into my life at a formative time and rescued me from something terrible. Can I help it if you make other potential lovers look like fried sea bass by comparison?”

“I didn’t bring you out here to discuss your lack of lovers,” he pointed out.

“And here I hoped you were offering yourself up as an educational experience,” she sighed.

He glared down at her as they walked toward baggage claim.

“Okay,” she said glumly. “I’ll give up, for now. What do you want me to do out here?” she added, and sounded like the professional she really was. “You mentioned something about skeletal remains.”

He looked around them before he spoke. “We had a tip,” he told her, “that a murder could be solved if we looked in a certain place. About twenty years ago, a foreign double agent went missing near Tulsa. He was carrying a piece of microfilm that identified a mole in the CIA. It would be embarrassing for everybody if this is him and the microfilm surfaced now.”

“I gather that your mole has moved up in the world?”

“Don’t even ask,” he told her, then, with a smile he added, “I don’t want to have to put you in the witness protection program. All you have to do is tell me if this DB is the one we’re looking for.”

“Dead body,” she translated. Then she frowned. “I thought you had an expert out here.”

“You can’t imagine what sort of damned expert these guys brought with them.”

Yes, she could, but she didn’t say anything.

“Besides,” he added with a quick glance, “you’re discreet. I know from experience that you don’t tell everything you know.”

“What did your expert tell you about the body?”

“That it’s very old,” he said with exaggerated awe. “Probably thousands of years old!”

“Why do you think it isn’t?”

“For one thing, there’s a .32 caliber bullet in the skull.”

“Well, that rather lets out a Paleo-Indian hunter,” she agreed.

“Sure it does. But I need an expert to say so, or the case will be summarily dropped. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a former KGB mole making policy for me.”

“Me, neither,” she said inelegantly. “You do realize that somebody could have been out to the site and used the skull for target practice?”

He nodded. “Can you date the remains?”

“I don’t know. Carbon dating is best, but it takes time. I’ll do the best I can.”

“That’s good enough for me. Experts in Paleo-Indian archaeology aren’t thick on the ground in the ‘company’ these days. You were the only person I could think of to call.”

“I’m flattered.”

“You’re good,” he said. “That’s not flattery.” Changing the subject, he asked, “What have you got in those cases if you didn’t bring clothes?”

“A laptop computer with a modem and fax, a cellular phone, assorted digging tools, including a collapsible shovel, two reference works on human skeletal remains.”

She was struggling with the case. He reached out and took it from her, testing the weight. “Good God, you’ll get a hernia dragging this thing around. Haven’t you ever heard of luggage carriers?”

“Sure. I have three. They’re all back in D.C. in my closet.”

He led the way to a sport utility vehicle. He put her bags in the back and opened the door for her.

Cecily wasn’t beautiful, but she had a way about her. She was intelligent, lively, outrageous and she made him feel good inside. She could have become his world, if he’d allowed her to. But he was full-blooded Lakota, and she was not. If he ever married, something his profession made unlikely, he didn’t like the idea of mixed blood.

He got in beside her and impatiently reached for her seat belt, snapping it in place. “You always forget,” he murmured, meeting her eyes.

Her breath came uneasily through her lips as she met that level stare and responded helplessly to it. He was handsome and sexy and she loved him more than her own life. She had for years. But it was a hopeless, unreturned adoration that left her unfulfilled. He’d never touched her, not even in the most innocent way. He only looked.

“I should close my door to you,” she said huskily. “Refuse to speak to you, refuse to see you, and get on with my life. You’re a constant torment.”

Unexpectedly he reached out and touched her soft cheek with just his fingertips. They smoothed down to her full, soft mouth and teased the lower lip away from the upper one. “I’m Lakota,” he said quietly. “You’re white.”

“There is,” she said unsteadily, “such a thing as birth control.”

His face was very solemn and his eyes were narrow and intent on hers. “And sex is all you want from me, Cecily?” he asked mockingly. “No kids, ever?”

It was the most serious conversation they’d ever had. She couldn’t look away from his dark eyes. She wanted him. But she wanted children, too, eventually. Her expression told him so.

“No, Cecily,” he continued gently. “Sex isn’t what you want at all. And what you really want, I can’t give you. We have no future together. If I marry one day, it’s important to me that I marry a woman with the same background as my own. And I don’t want to live with a young, and all too innocent, white woman.”

“I wouldn’t be innocent if you’d cooperate for an hour,” she muttered outrageously.

His dark eyes twinkled. “Under different circumstances, I would,” he said, and there was suddenly something hot and dangerous in the way he looked at her as the smile faded from his chiseled lips, something that made her heart race even faster. “I’d love to strip you and throw you onto a bed and bend you like a willow twig under my body.”

“Stop!” she whispered theatrically. “I’ll swoon!” And it wasn’t all acting.

His hand slid behind her nape and contracted, dragging her rapt face just under his, so close that she could smell the coffee that clung to his clean breath, so close that her breasts almost touched his jacket.

“You’ll tempt me once too often,” he bit off. “This teasing is more dangerous than you realize.”

She didn’t reply. She couldn’t. She was throbbing, aroused, sick with desire. In all her life, there had been only this man who made her feel alive, who made her feel passion. Despite the traumatic experience of her teens, she had a fierce physical attraction to Tate that she was incapable of feeling with any other man.

She touched his lean cheek with cold fingertips, slid them back, around his neck into the thick mane of long hair that he kept tightly bound—like his own passions.

“You could kiss me,” she whispered unsteadily, “just to see how it feels.”

He tensed. His mouth poised just above her parted lips. The silence in the car was pregnant, tense, alive with possibilities and anticipation. He looked into her wide, pale, eager green eyes and saw the heat she couldn’t disguise. His own body felt the pressure and warmth of hers and began to swell, against his will.

“Tate,” she breathed, pushing upward, toward his mouth, his chiseled, beautiful mouth that promised heaven, promised satisfaction, promised paradise.

His dark fingers corded in her hair. They hurt, and she didn’t care. Her whole body ached.

“Cecily, you little fool,” he ground out.

Her lips parted even more. He was weak. This once, he was weak. She could tempt him. It could happen. She could feel his mouth, taste it, breathe it. She felt him waver. She felt the sharp explosion of his breath against her lips as he let his control slip. His mouth parted and his head bent. She wanted it. Oh, God, she wanted it, wanted it, wanted it….

The sudden blare of a horn made her jump, brought her back to the painful present in the chill of the nation’s capitol, outside the exclusive restaurant where she’d just made the evening news by attacking Tate Winthrop with a tureen of crab bisque.

She stretched, hurting as she let the memory of the past reluctantly slip away. A car horn had separated her from Tate two years ago, too. He’d withdrawn from her at once, and that had been the end of her dreams. She’d helped solve his murder mystery, which was no more than a Paleo-Indian skull with a bullet in it, used in an attempt to frame an unpopular member of congress. Any anthropologist worth her salt would have known the race from the dentition and the approximate age from the patination and the projectile points and pottery that the would-be framer hadn’t realized would help date the remains.

Tate had involved Cecily, a student, and that had given her hope. But fate had quickly taken hope away with a blare from an impatient driver’s horn. From that moment on, Tate had put her at a distance and kept her there, for the two years of her master’s studies in forensic archaeology. Their close friendship had all but vanished. And tonight had shattered her world.

Her doctorate was a fading dream already. Since Tate had rescued her from her abusive stepfather at the age of seventeen and taken her to live with his mother on the Wapiti Ridge Sioux reservation, which was near the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation, he’d acted in stead of a guardian. But he’d told her that she had a grant to pay for her education, her apartment, her clothing and food and other necessities. She had a bank account that it paid into. All her expenses had been covered for the past six years by that anonymous foundation that helped penniless young women get an education. At least that’s what Tate had told her. And tonight she’d discovered that it had all been a lie. Tate had been paying for it, all of it, out of his own pocket.

She pulled the shawl closer as a tall, lithe figure cut across the parking lot and joined her at the passenger door.

“You’re already famous,” Colby Lane told her, his dark eyes twinkling in his lean, scarred face. “You’ll see yourself on the evening news, if you live long enough to watch it.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Tate’s on his way right now.”

“Unlock this thing and get me out of here!” she squeaked.

He chuckled. “Coward.”

He unlocked the door and let her climb in. By the time he got behind the wheel and took off, Tate was striding across the parking lot with blood in his eye.

Cecily blew him a kiss as Colby gunned the engine down the busy street.

“You’re living dangerously tonight,” Colby told her. “He knows where you live,” he added.

“He should. He paid for the apartment,” she added in a sharp, hurt tone. She wrapped her arms closer around her. “I don’t want to go home, Colby. Can I stay with you tonight?”

She knew, as few other people did, that Colby Lane was still passionately in love with his ex-wife, Maureen. He had nothing to do with other women even two years after his divorce was final. He drank to excess from time to time, but he wasn’t dangerous. Cecily trusted no one more. He’d been a good friend to her, as well as to Tate, over the years.

“He won’t like it,” he said.

She let out a long breath. “What does it matter now?” she asked wearily. “I’ve burned my bridges.”

“I don’t know why that socialite Audrey had to tell you,” he muttered irritably. “It was none of her business.”

“Maybe she wants a big diamond engagement ring, and Tate can’t afford it because he’s keeping me,” she said bitterly.

He glanced at her rigid profile. “He won’t marry her.”

She made a sound deep in her throat. “Why not? She’s got everything…money, power, position and beauty—and a degree from Vassar.”

“In psychology,” Colby mused.

“She’s been going around with Tate for several months.”

“He goes around with a lot of women. He won’t marry any of them.”

“Well, he certainly won’t marry me,” she assured him. “I’m white.”

“More a nice, soft tan,” he told her. “You can marry me. I’ll take care of you.”

She made a face at him. “You’d call me Maureen in your sleep and I’d lay your head open with the lamp. It would never work.”

He drew in a long breath. His lean hands tightened on the wheel. One of them was artificial. Colby had lost an arm in Africa. He was a mercenary, a professional soldier. Sometimes he worked for various covert government agencies, sometimes he freelanced. She never asked about his frequent travels. They were companions who went out together occasionally, fellow sufferers of unrequited passions for other people. It made for a close friendship.

“Tate’s a damned fool,” he said flatly.

“I don’t appeal to him,” she corrected. “It’s a shame I’m not Lakota.”

“Leta Winthrop would argue that point,” he murmured with an amused glance. “Didn’t you lobby for sovereignty at that Senate hearing last month?”

“Me and several other activists. Some of the Lakota resent having a white woman plead their case, but I’ve been trying my best.”

“I know.”

“Thanks for your support.” She leaned back against the car seat. “It’s been a horrible night. I guess Senator Holden will never speak to me again, much less invite me to another political banquet.”

“He’ll love the publicity he gets from your exit,” he corrected with a chuckle. “And I believe he’s been trying to persuade you to assume the position of assistant curator in charge of acquisitions with his new Native American Museum project in D.C.”

“So he is. I may have to take it now. I can’t see going on with my studies under the circumstances.”

“I’ve got some cash in Swiss banks. I’ll help you.”

“Thanks, but no, thanks. I’m going to be totally independent.”

“Suit yourself.” He glanced at her. “If you take that job, it won’t get you any points with Tate. He and Matt Holden are bitter enemies.”

“Senator Holden doesn’t favor allowing a casino on the Wapiti reservation. Tate does. They’ve almost come to blows on the issue twice.”

“So I heard. And that’s not all I’ve heard. Holden is sticking his nose into a hornet’s nest in the Indian Affairs committee, and he’s had some public and all but slanderous things to say about the push for a casino at Wapiti.”

“There are other Sioux casinos in South Dakota,” she replied. “But Senator Holden is fighting this one all the way. Nobody knows why. He and Tate have had some real battles over this.”

“That’s just an excuse and you know it. Tate hates the man.” Colby pushed back a strand of straight black hair that fell into his eyes. Unlike Tate, his hair was short. “I know I said this before, but it bears repeating. You know Tate won’t like you staying with me.”

“I don’t care,” she said bitterly. “I don’t tell him where to sleep. It’s none of his business what I do anymore.”

He made a rough sound. “Would you like to guess what he’s going to assume if you stay the night in my apartment?”

She drew in a long breath. “Okay. I don’t want to cause problems between you, not after all the years you’ve been friends. Take me to a hotel instead.”

He hesitated uncharacteristically. “I can take the heat, if you can.”

“I don’t know that I can. I’ve got enough turmoil in my life right now. Besides, he’ll look for me at your place. I don’t want to be found for a couple of days, until I can get used to my new situation and make some decisions about my future. I want to see Senator Holden and find another apartment. I can do all that from a hotel.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Make it a moderately priced one,” she added with graveyard humor. “I’m no longer a woman of means. From now on, I’m going to have to be responsible for my own bills.”

“You should have poured the soup in the right lap,” he murmured.

“Which was?”

“Audrey Gannon’s,” he said curtly. “She had no right to tell you that Tate was your benefactor. She did it for pure spite, to drive a wedge between you and Tate. She’s nothing but trouble. One day Tate is going to be sorry that he ever met her.”

“She’s lasted longer than the others.”

“You haven’t spent enough time talking to her to know what she’s like. I have,” he added darkly. “She has enemies, among them an ex-husband who’s living in a duplex because she got his house, his Mercedes, and his Swiss bank account in the divorce settlement.”

“So that’s where all those pretty diamonds came from,” she said wickedly.

“Her parents had money, too, but they spent most of it before they died in a plane crash. She likes unusual men, they say, and Tate’s unusual.”

“She won’t go to the reservation to see Leta,” she commented.

“Of course not.” He leaned toward her as he stopped at a traffic light. “It’s a Native American reservation!”

She stuck her tongue out at him. “Leta’s worth two of Audrey.”

“Three,” he returned. “Okay. I’ll find you a hotel. Then I’m leaving town before Tate comes looking for me!”

“You might hang a crab on your front door,” she said, tongue-in-cheek. “It just might ward him off.”

“Ha!”

She turned her eyes toward the bright lights of the city. She felt cold and alone and a little frightened. But everything would work out. She knew it would. She was a grown woman and she could take care of herself. This was her chance to prove it.