Page 38

CHAPTER 38

Outside on the grass, Connor grabbed the hose and adjusted the sprayer. “What are you doing with her, man? She killed your father!”

“Good. Am I allowed to say good?” Dante turned on the water at the faucet. “Or how about…I don’t care. He was a fiend who brutalized my mother and me and your mother and every person around him. A psychopath of the first order, from a family of psychopaths stretching back generations. Someone needed to kill him. Good for Maarja’s mother for planning so meticulously, and let’s show some sensitivity for the poor little girl who was used as a pawn.”

“If you command, my liege.” Connor gave a mocking half bow. “But good luck on getting the rest of the Arundels to cooperate.”

“She triggered the explosion, but she didn’t know, and innocence has to be a shield.”

“That’s not in the code.”

“Show me where it’s written down.”

“It’s not, but we all know it.” Connor waved his arm to indicate the greater family. “Anyway, given a choice, she’d do it again now.”

“So would I. So would you. Give me that.” Dante wrestled the hose away from him. “Do you remember Benoit?”

Connor shook his head. “Not really. Except…he made my mother cry.”

“Did you never wonder if we’re half brothers?”

“My mother was his cousin!”

Dante sprayed him with the hose. “Get real.”

Connor wiped his face, smearing plaster and blood. “Thanks for putting that disgusting thought into my head.”

Dante used the hose like a shower on himself. “He loved hurting people, especially people who couldn’t fight back. Especially family. Especially women.”

Connor took the hose back and did the same. “If you insist on having Maarja, she’s going to cause trouble forever.”

“The family will damned well learn to deal. I’m done swearing off her. She ran into an explosion to save my mother. She cried when Mère died. She was a virgin.” Dante shouldn’t have confided that last, but Connor had been his friend forever and—

Connor seemed unfazed. “You only liked her for like fifteen minutes, then you went into that deadly silent cold-eyed glare you’ve perfected.”

“I thought she was involved with the theft of the bottle. Then she told me she’d been the one who detonated the bomb. I’m a dickhead. It’s required, especially now.”

Connor did a belated double take. “She—”

Exasperated, Dante said, “Don’t say she killed my father again.”

“She was a virgin?” Connor’s voice rose.

Crap. Dante should have remembered Connor’s slow reactions. “Could you be any fucking louder?” He glanced toward the house, twisted the sprayer to jet, and hit Connor in the face again. “Don’t tell her I told you!”

Undeterred, Connor questioned, “A virgin? You found a… You slept with the last remaining member of the Daire family and she was a virgin?” He raised his hand to protect his face. “No. No way. She fooled you.”

“How? Tell me, oh, enlightened one. Explain—”

“Plastic surgery. Something… I don’t know! That’s too much—”

“Don’t say it!”

“Like fate.”

“I told you not to say it.”

“Tell me you used a condom.”

Dante stared at Connor. Let him take the hose. Spray him in the face.

“What the fuck were you thinking?” Connor shouted. “What the fuck were you—”

“I wasn’t thinking. I was… It had been a tough day and she… I… She cried. And I’d been waiting for her all my life and…” Dante wiped at his eyes. “Oh, just spray me again.”

Connor let the hose dangle, too horrified to even take advantage. “Is she pregnant?”

“I’m an enlightened being. A product of the twenty-first century. I’m not superstitious. It was one time.”

“ One time?”

“Yes!” Dante remembered that morning in the parking garage. “Except this morning.”

“What the hell?” Connor shouted again.

“Probably the wrong time of the month.” Dante was aware he was babbling. “She shouldn’t be pregnant.”

Connor sprayed him in the crotch. “That’s no answer!”

Dante flinched and protected. “She says no.”

“Did you see her take a pregnancy test?” Connor read the answer on Dante’s face. “Do you believe her?”

“I believe I’ve got to get this situation under control damned fast before…”

“Before the baby bump is so big she’s waddling?”

Dante inclined his head.

“Are you going to marry her?”

“I already did.” Dante reached into his sleeve.

Instinctively Connor flung the hose aside and pulled his stiletto.

Dante produced la Bouteille de Flamme .

The stiletto disappeared back into Connor’s sleeve, and he reached out with tentative fingers. “Is that…?”

“Yes. Yesterday someone put it in her house.”

“To frame her.”

“Yes. To get her killed by someone, I assume someone in the family who could be trusted to overreact either with purpose or as a tool.” Dante gently transferred the bottle to Connor’s cradled hands.

Connor viewed it with a mixture of awe and terror. “How did you find out?”

“She called me.”

“Did she? How terrifically interesting.” Connor frowned at the bottle.

“I went at once, of course. I recognized the machinations, if not the hand behind it.”

“Are you sure she’s not playing you?”

“Positive. Because I also recognized…her. Who she was to me. Fate is not the bitch I’d imagined, because for the first time in three weeks, I felt whole. In my heart.” He was saying words he hadn’t even thought before, but they came out easily, as if he’d always known and finally admitted.

“Ah.” Connor nodded judiciously.

Dante felt a little chagrined. “That’s all? Ah?”

“You’re in love.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.” Knee-jerk reaction. And he didn’t do knee-jerk reactions.

“When I met Owen, I didn’t want to commit. I didn’t want to fling myself into a marriage. Especially a gay marriage. My God! I knew the havoc he would cause in my life, my associations. My mother! I tried to walk away, I really did. I walked so far I almost didn’t get back before… When I came to my senses, he didn’t want to listen to me. He didn’t trust me when I said I loved and needed him. I had to prove myself before he would enter the relationship again.” Connor took a discomfited breath. “I had to beg.”

“Ah.” No wonder Connor used that single syllable; it said more than Dante ever imagined.

“I understand what you feel.” Connor wore that misery loves company face. “Did you beg?”

“No time for that. She was in danger in her own home—and she had the stopper.”

“I see that.” Connor touched it with one fingertip. “You got her to…?”

“She joined them while I held it.”

“Witnesses?”

“Whoever had taken control of her security camera.”

“Now you’ve done it.” Connor laughed. “Did she realize what she’d done?”

“As soon as it was joined.”

Connor surreptitiously glanced toward the house. “I’ll bet that went well.”

“Not immediately.” The understatement of the century. “Connor…when she kissed me, the bottle and stopper gave off this flash of heat.”

“Like…like they’d been waiting all these years and… You are shitting me.” Connor glanced around as if in this sunny suburban backyard he saw the Daire and Arundel ghosts watching him.

Dante comprehended the feeling. “Not sure…but I suspect the stopper fused to the bottle.”

Connor gently twisted the stopper.

It didn’t budge.

Connor stared at him in consternation. “The fifteenth century for the win!”

“I’ve got to stop challenging fate.” Dante glanced toward the house. Was Maarja carrying his child? Why would she say no?

Because—lowering thought—she didn’t want to marry him. Couldn’t she see the advantages?

He was rich. He had a few scars, but last night she’d enjoyed his body. He’d made sure of that. The way she responded… Oh, yeah. He would definitely make sure she craved him time and again. That was only fair, since he craved her. He could keep her safe…although she wouldn’t be in such danger if she hadn’t been there for the explosion… “If she isn’t pregnant from the first time, she’s probably pregnant from what she did to me after the attempt to run us off the road.”

“What she did to you?”

“You know. Death too close and all that.”

“Yes, I know.” Carefully Connor handed the bottle back to Dante. “Congratulations, man. You picked a good one. Or fate picked a good one for you.”

Dante placed it on the glass patio table in the sun. Together they stared at it, at the blending of colors, blue to purple to red, all rich and glorious, casting shimmering rainbows in circles around its base. “It’s a promise of peace,” Dante whispered.

Connor hummed softly, then seemed to make a decision. “Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.” He paced each repetition of the word as if he needed the seconds between to clear all the circuits in his brain. He stripped off his T-shirt, his pants, and underwear, and jumped naked into the pool. “Come in. It’s easiest. No one close. No one wearing a device.” It was a subtle accusation at Dante. Connor didn’t necessarily trust him.

Good point. No matter how you arranged the letters in Arundel, they always spelled corrupt . Dante stripped off and jumped in. “Son of a bitch! Your pool heater is broken?”

Connor grinned evilly. “Don’t have one. Did your dick shrink to the size of a peanut?”

“When you hit me with the water, yeah!”

“Come on. Into the middle.”

They swam to the center of the pool.

“Who are your suspects?” Connor demanded.