Awaken the Devil Read online

  He cocked one eyebrow. "Do you remember their deaths very much? I mean, did it hurt you? Are you worse off for it now?"

  It took only a moment for her to realize why he must be asking. During a conversation like this, Anne and Helena couldn't be far from his mind. Seeking to give comfort, though he had not asked, she chose her words carefully.

  "No. I remember it a little, but I'm not any worse off for it. Mac just kept raising me like he had always done, and I'm convinced he was a much better parent than they ever would have been, however much I might have liked to fantasize that they would have improved if given the chance.

  "I don't think they ever would have improved in reality. They didn't really want a child. I mean, I missed them, but I think it was almost more like I missed the idea of them or what I wish they could have been." When he put down his menu to examine her more closely, she stopped and took a drink to assuage her suddenly dry throat. "At least, that's what it turned into when I was older."

  Chandler looked immensely relieved for just a second until his impassive mask restored itself. "My wife died when Anne was six."

  She was surprised but thrilled that he had chosen to share this with her. She could not have hoped for a better in.

  "I have always wondered whether she suffered any ill effects for the loss at such a tender age. But I don't think she lost much either, as far as my wife's parenting skills went," Chandler spoke softly.

  Fielding was pushing her luck and she knew it, but she asked, "How did your wife die? "

  There were several ways that this could play out. He might tell her the truth. He might lie to her and tell her it was an accident or something. Or he might just refuse to answer, get up, leave the table, and go home. He tapped his fingers against the table.

  "She was murdered in our home by an intruder."

  He made it sound so horrible. It was almost as though it was the first time she had learned of it. It was the combination of surprise that he had admitted the truth and the harsh sound of the words that drew a gasp from her.

  "That's so…I'm sorry."

  His jaw worked furiously for a second, but he didn't say anything at all. The waitress came to the table, and she ordered her regular choice, focusing her attention back on Chandler. He ordered precisely and then neatly refolded his menu. Instead of continuing to talk about Helena, he asked her, "How did your parents die? An accident I would assume."

  "No. Actually they didn't die at the same time although they did both die in the same week." She knew this would do nothing to endear her to him, but he had told her the truth. She owed the truth to him. At least in the matter at hand. "They were reporters. They were covering two different stories in Beirut. My mother and her photographer were killed in a car bombing. My father died two days later in a crossfire during the assassination of a minor political figure. He never even knew about my mom before he died."

  He was surprised. She could tell even though he tried to hide it. "Did your uncle tell you the details?"

  "No. He tried to hide it from me. He told me they had passed on, whatever that's supposed to mean. I looked up the details myself. There was even a picture of the burnt out shell of a car." She paused, and then asked, "Did you tell your daughter? The details, I mean?"

  "Years later. Anne is very precocious. She always has been. As soon as I felt she was able to handle the details and she asked again, I gave it to her straight, as you American's say."

  Fielding smiled wistfully. "I bet you were a good dad."

  "I have tried above everything else." He seemed to regret the words immediately, looking everywhere in the room to avoid meeting her eyes, and she wondered why he was more uncomfortable with a pleasant little sentiment than he was all their other words. Then it came to her. Those other things, even the memories of his much-hated nanny, must have all been things he had managed to distance himself from emotionally. His daughter was the only thing that he had probably failed to push away. His emotions were near the surface when it came to the teenager. He would not like that.

  "Do you know that fellow in the far corner?" His sudden question broke her from her inner analysis of his personality.

  She turned and wished she hadn't. She ducked her head back, but she could still feel his eyes boring into her head. "Yes, as a matter of fact I do. He's my ex-fiancé. I forgot that most of the people I know also know the person who owns this place."

  "Ex-fiancé?" He was clearly amused by the words. "Did you dump him for greener pastures?"

  "No, I dumped him because I found him in bed with someone else."

  "And is that the girl in question or has he since moved on to greener pastures?"

  "No, that's her. Patrice. She used to play nasty tricks on me when we were kids."

  "So she's the person you would have made to walk the plank."

  She smiled gratefully at him for making her laugh. "The top of the list. I probably would have fished her out just to make her do it again."

  He cocked his head to the side—the gesture she was starting to learn meant he was really listening. "And is all this anger because she stole your beau away?"

  She shook her head. "She didn't steal him away. Believe me; he would have still married me. I dumped him. The anger is because she uses people without so much as a care for the feelings of…well, pretty much anyone. I'm sure you've met someone like that before."

  Chandler had indeed. He had married someone exactly like that. Indeed, the girl that Fielding was showing him looked remarkably like Helena had in the years before her death. Extraordinarily attractive on the outside, but hollow and empty inside. Like a beautifully wrapped present that you opened just to discover there was nothing inside.

  He had made that discovery about Helena early enough to save himself and yet in the end, he'd had to marry her anyway. Life did have its ironies and dirty tricks. Without really meaning to, he compared Fielding with the woman that her fiancé had thrown her over for. The girl, Patrice, was smooth and perfect. Her hair, her clothes, even her smile were just exactly as they should be.

  Across the table from him, Fielding's hair was hanging around her shoulders, curly from her shower at the theater. She wore no makeup. Her jeans and sweater seemed as comfortable and natural to her as being naked. Her unnaturally large and luminescent eyes were looking up at him over the rim of her drink making him wish that he had never agreed to come.

  This was possibly the stupidest thing he had ever done, and with a long history of stupid things from which to choose, that was particularly bad. Next to Patrice, Fielding was as fresh and elemental as nature itself. He could not conceive of how the same man could move directly from one woman to the other.

  The ex-fiancé, himself, was something of a mystery to Chandler. He looked like a stockbroker, Chandler decided at once. He was so meticulous that it seemed self-conscious. As though he were every moment aware that someone somewhere might be looking at him and judging him for any reason. He supposed that the man was handsome, but Fielding could have done better.

  If Patrice was an empty present, this man was wax fruit. All shiny and well put together, but on closer inspection, he turned out to be altogether unsatisfying. He and Fielding must have had the worst sex life on the planet. Two people could not have been more mismatched. Perhaps opposites attracted, but Fielding's ex-fiancé was the kind of fellow who would have been too busy making sure he had sex exactly the way it was meant to be done and missed out on the point of the whole exercise.

  Not that he had any place thinking about Fielding's experiences in the bedroom. They were none of his business. He had enough problems already when it came to banishing thoughts of her in his bed. That thought conjured up the sudden image of her hot skin rubbing up against his under cool, smooth sheets. His groin tightened under the table, and he called himself a fool for the hundredth time.

  It had been going alright. Truly it had. Until he had pointed out the couple. He had succeeded in not thinking about her as a woman, and she was clearly no
t interested in him. It had been a nice dinner where he had been saying too much. At least being half-aroused would keep him from getting so caught up in their conversation that he told her things he would much rather have kept to himself. To tell her about Helena…that had been madness.

  All the enjoyment had clearly gone out of the meal for her, and the food had not even arrived yet. "Shall I ask her to get it to go?"

  She raised grateful eyes to his. "Would you? I always feel like they're staring at me."

  He smiled slightly. "They are staring at you. And me as well. I suspect they're dying to know who I am. Shall I go and tell them?"

  He was only kidding, but she was clearly horrified. "No! No, I don't want you to have to talk to them at all. Believe me when I tell you, you're not missing anything." She frowned.

  "I wanted to have a nice social moment with a fellow co-worker, and I can't even do that without Dale and Patrice showing up."

  He filed the name Dale into his brain, though he didn't know why he bothered. No doubt he would never see the man again.

  "May I suggest that next time we pick an establishment where neither of us knows a soul? Then no one has any cause to stare at either of us." That was not exactly true. There would always be cause to stare at Fielding, for himself or any other man with eyes in his head.

  "When?" Her mood had clearly improved.

  "Pardon me?"

  "When should we try somewhere else?"

  He ought to say never. That he hadn't meant it literally and had only been joking. For all that, he really ought to tell her that he couldn't do anything at all with her any more, lessons included. But he couldn't do it. Not because he couldn't stand to see her disappointed. He refused to believe that. He had been happily disappointing people for forty-three years and would continue to do so with relish until the day that he died.

  But he also couldn't admit that he wanted to see her again. He wasn't completely insane, although he had to be at least partly so to have gotten involved in this mess in the first place. No, it wasn't because he wanted to see her. It was because…because…he didn't know bloody why. "Next Friday, I suppose."

  "Oh, good." She smiled like a child even if she maintained she was not. All guilelessness and sweetness.

  Fielding couldn't believe her good fortune. So what if Dale and Patrice were here, and might accidentally let her cover slip? She would just have to insure that he never spoke to them. Their presence was the reason she got to have another chance next weekend. It was a stroke of luck that she never would have expected. It was starting to work. And if she just kept her head about her and stopped thinking about him in a way that confused the issue, she was sure that it would keep working.

  He asked the waitress to bring their meals to go and led her out of the restaurant with a proprietary hand on her back she felt sure was for the benefit of Dale and Patrice and their fascination with him, which he seemed to find amusing. Odd, considering how the interest of other people typically seemed to annoy him. On the corner, he hailed her a cab first. "Here you are, Miss French—Fielding,"

  "Thanks. And Chandler, thanks for doing this for me." She got in the cab and rode away before she was tempted to act on her stupid impulses and ask if he wanted to share it.

  The next week was a study in sexual frustration for Fielding who tried to act like she was unbothered by the whole thing. She couldn't let on to Chandler who would have run for the hills if he so much as suspected that she found him attractive. Never mind attractive, she was starting to forget what it was like to have dreams that were not about getting in his pants.

  She couldn't talk to Daphne who would have fainted dead away to learn that she was harboring a secret lust for Chandler, even before she knew that he was suspected of killing his wife and Fielding was really a reporter. She couldn't talk to Josh who would completely flip if she mentioned she so much as thought Chandler Bentley was a nice guy. So she had to bear the burden alone.

  It was easier at rehearsals. There were people watching. So many things depended on her remaining almost anonymous among the crowd that she didn't dare single herself out as the one with the schoolgirl crush on the producer. She acted the same as she always had. Distant and pleasant. He treated her with cool reserve and occasional disdain. Which was just the way he treated her in private except that he called her Fielding instead of Miss French.

  At the old Forty-second Street theater, it was harder to ignore her baser desires. He approached their lessons, which had evolved into more of a collaboration, with the same kind of passion he showed at Pirate's rehearsals. She could feel the power of his energy just rolling off him in waves when they danced.

  By the time their forty-five minutes were up every night she was high from it. She had never been so aware of another person's body in the whole of her entire life. It was possible that she had never even been as aware of her own body as she was of his. She had memorized every angle of his hard, lithe frame by the end of the second week. Every nuance of the way that he moved.

  He was erotica in motion. And he was always in motion. The smell of his skin was beginning to muddle her brain and make her forget her real purpose. She had stopped asking him questions about his life for Mac and started asking because she wanted to know him as a man, not a subject.

  By Friday night, she was debating the wisdom of pressing the second dinner invitation. She had no doubt that he would try to pretend he'd forgotten about it if he hadn't actually done so. Maybe it would be better that way. She had lost her professionalism. But there was always Mac, and she was a long way away from letting him die in peace. And that was enough to motivate her.

  So after practice, she asked, "So where to this week? Remember neither of us can know anyone there."

  He sighed deeply, and she knew that he wanted to dismiss the idea and direct her to go home like an errant child. Instead, he ran his hands through his hair, a gesture she was starting to recognize as a Chandler hallmark, and looked out the darkened window at forty-second. "I don't spend a lot of time out. I doubt I would know anyone no matter where we went. The choice is yours."

  To insure that they didn't meet anyone that she had so much as said hello to in her entire lifetime, she departed as far as she could from her normal haunts. "There's a salsa club in Queens. I've never been, but I heard it was nice." The real truth was she had heard two strangers on the subway talking about how raw the place was, full of newly emigrated Cubans. Nobody from the paper would ever find a way there in a million years.

  "Salsa?" There was a hint of amusement underlying the smoothness of his voice.

  "We can try somewhere else if you'd like." She schooled herself not to show her disappointment that he had shot down the only idea she had.

  "No need for that. I have never been to an American salsa bar before. I expect it to be fascinating." He sounded like he actually meant it so she didn't press the issue.

  "Great, just let me shower and change." She grabbed her bag and headed for the bathroom wondering if he knew what a sacrifice she was making for him using the theater shower. She just hoped it would be worth it.

  Chandler picked up his own bag and headed in the direction of the other bathroom. He had been telling himself all week that he ought to duck out of their second non-date. Say he had another engagement or simply that he didn't want to go. But, as ever when the matter was Fielding, he appeared to have been deluding himself. When the moment came for him to back down and go home alone, he found he very much wanted to go, which was the best reason of all not to.

  And yet here he was, certifiably mad, changing into street clothes to go to a club where he didn't belong with a woman he could no longer deny he wanted to…well, the list of what he wanted to do to her was long and varied and totally inappropriate. And yet he was still going with her.

  The worst thing was that he didn't even know why. Certainly not because he wanted to feel her soft heat underneath him. That was the number one reason not to go. And even if she had offered, a scenario
he could never picture, he would have had to say no. Sex was not the motivator here, but for risk of his life, he still couldn't define what the bloody hell his motivation was.

  She seemed to regard him as a potential friend, trying to illicit his secrets and offering her own. Wanting to pal around with him on a Friday night like he was her best girlfriend.

  Maybe she was just lonely. Yet she didn't seem to be. He had gathered from their conversations that she was undeterred in her devotion to the uncle who had raised her although she had mentioned he was ill. She also claimed a brother-like figure named Josh. On the set, she had an obvious, if somewhat reserved, friendship with the other dancers in the line. Everyone seemed to love her, and she was obviously very loveable. Loneliness was probably not the issue, so what did she want with him?

  When he had caught her unguarded, he had seen an answering response to his attraction in her eyes so he knew at some level she was attracted to him and yet her behavior did not reflect that. She was surely far from the overheated place that he had reached where he was starting to make up excuses to get close enough to smell the heat on her skin. If lust was her motivator, she was certainly gifted at not acting on it.

  He decided abruptly to head for the door before he decided he could trust her. He was not this bloody stupid, and he was going bloody well home before he proved himself wrong on every account. Then she emerged from the shadows and looked curiously at his hand on the doorknob. She had obviously had the salsa club or something like it in mind when she had packed her bag.

  Her filmy black skirt hit below the knee, but molded truly indecently when she moved. When she headed in his direction, he could see the outline of every inch of her body, all the more agitating in its outward modesty. Her red shirt was also clinging, drawing his eyes over her curves without his permission. He was barely able to conceal the noise of tortured displeasure that rose in his throat, masking it as a cough.