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A bittersweet feeling of homecoming washed over her. Her mind, all but spinning out of control, just utterly shut down.
She was instantly propelled eight years into the past as a tidal wave of euphoria materialized out of nowhere, sweeping over her. Robbing her of her senses as she clung to him.
God she’d missed him. Missed the feeling that only he could create inside her.
Not that she let anyone else even try. She hadn’t taken any relationship on a test drive since theirs had ended. Hadn’t even allowed herself to become involved in one. It was far too much trouble. She’d become all work, no play. Relationships brought the specter of heartache with them, and her quota had been filled up for a lifetime.
Besides, Candace went out with enough men for both of them. There was no need for her to participate in this madness. So, for the last eight years, she’d been a virtual nun.
She wasn’t acting like a nun now.
Deep down in her bones, Natalie knew she shouldn’t be doing this, knew that this momentary aberration had just made her life a hundred percent harder. The amount of backpedaling that was going to be required to balance this out was going to be enormous.
But for this tiny island of time, it didn’t matter to her.
All that mattered was riding this lightning bolt until it disintegrated beneath her feet.
Her arms tightened around his neck as her body sealed itself to his.
How had he managed to survive without this? Without her in his life? How had he managed to wake up each morning without finding her in his bed? Right at this moment, he hadn’t a clue.
All his noble reasons for walking away from her turned to confetti and blew away in the wind like so many tiny squares of colored paper.
The feel of her body against his lit a fire in his veins. If they weren’t out in the open like this, in a public place undoubtedly garnering attention, he would have swept Natalie up in his arms and taken her to his bed—or to any handy flat surface in a pinch. And succumbing to a moment of weakness, undo everything that had cost him so much to do in the first place. Leaving her hadn’t even been the hardest part. Staying away was.
He still loved her.
If he’d harbored any doubts about that, they were gone now. Moreover, he was still in love with her, which was a completely different thing, and even he could understand the basic distinction now.
Lost in a fog, Matt was thinking more clearly than he had these last agonizing eight years. Passion filled him as he deepened the kiss.
Struggling to find the strength that she’d always prided herself on possessing, Natalie finally managed to wedge her hands against his chest and push Matt back.
“I had no idea you’d be that grateful for a doggie bag,” she quipped hoarsely. Clearing her throat, she searched for her bearings as well as her voice. “I have to get going.”
“Natalie—” he began, not really certain what it was that he wanted to say, only that he didn’t want her to leave. Not yet. Not after he’d discovered that the passion between them was just as red-hot as ever. Maybe even more so.
She looked into his eyes and could see what he was thinking. Maybe because the same thoughts had raced across her mind.
“This doesn’t change anything,” she told him. “You still left me. Still hurt me. One kiss, no matter how hot, isn’t going to erase that or mend any of the fences that you broke in your hurry to leave.”
Reluctantly, Matt withdrew his hands from her waist. “I know.”
But you could try, damn it. You could pretend to go through the motions. Tell me you were stupid and wrong. I’ll listen.
Disappointment filled all the crevices that passion had just occupied. Matt had given up much too easily. Pulling herself together, Natalie glanced at her watch. She really did have to go. Her father had said something about wanting her present at the emergency family meeting he was calling. He’d mentioned four o’clock. Even if she drove with her siren on, she was going to be late.
But then, probably so were the others. No one in the Rothchild family was known for punctuality. She was the one who came the closest. Her stepsister, Silver, didn’t even own a watch. But then, Silver was a rock star who moved to her own inner timepiece.
“I’ve got to go,” she repeated, doing her best to sound cool and removed, even though her body temperature was still bordering on feverish, thanks to him. “Call me if you find out anything new that has to do with Candace,” she instructed.
“Can I call you if I don’t?” He hadn’t meant to say that, but then, he hadn’t meant to kiss her, either. An afternoon in her presence and all his control seemed to splinter into useless pieces.
“No.”
The single word hung in the air as she turned on her heel and quickly walked away. Before she broke down and sealed her mouth to his again. He was an addiction. She’d only fooled herself into thinking she’d kicked it. It owned her.
To her surprise, half a beat later, Matt fell into place beside her. Annoyed, Natalie stopped walking. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“With you,” he replied simply. “You said you wanted me to work with you, remember?”
“I was referring to here, at The Janus.” God knew she knew better than to have him around for any length of time beyond that. If she’d thought otherwise, her reaction to his kiss showed her just how weak she was when it came to him.
Matt shrugged in response to her answer. “Two heads are better than one.”
A sarcastic remark hovered on her tongue, but never made it to her lips. In this case, the direct approach was better. “Not this time. I’m due at the house. My father is calling an emergency family meeting. Last I looked, you weren’t family.” And whose fault is that? she added silently.
“No,” he agreed, “but maybe you could use the moral support.”
She took it as a direct slam about her inner strength. Her eyes narrowed as she informed him, “I can handle my father.”
His tone was nonconfrontational. He wasn’t trying to get into a fight; he just wanted to help. When they’d been together, she was the one who’d wanted the kind of family that could only be found in human interest stories and carefully crafted feel-good movies.
“Never said you couldn’t. But I hear that your new stepmother is a piece of work.”
It was more than true but would have required some interaction on his part to learn for himself. “How long did you say you were back?”
“A couple of weeks.” He guessed the reason behind her question. “Word gets around fast,” Matt told her. Especially when you ask questions, he added silently.
“Thanks, but showing up with you would be like waving a red flag in my father’s face. He doesn’t really like you,” she told him honestly.
Matt laughed shortly. “Yeah, I know. He made that pretty clear.”
Her curiosity was instantly aroused. Just how full had those two weeks of his been? Had he come around the mansion without her knowing it?
“When?”
It was ancient history. Matt saw no reason to keep it secret any longer. “When he tried to buy me off.”
That didn’t make any sense. How could her father try to buy him off—and why would he?—if he had a cash flow problem? “I thought that your family supposedly lent my father money so he could get out of the financial hole he was in.”
“That’s now. I’m talking about before.”
Natalie still wasn’t following him. “How much before?”
He waved her question away. Maybe he shouldn’t have said anything. “Doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me,” she insisted. Her eyes pinned him in place. He wasn’t going anywhere and neither was she until he answered her question. “When did my father offer you money?”
“Before.” The expression on her face indicated that the single word did nothing to satisfy her curiosity, so he gave her more. “Eight years ago.”
She felt her heart twist. She’d been better off not knowing. “That’s why you left? Because he paid you off?” she asked incredulously. “Why you son of a bit—” Stunned, speechless, she raised her hand, ready to slap him across the face at the insult.
Matt caught her wrist, blocking contact. He knew that for simplicity’s sake, he should hold his peace and let her believe the worst about him. But something wouldn’t let him. He didn’t want her believing that he had been bought off.
She could think he was a rotten human being, not worth her time and certainly not her love, but he didn’t want her believing that she’d been cast aside for thirty pieces of silver.
“He tried to buy me off,” he corrected. “Offered me a bit of money, actually. Back then, your father thought you were worth a quarter of a million dollars. Or maybe that was what getting rid of me was worth to him, I don’t know. But I didn’t take it,” he told her, emphasizing each word.
Confusion washed over her. “If you didn’t leave because of the money—” A wave of jealousy struck. “Was there someone else?”
His eyes met hers. “You know better than that, Natalie.”
“No, I don’t.” She sighed, weary of this uncertain feeling she’d been carrying around with her. It wouldn’t matter if she didn’t feel anything for him, but she did. She wanted answers. “I don’t know better than that. Why did you leave me?”
There was nothing to be gained by this. “It’s in the past, Natalie. Let it go.”
If only she could. She’d tried hard enough, Lord knows, but she’d never gotten to that point. “I can’t.”
“Yes you can,” he assured her firmly. This was an argument that was not about to be resolved. Not now, not ever. “If you don’t want me coming with you, I won’t,” he agreed. “But you’re going to be late if you don’t get going.”
He was giving her the bum’s rush. Okay for now, she conceded reluctantly. But the gateway to the past had opened, if just a crack. She intended to wedge a crowbar into the tiny space and work it until she managed to open it up all the way.
But right now, she wasn’t up to waging potentially futile battles, so she turned away without a word and just kept walking. Wishing with all her heart that she had never set eyes on Matt Schaffer. Or that, at the very least, he was still back in Los Angeles.
She didn’t need this type of anguish on top of Candace’s murder.
Candace.
She was her top priority. All that mattered was finding out who killed her sister. Finding it out and bringing the bastard down. Whatever that took.
The wide, winding driveway before the mansion that she had once called home was packed with various expensive automobiles. Hers looked like a poor relation. Poor, but energy conscious, she thought wryly.
Recognizing the other vehicles, she realized that she was probably the last to arrive. Couldn’t be helped, Natalie thought.
Couldn’t it? a small, inner voice mocked. You didn’t need to kiss him back. Didn’t need to stand there, talking to him, hanging on his every word the way you used to.
Wow, now she was getting into an argument with herself. She was really losing it, Natalie thought.
Might as well go in and get this over with, she told herself.
When she rang the doorbell, Clive opened the door almost immediately. His expression appeared to be rigid until he saw it was her. And then he smiled, as if to say, “Ah, the normal one.”
Natalie was about to ask the butler if he had stationed himself at the front door to get as far away from her family as possible when she was interrupted by a crash that sounded as if it was coming from the living room.
She raised her eyes quizzically up to Clive’s face.
“That would be Master Ricky,” he informed her, answering her unspoken question.
She frowned. Her half brother was a whirling dervish in search of an accident. A walking example of Attention Deficit Disorder, he constantly left chaos in his wake. Her father was at a loss how to handle him and his mother, Rebecca Lynn, refused to, believing the boy was better off if he was allowed to “express” himself.
This did not have the makings of a good outcome. “Dad called a family meeting, but I thought he meant adults only.”
“Sadly, no,” Clive told her. “Miss Rebecca Lynn wants Master Ricky present. She said something about Miss Candace being an object lesson for him.”
On how not to live your life, apparently, Natalie thought. She couldn’t help taking umbrage for Candace even though she felt that no one should attempt to emulate her late twin’s lifestyle. But then everything connected with her stepmother seemed to irritate her to no end. The woman was like a rash for which there was no cure.
And her father seemed apparently blind to all of his wife’s shortcomings.
Reluctant to walk into the lion’s den, Natalie stalled for a moment. “How’s the meeting coming along?” she asked the butler.
A whimsical half smile fleetingly played along the older man’s lips. “No one has killed anyone yet.”
“Always a good sign,” Natalie agreed.
She unconsciously squared her shoulders, the way she always did when she was about to face Stepmother 2.0—which was the way she’d taken to referring to Rebecca Lynn. The thinly veiled animosity between the woman and the rest of the family had never really died down.
Too bad her father’d had that midlife crisis of his. Instead of buying a new sports car—he already had more than ten housed within his cavernous garage—he’d shed his second wife and married a woman young enough to be his daughter.
As far as she was concerned, Natalie had always preferred her father’s last wife. Anne Worth Rothchild not only had pedigree but she had class. She was a lady in every sense of the word. In contrast, Rebecca Lynn was a grasping gold digger in every sense of that word.
Try as she might, she just couldn’t get herself to like Rebecca Lynn, or her spoiled brat of a half brother. The only male heir in the family, Ricky, even at this tender age, radiated an aura of entitlement. Something, Natalie had no doubt, that had been taught to him by his mother. As someone who preferred to earn her own way, she found it absolutely repugnant.
Rebecca Lynn, Natalie was certain, was angling to be become the sole heir of the Rothchild fortune—once Harold Rothchild passed on.
Over her dead body, Natalie vowed. Not that she wanted any of the money. She just didn’t want Rebecca Lynn getting her hands on it exclusively.
Natalie stopped just short of the living room. As a matter of fact, now that she thought about it, Candace’s sudden death dovetailed nicely with their stepmother’s plans. She’d bet her last dime that Rebecca Lynn would have liked nothing better than to have Candace’s fate befall her and her two remaining siblings—her sister Jenna and stepsister Silver.
Can’t tell the players apart without a scorecard, Natalie thought dryly.
Forcing herself to walk into the living room, Natalie saw her youngest sibling, Jenna, a self-assured twenty-five-year-old, currently heading up her own party planning business, crouching on the floor. She was busy picking up the pieces of what had been, until moments ago, a colorful vase from a trip to Hawaii.
The vase, for reasons unknown, had suffered Ricky’s sudden displeasure. He would have gone on a rampage except that Harold had grabbed him.
Rebecca Lynn took immediate possession of their son, giving her husband a dark, censoring look. When that faded, it was replaced by a disdainful expression that took up residence on her perfectly made-up face.
Everything about the woman screamed “fake,” Natalie couldn’t help thinking. Rebecca Lynn’s hair was currently a riotous cloud of red that could not be found anywhere in nature.
Silver, Anna’s daughter, was sitting over in a corner, her expression barring anyone from attempting to approach her.
Ever the outsider. Although, from what she’d heard, in the last few years, Silver and Candace had actually gotten closer. However, the relationship had come about for all the wrong reasons, at least when it came to Candace, who had orchestrated the “friendship.” Her twin had been extremely jealous of their stepsister. Silver, who was the same age as they were, had been born beautiful. With her mother’s support, she had become a singing sensation by the time she turned sixteen. This after bringing the modeling world to its knees.
Silver, Natalie had always felt, could have become anything she wanted to be.
Looking around the room at the various members of her extended—or was that distended?—family, Natalie viewed them all with a disparaging eye and now just shook her head.
Talk about dysfunctional families. Hers would probably be up for some kind of prize—if there were prizes given for something like this.
His temper on edge because Rebecca Lynn had usurped his authority to discipline their son—again—Harold Rothchild looked at the latecomer with no attempt to hide his displeasure.
“So you’ve finally decided to grace us with your presence.”
“Yup, finally,” Natalie echoed in the same tone her father had just used.
So far, it’d been one hell of a day, and the rest of it wasn’t shaping up to be any better. Making her way over to a chair that was near Silver, Natalie sat down. Her stepsister slanted a glance in her direction and nodded a silent greeting.
“All right,” Natalie said, bracing herself for anything. “Let’s get on with it.”
Chapter 9
After Natalie took her seat, Harold didn’t begin speaking immediately. Instead, he moved restlessly about the wide, cathedral-ceilinged living room like a caged man desperately searching for the way out and only coming up against dead ends.
Finally, his back to the baby grand piano his wife insisted on getting for their son, he said, “By now, you’ve all heard the news. Candace is dead.”
“Is that why you called us here, to make sure we all knew?” Silver asked incredulously, raising her voice to be heard over her stepbrother’s high-pitched whining. “There’s been nothing else all over the news all morning,” she pointed out.
“No, I called you together because we need to make funeral arrangements.” His intense blue eyes shifted toward his wife.
Rebecca Lynn took immediate offense. “Hey, don’t look at me. I’ve never handled things like that.” A disdainful expression crossed her face. “Funerals give me the creeps.”
Anything that required work gave the woman the creeps, Natalie thought. “Eloquently put,” she murmured under her breath.
The general tone, since the words were not audible, earned her a dirty look from her stepmother. Bored and frustrated, Ricky’s whining went up a notch. It was a little like walking into an insane asylum, Natalie realized.
Her father shifted his attention to her. “Natalie, exactly when can we expect to have your sister’s body released?”
Her father was a reasonably intelligent man. He should have known the answer to that. And then it occurred to her that he expected her to have some kind of special pull at the coroner’s office. The system didn’t work like that.
“As soon as the ME finishes the autopsy and determines the cause of death,” she replied patiently.
Horror registered on Silver’s face. “You mean they’re gutting her like some kind of fish?” she asked, not bothering to stifle a shiver.
“We know the cause of death,” Jenna insisted. When Natalie looked at her, waiting, her younger sister declared, “Someone killed her.”
Was everyone being deliberately obtuse, or had the fuse on her temper been shortened by Matt’s sudden reappearance into her life?
“That’s not the cause, that’s the effect,” Natalie explained, trying to at least sound patient. “If we know how, we might know who.”
“What good is that going to do us?” Jenna asked sullenly. “She’ll still be dead.”
“No, Natalie’s right,” Harold cut in. “If we know who, then we’ll know if killing Candace was personal—or personal.” Was his daughter killed by a jealous lover, or someone who had it in for the family, for him, and this was their way of striking out?
A loud, exasperated sound escaped from Rebecca Lynn’s lips. The other women in the room all looked in her direction. “Okay, you’ve officially gone off the deep end,” she told her husband nastily.
“Don’t go declaring him mentally incompetent just yet, Rebecca Lynn, although I’m sure that the thought is near and dear to your heart,” Natalie said, a deliberately fake smile on her lips. Turning to her father, her “smile” vanished. “Just what do you mean by that?” she wanted to know.
Before Harold could say anything, Rebecca Lynn presented herself to him, her hands fisted at her waist. “Are you going to let her talk to me like that?” she demanded.
“Why not?” Silver interjected. “You talk to him like that all the time.”
Whatever heated words Rebecca Lynn retorted to her stepdaughter were drowned out by Ricky’s screams because no one was paying any attention to him. The next moment, he was scrambling up onto the piano bench and banging on the keys, adding yet another layer of dissonance to the cacophony.
Jenna’s voice was almost shrill as she demanded, “Will someone please shut that kid up?”
Harold looked as if he was down to his very last nerve as he implored his wife, “Rebecca, please, take him out of here.”
Rebecca Lynn crossed her arms before her, a portrait of immovable stubbornness. Everyone in the room knew that there was nothing she hated more than to appear as if she was being ordered around. “Why don’t you? He’s your son, too.”
Though she wanted nothing more than to just withdraw and go home, Natalie found herself coming to her father’s rescue.
“In case you hadn’t noticed, Dad’s the one who called the meeting.” Rebecca Lynn patently ignored her and picked up her all but empty second glass of gin and tonic. She’d raised it to her lips when Natalie added, “But I’ll be happy to take my little brother out of here.”
A look of alarm descended over Rebecca Lynn’s face. Swallowing a curse, she set her glass down hard on the coffee table and quickly rose to her feet. Striding across the room, she grabbed her son by the hand and yanked him off the piano bench. The boy’s screams only swelled in volume. Glaring at Natalie, Rebecca Lynn dragged her son from the room.
Ricky was heard kicking and screaming all the way up the stairs to his room.
If she knew Rebecca Lynn, Ricky was quickly going to become the housekeeper’s problem, Natalie thought, feeling sorry for the older woman.
Harold took advantage of Rebecca Lynn’s absence. His young wife had a way of intimidating him that neither Anna, nor June—the late, lamented love of his life—ever had. “Can’t you put some pressure on this ME of yours?” he asked Natalie. “I want to get Candace buried and put this whole nasty business behind us as soon as possible.”
“He’s not my ME,” Natalie pointed out, then realized something. “You’re worried that this is just the beginning, aren’t you?”
“What do you mean, just the beginning?” Confused, Jenna looked from her father to her sister. “Just the beginning of what?”
“Nothing,” Harold dismissed Jenna’s question much too quickly. The look he shot Natalie said that he’d told her what he had in confidence.
If she’d felt that this only involved Rebecca Lynn, she wouldn’t have said a word in front of Silver and Jenna. But her father had given her the impression that this thing went beyond her grasping stepmother and her unruly half brother.
Natalie looked pointedly at her father, passionately wishing he had a backbone. “They have a right to know, Dad.”
Jenna’s eyes nervously shifted from her to their father. “Know what?”
Since her father still wasn’t saying anything, Natalie took the matter into her own hands. “Dad thinks that the ring is cursed.”
It still didn’t make any sense. Jenna exchanged looks with Silver, who looked no more enlightened than she felt. “What ring?” Jenna wanted to know.
Again, Natalie waited for her father to say something. He didn’t. So she did. “The Tears of the Quetzal.”