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One eyebrow arched as he looked at her quizzically. “Born-again virgin?”
That was the way she’d come to think of herself. “I haven’t been with anyone in eight years. So I figured that pretty much qualifies me as a beginner if not born-again virgin altogether. So I figured…” She let her voice trail off as she shrugged.
The sound of Matt’s laughter echoed around the room and brought a burst of sunshine into her soul. The way it always had in the past. There was something about the sound that lifted her spirits and coaxed a smile from her lips. Even on those occasions when she didn’t think there was anything to smile about.
Matt laced his hands together around her shoulders, holding her close to him. Content to remain like that all night long. He didn’t have to be anywhere until nine the next morning, and there was nowhere else he wanted to be than here.
“So where does this put us, other than the floor?”
She drew in a breath. This was where she could reclaim her dignity. But the only thing she resorted to was the truth.
“Nowhere,” she answered. “I’m assuming that whatever made you leave is still there, still a reality that you’re dealing with.”
He thought of the phone call from his brother, the frantic one that demanded he “do something. Make it right.” Those were always Scott’s words when he asked—demanded really—that he come to his rescue. Pointing out that if Scott had behaved, if he’d kept his pants on to begin with, there’d be no need for his brother to put him on the spot and “make it right.”
He’d resigned himself to the fact that Scott would always be Scott. A leopard whose spots didn’t change with time.
But, like it or not, Scott was family. His family and he couldn’t just stand by and let something happen to Scott, no matter how tempted he was to hit his older brother upside the head in hopes of knocking some kind of sense into him.
Not likely, Matt thought.
Scott’s world revolved around Scott and no one else—until he feared retaliation because of some stupid transgression on his part. Like the time his brother bedded Candace.
“Yes,” he told her quietly, “nothing changed.”
She really was an idiot, wasn’t she? And now Matt knew it as well as she did. Doing her damndest to keep her tears in check, Natalie began to rise.
She was surprised when he wouldn’t let her. Matt tightened his hold on her, making her stay put. She raised her arm to push him away when he stopped her cold with his words.
It was time to tell her. He didn’t want her imagination conjuring up false, negative theories, didn’t want her believing something that wasn’t true. Believing that he didn’t love her. Natalie deserved to know the truth.
“You want to know why I left that morning?”
She stopped struggling. “Considering that I’ve asked you several times since yesterday, I’d say you just made a very clever leap to a conclusion.”
Her sarcasm didn’t affect him. He knew it was her shield, her way of keeping the pain at bay. Hopefully what he had to tell her would minimize the pain. “I left for you.”
So he kept trying to tell her. “Oh, please.” She rolled her eyes. He was more clever than that. “You’re going to have to do better than that. That’s right up there with that old saw, ‘it’s not you, it’s me.’”
“It was me,” he insisted, then amended. “Or more accurately, it was my family. And it still is my family. The morning I left, I’d gotten a call from Scott. He was in some kind of trouble—”
“What kind?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter. What mattered was I realized that he and the rest of them would always keep pulling me back in. I’ve tried to separate myself from my family, to go my own way and just pretend they didn’t exist, but—”
“They’re still your family,” Natalie supplied with a sigh. How well she knew that feeling. There’d been a time when she’d considered changing her last name. But that still wouldn’t change who she was, or that they were her family. “Welcome to my world.” She propped herself up on her elbow and looked down at him. Was it as simple as that? He’d pulled away from her because of his family? “Look, if you can put up with mine, I can put up with yours.”
There was one basic flaw with that philosophy. “Yours doesn’t kill people. Doesn’t have people after them because they want to ‘even’ some score. I left you because I couldn’t put you in that kind of danger just because I couldn’t live without you.”
“Too late,” she declared. “Candace’s murder just changed the rules of the game. There might be a very good chance that my sister was killed because someone was looking to get even—” Natalie abruptly stopped, her eyes widening as she just now recalled the end of his statement. “Did you just say you couldn’t live without me?”
Maybe he shouldn’t have told her. But now that he had, he wasn’t about to say that he hadn’t meant what he’d said.
“Yes.”
Feeling her heart beginning to accelerate, Natalie struggled to sound calm. “And how long has this been going on?”
He told her the simple truth. “Since the first moment I laid eyes on you.”
If she was smart, she wouldn’t believe him. But she’d already proven she wasn’t smart. Because she was lying on her kitchen floor, naked—and wanting more.
Natalie laughed softly and shook her head as she moved closer to him. “You know, for a monk—” which was what he’d alluded his life was like “—you have a very smooth tongue.” Each word was separated by a small, flittering kiss as her lips lightly grazed different parts of his anatomy. She felt him stiffening against her and smiled. “Encore?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” he told her just before he brought her up to his level and sealed his mouth to hers.
Chapter 11
She was getting nowhere.
And the worst part about it, she was getting there in slow motion.
Natalie could feel her frustration mounting, governing her every waking moment—and keeping her from finding sleep for more than a few fitful minutes at a time.
Thanks to Matt’s connections, over the last week she had been able to question anyone at the party who might have seen her twin interact with people at the gala. The upshot of that had been that, other than posing for the cameras and exchanging a few words with reporters, Candace hadn’t really talked to anyone besides Luke Montgomery and Matt himself.
Matt, at least, didn’t seem to have anything to hide. She wasn’t all that sure about Luke yet.
Not only had Matt covertly gotten her a copy of the tapes that her own department had commandeered but he had also given her Montgomery’s guest list under the guise that it was public knowledge who had attended. For her part over this last week, Natalie had judiciously gone down that list, calling or going to see as many people on it as she physically could.
All she had managed to garner over and over again was not information but condolences. For the most part, once she identified herself as Candace’s twin, the people she spoke with focused on the words “so sorry for your loss.” When it came to saying something kind or flattering about Candace, there was far less enthusiasm. The kindest thing that anyone could offer was that her sister was “a woman who knew how to have a good time.”
Natalie sincerely doubted that. What Candace had actually done was try desperately to numb herself, to party to the point of exhaustion. She’d gone at an almost frenzied pace from man to man in hopes of finding the man, never realizing that relationships did not spring out of the ground fully formed but actually took work. Constant work. With luck, that work made the relationship better. Made it golden.
Candace wasn’t the only one to be disappointed, she thought now, sitting at her desk in the semidarkness in the room she used as her office.
That was the kind of relationship, eight years ago, she would have sworn she had with Matt. And yet, look how wrong she’d been about that. The first perceived bump in the road and he had vanished without a trace. Never mind that the bump originated with him and not her…and that he’d done it supposedly for selfless reasons. What it came down to in her mind was that he hadn’t thought enough of her to ask how she felt about this sacrifice he was making. He hadn’t even bothered to ask if she agreed with his reasoning.
If he had, she would have talked him out of it. Then. But now, there was no point in going over old ground. Too much time had passed, too many years of hurt that hadn’t been remedied. Despite the lovemaking that first night—and the second and the third and all the rest that followed—the path they were on had been set. Try as she might, she didn’t see them going off into the sunset together.
Besides, he hadn’t said anything about getting together, not in any sort of permanent way. For the last week they had gotten together every evening to discuss their combined lack of headway in this investigation. Somehow these discussions always culminated with them going to bed together. Natalie mused that their insatiable desire for one another was most likely the result of an attraction that should have come with its own asbestos container because, left out in the open, it was as combustible as nitroglycerin.
So here she was, slipping out of her bed, padding in bare feet into the next room, dressed in a longer-than-usual-peasant blouse she’d pulled on and nothing more. Restless, her mind going in three different directions at once, Natalie wanted to look over her notes in order to see if there was something she’d somehow missed. Anything, no matter how tiny, that might finally send her off in the right direction.
She’d been at it less than twenty minutes when she became aware that she was no longer alone in the room. Matt had come up behind her.
The next moment, he lifted her hair away and pressed a kiss to the back of her neck. “Bed’s cold without you,” he murmured.
His breath was warm on her skin, sending shivers down her spine.
“This is April in Vegas. Nothing is cold in Vegas in April.” She struggled to sound coherent. She would’ve thought that after the torrid session they’d had together, she couldn’t be aroused again so soon.
But she could and she was.
“Relatively cold compared to before,” Matt amended. As he spoke, he placed his hands on her bare shoulders.
It was a possessive gesture she found oddly comforting. She never did think clearly around him, Natalie mused.
“Have a sudden inspiration?” he asked, looking over her shoulder at her notes.
With effort, she focused on what had drawn her out of bed.
“I wish.” Natalie sighed. “I don’t even know if Candace was killed and the ring was stolen to make it look like a robbery, or the ring was the object of the crime and she was killed when she wouldn’t give it up.”
“Does it matter?” There was an ironic tone to his voice and she knew what he meant. That either way, the outcome was that Candace was dead.
“It might help me figure out who did it,” she explained. “If Candace picked up someone and brought them home, then that explains why the door wasn’t jimmied and points to the killer being a stranger. If it was someone she knew, she opened the door because of that—and whoever killed her did it for personal reasons.”
Matt took her argument a step further. “Maybe the ‘personal’ reasons was that he—or she,” he inserted although it was obvious to Natalie that he really didn’t think that a woman was responsible for Candace’s death, “felt the ring actually should belong to them and not Candace.”
That was an odd thing to say. “I thought the ring was always in our family.”
“I heard a rumor to the contrary the other day.”
Natalie was immediately intrigued. Swinging around to look up at him, her mouth dropped open. She hadn’t realized that Matt hadn’t put anything on when he’d come looking for her. Her present position put her at a definite disadvantage as far as clear thinking went. Clearing her throat, she rose from the chair, doing her best to keep her eyes on his.
“Why didn’t you say anything earlier?” she wanted to know, her voice quavering just a little.
They’d gotten into it pretty hot and heavy almost from the moment he’d walked in the door. She’d been on his mind the entire day. By the time he’d come over, all he’d wanted to do was make love with her until he dropped from exhaustion.
“Earlier I was occupied,” he told her.
No, she wasn’t going to allow herself to get sidetracked. Not this time.
“This is important,” she insisted, hitting his shoulder with the flat of her hand.
He merely grinned. “So was what I was doing earlier,” he answered, before returning to the subject at hand. “Besides, it was only a rumor, and I hadn’t heard anything to back it up.”
Still, it was a new idea, a possible new direction to go in. “We need to follow that up.”
She remembered the note her father had told her he’d gotten. A note that seemed to threaten all of them. She’d kept that little tidbit from Matt on the pretext that she didn’t want him to worry. Now her father’s fear had gotten legs.
“If someone thought the ring belonged to him, or was stolen from his family, well, that could be motive enough to kill Candace when she wouldn’t surrender the ring—” She caught her breath as she felt Matt slip his hand up along her thigh. “What are you doing?”
“Sliding my fingers along the softest, most tempting piece of flesh I’ve ever had the good fortune to touch,” he told her seductively.
Her pulse began to scramble. “I can’t think when you do that.”
“That’s the whole idea,” he admitted. Taking her hand, he began to draw her from the room. “Come back to bed, Natalie. It’s three in the morning. The only people who are up at this hour are the gambling addicts and the pit crews who make their living off the addicts. We’ll pursue this angle in the morning,” he promised her. He pressed another kiss to her temple. “Right now, all I want to pursue is you.”
Damn but he could reduce her to a quivering mound of jelly in an instant. “That would be assuming that I was on the run.”
The grin on his lips grew wider—and all the sexier for it. He was already making love to her with his eyes. “Yeah.”
She could feel the heat radiating from his body. Encompassing her. Making her yearn for contact. “I’m not running.”
“Even better,” he murmured, closing his arms around her and pulling her to him.
Damn it, she was supposed to be concentrating on finding Candace’s killer, not surrendering to a man with whom she had one hell of a past and no obvious future.
What was she thinking?
That was just it, she wasn’t thinking. She was feeling. Feeling an entire cauldron of emotions that were swirling madly through her.
And then, while her mouth was still sealed to his, she felt herself being lifted up in the air. Lifted and carried back to her bed.
The journey, punctuated with a myriad of hot, passionate, open-mouth kisses, was slow going. But half the fun, she knew, was in getting there.
By the time they did, he had her so worked up that she was all but ready to attack him.
The passion escalated to heights she didn’t think could be achieved, especially with someone who knew her the way Matt did.
She knew that in the not-too-far distance, the inevitable waited. Matt would leave again, and she would let him go. Because he felt that ultimately they didn’t belong together, and she had too much pride to beg him to reconsider.
But for now, they had this little piece of paradise together, and she was going to make the very most of it for as long as she possibly could. She knew she was living on borrowed time, and it made every moment that much sweeter, that much more precious.
Matt sat on the bed, watching Natalie get dressed, silently marveling that such a simple act could exude such poetry at the same time. “I could come with you, you know.”
Natalie slipped on a pair of black pumps. Her entire outfit was as tasteful and subdued as Candace’s had always been flamboyant and scintillating.
Her eyes met Matt’s in the mirror above the bureau as she put in a pair of diamond studs.
“I know. But it’s better all around if you don’t.” She was aware that the answer she’d given him wasn’t the one Matt wanted to hear, even though he didn’t challenge her on it. Feeling guilty because he was being so nice about it, she tried to explain. “Seeing you is going to remind my father that he owes your family money and—”
Natalie abruptly stopped talking. What she was saying was making Matt’s point for him, or at least part of it. He’d told her that he felt they couldn’t make a go of it because of their families. That his would always keep reeling him in. That, no matter what he did on his own, he would always be thought of as part of the Schaffer family, a family who had underworld ties and who poisoned everything it touched.
He hadn’t wanted their reputation to touch her.
She’d stopped talking so suddenly, he thought something was wrong. Matt got up off the bed and crossed to her.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” She forced a smile to her lips in an effort to convince him that everything was fine. “If you want to come to the memorial service, then come,” she said, inviting him. And then she added, “I’d like that.” Her eyes swept over him. He was dressed in the suit he’d worn last night. It was light gray with a dark blue shirt to set off his eyes. He looked much too vibrant for a memorial service. “Do you have a dark suit?” He gave her a look that all but said, You have to be kidding. “Okay, then,” she decided out loud. “If you’re serious about wanting to be with me, then yes, I’d love to have you at Candace’s memorial service.” She tried not to think about her father’s reaction to seeing Matt there.
“Not that I’m trying to jinx this, but what just changed your mind?”
She gave him an innocent look as she spread her hands wide. “I’m female.”
He laughed then and brushed a quick kiss against her lips. “Yeah, I noticed.”
It took Matt less than a half hour to get ready, a fact that left her in more than a little awe, especially since part of that time included driving over to his place in order to change into a navy-blue suit.
“Approve?” he asked her as he got back into her vehicle.
“Approve,” she replied with a nod and a smile. And so, she added silently, would every woman over the age of five and under the age of one hundred. If they had a pulse, they would definitely approve of the handsome man sitting beside her.
Her father, however, would be a different story. Driving to the small chapel on the cemetery grounds where the service was to be held, Natalie braced herself. It had been years since she had sought or needed parental approval, but she still hated confrontations.
They weren’t the first ones in the chapel. Her father and his wife, her stepsister and younger sister were already there.
She was aware of the looks she was getting from her family the moment she walked through the chapel doors with Matt walking beside her. Jenna’s face registered first surprise, then looked pleased. Silver just looked stunned. Natalie was well aware that her famous stepsister was sizing up the man who was with her. Silver wasn’t Candace, she didn’t see every man as a possible key to happiness, but she made no secret of the fact that she did like a good, decent specimen of manhood when she saw one.
Daggers and hostile glares came her way courtesy of her father and his trophy wife. Most likely for different reasons, Natalie surmised, pretending not to notice either of them.
The minister she’d engaged for the service was at the podium. Their eyes met and Natalie nodded, giving him the signal to begin even though the chapel was only half full. She was well aware of the fact that Candace had so-called friends who thought that watches were a conspiracy by the government to entrap them in small, confining boxes that were dictated by the sweeping hands of a clock.
The upshot was that half of the “friends” she’d invited weren’t here. She figured it was either because they’d forgotten the day, because they didn’t want to acknowledge the fact that a life force like Candace was actually gone—or because they simply didn’t care. All Natalie knew for sure was that the bottom line was they weren’t here and somewhere, wherever Candace was, she was disappointed at the relatively small showing.
Had she made this service public, Natalie was certain the paparazzi would have come out in force. That might have been enough to lure out the so-called friends who weren’t here now.
Part of her almost felt that she should have done that. Because this was for Candace, not her. But in the end, she decided that her twin’s life had been a three-ring circus for years and not in a good way. Her death shouldn’t be allowed to follow that same path.
It was a short service.
When Natalie delivered the eulogy, she tried very hard to concentrate on only the good moments and spoke, for the most part, about Candace’s generous heart when they were growing up together. It was a life, she concluded, cut short much too soon because she wanted to believe that the best was yet to come for Candace.
Afterward, a few of her friends spoke, saying they would miss her at parties and that she left very big shoes to fill. There was not much to say after that. Natalie was painfully aware that her father said nothing. At one point, he looked as if he was about to stand up, but Rebecca Lynn had linked her arm through his, even while they were seated, and she restrained him from rising. With a shrug, he remained where he was.
As the participants filed by the minister on their way out of the small church, Natalie realized that her father had brought his housekeeper with him. It was she who was in charge of Candace’s two children. With a boy tethered to each hand, the woman managed to keep the boys in check. Mick and David looked oddly subdued, as if they understood what was happening.
In her heart, she sincerely hoped not. Funerals and memorial services were no place for children. Natalie noticed that her half brother was mercifully missing from the service.
Bending down, Natalie looked from one boy to the other. She smiled at them. “You guys okay?” she asked, doing her best to sound upbeat.
Two mop-heads bobbed up and down as they mumbled, “Uh-huh.”
What was going to become of them? she wondered. She doubted that her father was going to allow the boys to move in with him and that would mainly be the fault of the empty-headed witch of the west. Rebecca Lynn would not welcome children who were not her own.
She was tempted to claim the boys herself, but she was realistic. Because of the nature of her work, she knew she wouldn’t be allowed to take them in or adopt them. The job called her away at odd times of the night and day. It was certainly not the most stable environment for two little boys.
But there was time enough to worry about that later, she told herself. Rising to her feet again, she slanted a glance toward Matt. For now, she had more than enough on her plate.
“May I see you for a moment, Natalie?” her father requested, his voice taking on that formal tone that, as a child, used to tell her that she was in trouble.
She turned to Matt. “I’ll only be a minute,” she promised. He nodded and stepped back, after saying, “Sorry for your loss, Mr. Rothchild.”
Harold made no acknowledgment that he even heard him speak. “What were you thinking?” her father demanded the moment Matt stepped away.
She was still angry at him for not getting up to say something, however small, in tribute to Candace. For God’s sake, his daughter was dead. Didn’t he care?
“You’re going to have to be more specific than that, Dad.”
“You know perfectly well what I’m referring to,” Harold insisted peevishly. He looked at Matt. “How could you bring Schaffer here with you?”
It was on the tip of her tongue to say, “My arrangements, my choice,” but that would put her in the same low class as Rebecca Lynn, so she focused only on addressing his question. “Because he said he wanted to pay his respects to Candace.”