Payback

Luke was wearing the traditional starched white chef’s jacket and black cotton pants. The jacket was pristine, presumably because he’d changed before leaving the kitchen. He’d discarded the mandatory head gear and his short-cropped hair stood up in a thick, dark crest above his tanned complexion and smoke-gray eyes. Despite spending twelve-hour working days inside various kitchens, Luke looked as if he made his living outdoors. She knew he started each morning, almost regardless of the weather, with a five-mile run along the lakeshore, which partly explained the permanent tan and the impressive physique. She admired his self-discipline, but even when they first started dating and the gloss was still pretty blinding, she’d wished he could be a little less perfect.

They’d needed to break up before Kate was willing to admit the extent to which she’d been intimidated by Luke’s assets. He had so darn many, aside from self-made wealth and good looks: his warmth, his friendliness, his easy sense of humor and his ability to roll with the punches while still working at a fiendish pace.

Then there was his storybook Italian family. She’d loved hearing tales about his brothers and sisters, not to mention his ever-expanding crop of nieces and nephews. She’d envied him the casual camaraderie of his five siblings and the general aura of controlled chaos surrounding his family life, although toward the end of their relationship she’d begun to wonder why she’d never met any of his relatives face-to-face. She knew Luke well enough to realize that any girlfriend he was serious about would be required to get along with his family.

Even more than his family, she’d envied the ease with which Luke showed his emotions. If he was happy, he laughed. When he cooked for her, he hummed as he worked, completely indifferent to the fact that he was always off-key. When they made love, his passion was all-consuming, his attention totally devoted to her. If he was angry, he yelled. And when the anger passed, it was forgotten, with no lingering bitterness or need to prove he’d been right all along.

She’d been with Luke the night he learned that his maternal grandfather had died from complications after supposedly routine surgery, and he’d cried as he heard the news. Apparently he’d never received the memo informing him that macho men were required to keep a stiff upper lip at all times. Kate’s grandparents, Southern aristocrats who believed that gentlemen and ladies should avoid behaving like men and women whenever possible, would have been appalled by Luke’s emotionalism. She had simply loved him more for his lack of inhibitions.

Luke’s ability to grieve openly had haunted her in the aftermath of her father’s disappearance. He had seemed to know instinctively how to integrate death and mourning into the natural order of his life. Kate, by contrast, had floundered. Her father’s death brought nothing but unanswered questions and the hurt of issues left permanently unresolved. Her sadness at his loss seemed too complicated to grasp, let alone to express in something as mundane as tears.

Kate instructed herself to stop wallowing in the past and focus on coping with the present. Luke had paused to chat at several tables as he crossed the dining room, but now he was only steps away from the hostess station. Steps away from her. Kate wished she could greet him with a casual smile and a throwaway comment about…something. Unfortunately, when your last encounter involved the sort of brutal betrayal that left you internally bleeding, it was a bit difficult to come up with anything that didn’t sound either snide or demented.

Luke halted a couple of feet away and simply stood there, saying nothing. She pretended to look at him but was actually careful to avoid meeting his gaze. Her brain was a blank, but eventually she managed to manipulate her mouth into a smile. At least, she hoped it was a smile and not a grimace.

She held out her hand. “Luke, thank you for meeting with me on such short notice.”

He ignored her hand. “You’re welcome.” His icy tone belied the polite words. “I assume you’re here to talk about your father.”

“Yes, if we could.” She let her hand drop to her side, her voice chilling to match his. If she’d expected the passage of seven months to heal the wounds of their parting, she had obviously been delusional.

“Let’s go to my office.” He turned without waiting for her to respond, not bothering to check if she was following as he wove a swift path to the tiny room set aside for him to make phone calls, pay bills and meet with vendors. Unlike the colorful dining rooms, or the shiny stainless steel of the spacious kitchens, his offices in all three restaurants were tiny, white-walled cubes. Small enough to be oppressive, and cold enough to form a suitably icy background for their conversation, Kate thought bleakly.

“I hope your mother wasn’t upset by what we discussed this morning.” Luke stood behind his desk and didn’t suggest that either of them should sit down. If body language was anything to go by, his attitude to this meeting was several degrees less enthusiastic than her own.

“Of course my mother is upset.” Kate bit back the urge to suggest he should refrain from making ridiculous statements. “Six months ago she found out that the man she’d loved for twenty-eight years was a bigamous, cheating liar. Then she was informed he’d been murdered. The next cheery little revelation was that her supposed husband had left far less money than anyone would have thought possible. What funds did exist went straight to probate, where the lawyers are having a grand time charging huge sums of money to unravel a quarter century of my father’s carefully manufactured deceptions. In the meantime, my mother’s been forced to sell her home of a dozen years and adjust to the fact that at least half her friends weren’t actually friends at all, merely hangers-on, out for what they could get. Now you summon her to your presence so that you can pass on the news that—big surprise!—maybe Ron Raven is alive after all.” She let out an exasperated breath. “How in the world do you think she feels?”

Luke’s voice and expression both remained cool. “Right now I imagine she’s teetering somewhere between overwhelmed and devastated.”

“Your imagination is correct. I’m wondering what the upside of your revelation was supposed to be.”

“The fact that Avery might be able to uncover the truth about what really happened to her husband?”

Kate made an impatient sound. “Where my father is concerned, truth is likely to remain unavailable however much we scrabble in the dust he left behind.”

“It’s clear you disapprove of my decision to tell your mother what I saw.”

“Yes, of course I disapprove. In effect you told her that Ron Raven cared so little about her that he was willing to fake his own death to avoid ever seeing her again. Thanks so much for your comforting words!”

He winced at her sarcasm. For a moment, his guarded expression broke down, revealing unmistakable self-doubt. “I felt I owed your mother the truth precisely because Ron lied to her for so many years.”

Kate wasn’t ready to acknowledge that Luke might have found himself in an almost impossible position. “You should have talked to me,” she said tersely. “Not my mother.”

Luke’s smile was wintry. “Maybe, but I was never into masochism, Katie. Having my balls cut off and shoved down my throat comes way down on my list of ways I want to spend the morning.”

Goose bumps erupted all over her arms when he called her Katie, even though the endearment was tucked inside a major insult. She reminded herself that her body was simply responding to ingrained sexual cues after months without sex. In her current celibate state, she could probably watch Patrick Dempsey making out with a TV lover and her hormones would provide the same knee-jerk response. And, watching Patrick, she’d get the sexual buzz without the added insult.

“For some reason, my mother believes your story about seeing Ron Raven might actually be true.” She hadn’t intended to sound so hostile, but Luke’s presence suffocated her, destroying her good intentions. She struggled to moderate her tone. “My mother asked me to find out if you had any additional information we might be able to hand over to a private investigator in the hope that he would be able to track down the man you saw in Washington, D.C.”

“Do you believe I saw your father?” Luke asked. His voice was unexpectedly quiet and the question seemed less of an attack, more of a genuine request for her opinion.

Kate hadn’t yet summoned the courage to examine that question. She’d focused on her mother’s state of mind and Luke’s transgressions mostly because it let her off the hook in terms of her own reaction to the eerie possibility that her father was alive.

“I’m sure you believe you saw him,” she said finally. Even when she’d first heard the news, she’d never doubted Luke’s sincerity.

“That’s not what I asked.”

She shrugged. “You knew my father quite well. I’m assuming the lighting was adequate and you saw him reasonably close up?”

“Yes.” Luke’s hesitation was almost imperceptible. “I heard him laugh before I looked at him. I was talking to my sister when I heard this familiar sound and I thought, My God, that sounds just like Ron Raven. I glanced up, not expecting to see him, of course, despite the laughter. But there he was. Eating dinner with an attractive, dark-haired woman and looking as if he was enjoying himself. For a couple of seconds, I was literally too shocked to move.”

The sickness in Kate’s stomach returned with renewed intensity. Hearing Luke describe the incident gave her father’s possible reappearance a reality it had previously lacked. An unwelcome reality, she realized. “There doesn’t sound as if there’s a whole lot of room for you to have made a mistake.”

“No. Still, I never exchanged a single word with the man and never heard him speak to anyone else. Everybody’s supposed to have a double somewhere in the world. Perhaps I saw Ron’s.”

She wished she could believe that, but her ability to ignore inconvenient facts wasn’t quite up to the task. “My mother said the man ran away when you tried to approach him.”

Luke nodded. “He was sitting right next to the door, and I was across the room, tucked into an alcove, with at least half a dozen tables between me and the exit. I chased him into the parking lot, but there was no way to stop him driving off once he made it into his car. I discovered it’s a lot more difficult to catch somebody than it looks in the movies.”

“I guess you didn’t manage to get the license number of his car as he drove away?”

“Actually, I did.”

“You did?” She glanced up, startled. “Could we trace it, then?”

“I already had a private investigator track it down before I contacted your mother. The car was a brand-new Mercedes, and it was registered to a man called Stewart M. Jones.”

For a second, Kate was puzzled. Then she realized that—of course—if her father wanted to avoid being discovered he couldn’t go around calling himself Ron Raven. “If you have those vehicle registration details, my mother and I should be able to track the car’s owner back to an address, shouldn’t we? I assume you have to give an address when you register a car in Virginia?”

“Apparently, yes. But my investigator reported that Stewart Jones sold the vehicle the day after I chased him into the parking lot. What’s more, the address given on the accompanying paperwork isn’t valid.”

“He gave a fake address?” Kate realized her surprise was misplaced. “Well, of course he would have to, I guess, since he was trying to stop you tracking him down.”

“The address wasn’t fake in the sense it didn’t exist. It just wasn’t Mr. Jones’s current place of residence. According to my investigator, somebody calling himself Mr. Jones lived at the address for a few weeks back in the summer. But he moved away from that particular location a couple of months ago.”

She sighed. “In other words, the car is pretty much a dead end in terms of tracking down Mr. Jones.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“You clearly believe that Stewart Jones is simply another name for Ron Raven, and that Ron sold his car rather than risk being traced.”

“Yes, that’s what I think.” Luke shrugged. “But take my opinion for what it’s worth. Not much, according to the cops. They’re convinced Ron is dead and that I’m a crime-scene junkie with delusions of seeing dead people. And they’re the experts, after all.”

She wished she could dismiss his story as the ramblings of a nutcase, Kate thought miserably, but his information was almost more compelling because he was so willing to provide her with reasons not to accept it. Luke was among the more down-to-earth people she knew, and she simply couldn’t picture him disrupting an enjoyable dinner with his sister to conjure up imaginary visions of a dead man.

“I appreciate the effort you put into tracking down the man you saw,” she said finally. “It sounds to me as if it really could be my father, so it’s probably just as well you didn’t manage to catch up with him.” She forgot for a moment to hide her feelings and allowed bitterness to seep into her voice. “I don’t see how it can bring my mother anything but grief to have proof that her lying, cheating husband is alive.”

“Ron left behind three children as well as two wives,” Luke said, his voice still quiet. “What does it say about his relationship with them…with you…if he’s determined not to be found? Don’t let him off the hook, Katie. You deserve better from him. For that matter, so do your half brother and sister.”

The absolute last thing she wanted was for Luke to be kind or sympathetic. Kate could feel her composure fraying by the second, unraveled by his gentleness. This would be an excellent moment to make her escape, she decided. So far she and Luke had managed to avoid inflicting serious bodily harm on each other, which had to be a good thing. Not to mention a precarious thing. It would be smart not to tempt fate.

“You’re right.” She inclined her head in acknowledgment. “If my father is alive, he has a lot to answer for. Except that I’m not sure I care enough to ask the questions. Right now, I feel he doesn’t deserve that much attention from me.”

“What about your half brother and sister?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t found the courage to meet them yet. Fortunately for me, I was in Europe when Adam brought Megan to Chicago after they got married.” She stopped abruptly. This was getting too personal again. “Anyway, thanks for all you’ve done, Luke. Sorry about the earlier hostility. I was worried about my mother and took out my worries on you.”

She dredged up a bright, meaningless smile, just to show that they were both grown-ups, and that this was a business conversation despite the intensely personal nature of the topic. “Would you give me the name of the detective you used to track the vehicle registration tags? If my mother should decide to pursue an investigation, it only makes sense to build on the inquiries you’ve already made.”

She felt Luke’s gaze rest on her face, but she avoided looking up. She was getting the same shaky, desperate feeling that had afflicted her in the weeks immediately after she learned Ron Raven had been murdered. She despised herself for still caring about her father, but she could only hide her emotions, not banish them. Luke had always been able to see through her protective barriers more easily than other men and that was a problem, given how badly she wanted to keep her feelings to herself. With all the evidence they already had of Ron Raven’s deceptions and double dealings, it was humiliating to go to pieces over the fact that her father apparently cared about her even less than she’d previously realized. She didn’t want Luke to know how…abandoned…she felt at this moment.

Thankfully, he made no more personal comments. “The investigator I used is called George Klein,” he said. “George is ethical, efficient and easy to work with and I’m happy to recommend him. If you decide to go ahead with an investigation, let me know. I have a couple of other tips that might help. Or they might be completely useless. To be honest, my guess is that your father has already moved on to a different city. He most likely ditched the Stewart Jones identity at the same time as he sold the Mercedes. He’s a man accustomed to planning ahead, so he would have had another identity already waiting for him to step into.”

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