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‘There certainly is,’ he murmured.
‘There’s plenty of things you’d do well to avoid too.’ Fair warning. Smiling wryly, Madeline turned on her heel and let herself out.
‘So what’s the deal with you and Madeline Delacourte?’ Luke asked his brother as they resumed their battle with the Shaolin sticks some fifteen minutes later, this time with a watchful pickpocket for an audience. ‘You into her?’
‘Why the interest?’ asked Jake and followed through with a glancing blow to Luke’s side.
Luke stopped talking and started concentrating on his defence. But the image of Madeline Delacourte—she of the knowing smile, honey-blonde hair, and long shapely legs—just wouldn’t go away. ‘Why do you think? I’m not asking for a kidney here. All I want is a straight yes or no answer from one of you.’ He really didn’t think it was too much to ask.
‘No,’ said Jake, blocking Luke’s next blow. ‘She’s just a friend.’
‘Is she married?’
‘Not any more.’
‘Engaged?’
‘No.’
‘Attached?’
‘No.’ Jake’s stick caught him on the knuckles and damn near took his fingers off. ‘Madeline’s choosy. She can afford to be.’
‘She’s wealthy?’
‘Very. Her late husband’s family were British spice traders, back when the East opened up. They made a fortune and sank most of it into real estate. Maddy’s husband owned a string of shopping centres and hotels along Orchid Road and half the residential skyscrapers in south-east Singapore. Maddy owns them now.’
‘Her husband died young?’
‘Her husband died a happy old man.’
Luke winced. He didn’t like the picture Jake was painting. ‘Any kids?’
‘No.’ More blows reached him. ‘You’re not concentrating,’ said Jake.
‘I’m still coming to grips with the trophy-wife thing.’
‘Maybe she loved him.’
‘How much older was he?’
‘Thirty years,’ said Jake. ‘Give or take.’
Luke scowled and came in hard, peppering his brother with blows, his growing disillusion with Madeline Delacourte giving him a ferocious edge. The fighting ceased being a sparring exercise and became instead an outlet for emotion of the explosive kind as he went for Jake’s hands, the better to rid them of the long stick. Not a berserker, not quite, but a creature of instinct nonetheless and one Jake would have no peaceable defence against.
Cursing his lack of control, Luke grounded his staff and stepped back abruptly, breathing hard as he bowed to formalise the end of the session. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered, and headed for the stack of towels piled on a low wooden bench over by the wall.
Jake had walked towards Po and was speaking to him in the calm quiet way that Luke had always loved about his brother. The kid nodded once, warily, and hightailed it out of the dojo door. Jake turned his attention back to Luke after that. Luke looked away and towelled his face, not wanting to meet Jake’s condemning gaze, or, worse, his understanding one. Once a younger brother, always a younger brother, though he was not the youngest of the four boys in the family. Tristan carried that dubious honour.
By the time he’d finished roughing the towel over his shoulders and stomach, Jake stood beside him.
‘You want to tell me what that was all about?’ asked Jake quietly.
Ten rigorous years of living life in the explosive lane? Never settling down, never staying in one place for more than a few months? One too many dices with death? A volcanic recklessness that had been building and building and needed an outlet before it blew him apart? ‘I changed the rules on you halfway through the match and I shouldn’t have. I stopped. No one got hurt. What’s to tell?’
‘You let anger take hold,’ said Jake. ‘You lost your centre.’
He didn’t have a centre. He wasn’t even sure he had a soul any more after standing witness to so much death and destruction. And the thought that Madeline Delacourte, saviour of street urchins, had sold her soul for wealth ate at him like acid. Just once he’d wanted an angel of mercy to grace his life rather than the spectre of death.
‘How long since you last took a job?’ Jake asked next.
‘A few weeks back, give or take.’ Not that he minded. Better for everyone when he wasn’t working.
‘You right for money?’
‘Money’s fine.’ Luke’s line of work had paid remarkably well over the years. He wasn’t in Madeline Delacourte’s stratosphere by any means, but he had no monetary need to ever work again.
Jake opened his mouth and closed it again without speaking. His face took on a pained expression. ‘Blame your brothers,’ he murmured.
‘For what?’
‘This. You’re not in love, are you?’
Luke stared at him in astonishment. ‘What?’
‘No uncontrollable yearning to phone, visit, or possess one particular woman above all others?’ Jake asked warily.
‘No.’ Not unless he counted wanting to possess the sister of mercy who’d just sashayed out of Jake’s dojo without a backward glance. Which he didn’t.
‘This is a good thing,’ said Jake. And with his next breath, ‘So what the hell’s your problem?’
‘I don’t know.’ Something about this brother demanded honesty and always had. Luke gave it to him straight. ‘It’s just…walk in the shadow of violence long enough and it begins to claim you. I looked at Madeline Delacourte and saw beauty, not just of form but in deed as well. When your words painted her otherwise I saw red.’
Jake frowned as he towelled himself down. ‘There’s goodness in Maddy—ask any kid she’s dragged from the gutter. There’s beauty in the way she walks this city’s dark side without fear. As for marrying to secure a better life—maybe she did, maybe she didn’t—it’s none of my business. And it doesn’t make her a whore.’
Luke scowled. ‘It doesn’t exactly make her pure as the driven snow either.’
‘What do you care? An angelic woman would drive you insane within a week.’
‘Yes, but it’d be nice to know they exist.’
‘When I find one I’ll give you a call,’ said Jake dryly. ‘Meanwhile, I suggest you respect Madeline Delacourte for what she is. A smart and generous woman who doesn’t give a damn if she has more enemies amongst the upper echelons of society than friends. She does what they don’t. She pours truckloads of money into programmes designed to help the poor and displaced. She gets her hands dirty. And she doesn’t judge people according to past actions and find them wanting, the way you’ve just done.’
Luke scowled afresh. ‘Point taken.’ If Jake was willing to defend her, then she must be all right. Not an angel, just a mere mortal like everyone else. Angels were for fairy tales. He tossed his towel down on the bench. ‘I might stay on the floor a while.’ Work the forms, push his body hard and maybe, just maybe, bury his recklessness and his wrongful snap judgements beneath exhaustion.
Jake slid him a sideways glance, cool and assessing. ‘Fight me again,’ he offered. ‘Street rules, this time. No long sticks. No holding back. Just you and me.’
‘What if I hurt you?’ asked Luke gruffly, even as the beast within him roared its approval at Jake’s offer.
‘You won’t.’ Jake smiled gently. ‘But feel free to try.’
Jake had given Luke unspoken permission to work off his anger and during the fighting that followed he did, sending more and more his brother’s way until Jake faced the whole of it, drawing it from him effortlessly and shaping it into something harmless, something almost beautiful in its purity of intent. Fifteen minutes later, when they were both breathing hard and dripping sweat, Luke finally felt his tension start to ease.
Twenty minutes in, conspicuously on the losing end of this bout and grinning like a loon, Luke took the match to the floor and karate-with-intent turned to curse-and-laugh-filled wrestling. One last almighty elbow jab to Luke’s solar plexus and Jake had him licked.
‘You’d better be feeling better,’ said Jake, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand as he staggered to his feet. ‘Because I’m sure as hell feeling worse.’
Luke tried to sit up, groaned in pain, and thought the better of it. Flat on his back on the floor was just fine. Nice view of the ceiling from here. Jake’s conquering grin came into view first, then his hand. Luke batted it away. ‘Go away. I’m meditating.’
‘You? Meditate?’ Luke had never really mastered the finer points of meditation, and Jake knew it. ‘On what?’
‘Cobwebs. There’s one in your light fitting.’ Jake swore blue that meditation was simply a variation on the absolute focus Luke brought to the dismantling of bombs. Trouble was, Luke couldn’t bring that kind of focus to anything but unexploded weaponry. He certainly couldn’t wish it into being while contemplating his navel, even if his navel was a metaphor for life, the universe, and everything.
‘Cobweb meditation is good,’ murmured Jake. ‘Cobwebs can draw you to the centre of things and reveal hidden truths. Mind you, it’d help if you closed your eyes and stopped trying to incinerate your retinas while you’re at it.’
‘Always the perfectionist,’ muttered Luke, but he closed his eyes and breathed deeply.
‘What do you see?’ asked Jake.
‘The back of my eyelids.’
Jake sighed. ‘Focus.’
‘I know. I know. I’m on it,’ said Luke. ‘I’m moving my mind out into the flow.’
‘Good. What do you see?’
The face of a woman, bright against the darkness. Shoulder-length honey-blonde hair styled straight with a full fringe. Moss-green eyes flecked with brown and framed by sable lashes. A wide mobile mouth made for laughter and kissing. She would kiss very well; he knew it instinctively. She could make a man believe there was good in the world.
Madeline Delacourte.
Luke snapped his eyes open and sat up fast, never mind the pain coursing through his side or the thorn of desire lodged deep in whatever passed these days for his soul.
‘Anything?’ asked Jake.
Luke shook his head. ‘Nothing you want to know.’
CHAPTER TWO
MADELINE made a habit of following up on her rehomed street kids the day after she’d dropped them off at their new abode. Nimble-fingered Po had many survival strategies and scams in place, most of which would be calling for his attention right about now. If Jake could manage to keep Po around the dojo for the next forty-eight hours or so…if Jake could offer the boy something to work towards, something he wanted more than his old way of life…then Po had a chance at staying off the streets. That first step away from the old life was always the hardest, Maddy knew, but it could be done.
All Po needed was the right incentive.
Jacob was fronting a kick-boxing class when she walked into his dojo. He scowled when he saw her and jerked his head towards the back rooms, the half a dozen tiny rooms where guests and visiting students stayed, along with the occasional wayward boy.
She found Po in the kitchenette, kneeling on the round table, his attention firmly fixed on an odd assortment of kitchen appliances that had been placed dead centre of the round. Luke Bennett stood opposite Po, fully clothed this time, which was something of a disappointment, his voice a low rumble and his head bent as he too focused on the stuff on the table. Some sort of rolled-out cloth-bound toolkit lay between boy and man, only these particular tools weren’t like any other implements Maddy had ever seen.
‘Nearly done,’ Luke’s voice rolled over her, low and soothing. ‘Steady. Steady. Just a li-i-ttle bit more. Okay, Po. Now.’ Po’s hands moved quick and sure as he wielded a tiny pair of wire cutters over a mass of wires, Luke’s fingers just as nimble as he unwound a silver spring and shoved a piece of what looked like Blu-tack in its place. Moments later both boy and man leaned back, their grins wide and white. ‘You’ve got good hands, kid. I’ll give you that,’ said Luke.
Po beamed. Maddy stared.
‘Is that—’ she couldn’t believe her eyes ‘—a bomb?’
‘Of course not. What kind of question is that?’ Luke finally deemed fit to look her way, laughter lurking just around the corner. Maddy felt the force of that vivid amber gaze clear down to her toes. ‘It’s a makeshift detonation mechanism attached to a toaster.’
Maddy opened her mouth to speak but no words came out. Where to begin?
‘Luke’s got it set up to burn toast unless we can disable the detonator in time,’ added Po.
‘And the wallet in the toaster?’ she asked acidly. ‘What does that do?’
Po suddenly found the cracked linoleum floor pattern fascinating. Madeline stifled a groan. ‘Po, who owns the wallet?’
‘Jake,’ said Luke. ‘Po liberated it from him this morning and I liberated it from Po. Po’s currently planning to put it back where he found it. He’d appreciate my silence on the issue. The main problem being that once I set the wallet to toasting, Po has approximately a minute to disable the detonator without jamming the toaster. Any longer than that and I’m pretty sure Jake’s going to notice the scorch marks.’
Still nowhere to begin. Anywhere would do.
‘Okay, debatable disciplinary measures aside, you don’t think it slightly unwise to be teaching a child how to build and dismantle a trigger mechanism for a bomb?’ She’d started the sentence with her voice low and controlled, the better to avoid shrieking by the time she got to the end.
‘Maybe under ordinary circumstances, yes, but look at it this way,’ said Luke, using that same soothing voice he’d used earlier. Unlike earlier, when she’d been reluctantly charmed, it made her want to strangle him. ‘Po’s a pickpocket. A career that values steady nerves and nimble hands is a natural progression for him.’
‘Exactly how,’ she said, with a generous dollop of sarcasm, ‘is a career in bomb disposal progression?’
‘Well, for one thing it’s legal.’
‘Did you mention how if you stuff up, you die?’
‘Happens I did,’ said Luke. ‘I’m all for full disclosure.’
‘There’s so much to admire about you, Luke Bennett. Pity about the rest.’
‘Oh, that’s harsh,’ he murmured without an ounce of repentance. ‘Sorry, kid,’ he said to Po. ‘Lesson cancelled. I suggest you think hard about whether or not you’re prepared to live by my brother’s rules because I’m telling you now, you won’t get a second chance with him. If it’s easy money you’re after, go back to picking pockets. Then when you grow up you can join the real thieves and be an investment banker.’ Luke slid Maddy a sideways glance. ‘Or you can always try the minimal-effort, time-honoured method of improving your lot in life and marry someone with money. Happens all the time.’
Maddy took the hit as she was meant to take it.
Personally.
‘Now I know why your brother enjoys beating the daylights out of you,’ she murmured.
‘Trying,’ corrected Luke helpfully. ‘He enjoys trying to beat the daylights out of me. There’s a difference.’
‘Po, will you excuse us for a moment, please?’ said Madeline.
‘Can I get the wallet first?’
‘Maybe later,’ said Luke. ‘And if you steal anything else of Jake’s I swear you’ll be cleaning the dojo floor with a toothbrush.’
Po grinned and disappeared.
