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The phone began to ring, jarring him out of his reverie. He glanced at the caller ID and then relaxed, shifted into business mode and answered with his usual voice of authority, and the morning continued.
Alicia was pouring herself a refill from the coffeepot when John came back into the kitchen. This time he was dressed, thank God. She didn’t think she could take another reality jolt like that without making a fool of herself.
“Did you find everything you needed?” John asked as he got a cup down from the cabinet and filled it.
Alicia lifted her cup. “Coffee was enough.”
John’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he raked her body with a slow, assessing gaze. Then he reached back in the cabinet, got down two bowls and pointed to a door behind her.
“There are a couple of kinds of dry cereal in the pantry. Pick one for yourself. I want Cocoa Puffs. Would you mind passing them over?”
“But coffee is—”
“You’re too thin.”
Alicia’s mouth dropped. In the world of high fashion, there was no such thing. She reached for the Cocoa Puffs and handed them to him, and as she did, she began to smile. The cartoonlike characters on the cereal box were such opposites of the persona this man projected. She eyed the other box of cereal, touting health and bran, then opted for Cocoa Puffs, as well.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had chocolate anything for breakfast before.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Why not?”
Alicia paused with the bowl in her hand, and even as the words were coming out of her mouth, she knew how ridiculous they were going to sound.
“I guess because no one ever offered it.”
John’s eyes widened as he turned, staring at her as if she were a curiosity.
“Haven’t you ever made a meal for yourself?”
She felt heat on her face and an odd sense of guilt, as if she’d been examined and found lacking.
“No.”
He thought of White Fawn, down on her knees scraping bits of flesh and tallow from the insides of skins, hanging slivers of deer meat over small fires to smoke and dry. Picking berries to add to his meals, the tips of her fingers stained blue from their juice.
Then he took a slow breath and nodded. Judging her wasn’t any of his business, although he couldn’t resist a small dig.
“Sounds to me like you should have run away from home a long time ago.”
“You’re probably right,” she shot back. “Pass me the cereal when you’re through, please.”
He grinned and handed over the box.
Alicia felt its weight in her hand, but at that moment, she couldn’t have moved to save her soul. That smile…Sweet mercy. Thankfully, he turned his back on her to retrieve the milk from the refrigerator. By the time he came back, she had pulled herself together and had filled her bowl.
“Don’t float it,” she muttered, when he began to pour milk on her cereal.
He paused, eyeing the intent expression on her face as she watched the little chocolate puffs rising with the milk. He didn’t want to admit it, but she intrigued him.
“Then pour it yourself and consider it your first stab at cooking.”
Alicia’s face burned even more. She’d been rude, but not intentionally.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “That came out as a demand, and I didn’t mean for it to.”
John shrugged. “You’re not running for Miss Congeniality…but we need to remember that you are running. So sit down and eat. When we’ve finished, we need to make a plan to get you to the proper authorities.”
Alicia wanted to be angry. She wasn’t used to being talked to this way, but her own sense of justice made her admit she’d asked for it.
“Yes. Thank you,” she said, then took the spoon he offered and followed him to the kitchen table.
They ate in silence. Every now and then, Alicia would sneak a peek at his face to see if he was still irked with her, but he seemed to have let it all go, which was fine. She thought about the scars on his body and wanted to ask, but she’d already been rude once. Adding to her list of transgressions didn’t seem like a good idea, not when he was helping her like this. So she dug into her cereal, enjoying the sugar-loaded treat more than she would have imagined.
Once John looked up and caught her in the act of staring. Instead of looking away, he surprised her by staring back.
Before she could move, he reached over and swiped his thumb across the corner of her mouth. “Chocolate milk.” When he licked the milk off his thumb in a slow, studied motion, an ache shot through her belly so fast she groaned.
“You okay?” he asked.
Hell no. “Other than the fact that you’ve discovered my ineptitude at feeding myself, my inability to take care of myself and the fact that I can’t keep all my food in my mouth, I’m just peachy.”
It was the sarcasm that got him. He grinned.
“Point taken.” He got up and put his dirty dishes in the sink. “Don’t rush on my account. I’m going to the office to check my e-mail and make a few calls.”
Alicia nodded, while another concern suddenly surfaced. She didn’t know a thing about what he did or how he got the money to live this way.
“What do you do for a living?” she asked.
He paused, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully, then shrugged. “These days, I mostly buy and sell stuff.”
“Oh…you play the stock market?”
“I don’t play at anything. One facet of my life is importing and exporting things, some of which are antiquities.”
“Really? Like what I saw hanging on your walls?”
“No, most of those are family relics. Feel free to look around. I won’t be long.” He turned and left.
Alicia nodded, then eyed his purposeful stride, along with his backside, with honest female appreciation.
Once she finished eating, she set her dishes in the sink as he’d done, then glanced out the windows. The wind was up. Whitecaps rode the waves all the way in to shore and then out again, while the waves crashed against the rocks. Not a good morning for a stroll on the beach, although it mirrored the turmoil in her life.
She needed to think. She knew senators, congress-men—all kinds of Washington, D.C., bigwigs…but they were also her father’s contemporaries. His cohorts. They were people who’d been to dinner at their Miami home, who’d vacationed with them at their villa in Italy. Which ones—if any—could she trust with her information? She’d grown up watching her father buy loyalty the way other people bought groceries. If she told the wrong person, she would be signing her own death warrant.
She wandered past the library, then down the hall into the living room, where Native American artifacts had been hung in tasteful abandon. But she wasn’t really seeing them for the worries and thoughts going through her mind. Then her gaze landed on some photos, and she moved a little closer.
They were obviously old—tintypes, sepia-colored daguerreotypes, even an old panorama-style photo taken on the rim of some mountain that overlooked a great chasm with a river far below.
She squinted her eyes to read the tiny label affixed to the bottom of the frame, noting that it was of a portion of the Grand Canyon and the river was the mighty Colorado. The photo to the right was of a single figure, a Native American man with hair hanging almost to his waist. His face was painted and his chest was bare. He was wearing a breechclout made of skins, with some kind of leggings. It was hard to make out details, considering the picture was an old sepia print, and faded at that.
But Alicia hadn’t been raised in her father’s business without some of it rubbing off, because it was the rifle he was cradling in his arms that caught her attention. It looked like a long rifle. One of the old single-shots that required patches and powder and lead balls. She glanced at his face again, partially hidden by the long fall of hair on either side, then started to move on when something caught her eye.
She leaned closer, peering intently at the man’s bare chest. There was a crescent-shaped scar right below his collarbone on the left side of his chest, just like one of the scars she’d seen on John’s chest this morning, when he’d walked into the house naked. She glanced up at the face in the photo, studying the features beneath the paint. Something about them…
“Fierce-looking creature, isn’t he?”
She jumped. The deep rasp of John’s voice in her ear was unexpected.
She nodded, then glanced at the collar of John’s T-shirt, curious about the similar scar, but the shirt concealed it.
“Do you know who he is? There’s no name on the photo.”
John glanced down at her, then shoved his hands in his pockets and shrugged.
“A distant relative.”
“Oh…that explains why I thought he looked a little like you.”
John’s mouth twitched at the corner as he pretended to study the photo a little closer. It wouldn’t do to tell her flat out that it was him, and that he not only remembered the day the picture had been taken, but that he still had the rifle he was holding.
“I guess, to the whites, all Indians look alike,” he said, and then changed the subject. “Regarding your situation…have you figured out how you’re going to inform the authorities of what your father is doing?”
Alicia frowned. She didn’t think of herself as ethnically prejudiced and didn’t like him attributing that bias to her.
“I didn’t say that,” she replied, ignoring his question. “I said he looks a little like you. In fact, you even share a similar scar. Right there,” she added, pointing to the photo.
Without thinking, John’s hand moved to his chest, feeling the scar beneath the soft fabric of his shirt. He started to ask her how she knew about his scars, then remembered he’d walked bare-assed through the house right in front of her this morning, and sighed. It served him right.
“Hmm, I guess we do,” he said. “I never noticed.”
“You have a lot of scars,” she said.
“Yes.”
Alicia thought he would elaborate, but when he didn’t, she didn’t have the guts to ask him why.
“Now, about those phone calls,” John said. “What’s your plan?”
Alicia could tell the discussion about his ancestry was, for the time being, over. And he was right. There were things that needed to be set in motion so justice could be served.
“There are a lot of powerful people who are friends with my father, but this isn’t information that a regular police department would even deal with. Maybe the FBI…only Dad went to college with the deputy director. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not accusing him of being in cahoots with Dad, but I’m also not certain if he’d believe me. I have this image in my head of trying to convince people of the truth while Dad finds a way to make me out to be crazy…claiming I’m trying to ruin him because he disowned me, or something. And I don’t want to wind up in some loony bin, drugged out of my mind to keep me quiet, or six feet under because I was nothing but collateral damage on his path to his personal goals.”
John was listening, but he was also distracted by the fact that from where she was standing, he could tell she wasn’t wearing a bra. It irked him that he’d even noticed, and he chalked it up to the fact that it had been a while since he’d been with a woman. Maybe all he needed was to take another drive down to Savannah, although the last time he was there, he’d gotten mixed up in a bank robbery and shot for his troubles.
“So what do you think?” she prodded.
That you’re not as skinny as I thought. “Uh…that it’s your call.”
She groaned, then turned away and strode to the windows.
John followed.
“Look…if you really don’t trust the powers that be, there’s always the media,” he said.
Alicia’s frustration shifted. “What do you mean?” she asked as she turned to face him.
“You know the newspapers…always ready for the next big scoop. I know a journalist who works out of D.C.—Corbin Woodliff.”
“The Corbin Woodliff who won a Pulitzer a couple of years ago?”
“Yes.”
Alicia’s pulse skipped. That might be the answer. “Can you get me in to see him?”
“If he’s in the country,” John said, watching the play of emotions on her face.
Alicia’s voice rose an octave, evidence of her excitement. “If he broke the news, then the authorities would have to follow through. They couldn’t ignore it. They couldn’t be bought off if there was a huge public outcry.”
John nodded.
A smile began in her eyes, then spread to her lips as she impulsively threw her arms around his neck and hugged him.
“Oh, John…I think you’ve just saved my life…again.”
The first thought that crossed his mind was that he’d been right. She wasn’t wearing a bra. The second was that he’d managed to keep himself involved in her business by being the go-between for her source, which was good. He would do whatever it took to get to Richard Ponte. He wouldn’t let himself care that he was using her. His agenda had been going on too long for him to care about anything or anyone but the end result.
Before Alicia had a chance to register what she’d done, an alarm began going off. She jumped back, startled, as she looked around for the source of the sound.
“What’s that?” she cried.
John’s eyes narrowed. “A security alarm. Someone just came through the gate at the end of the driveway.”
“Was it locked?”
“Yes.” He didn’t add that he had additional security in place, in case anyone tried to bypass that lock.
“It’s not possible that it’s just a delivery…or a visitor?”
“I don’t get visitors.”
Alicia looked at him strangely. “Ever?”
“Ever,” John muttered as he headed for his office to check the security cameras, with Alicia right behind him.
Within seconds of getting to the security screen, he recognized who had triggered the alarm—and so did Alicia.
“It’s Dieter! Oh God…he’s found me! That means Dad knows where I am again.” Panic set in as the ramifications began to unfold. “That means you’re in danger, too. I shouldn’t have—”
