“Peaceful? You?” Jane crossed to the swing and gave Eve her coffee before dropping down beside her. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I have my moments.” He took a sip of his coffee. “There’s a lake near Fiero that I visited when I dropped in to see Maria. It was a peaceful place too.”
“Maria Givano?”
“Yes.” He gazed out at Joe, who was standing on the bank of the lake several hundred yards away. “Quinn is distancing himself from our little coffee klatch. I wasn’t sure he’d even let me in the cottage.”
“Did you expect anything else?” Eve asked. “He still doesn’t trust you.”
“But you trust me.” Caleb’s brows lifted. “Amazing. Since I haven’t done anything to persuade you.” He paused. “And what you saw in the cathedral wasn’t something that would inspire you to want to draw closer to me.”
“No.” Eve would never forget that horrible scene. Caleb had been like someone who had stepped out of a horror story, the stuff of which nightmares were born. Yet she could not keep herself from separating that man from the Caleb she had grown to know. “And you don’t want me to draw close to you. You want to stand apart. Have you ever been close to anyone, Caleb?”
He shrugged. “When I was a child. My uncle, my parents, my sister. It didn’t seem worthwhile to make the effort with anyone else.”
Jane leaned forward. “Because you couldn’t be sure it would have been a genuine closeness? It was too easy for you to make people like you, even love you. You told me that you had trouble withstanding temptation.”
“What is this?” He tilted his head. “Am I having some kind of psychological evaluation?”
“Yes,” Eve said. “Because you barged into our lives and made a handprint that we can’t erase. Jane and I discussed it, and we decided that we had to get a grip on you before you slipped away.” She smiled faintly. “So I called Megan and asked her questions. She didn’t know the answers but she phoned Renata. She knew if anyone could tell us about you, it would be Renata.”
Caleb nodded. “Yes, our Renata’s a storehouse of information. But she usually keeps everything she knows confidential.”
“Megan and she are very close,” Eve said. “Renata trusts her.”
“And just what did Renata tell Megan?”
“Only what we asked her to find out,” Jane said. “The killing of Maria Givano seemed to be the beginning of everything. We asked why her death was the trigger that set you hunting Jelak.” She paused. “She was your half sister.”
“You could have asked me.”
“But you might not have told us.”
He nodded. “Possibly. Because one question might have led to another.”
“And it did,” Eve said. “She’d married a year earlier and taken her husband’s name of Givano. But her birth name was Caleb.” She shook her head. “But even that wasn’t totally correct. Because the family had changed their name when they’d moved away from Fiero. She would have been Maria Ridondo.”
“Indeed?” Caleb asked mockingly. “Then you’ve put two and two together and come up with the brothers who were the scourge of Fiero, the wicked purveyors of the dark arts, who held the village in thrall for decades.”
“Yes,” Eve said. “How dark were their arts, Caleb?”
He didn’t speak for a moment. “Very dark. Jelak wasn’t far off about the vampire gods.”
“And the power,” Jane said. “I was thinking about what you said about Jelak believing that invisibility was part of the powers he’d attain after resurrection. That was too over-the-top for me to accept. But then I started to think about the way you could move around wherever you wanted. If anyone stopped you, then you just changed their perception. That’s a form of invisibility.”
“Legend has a habit of twisting truth,” Caleb said. “But Jelak had enough truth mixed with legend to fuel that ambition.”
“You’re a member of the Devanez family Megan told us about?”
“Yes, the Ridondo brothers fled Spain during the Inquisition and settled in Fiero. They decided that the only way they could keep themselves safe from informers to the Church was to keep the villagers terrified of retribution.” He shrugged. “It worked, but how much blackness can a soul take? When they decided that they would leave the village and try to start a new life, it was almost too late. They settled, they had children, grandchildren, time passed.” His lips twisted. “With only minor episodes that could be called totally wicked. But the call of the blood never entirely goes away. Neither does the knowledge that the power is there ready to be tapped. Most of the Ridondo descendants found it was safer to become hunters to expel some of that passion and leach away the darkness.”
“As you did.”
“As I did.”
“Your sister,” Eve prompted.
“I was never home much. I was always away from the time I was a teenager. My parents sent me to live with my uncle because they decided that he could handle me better than they could. He was a hunter.” He shrugged. “I don’t blame them. I was showing signs of being a throwback to the first Ridondos and that would have been awkward for them.”
“Yes, I’d describe a tendency toward vampirism as being very awkward,” Jane murmured.
“And they didn’t think I’d be a suitable guardian for my sister, so before they died they set up a trust find and made arrangements for her to go to a series of private schools. I admit I resented that lack of confidence. I loved Maria. I would have seen that she had a good life. But Maria was years younger and very different from me. No darkness about her. She wanted to live life and drain every minute of pleasure from it.”
“You did love her,” Eve said, her gaze on his face.
“Oh, yes. As I said, there weren’t many people that I did care about. Anyway, she met a young man while on vacation in Paris. Carlo Givano. Handsome, charming, hardworking, totally devoted to making her fall in love with him. He persuaded her to elope and took her back to his home, a vineyard outside Genoa.” He paused. “When I went to visit her, I liked him. I went away convinced that she’d made a decent marriage.”
“And did she?” Jane asked.
“No.” He looked out at the lake. “Givano was a member of the cult. He’d been sent to track down members of the Ridondo family, namely, female members: the males might have proved too difficult. There were still stories being repeated in the cult of the Ridondo brothers’ powers. They didn’t want a confrontation, they wanted a victim.”
“Why?”
“They were experimenting, trying to find the strongest bloodline to lead them to their resurrection. They thought it logical that since she was a descendant of the Ridondos, her blood would be almost magical. That it might even give them instant resurrection.”
“And Givano lured her to them.”
“Jelak was on the scene by then, and he couldn’t wait to get his hands on her. He paid Givano to give her to him.” His lips tightened. “He was clumsy. He wasn’t sure what he was doing. He kept her alive a long time before he realized she wasn’t going to let him win the game.”
“So you set out to find Jelak,” Eve said. “What about Givano?”
He turned from the lake to look at her.
He didn’t need to answer, she thought. It was all there in the stark brutality of his expression. She had seen what he had done to Jelak. What he had done to the man who betrayed his sister would have been equally horrendous.
She looked down into the coffee in her cup. “I’m sorry about your sister. I can see why you would have been so bitter.”
“Can you? Yes, you know what it’s like to lose someone you love.” He smiled. “Well, is your curiosity satisfied? Are you ready to let me go off into the sunset?”
“No.”
His brows rose. “No?”
She looked up at him. “You may have done it for your own purposes, but you saved Joe, and you saved me. I can’t forget that. I feel a certain bond.”
“What?” He shook his head. “You’re much more clear thinking than that.”
“Maybe I’m not.” She got to her feet. “But I don’t think that we’re through with each other, Caleb. I don’t know what you’re going to be to us, but we’re going to have to play it out to the finish.”
He suddenly chuckled as he stood up. “I told Quinn that you’d want to put a period to the episode. You’re not doing that, Eve.”
“Just a comma.” She smiled faintly. “I may have need of a hunter.”
He turned to Jane. “What about you? A period?”
“I’m taking it under consideration.” She added coolly, “I don’t appreciate ‘invasions.’ “
“But you liked that one.” His lips indented at the corners. “I made sure you would.” He turned and started down the steps. “But I’ll respect your decision, whatever it is. That’s part of the code I’ve tried to teach myself. Good-bye, ladies.” He glanced at Jane, and he smiled. “It’s been an experience I won’t forget.”
Jane got up and joined Eve at the steps to watch Caleb climb into his car.
“Quite an experience,” she murmured. “I’m not sure that you were wise to make any commitment to him at all.”
“I didn’t make a commitment.”
“You didn’t cut him loose or turn your back. With Caleb, that could become a commitment.”
She shook her head. “I told him the truth. He knows all about truth and lies. Probably no one could differentiate better.” She glanced at Jane. “Could they?”
“No, I guess not.” She watched him drive away. “I’m going to be leaving tomorrow. I have to go back to Paris. I let Celene Denarve, a gallery owner, talk me into another show there. It’s scheduled for next week.”
Eve looked at her in surprise. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because then you would have tried to make me go back and made it difficult for me if I decided to cancel the show.” She made a face. “Almost as much as Celene would have if she’d had to postpone. She’s been a good friend to me, but she’s got a bit of a Gallic temperament.”
But Jane would have canceled it without a thought if she’d thought Eve needed her here, Eve knew. “You bet I would have made your life difficult. Dammit, you dropped everything to fly to my rescue.” She reached out and lovingly took Jane’s hand. “Thank you.”
“Don’t be silly,” Jane said. “I did it for me. I would have been a nervous wreck if I’d had to gnaw my fingernails worrying from across the Atlantic.” She added teasingly, “What? Do you think I like you or something?”
“I thought there was a possibility.” She reached down and patted Toby’s head. “Of course, it might be that you just missed Toby.” She smiled. “If this is going to be your last night here for a while, I’ll ask Joe to put some steaks on the grill. You always like to barbecue.”
Jane nodded. “I like the ambience more than the food. The sun going down over the lake, the smell of the charcoal, you sitting on a folding chair beside the grill watching Joe. When I’m away, I remember all those things.” Her gaze went to Joe standing by the lake. “It’s good that I’m going away right now. You need some time alone with Joe. Things are . . . different now.”
“I can’t deny that’s true,” she said. “When I picked you up at the airport, I never dreamed how different they were going to be. But Joe seems to be handling it well.” She glanced at Jane. “How are you handling it? We threw a lot of weird stuff at you. To your credit, you never threw up your hands and told us to go to the nearest psychiatrist.”
“What can I say? If you were nuts, I didn’t want to be sane. So I had to go along for the ride.”
“It was a rough, bumpy ride.”
“But we all came through it.”
Eve gazed at her searchingly. “But in what state?”
“You’re asking me if I believe in Joe’s ghost? I still don’t know. It’s hard not to believe in her after you got that call from the senator. Yet it defies everything that’s solid and sure in my life.” Her hand tightened on Eve’s. “But you’re solid, you’re sure, and so I have to believe everything you believe. Yeah, I believe in Nancy Jo, but I’d believe a hell of a lot more if I could see or touch her.”
Eve laughed. “That’s my practical Jane.” She released her hand. “Now I think I’ll go down and tell Joe that a barbecue is in order.”
“I’ll take the steaks out of the fridge.” She hesitated as she turned toward the door. “You told me about Nancy Jo. You didn’t tell me if you’d told Joe that you’d been seeing Bonnie.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It would have been difficult. Nancy Jo was enough of a problem for him to face without Bonnie being thrown into the mix.”
“For him to face, or for you to have to give up to him?”
“What are you talking about?” Eve asked impatiently. “Joe has grown almost antagonistic toward Bonnie in the past few years. It would have just added fuel to the fire for him to know that my obsession has grown to the point that I even dreamed about Bonnie.”
“ ‘Dreamed’?”
“It’s hard for me even now to admit she isn’t a dream. Imagine how hard it would be for Joe.”
“But now he has his own out-of-the-world experience with which to compare it. I’d think that would make a difference, don’t you?”
Eve looked away from her. “I’m not sure.”
“You don’t want to give her up,” she said softly. “I was wondering if you’d react like that. You don’t want to share her. She’s been yours all these years in a way that was incredibly secret and special. To tell Joe about it would be like giving her up to someone else. You can’t stand the thought.”
“Ridiculous. I love Joe.”
“That doesn’t mean you want to share Bonnie with him. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to treasure Bonnie. You just have to realize what you’re doing. It was difficult, but you understood about Nancy Jo. That must have meant a hell of a lot to Joe. This is the time when Joe might come close to understanding why you never shared Bonnie.”
Eve felt stunned as Jane’s words hit home. Dear God, was Jane right? Eve had thought she was protecting herself from everyone thinking she was a nutcase. She had thought she was protecting her relationship by not letting Joe know how overpowering was her obsession.
But she was actually keeping Bonnie a deep, precious secret so that she wouldn’t have to share her. As selfish as a miser hoarding her gold.
“It’s true, isn’t it?” she whispered.
“Only you will know that, Eve,” Jane said gently. “Nothing could be more natural than for you to react like that. She’s your baby. She was taken away from you in life, so you want to keep this spirit of Bonnie close and safe. But either way you have to face it so that you can handle it. As I said, things are different now.” She reached over and kissed Eve’s cheek. “I’m going to go in and get out those steaks and start packing.”