Remember (36 page)

“What’s wrong?” he demanded. “You’ve got a peculiar expression on your face.”

“I love you,” she said.

He gaped at her. “What?”

“I love you.”

He crossed the floor in three strides and sat down on the sofa next to her. He held her hands tightly and peered into her face.

“Nicky, would you mind repeating that one more time?”

“I love you, Clee. I love you.”

“Oh, Nicky,” he said, and then he took her face between his hands and kissed her, he leaned against her and eased her down onto the cushions.

Moving a strand of blond hair away from her face, he said, “I love you too—I’ve told you that before. And it’s been painful not having you with me.”

Nicky touched his mouth and traced its shape with a fingertip. “I know, it was the same for me, darling.”

He kissed her more passionately this time, his tongue finding hers, grazing it, lingering against it. Abruptly he stopped and whispered against her hair, “Let’s go to bed. I want you.”

Clee stood up, offered her his hand and together they went into the bedroom. They flung offtheir clothes and wrapped their arms around each other. They stood for a long moment without saying a word, without moving, just happy to be close and intimate and together again.

At last he said, “It’s never been like this before for me.”

“It hasn’t for me either,” she said, and she knew now that this was the truth. She had not loved Charles in the same way that she loved Clee, each man had brought out something different in her.

There was another moment of silence as he buried his face in her hair and his hands moved down over her back, sliding onto her buttocks, he pulled her against him so that their pelvic bones touched.

Nicky became aroused, as he already was, and now it was she who took the lead, pushing him gently away from her and pulling him over to the bed.

They lay on their sides, facing each other, gazing into each other’s eyes, saying nothing. But neither of them needed words.

Each could read the other’s face, which was eloquent with love and desire.

“Ah, Nicky, my lovely Nicky,” he whispered, and he brought her closer, his right hand on the nape of her neck. “I want to possess you completely, take all of you to me….”

“I know … I want that too.”

Their mouths came together again, and he slipped on top of her, pushed his hands under her back and pulled her against him. His mouth became insistent, demanding, ardently she responded to him, her passion mounting as his did. He entered her unexpectedly, without any foreplay, as he had several times in Provence, and she gasped in astonishment. And then as he eased deeper into her, her legs went around his back and she cleaved to him, became part of him. At once they found their own rhythm, as they always did, moving faster and faster.

“Oh God, Nicky, oh God,” Clee cried as he lifted his mouth from hers.

His breathing was labored, he gasped as she was gasping.

She stiffened under him, began to quiver. “Clee! I love you!” She opened her eyes and looked up into his face. “I love you,” she moaned softly. Her quivering intensified and she gave herself up to him, came to him swiftly.

As always, her passion for him brought Clee to the very height of excitement, and he began to lose control. Before he could stop himself, he was flowing into her, calling her name as she had his, telling her that he loved her as he had not loved any woman ever in his life.

He fell against her, breathing heavily, then lifted his head, bent over her and kissed her face. Her cheeks were damp, he tasted the salt of her tears.

“You’re crying,” he said in surprise, wiping the tears away.

“Nicky, what is it? Why are you weeping?”

“I don’t know,” she murmured, looking up at him. Half laughing, she added, “Because I’m so happy, I guess.”

He merely smiled that lopsided smile of his, which she knew so well, and saying nothing, he simply took her into his arms and held her.

“This is a much better picnic than the one we had that night at the farm,” Clee said between bites on a chicken leg.

“I don’t agree!” Nicky looked at him and shook her head. “That was the best picnic I’ve ever had in my entire life. You made such wonderful things, including the greatest peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I’ve ever eaten.”

Clee threw back his head and laughed. “If that’s all it takes to please you, I can see I’m going to have an easy time with you.”

Nicky laughed and reached for her glass of white wine on the bedside table. “I can be very tough about some things, you know.”

They sat cross-legged in the middle of the large bed, wrapped in the hotel’s white toweling bathrobes. There was a plate of chicken and the bread basket between them, on the room-service table nearby, which Clee had wheeled in from the living room, there was a bowl of green salad, a basket of fresh fruit and the bottle of Montrachet in an ice bucket.

“Do all the girls mistake you for Kevin Costner?” Nicky suddenly asked, eyeing him appraisingly.

“Heavens, no, why?”

“Well, he’s your look-alike, you know.”

He made no comment and drank his wine.

“I mistook you for him, in fact.”

“What are you saying, Nicky?”

Then she told him about the mistake she had made in Athens, how she had bought a magazine because she thought it was he on the cover.

“It must be wishful thinking on your part,” Clee said dismissively.

“Is that what you really want? A movie star?”

“No, Clee. I want you.”

“You’ve got me, babe, in case you hadn’t realized it.”

Nicky smiled and said, “I’m glad.”

“And what about you, Nicky? Do I have you?”

“You know you do, my darling.”

He grinned and blew her a kiss.

Reaching for her wine, Nicky took a sip, then sat nursing her glass in both hands, looking thoughtful. After a moment or two she said slowly, “Clee, when I was in London and called you in Berlin, just before I left for Rome, I told you I’d been to see Anne Devereaux at Pullenbrook—”

“You went to make amends, right?”

“Well, yes, that’s true, in a way. But I also had another reason to go and see her.”

Nicky cleared her throat and plunged in. “I had decided that Charles might be alive. That he might very well have faked his own death, to vanish, for his own reasons.”

Clee stared at her dumbfounded for a second, then put the chicken leg back on the plate and exclaimed, “You can’t be serious!” He shook his head and began to laugh. “Come on, Nick, it’s me you’re talking to—stop kidding around.”

“But I’m not kidding, I’m serious, dead serious.”

Her sober tone had its effect, and he looked grave, carefully weighing what she had said. Finally, he asked, “What happened to make you think that, after all these years?”

Nicky told him the story, reciting most of the pertinent details, but stopping short once she had filled him in about the events in Rome and Athens. She said nothing at all about Madrid.

When she had finished, Clee said in an oddly subdued voice, “Why the hell would you want to traipse all over Europe looking for a dead man?

Well, a supposedly dead man. Hadn’t he caused you enough pain? Or do you still have feelings for him, Nick? Is that it?”

“No, I don’t. I’m emotionally free of Charles Devereaux, and I have been for a long time. Long before I fell in love with you, in fact.”

He simply looked at her more closely, his eyes pinning hers. Then he said quietly, “If you say so … Yes, I believe you, Nick.

Just tell me why you went looking for him.”

“I wanted to get to the truth. Listen, Clee, I was stunned, shocked, disbelieving, when I saw that face on our newscast from Rome. But he did look so much like Charles that I felt I had to go and talk to Anne.

I just couldn’t get that face out of my mind. And I’d always been a bit dismayed, sort of troubled because Charles’s body was never found.”

Nicky paused, then shook her head. “I suppose it’s human nature to want to have a funeral, to bury the dead…. I think I wanted to get to the truth so that I could close that chapter of my life.”

“Is it closed now? Really and truly closed? Or is he going to haunt you?”

“No, I’ve just told you, it’s closed.”

“Tell me something else, Nick. Why are you now so sure he committed suicide, that he’s really dead? What made you change your mind?”

“Because I kept coming up against brick walls wherever I went.

There was no trace of him in Rome or in Athens.”

“Why did you go to Madrid?” Clee frowned slightly before reaching for his drink. “What did you hope to find there?”

“I wasn’t sure what I’d find, actually. I wanted to show the pictures to his former Spanish partner. I guess I was seeking a confirmation or a denial from Don Pedro.”

“And what did the Spanish guy say?”

“I didn’t see Don Pedro, he was away. As I told you on the phone this morning, I took a flight out of Madrid late on Saturday afternoon and checked in here.”

“Why the sudden change of heart?”

“It hit me that if I could so easily mistake Kevin Costner for you on the cover of a magazine, then perhaps I could have mistaken another man for Charles Devereaux—with a slightly altered appearance, of course.”

“Photographs can be very deceptive and misleading. Let me see them, Nicky, I’d like to take a look.”

“I got rid of them…. I hope you’re not angry with me, Clee.”

“No, not angry, just startled, and troubled. I wish you’d told me immediately, the day after you’d seen the newscast. I’d have

understood, Nick, once I’d gotten used to the idea that the guy might be alive—and giving me competition.”

“You have no competition, Clee. I love you.”

“I’d also like you to trust me—I’m a pretty intelligent guy, and I respect you, your emotions, your mind, your professionalism.

And your independence. I would never interfere with anything you wanted to do, unless I thought you might get hurt in some way.

For God’s sake, you’re a mature woman, a seasoned broadcast journalist, a war correspondent that I’ve worked side by side with for two years.

Do you think I don’t know you and trust you?

Anyway, I’d never treat you like a child.”

“Thanks, Clee, and yes, you do know me, perhaps better than anyone else. I’m glad you trust me, and I do trust you, you know.”

There was a sudden silence, and after a couple of minutes, Clee said, “So his mother didn’t think the photographs resembled him?”

“No, she didn’t. She was adamant, in fact. And so was Philip Rawlings, her boyfriend. You know, the man she was with in Les Baux.

” He nodded. “I remember. What’s the legal situation in England? I mean about Charles Devereaux.”

“He was listed as a missing person because there was no body. A suicide note doesn’t make any difference when there’s no body.

I’m not sure whether the police have closed their files on him yet. I never thought to ask Anne.”

“You’ve never ever discussed Charles Devereaux with me—what little I know came from Arch Leverson. But he was pretty close-mouthed about the whole thing, didn’t say very much, out of loyalty to you. I didn’t even know Devereaux had left a suicide note. Was it addressed to you?”

“No, to his mother.”

“What did it say—do you know?”

“Yes, she showed it to me when I flew to England a few days after the suicide. It was only a couple of lines, very brief, almost cold. He said in the note that he didn’t want to live any longer, that he was doing the only thing he possibly could—taking his own life—and that he hoped she would forgive him.”

“Has she?”

“I don’t really know—she still grieves for him, I’m certain of that, although she keeps up a good front.”

“Was there a letter for you?”

“No.”

“Didn’t you find that strange?”

“Yes, I did. But maybe he didn’t have any last words for me.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because in the months before he killed himself he did everything very deliberately. He sold his shares in the wine-importing company to his British and Spanish partners, he sold his flat, made a will and put all of his affairs in order. It was all done very, very methodically, Clee. So if he had had anything he wanted to say to me, he would have written me a letter, don’t you think?”

“I suppose so,” Clee murmured. “Who got his money?”

“Anne is the beneficiary under his will, but of course she hasn’t inherited it yet, because Charles is not considered to be legally dead.

Under British law, Anne can go to court for a legal declaration of death only after seven years, not before. She’s got four more years to wait.”

Clee leaned forward, a frown furrowing his brow, his eyes thoughtful.

He said slowly, “When a man melts into thin air to start a new life with a new identity, he usually does so for a helluva good reason.

When you thought Devereaux might be alive, why did you think he’d faked his own death? For what reason, Nick?”

“I wasn’t sure. I told Arch when I saw him in Rome that it

might be a reason so bizarre no one could even imagine it. But actually I thought Charles was involved in something illegal.”

“Such as?”

“Arms smuggling or drug trafficking.”

“Yeah, I guess I’d have come to the same conclusion,” Clee agreed.

“Especially in view of the world we live in today.”

“I brought all this up tonight because I wanted you to know, Clee,” Nicky said, gazing at him earnestly. “I didn’t want anything to be between us.”

“I’m glad you told me, and I’m not angry.” Clee’s boyish smile flashed, and he went on, “I just feel a bit protective of you, that’s all…. I love you.”

“And I love you.”

“Let’s not discuss this guy Devereaux anymore. Let’s bury him once and for all, shall we?”

“He’s already buried,” Nicky said as she slipped off the bed. She went around to Clee’s side, and hugged him hard. “Thanks for being so wonderful, and for understanding,” she murmured. Then she said, “I’ll be back in a minute, don’t go away.”

“I’m neer leaving,” Clee said, and smiled.

Nicky went into the bathroom, closed the door and leaned against it.