Teresa Medeiros (9 page)

Ever the pragmatic engineer, Gordon Montgomery clapped him on the shoulder. “Somethin’ seems to be bottomin’ out the water pressure, sir.”

“Something,” Tristan concurred, knowing no amount of restraint in the world could hide his darkening expression. “Or someone.”

As he turned on his heel and strode from the boardroom, Sven and Copperfield exchanged an apprehensive glance, forging an unspoken agreement that it would be wiser not to follow.

When Tristan stepped off the penthouse elevator, he was bombarded by billowing clouds of steam. His irritation mounted as he felt his raw silk suit wilt against his frame like an overwatered daisy.

After slamming the door of his private office to protect his computers from the humid assault, he headed for the bedroom, muttering dire imprecations beneath his breath. A thunder resembling that of Niagara Falls was rumbling from the open door of the bathroom.

He plunged through the veil of mist, too angry to care if the idiotic Miss Whitewood was fully clothed or dressed in nothing but bubbles and a smile. Which didn’t explain his stab of disappointment at finding her still wearing her shabby shroud.

Water poured from the brass faucets of the tub in steaming gouts. Both sinks were running full tilt as were the twin shower heads. Their roar muffled his arrival, leaving him free to observe his guest gleefully flipping the handle of the commode, then bouncing backward to admire the result. As soon as the tank stopped running,
she would repeat the ritual—flushing, chortling with delight, then watching intently as the water drained from the sparkling basin.

Tristan wrenched off the bathtub, then waited for a lull in the water pressure to lean into the shower. Just as he was giving its crystal knob a vicious twist, another shift in pressure sent a gush of warm water cascading over his head. The commode’s roar subsided to a trickle, leaving no sound in the room except the steady
plop, plop
of water dripping off the cuffs of his trousers to soak his newly installed Berber carpet.

Arian slowly turned around. She eyed him from head to toe before bobbing a wary curtsy. “Good day, Mr. Lennox. Is it raining outside?”

Her baffled blink left no doubt as to how ridiculous he must look with his painstakingly applied mousse dripping into his collar and his two-thousand-dollar Valentino suit plastered to his body. In contrast, the steam had coiled her hair into an enchanting halo of ringlets and made her skin look as dewy as the petals of a lily. The injustice of it infuriated him.

“Of course it’s not raining! Are you out of your mind?” His bellow echoed off the tile walls, making her flinch.

Clearly assuming his question was a rhetorical one, she cast the toilet a last wistful glance before sidling past him. “Remarkable plumbing. I had heard of such marvels being installed in the new palace at Versailles, of course, so you mustn’t think me an utter bumpkin.”

A bumpkin was by far the most flattering description Tristan was entertaining at the moment. “They don’t have tanning booths
or
indoor plumbing in France?” he growled, snatching a towel from the warmer and stalking after her.

She evaded his question by nearly colliding with a wide-eyed maid carrying a breakfast tray and several newspapers. It didn’t improve Tristan’s temper to realize the woman had overheard his uncharacteristic outburst.

As Arian intercepted the tray with a husky moan of anticipation, the succulent aroma of bacon wafted to his nose. Sven must have ordered from the deli downstairs, Tristan thought, unconsciously licking his lips as he eyed the thick slabs of pork. He would never allow such artery-hardening slop in his private kitchens.

“Thank you ever so much,” Arian said, tucking the newspapers beneath her arm as Tristan’s scowl sent the maid scurrying from the suite.

Still glowering, he toweled the moisture from his hair while Arian settled herself cross-legged on the bed and began to shovel in forkfuls of fried egg as if she’d never heard of a fat gram. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a woman eat without berating herself for enjoying it.

“Oh, Lord, I was ravenous,” she mumbled, tearing off a generous bite of the bacon. “I feel like I haven’t eaten in over three hundred”—she glanced up to meet his frosty gaze before swallowing with an audible gulp—“hours.”

She drained a mug of hot chocolate, leaving Tristan to covet the enticing mustache of marshmallow foam adorning her upper lip.

“Would you care for some?” she asked, proffering a plump cinnamon roll studded with raisins.

“No, thank you,” he said stiffly, the wheat-germ waffle he’d choked down at five that morning lying like a brick in his stomach. “I’ve eaten.”

He regretted his haste the moment Arian’s dainty coral tongue caressed a dab of icing from the pastry. Her moan of delight made his gut contract with longing. He wanted to snatch the roll from her and wolf it down in one gulp. Shocked by the outlandish impulse, he wadded the towel into a ball and hurled it into the corner.

“I didn’t come here for breakfast, Miss Whitewood. I came to ask you a few pertinent questions.”

“Then I hope you’ll be satisfied with my answers. I’ve always been told I’m frightfully impertinent.”

He tore his gaze away from her winsome grin. “My technicians are presently combing the streets surrounding the Tower for debris from your crash. I was hoping you might save them some of their valuable time by explaining to me just how you came to be
soaring
past at the precise moment of the magic competition.”

“I don’t remember.” She polished off the cinnamon roll and began licking each finger in turn like a fastidious little cat.

Riveted by the innocent display of eroticism, Tristan suddenly had trouble remembering his original question. “You don’t remember what?” he repeated faintly.

“I don’t remember how I came to be flying past. I’m afraid I hit my head when I crashed and have been afflicted with an unfortunate case of … manesia.” She set the tray aside, looking immensely pleased with herself.

Tristan didn’t know whether to laugh or back away and call the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. “You wouldn’t, by any chance, mean ‘amnesia’?”

He had to give her credit. She recovered with nothing more than a thoughtful blink. “That’s right. Amnesia. Sometimes when you have it, you can’t remember what it’s called.”

Her guileless expression only intensified his desire to strangle her. He locked his hands behind his back to stifle the urge and began to pace at the foot of the bed. “Allow me to clarify your assertions. You hit your head. You have amnesia. But you do remember that your name is Arian Whitewood, you come from France, and you’d like very much for me to reward you a million dollars.”

He pivoted on his heel to discover that instead of hanging on his every word as any one of his underlings would have done, her attention had strayed to the scattered newspapers. He wondered if it had been Copperfield’s idea of a joke to send up not only the Sunday-morning editions of the
Times
and the
Post
, but special
rush editions of the tabloids as well. Arian didn’t seem the least bit distressed by the
Prattler
’s depiction of her as a bug-eyed first cousin of E.T., but she was gazing intently at the cover of the
Global Inquirer
.

“They’re saying I might be this man’s daughter,” she said, her expression oddly earnest. “He looks like a pleasant enough fellow. Do you see a resemblance?” She held the cover next to her face to reveal a sulky young Elvis in the prime of his prepolyester career.

Tristan’s cynical laugh was curbed by the wistful note in her voice. He curled his upper lip in a sneer that rivaled Elvis’s to hide its jarring effect on him. “Let me guess. You’ve forgotten your father’s name as well.”

She lowered the paper, meeting his gaze evenly. “I don’t believe I ever knew it.”

Tristan would have found her confession less disturbing if it had been tainted by even a hint of his own bitterness. Eager to escape her large, liquid eyes, he strode over to the wall, his temper so feverish the automatic sensors sent the closet doors shooting open with a
whoosh
instead of a hiss.

He snatched down the handsome Panama he’d bought to wear on the beach at Martinique during a vacation he’d never found the time to take, marched back across the room, and tossed it into Arian’s lap. “Pull a rabbit out of my hat.”

Cradling the hat between her palms, she peeped over the brim, then indulged him with the sort of cautious smile one might reserve for an escaped lunatic. “Well, now, I can’t very well pull one out if you haven’t put one in.”

He blinked at her, alarmed that her logic was starting to make sense to him. “I don’t want you to pull out a rabbit that’s already there. I want you to conjure one up out of thin air like bad magicians have been doing for centuries.” He nodded toward the hat. “Go on. Snap your fingers. Twitch your nose. Cross your arms and blink. I don’t give a damn how you do it, but if you can pull a
bunny out of that hat in the next five minutes, I’ll call and have Copperfield cut you a check for one million dollars.”

Tristan was startled to realize he meant it. His carefully preserved peace of mind was worth more to him than a paltry million. He would forgo the satisfaction of proving this woman a fraud if he could just get her out of his life. And his bed.

She glanced at him, then back at the hat as if she were warring with some powerful temptation. One of her hands fluttered toward her chest and that unusual necklace of hers before curling into a fist and falling back to her lap.

“I won’t,” she whispered, bowing her head so that a curtain of hair fell around her features.

She wasn’t getting off that easy. Tristan reached down and flipped back the dark veil, regretting the casual motion the instant he felt the silky stuff cling to his fingertips. An elusive ribbon of scent drifted to his nostrils, making them flare with primitive hunger. “Won’t or can’t?”

“I don’t …” She faltered when her eyes met his.

He leaned down until his lips were only a whisper away from hers and gently offered, “Remember?”

She recoiled, her dark eyes snapping. “ ’Tis the truth, sir. Whether you choose to believe it or not. And if you refuse to recognize flying as magic, then I can’t see how dragging a hedgehog out of a chapeau is going to sway you.”

Tristan allowed the skein of hair to escape his fingers, unable to remember the last time anyone had dared to defy him. Even Copperfield’s thinly veiled insults were little more than petulant digs to his vanity. What surprised him most was that Arian’s petty rebellion provoked grudging respect instead of frustration.

He straightened, forcing his shoulders into a parody of his effortless shrug, “Very well, Miss Whitewood. I’ll continue to investigate your claim. But if you have a
sudden uncontrollable urge to bend your jelly spoon with your mind, levitate a bagel, or even perform a card trick or two, do have Sven send for me.”

Her outraged gasp warned him he’d finally managed to offend her. She pursed her generous lips in prim displeasure. “Playing cards, Mr. Lennox, are naught but tools of the devil.”

Tristan had no answer for that but to turn on his heel and flee to the nearest sanctuary. Snatching up the phone, he barked, “I’ll be working in my private office for the rest of the day. I’m not to be disturbed.”

But even as he slammed down the receiver on the befuddled operator, he knew his command had come a day too late. Arian Whitewood had already disturbed the rigid calm he’d perfected over the past ten years. Cracked the veneer of reserve that kept him sane when fury and regret threatened to overwhelm him. She’d even had him challenging her to do magic, for God’s sake! As if a belief in such nonsense was anything more than sheer lunacy. What idiotic thing would he do next? Beg her to put a hex on his business rivals before his next conference call? Hell, maybe she could even kiss his nose and turn him into a prince. The image didn’t make him smile as it should have.

He swiveled his chair around and propped his feet on the windowsill, shivering as the icy air blasting from a floor vent struck his soggy suit. The autumn sun bathed the tinted windows in a golden haze, but its warmth failed to penetrate the climate-controlled environment.

He hadn’t always been such a skeptic. He had once believed in magic of another kind. A wizardry woven of microprocessors and binary codes with incantations measured in megahertz and gigabytes. But that was before reality had robbed him of his childlike faith in the wonders of technology and the workings of his own fertile imagination.

Years of being on guard made the nearly imperceptible
sigh of the door opening behind him echo like a shout. Tristan swung around in the chair, prepared to blast Arian with a thunderbolt of his own if she’d dared to intrude upon his private domain.

Cop stood in the doorway, a sheepish grin on his face. “I thought you’d want to know I dismissed the meeting.”

“Did Montgomery have any more brainstorms?”

“Sorry. He just kept shaking his head and mumbling, ‘Puir lassie. Took a frightful tumble, she did.’ ”