Lazlo’s Last Stand

death by a crazy woman, skinned my knees and lost a pair of very expensive shoes, and ruined an even more expensive designer gown. Don’t mess with me!

Instead, she met his gaze with steady calm and said, “I do needlepoint to relax. Otherwise my brain won’t shut off. Okay?”

“Fascinating,” Corbett murmured, eyelids at half-mast. “I would never have guessed.”

“I guess you don’t know me as well as you thought you did,” Lucia snapped back, in no mood to be patronized.

The moment stretched…and stretched…long enough for it to come to her, what it was that was making her feel so unsettled. She was beginning to realize she didn’t know Corbett Lazlo all that well, either.

Chapter 4

I’ve known her for more than ten years, Corbett thought. I hired her, trained her, I’ve worked with her nearly every day of those ten years, and she’s right. I don’t really know her…do I?

It was an unsettling thought, in the way earthquakes are unsettling. This one rocked the very foundations of his own convictions, shook his confidence in his own beliefs, made him wonder how much he really knew about anything-or at least about the people in his life.

But it was only the latest in the series of tremors that had shaken him tonight, shaken him to his very core.

I have a son.

A son, moreover, who was bent on killing him.

The boy’s mother, the woman he’d once cared for, in his fashion, and long believed to be dead, was very much alive, and bent not only on killing him, but also on destroying everything in the world that mattered to him, including the woman he…loved.

Yes, God help me. Love. What other word could he use to express how much she meant to him?

And that woman, whom he had always considered to be someone in need of his protection, had saved his life tonight.

Under the circumstances, he thought he might be forgiven some slight discomposure.

What he really was, though he hated to admit it, was exhausted. Tonight he felt every one of his forty-eight years, and a few more besides. Awful thought: Was it possible that a man rounding the corner and homing in on the half-century mark might be getting too old for this business?

Rubbish. He’d be fine, he told himself, once he’d had a hot shower and a good night’s sleep.

Though he suspected it was going to be a good long while before he could enjoy either of those things.

First, he had to get Lucia to a place beyond Cassandra’s considerable reach. And there was only one place he knew of where he could be certain she would be safe. Besides himself, only Adam knew of its existence, and not even Adam knew exactly where it was located. Which meant the only way to get Lucia there was to take her himself.

Furthermore, after tonight’s events he was reasonably certain the only way to ensure she would remain there, short of chaining her to the wall, would be to stay and personally see that she did.

He’d been through these facts in his mind again and again, trying to find another way, but it always came up the same: For the foreseeable future, he was going to have to live in close-one could say intimate-proximity to the woman he’d been trying desperately for the past ten years to maintain as much distance from as possible.

Bloody hypocrite. The voice of his conscience, which most of the time he was able to ignore-on this subject, at least-chided from the back row of his mind. If you were really trying to avoid contact with the woman, you wouldn’t keep challenging her to martial arts duels. And you didn’t really have to take her with you to the embassy tonight…did you?

Truthfully? Probably not. And if I hadn’t done both of those things, I’d most likely be dead.

So. Nothing for it but to carry on, face the woman standing before him with her chin at a stubborn tilt and her cheeks flushed with anger. Face her and reply as he always did, with dignity and decorum, keeping the vivid memory of what her body felt like pinned beneath his, hot and moist with exertion, heart thumping, chest heaving against his, her woman’s scent like a fog in his brain…keep all that buried in the deepest and most private reaches of his soul. As he always did.

He’d faced armed killers with less trepidation.

“Perhaps not.” He answered her question in a voice carefully devoid of all expression, keeping his eyes veiled, as well. “Perhaps I don’t know you at all. However, I think I can safely assume you might like to, uh…freshen up after our evening’s adventures. While we wait for your belongings to arrive, I should imagine there’s time for a shower, if you wish.”

How stuffy he sounds-like a British schoolmaster. Sorely tempted to tell him so, Lucia instead merely inclined her head formally and murmured, “Thank you. That would be nice.”

After all the shocks that had rocked her this evening, the prospect of getting naked in Corbett Lazlo’s bathroom barely registered on the Richter scale.

A sense of unreality enveloped her as she followed him through the tastefully decorated but impersonal living room, down a hallway past several intriguingly closed doors and into a large bedroom-his, obviously. Like the living room, it was furnished in a typically masculine style, but here at least were a few personal touches: A photograph of his parents-a snapshot taken on a windy day with a lake in the background; a dark blue robe tossed carelessly across the foot of a king-sized bed; an open book lying facedown on a table beside a comfortable chair, a pair of reading glasses perched crookedly atop the spine.

But the feature that immediately caught and held her attention was the huge domed skylight above the bed. She halted and stared up at it, captivated by the pale glow from the cloudy Paris night through rain-washed glass.

Corbett had crossed the room without pausing and now, with his hand on an ornate doorknob, turned to give her an inquiring look.

She glanced at him briefly, then went back to gazing at the subtle dance of light in the ceiling. “It must be amazing when there’s something to see,” she said lightly, for some reason reluctant to give away her true feelings. Particularly the wave of homesickness that had come over her so unexpectedly, sweeping her back to childhood camping trips in the California high country, happy times spent with her parents far away from the heartaches and pressures of being an overachieving misfit, too smart to fit in with the popular kids and too pretty to find acceptance among the geek crowd. She could almost smell the sun-warmed pines and crushed meadow grass, and the particular scent of her father’s flannel shirt and lucky fishing vest. If she closed her eyes…

“Having come much too near to losing the privilege forever, I do like to be able to see the stars,” Corbett said. His tone was dry, and his head tilted now at an angle that seemed almost defensive.

Lucia gave him a sideways look from under her lashes as she went to join him. “I never would have guessed,” she said, mimicking his earlier remark to her.

He shot back, deadpan, “I guess you don’t know me as well as you thought.”

It was too close to her own musings, and she didn’t reply.

He gave the knob a turn, opening a door in the wood paneling into what turned out to be a dressing room and closet, though it was larger than the bedroom in Lucia’s tiny two-room apartment on the other side of the river. From a bank of shelves he took a folded bathrobe, snowy white, the thick, plush kind found in very expensive hotels. She wondered if he kept a supply handy for all his female guests. She wondered-but only briefly-if any of those guests ever shared the shower with their host. Or that view of the stars.

“The bathroom is through there. You will find clean towels in the linen cupboard next to the fireplace-”