Lazlo’s Last Stand

After a moment he went on, staring straight ahead at nothing. Or at his memories.

“As I guess you’ve already heard, Cassandra was sent by her father, Maximilian DuMont, to set me up for a hit. She engineered a chance meeting between us, which I gladly went along with. She was a real knockout, and I was, well, as willing as any young man.” He shifted irritably in his chair. “I’m not going to go into the intimate details, if you don’t mind. Suffice to say, it got very hot very quickly. As I said, we were both young and rash. I’m not sure, really, why she didn’t arrange the hit right away. It would have been easy to do, since we didn’t ID her as Max’s daughter until after. Although I did have my suspicions. I wasn’t quite so egotistical as to think it a natural everyday occurrence to have drop-dead gorgeous redheads falling over themselves to share my bed.”

Lucia made a strangled sound and quickly drank more coffee.

Corbett glanced at her, then frowned and lifted his own mug before going on.

“Based on what I later learned, I think she’d convinced Max to let her string me along for a while, to see if she could get any valuable information about SIS operations out of me before bumping me off. It didn’t work out that way, as you already know.”

Lucia cleared her throat. “She fell in love with you.”

He nodded. “She did. I knew it but didn’t think a thing about it. What did I know about a woman’s love? What the hell, I was enjoying myself-and her. She was unlike any woman I’d ever known-exciting…a bit dangerous, you know?

“Anyway, we’d been at it about six weeks when Daddy decided he’d waited long enough and ordered her to lead me into the ambush he’d set up. Instead, she warned me.” He paused to scrub a hand over his eyes. “My God, when I think what it must have cost her to do that-to go against her own father, knowing what he was capable of…But at the time I didn’t care. I was following my own agenda. And I saw a chance to set a trap of my own to take down DuMont’s organization. I used her.”

He lifted his head to glare at Lucia, and his eyes looked as though they’d been burned into their sockets. “We had this big emotional scene. I pretended to be devastated that she’d lied to me. Outraged. Angry. Then I forgave her. We made up, and I gave her a ring. Supposedly my fraternity ring. Except it had been especially made for the occasion by the magicians at SIS, a very nice little bug. Quite clever, really. She couldn’t wear it openly, of course, so I gave it to her on a chain, which she could wear concealed under her clothes-close to her heart, as it were. Then I sent her back to her father.” He drank some coffee, then grimaced.

“I truly don’t know what I expected to happen. I suppose I knew there was a possibility he’d kill her, even if she was his daughter. As it turned out, he did worse.”

“Adam said he disowned her,” Lucia said, and her voice was only a scratchy whisper.

“Oh, yes. He did that. But before he gave her the boot, he put together a hit squad to take me out. Her brother was the one in charge of the team, and Cass was forced to go along so she could watch me die. But because of the bug, we were ready and waiting for them. So instead of watching me die, Cassandra DuMont watched me kill her brother.”

He pushed away his empty coffee cup and, after a moment, covered his face with both hands. His voice came muffled and hollow. “I’ll never forget the look on her face when she realized what I’d done. She knew I had to have gotten the information about the hit through her, somehow. She was a smart girl, and she put it together in a heartbeat. She knew I’d used her…betrayed her. I’m certain now that she also knew at the time she was pregnant with my child. She was only nineteen, Lu. Nineteen. She was just a girl, crazy in love with me. And I destroyed her.”

Chapter 7

Oh, God, no wonder he’s the way he is. No wonder he can’t let himself love me. Love anyone.

“Oh, God…”

It wasn’t until she realized Corbett was staring at her with eyes hot and red-rimmed and a jaw tight with self- loathing that she knew she had spoken aloud. And that he’d misunderstood.

Stricken, she put out her hand to touch his arm, opened her mouth to explain. But he’d already pushed back from the table, away from her. Rising, he began to pace, one hand folded across his ribs, the other, with fingers spread, raking roughly through already unkempt hair.

“I know what you think of me, and I don’t blame you-believe me, I’ve thought the same thing myself at least a thousand times. It was a reprehensible, truly beastly thing to do. And yet I-” he turned to look at her, his face bleak “-I’ve thought what I might have done differently, if I were in the same spot today. And God help me, I can’t see what I would change. Even if I had loved her, I had a job to do. A duty…”

He paused, swore, then went silent, listening. He strode to the door of his study and opened it, and then, above the hum of tension inside her head, Lucia could hear it, too. A high-pitched electronic beeping. Still muttering under his breath, Corbett vanished into his study, leaving Lucia to sag in her chair and rest her forehead on her cupped hand, drained.

He called me Lu.

It the midst of the emotional blitz, it had slipped by her. How could she not have noticed? In the ten years she’d worked for Corbett Lazlo, often close by his side, he’d never once called her anything but Lucia-and an occasional Miss Cordez when he was particularly impatient with her. Today he’d called her Lu. The implications of that, together with the confession…

Things are different between us. Just like that. From one day to the next, everything’s changed.

She felt hollow and shivery inside, the same way she’d felt in Corbett’s shower, in Paris. It was a feeling as much of fear as of happiness. Too much, too fast. It scares me.

“Lucia, sorry-can you come here for a minute, please? I’m going to need you.”

Corbett called to her from the doorway of his study, but turned away before she could respond. He didn’t want to see her expression when she looked at him. Disgust or disappointment-he didn’t know which would be worse, but he was certain either would cause him pain more searing than his broken ribs, and he didn’t know whether he was strong enough just now to maintain his composure in the face of it.

He eased himself gingerly into a chair in front of the bank of monitors, acutely aware that she’d come into the room, that she was there close by his side-too close.

“What is it? Is it the boy?” Her voice sounded breathless and shaken.

He aimed a brief glance at the tawny curl just in front of her left ear and shook his head. “I don’t know yet. It’s Adam-”

“Adam! Oh, no…please, no!”

Her stricken cry stabbed him like a knife. Not that it surprised him. He’d wondered and then there was that rather intimate little moment between them when they’d said goodbye before she’d boarded the helicopter…

“Nothing like that,” he said quickly, aware that his smile must appear strained, even grim. And how will I be able to tolerate being around them if-when-they both figure out they’re in love with each other? “As far as I know, at this moment Adam is fine. He wants a video conference. Can you route it for us so it can’t be traced?”

There was a small pause, a throat-clearing sound and then a calm, “Yes, of course.”

She pulled a chair over from his desk, sat in it and reached for the keyboard.

He watched, transfixed, as she began to tap at the keys, her fingers flying too fast to follow, a little frown creasing her forehead, color still staining her cheeks. The smell of her hair clouded his mind. When he couldn’t stand it anymore, he rose, stiffly.

“Call me,” he said as he headed for the door. “When you have it set up.”

“This might take a while.” She tossed a glance over her shoulder. “Where will you be?”

He paused, considering how much to tell her about the one place he knew he would find the solitude he needed just now, and finally settled on a rather prim, “I believe I’ll have a wash.”