Chapter 56
The man who answered the intercom and looked at her through a tiny camera located at the gate of Cole's estate was surprisingly easy to convince that Mrs. Harrison should be allowed to surprise her husband by being admitted without advance notice. In fact, the middle-aged man was positively beaming with delight as he showed her through the silent house to the back door that opened onto the patio surrounding the mammoth free-form swimming pool.
Cole was standing alone in the dark, his hands shoved deep into his trouser pockets, his head tipped back as if he were looking up at the stars. Diana opened the door and silently slipped outside, watching him, trying to think where to begin when all she wanted to do was fling herself into his arms. She'd rehearsed a dozen opening speeches on the flight there, all of them designed to let her stay and face his trouble together with him. She'd thought of pleading, of reasoning, of demanding. She'd considered trying tears to weaken his resistance. But when the moment was finally upon her, she couldn't seem to begin. She took a step forward and saw him stiffen with resistance the instant she spoke. 'Cole?' He didn't even turn his head or look at her. 'What are you doing out here?'
'Praying.'
Tears stung her eyes when she remembered the way he had dismissed the idea as the last resort of fools —dreamers who won't face the fact that they cannot have something. 'What are you praying for?'
'I've been praying for you,' he said in a hoarse whisper.
Diana walked into his arms. They closed around her, yanking her against him, while he buried his lips in hers. When he finally ended the kiss, he kept her crushed against his length, his jaw resting against her head, as if he were afraid to let her go for fear she would vanish. Content to stay there, she rubbed her cheek against his hard chest. 'I love you.'
His hand slid up her back in a caress, and he brushed a kiss against her temple. 'I know you do. The proof is in my arms.'
'I know why you're having so much trouble with the SEC. Charles Hayward told me.'
He went very still. 'He told you what?'
'I went to see him last night. He told me you got Barbara pregnant and she had to have an abortion. She can't have children because of complications from it. She's been in and out of intensive therapy programs for years.'
'He told you all that,' Cole said, leaning back and studying her with puzzlement and disbelief, 'and you came here, to me?'
She smiled at him in the moonlight and nodded; then she cuddled closer in his arms again. 'I know it isn't true.'
'Because you believe in me?' he speculated, confused.
'Yes. And because back then we all had bets about who would get you to kiss them.'
A low chuckle rumbled in Cole's chest beneath her ear. 'And no one won,' he stated, understanding at once where she was going with that. With a smile in his voice, he whispered, 'How much did
His wife opened his shirt button and pressed a playful kiss on his chest. 'Nothing. I only make idiotic bets in Las Vegas.'
They were on their way to the bedroom when Diana remembered what she'd brought to give him. 'What's this?' Cole asked, setting her suitcases at the foot of his bed. She handed him an envelope and a hand-decorated sack. He opened the envelope first and then the sack. Spencer Addison had sent him a brief history of Doug Hayward's drunk-driving arrests, the last of which was while he was in law school and had resulted in serious injury to the face of the female passenger with him at the time.
Rose Britton had sent him a bag of homemade chocolate chip cookies.
Even after they had made love, Diana couldn't sleep. With her head resting in the crook of his arm, she stared out at the colorful waterfall beyond the bedroom's glass wall.
'I used to wear you out,' Cole teased gently. 'Now you lie awake pretending to sleep. That doesn't bode well for the next fifty years.'
'What's going to happen at the SEC hearing?'
She sounded wide awake and very worried. 'Would it do any good to tell you not to worry?' he asked.
'None at all.'
He hesitated, hating to talk to her about the details of the snare that held him powerless right now, but she had a right to know and to understand. Based on his recollection of her camping trip stories and the way she ran her business, she had a greater fear of the unknown than of a visible threat.
'I know how stupid this sounds,' she murmured in the darkness, 'but you had a thriving company without the Cushman microprocessor. After everything that's happened, I wish you could just give it back to them along with their whole company.'
'I didn't buy Cushman to get their chip. Intel is the leader at the high end. The low-end market is already being carved up into smaller and smaller pieces by a lot of foreign producers. In my opinion, the world doesn't need another computer-chip provider.'
Diana rolled over onto her side and propped her head on her hand, facing him. 'Then why in God's name did you go to all that trouble to buy them?'
'I wanted some patents they held and didn't know how to use. They owned a tiny piece of a puzzle that we needed in order to produce the most desired commodity in the world right now. We had everything else put together.'
'Which is?'
'Which is an ultra-long-life battery that would power laptop computers and cellular phones for days instead of hours. Everyone is working on one,
and everyone is getting closer, including us, but whoever brings that battery to market first wins the game —and the stakes are almost beyond comprehension. The scientist who's heading the project for me used to work for Cushman and he knew about the patent. He works off-site, in secret, in a lab he runs with a few assistants who don't completely understand what he's doing. Neither do I, for that matter. His assistants think he's working on a super-thin computer monitor/television set, which he is—in his spare time.'
'Could you possibly sell Cushman back their chip and keep the patents?' she asked helpfully.
'Not a chance,' Cole said sardonically. 'They don't want that chip. Based on what I learned from a friend the other night, Cushman wants the profits we'll make from that battery. The only chance they have of getting their hands on those profits is if they can convince the court that I cheated them by forcing the value of their stock down before I bought it.
'The patents were and are a matter of public record, so they can't accuse me of having insider information or anything like that.'
Diana smoothed her fingers over the muscles of his stomach and chest. 'What do you need to get out from under this right now?'
'I have a team of lawyers working on it. We'll find a way,' Cole said with absolute conviction.
Satisfied that he would, Diana curled up against him and promptly fell asleep.
Cole was awake until dawn, because he already knew there wasn't going to be 'a way.' His lawyers had already told him to expect to be charged with fraud and to stand trial. Nothing short of a miracle would keep that from happening, he thought grimly. But then, Diana was lying in his arms, in his bed. and that was a miracle. She had come to be with him when everything she heard and saw should have made her run like hell. That was a bigger miracle.
Chapter 57
