Darkness Before the Dawn Read online

  “Of course, darling,” Maggie soothed instantly. “Why don’t you sit and relax? By the way, where’s the baby?”

  “Still at the baby-sitter’s. Mrs. Gilliam is bringing her up at six. That reminds me, I’d better call …” Kate disappeared before Maggie could stop her, and she was left alone in the lofty confines of the old apartment, alone with her nemesis, who made even Bud Willis seem less reprehensible.

  Hell, she was an adult. There was no reason on this earth why Randall Carter should still have the ability to elicit such emotions from her. She’d be civil, cool, and remote. There was no way in hell he’d ever have to know that a small, secret part of her soul was still lacerated from her last encounter with him.

  She gave him her brittle, polite smile. “So tell me, Randall,” she said, “are you still messing in other people’s politics for kicks?”

  He just looked at her. His was an arresting face, not particularly handsome, but striking. His nose was long, elegant, and aquiline; his mouth was equally aristocratic and thin-lipped. His cheekbones were high, almost Slavic-looking; that trait that had served them well six years before, when their lives had depended on passing as Eastern Europeans. His eyes were a dark, stormy color somewhere between blue and gray. They never laughed, and they never warmed with life and tenderness. They stayed cold and stormy and slightly mocking even at the very best of times, and yet they pulled her. As they’d pulled her six years ago, when he had been married and she had been fighting her hopeless attraction to him—an attraction that he’d done everything to encourage.

  “Other people’s politics aren’t as much fun as they used to be,” he said slowly. “I’ve spent the last few years making money that I don’t need.”

  “Poor Randall,” she mocked gently, inordinately pleased that she could do so.

  “And what about you, Maggie? You’ve been through a lot since we were together. A divorce, an affair, another marriage. How are you surviving widowhood?”

  “Surviving,” she said. “I’m surviving. I don’t believe you just happened to show up, Randall.” She changed the subject quickly. “Why are you here? Who sent you? What the hell is going on at Stoneham Studios?”

  He moved then, and she’d forgotten his peculiar grace and speed. She stood her ground as he advanced upon her, determined not to give way, but as he closed in on her, she felt trapped, smothered, diminished. He was only just over six feet tall, and yet he dwarfed her. She could sense the tension radiating through his body, beneath that perfect gray suit of his, and his tension reached out and caught hold of her own nerves, twisting them into knots.

  “So many questions, Maggie,” he said softly, his voice a silken threat. “I’ll answer them if you’ll answer one of mine.”

  “Shoot,” she said defiantly, and then winced at the horrible appropriateness of her word.

  His oddly sexy mouth twisted into a reluctant smile. “I couldn’t help but overhear the police discussing the case. It appears that Francis’s body was in a very strange condition. He had multiple bumps and bruises that had clearly been inflicted after death. And the tips of his fingers, his ears, and his nose were frostbitten.”

  Maggie kept her face stony. “So?”

  “So I wonder what could have caused it. You remember how curious I can be. But there was something even more interesting, Maggie.” He moved even closer, so close she could smell the faint tang of whiskey on his breath, so close she could see faint lines of gold fanning out in his gray-blue eyes. “I’ll tell you what I’m doing here,” he said, “when you tell me why Francis Ackroyd had grapefruit marmalade on his shoulder.”

  four

  “You know, I like him,” Kate said three hours later. She was curled up on one of the living-room sofas with an afghan draped around her small body and her head resting on a pile of pillows.

  Maggie stared at her for a long moment. She was stretched out in a chair, barefoot. Her second glass of whiskey and water was making no dent on memories she desperately wanted to drown. “Who?” she said finally.

  “Randall Carter.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” she said flatly. “He’s a cold-blooded, arrogant bastard, with ice water in his veins. He’d sell his own mother if the price was right.”

  Kate roused herself enough to peer at her older sister. “You figured all that out in the space of an hour? You’re a quick judge of character.”

  Maggie decided to go on the attack. “I figured out I like Caleb McAllister in less time than that.”

  Kate’s mouth thinned into an angry line. “You’re welcome to him.”

  “And you’re welcome to Randall Carter.”

  “There’s no comparison,” Kate shot back.

  “Isn’t there?”

  There was a long silence as the two sisters stared at each other. “I don’t think we need to be obscure,” Kate said finally. “Our situation is difficult enough without talking at cross-purposes. Does Randall Carter mean something to you? Do you know him from before?”

  “Randall Carter means absolutely nothing to me. Less than nothing,” Maggie said in a flat voice. “And yes, I know him from before.”

  “Aha!”

  “Aha, what?” she snapped. “I can’t stand the man. He’s a sleazoid, he’s a worthless piece of garbage, he’s—”

  Kate giggled. “I can’t imagine someone as elegant as Randall Carter being called garbage.”

  A reluctant smile played around the corners of Maggie’s generous mouth. “You’re right. The man reserves all his emotion for his wardrobe.”

  “How would you know that?” Kate asked. “Were you in a position to ask for his emotions?”

  “I’ll tell you what, Kate,” she said in a friendly voice. “I won’t pester you about your convoluted feelings for Caleb, and you won’t interfere in my past relationship with Randall. Believe me, it’s very past, very old, and very dead. The only thing I feel for him is contempt.”

  “It’s a deal—if you answer one question.”

  Here we go again, she thought with a shudder. At least it couldn’t be as horrifying as Randall’s unanswerable question. “All right.”

  “Was it six years ago that you knew him?”

  Maggie looked at her sleepy younger sister with surprise. “Why do you ask that?”

  “Because the whole family knows that Maggie the Indestructible self-destructed six years ago. And no one ever knew what or who caused it. Was it Randall?”

  That was almost as horrifying as Randall’s question, she thought grimly. She considered denying it. She considered getting up and walking out of the room. But Kate was right—they were in too much trouble as it was. Kate didn’t need to know just how much Randall suspected. Maggie herself didn’t even know—Kate had walked into the room immediately after that bombshell of the grapefruit marmalade, and he’d been polite, charming, and distant and had left a courteous half-hour afterward without another word about Francis’s demise. But his silence wouldn’t last forever.

  Maggie looked over at Kate’s sleepy face. “It was Randall,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

  Kate’s muffled sound of protest deteriorated into a quiet little snore. Maggie sat watching her sister and took another sip of whiskey. It had been Randall, indeed, she thought, and gave her weary mind over to the memories that the alcohol couldn’t keep at bay.

  She’d been so damned young six years ago, younger than her twenty-eight years at the time, and she still had an extraordinary faith in human beings that was downright stupid, when she looked back on it. She’d gone through a disrupted childhood that had included a mother who was feckless and charming and never there when you needed her, a father who was cold and distant, three stepfathers, and innumerable honorable “uncles.” She’d been forcibly introduced to sex by one of her drunken stepfathers, and if the psychologists that her outraged and suddenly maternal mother had provided had managed to convince her that it wasn’t her fault, she had had yet to prove to herself that she could do more than just mana
ge a physical relationship.

  But still and all, she had somehow expected the best from people, despite their lapses. Maybe Granny Bennett had taught her that before she died; maybe Queenie had managed to instill it in her. She’d learned to look past her mother’s selfish irresponsibility to the very real love beneath it, and she’d learned to accept her father’s distance. She’d learned to be strong and loving to her younger sisters, generous with her mother, and accepting of human frailty—until she made the mistake of falling in love with a man who didn’t deserve her.

  Why she’d ever been fool enough to work for the CIA was another matter. She’d been restless and bored and had needed a better outlet than law school for her razor-sharp intelligence and her longing for excitement. All her life she’d been torn between her need for security and her need for adventure. She needed the security to balance her disrupted childhood, and most of the time that part of her was ascendant. But her mother’s gypsy blood made her break out every now and then, longing for something more exciting, and that impractical longing had made her drop out just before her law boards and give in to Mike Jackson’s importunities and work for the Company.

  Who would have thought they would both end up in a peaceful, nonprofit organization like Third World Causes, Ltd.? she thought with a lazy grimace. She’d gotten out of the CIA sooner than Mike. It had taken less than a year to become thoroughly disenchanted with the way the Company worked. She could thank Randall Carter for that, she supposed. He did have his uses.

  She had still been in training six long years ago when she had met him, was still doing the myriad paper work and secretarial work that somehow was supposed to be suited to female trainees but not male ones. She’d been sent up to Jackson’s office, her arms full of secret files involving Yugoslavian terrorists, and even though she knew that the deep, rich voice that was telling her to enter wasn’t Jackson’s, she had still been unprepared for her first sight of Randall Elverston Carter. She’d almost dropped the files on the carpet.

  It had an eerie similarity to today, she thought, burrowing down into her chair. He’d been alone in the office, staring out the window, and he’d turned when she’d entered. His dark eyes had narrowed as they swept over her suddenly gawky figure. He’d had the uncanny ability to make her feel too tall, too gangly, too clumsy. And yet later he hadn’t made her feel that way at all.

  “There you are, Maggie.” Mike had come up behind her. “This is Randall Carter. He’s a friend of the Agency’s; he helps out every now and then in an unofficial capacity. Randall, this is Maggie Bennett.”

  Randall had nodded, his elegant head inclining regally. All the while those dangerous eyes had watched her.

  Jackson had continued on. “We’re sending you out on your first mission, Maggie. It’s simple enough—you’re to provide cover for an operative traveling through Eastern Europe. You’ll pose as his wife. The whole thing shouldn’t take more than a week—ten days at the most. Just a chance to get your feet wet.”

  Maggie had turned to look at Randall, aquamarine eyes into stormy gray, and there was an unspoken question on her face.

  He shook his head. “Not me, I’m afraid,” he’d said in that rich, deep voice that was unexpectedly delicious. “Mike’s agent is a man named Jim Mullen. He’s going to be acting as a sales rep for one of my companies. It should prove a good enough cover.”

  “One of your companies?” Maggie couldn’t help but echo.

  “Randall’s our quintessential capitalist pig, Maggie,” Mike had announced genially, dropping into his desk chair. “Born with a pedigree and a silver spoon in his mouth, and no matter what he does, he just keeps making money, don’t you?”

  Randall inclined his head once more. “It gets boring.”

  “I imagine it does,” Maggie said faintly. His eyes still hadn’t left her. Even after she turned and tried to concentrate on Jackson, she could feel them, feel their pull—a pull she recognized, even with her limited experience, as purely sexual.

  “So poor Randall gets his kicks helping out,” Jackson had said, and his gaze flew back and forth between the two of them, not missing a thing, neither Maggie’s averted face and stiff back nor the intense, unreadable expression on Randall Carter’s aristocratic face. Jackson knew how to read faces, and he didn’t like what he saw. He didn’t like complications. “But you two won’t be working together,” he added abruptly. Randall finally looked away from Maggie and turned a quizzical expression toward the older man at the sudden change in plans. “Maggie, I can brief you just as efficiently as Randall can, and we don’t want to bore him with details.” He smiled his friendly smile that hid his barracuda nature. “Randall’s easily bored,” he added to Maggie. “As long as we keep him reasonably entertained, he’ll help us. So we try to spare him all the nitty-gritty of everyday life.”

  “I don’t think I’d find Maggie boring.” His voice was low and mesmerizing, and Maggie lifted her head and looked straight into his eyes.

  It was a heady experience. A sexual current was flowing between them, a hypnotizing threat that Maggie wanted nothing more than to succumb to. She’d avoided romantic involvements when they’d proved to be more trouble than they were worth. The man staring at her now was nothing but trouble, sheer, terrifying trouble, and normally she would have run. But not this time. She turned and faced him, an unconscious offering that said she was ready for the first time in years to take a chance.

  “How’s the wife, Randall?” Mike said.

  Randall had already learned to be impassive. He didn’t even blink. Maggie flinched and withdrew, physically, mentally, emotionally, pulling in on herself. “She’s fine, Mike. You already asked after her.”

  “Did I?” Mike murmured. “I must be getting forgetful. Maggie, we’ll go over everything you need to know tomorrow. You won’t be heading out until next week—we’ve got plenty of time to get you settled.”

  Randall wasn’t one to give up easily. “I think I’d do a better job,” he said. “And I’m at loose ends right now.”

  But Maggie had skittered away, nervous and remote. Jackson gave her an approving smile. “We wouldn’t think of bothering you, Randall. Maggie and I will handle this just fine.”

  But Randall had pursued her and had done everything he could to feed her attraction. He’d wanted her, wanted her like he wanted one of those damned works of art he collected, and he’d gone after her. And in the end he’d gotten her.

  The quiet snore from the sleeping figure opposite her startled Maggie out of her memories. This wasn’t how she’d envisioned spending her first vacation in years, she thought with self-deprecating amusement, which was only a defense against the pain. Hauling bodies around and then wallowing in unwanted memories of Randall Carter. It would be enough to depress even the cheeriest person.

  She reached for the bottle of Cutty Sark on the floor next to her chair, refilled her glass, and took a deep drink. She wasn’t used to drinking, and she would probably have a hell of a hangover tomorrow—when she’d have to handle the usually overwhelming arrival of her mother. But she’d be even more exhausted if she had no sleep at all, and the sudden reappearance of Randall in her life needed more than willpower to banish. Why the hell did he have to show up now, asking questions about grapefruit marmalade?

  And why had he had to show up in Eastern Europe six years ago, just as everything was falling apart?

  She’d managed to avoid him during the week before she left. Oh, he’d shown up in the office every now and then when she’d least expected it, and the feel of those dangerous eyes would pull her attention away from the maps and data she was trying to study, and she’d look up to see him, tall and perfectly clothed and somehow more threatening than any half-dressed savage. But Mike had run interference, more out of self-interest than the goodness of his heart, and Maggie had managed to keep her distance. She hadn’t been able to keep her imagination and fantasies under control, but no one knew. Except perhaps Randall Carter himself, who seemed to have th
e uncanny ability to read her mind.

  She’d found out about his wife. It had been easy enough to do—Marilyn Carter was a beautiful, socially prominent brunette who appeared often enough in the social pages of the Post for Maggie to memorize her patrician features. She’d even cut her picture out and stuck it to her refrigerator door during that endless, hellish week, to remind herself. She should have cut Randall’s half of the picture off and thrown it away.

  She’d taken off for Eastern Europe with a sigh of relief. Margaret Mullen, off to meet her husband Jim, a representative for Carter Industries who was currently scouting the market for exported automobiles. It would be an easy job, Mike had promised, more a vacation than anything else. Mullen would have done the hard part by the time she got there, and the detailed plans for several Eastern European missile bases would already be making their way back to Washington via another messenger. All she had to do was provide cover for Jim Mullen while they spent an innocent two days touring and then flew back to Washington.

  Of course, it hadn’t worked out that way. No one had been at the small, seedy airport outside of Gemansk. It had taken her three days to find Jim. He had been holed up in a caretaker’s shed in a cemetery that was gruesomely appropriate. His shoulder where the bullet was lodged had already begun to swell and redden.

  During those three days, she’d sent word back to Mike. She wasn’t supposed to rely on her own abilities—her orders had been exact. If there was a problem, she was to call them with the prearranged code and wait for further instructions. By the time she found Mullen, those instructions had come through: Wait for rescue. Someone would be coming.

  First aid had been limited during the thirty-six hours she hid out in the shed with the wounded agent. Mullen had been in and out of a mild coma. He had ordered her to leave him when he regained consciousness and had lain sweating and shivering when he was out. Maggie did her best to warm him, did her best to clean the wound that had spread raw, angry red streaks down his torso, and tried to ignore the smell of rotting flesh as she waited in the darkness with tears streaming down her face. She had waited for rescue, hating her own impotence.