Judith lifted her head and blinked up at him. His heart nearly shattered at that love in her eyes. The absolute trust. I believe you, Thomas. Jean-Claude isn't going to take any more of my life from me.
He nearly groaned in despair. He wanted that kind of trust, but now he knew he had to confess. How understanding would he be if the roles were reversed? He had a suspicious nature, never trusting anyone. How many times had it crossed his mind that she was involved in the theft of the microchip and that it had driven La Roux's obsession with her? He'd even considered briefly that her guilt and shame for her brother's death stemmed from the fact that she'd taken the microchip and La Roux had sent his men after her to get it back.
Stefan waited until Judith was safely buckled into the passenger seat and he was behind the wheel of her car. She'd given him a little frown when he'd handed her inside, putting the tote bag with his weapons within easy reach, but she hadn't protested when he'd taken the driver's side.
She pressed her lips together as they drove out of Sea Haven. The fog was still heavy and darkness was creeping in as well. "Thomas, if you want out, I'll understand. My shady life seems to be catching up with me."
He reached for her hand, tucked it close to his heart and shook his head. "Don't be silly, Judith. I have no intentions of going anywhere."
"He's got to be out of prison. Or he sent someone to do his dirty work, but this feels like him. That 'Who is he, Judith?' is so like him. He always looked at me as if I was the beginning and end of the world for him." She looked down at her hands and sighed. "Which is probably why I fell so hard for him. There's such a lure in that you know . . ." She trailed off, her breath catching in her throat, her gaze jumping to his face.
He was so connected to her in his mind, he could follow her sudden reasoning and he nearly groaned aloud. He needed her like that, so close he could feel her breathe, his world, the entire world was this woman beside him. Without her, there was no reality. Stefan Prakenskii would remain forever a shadow, slide in and out of danger, taking lives like death itself and eventually he would cross a line he could never go back from.
"Like me. Like me, Judith. Just say it." A touch of anger edged his voice because her sudden insight wasn't going to make his confession any easier. If she could reason that out, she would know a man like him studied a mark and figured out how best to insert himself into his or her life to get what he wanted.
Judith nodded slowly. "You do make me feel that way, Thomas."
"Because I feel as if you are my world. There will never be anyone else for me, Judith. I love you. I don't know how it happened. Hell, I didn't even know it could happen." He turned down the road leading to the farm. "There's more to this Jean-Claude mess than you know. I came here as Thomas Vincent for a reason." He glanced at her, judging her reaction.
She frowned at him, her long lashes fanning her cheek. "I'm well aware of that."
He waited while the gates opened automatically and drove on through, pausing just long enough to assure himself the gates had closed properly behind him. In his life, there had been so many times when he felt on the brink of a precipice, but nothing like this. His heart was actually pounding, and he knew he could feel sweat beading on his forehead.
He parked the car and helped her out, carrying the tote bag for her up the stairs into her house. "You know, Judith, about my coming here to warn my brother, but I was working for my government at the time. I had another assignment."
Judith turned slowly to face him, there in the middle of her living room, surrounded by the serene beauty he'd come to associate with Judith. Very carefully she set the canvases down on the low-slung, black-lacquered table. "I don't understand. You said you came to Sea Haven to warn Levi that Petr Ivanov was still hunting him."
He ran a hand through his hair, rubbed the bridge of his nose and nodded. "And that was the truth, but not the entire truth." He set the alarm on the house, more to give himself breathing space than anything else.
"Just say it, Thomas."
"A little over five years ago, a very important man working on a new defense system for our government was attacked. His wife had been compromised and she helped by providing extremely sensitive information to the man who was behind the theft. One of my brothers, Gavriil, was one of his bodyguards. Gavriil is about eighteen months older than me and we were closer than a lot of young kids when our parents were massacred. He was severely injured. In our business, that's a death warrant. We don't get nice retirement checks. Men like Gavriil and me live without real identities. Sorbacov, the man who came up with the idea of taking the children of his country and training them . . ."
"Using brutal force to turn them into killers and spies," Judith corrected.
He nodded. "He has too much to lose if any one of us starts talking. We're ghosts and he can't afford for any of us to surface. The moment I knew Gavriil's wounds were serious, I made my way to him and helped him escape the hospital. I took him to a doctor I knew was safe. He disappeared after that, although we have a way to get in touch with one another to indicate we're alive and well."
He watched her face closely, knowing he was starting the story with his injured brother because it would appeal to her compassionate nature. He couldn't stop being who he was. His training had given him the ability to read every expression, to adjust quickly if he was losing a battle. So far, she was looking at him with soft eyes, not really understanding where he was going with it all, but willing to understand.
"The information stolen was on a microchip, a tiny little speck really. It had been sewn into a coat and the thieves had known exactly where to find it. They cut it out of the coat and disappeared. That chip is extremely important and I was sent to track it down."
He studied Judith's face. She'd gone very still and there was a very small frown forming on her face, as if she was puzzling something out in her mind.
"I found the wife and her lover and they led me straight to Jean-Claude La Roux."
Her head went up, her gaze jumping to his. The breath left her lungs in a rush, as if he'd sucker-punched her--and he probably had. He took a step toward her. Judith backed away, shaking her head, raising one hand palm out to ward him off.
"I don't understand."
"Before I could get to him, La Roux was brought up on charges in France and was sent to prison. The chip was never offered on the black market and we knew he hadn't had time to sell it. We tried diplomatic means to get him transferred to Russia, but France refused to cooperate. In the end, as a last resort, I was sent to the prison to assess the situation. We needed to know if he still had the chip and how were we going to get it back."
Judith pressed a hand to her stomach. "You didn't come here to retire as Thomas Vincent. You came here because you think Jean-Claude gave me the chip." Her dark eyes went stormy. "Did you think I let him murder my brother rather than give it back to him?"
"Judith." He took another step toward her, but she backed away again, this time putting the counter between them. "That's not true. I shared his cell. The walls were covered in photographs of you. I believe he's obsessed with you, but wasn't certain why. I spent two months in that cell with nothing to do but look at those pictures of you."
"Oh, God. You want me to believe you fell madly in love with me because of some pictures in a prison cell? Do you really think I'm that stupid?" She looked around her as if desperate for a way to escape. "What do you want, Thomas? Or is it Stefan I'm talking to now? Just tell me, and then go."
"I don't know when I fell in love with you, Judith. I wish I could tell you, but I realized that first day I met you, when you came toward me that my life was going to change."
She shook her head, rejecting his admission. "Tell me about you and Jean-Claude and why you're here. The real reason."
"I knew, after meeting him, the only way to get the information we needed was to get him out of prison and take him to a place where we could interrogate him ourselves. That was the plan, and then Sorbacov stepped in. He
ordered other agents to aid La Roux's escape and sent me here. I knew it was a setup. I'm too valuable to babysit an ex-girlfriend on the off chance that La Roux would somehow manage to escape our agents. He had to be planning to use me as bait to bring Lev out into the open." It was a measure of his distress that he called his brother by his given name.
"So you were really sent here to babysit me? And your government helped Jean-Claude escape? Wow, you found the perfect way to keep an eye on me. All those times you admitted you'd been trained in the art of seduction, you weren't kidding, were you? And I was so easy. All you had to do was study my personality and I was easy pickings. You're damned good at your job, Stefan."
"You're making it sound far worse than it was. I had no intention of babysitting you--or seducing you. I'm telling you, Judith, I'm in love with you. The rest of it wasn't supposed to happen. La Roux had his men waiting. They killed the agents and he's in the wind now."
"How handy that you're right here, in the exact place that he's bound to come."
"Judith," Stefan began.
She shook her head and gathered up her paintings. "I don't want to hear any more. I'm going to work. You can leave."
"You know I'm not going to leave. We'll work this out."
She looked him up and down, a long, slow perusal of distaste. "There isn't enough time in the world to work this out." Abruptly she turned her back on him and went downstairs.
20
JUDITH refused to cry in front of Stefan. She just wouldn't let him destroy her hard won poise. How could she have let him into her life--into her heart--so fast? She was so stupid. Tears blurred her vision as she hurried down the stairs carrying the paintings with her. It was growing dark and she flicked on the lights to better illuminate the canvases to see how much actual damage there was to the artwork while she stretched them. Unlike the happy chaos of her kaleidoscope studio, this room was where she earned money as a conservator of old paintings and she kept it immaculate.
Closing the door firmly she contemplated whether to bother locking it. A man like Stefan Prakenskii could get through a security system, he certainly would have no problem getting through a locked door. She stood there, in the middle of the room, wanting to throw a childish tantrum, to hurl the canvases around the room and scream out her anguish.
Instead, she stayed in perfect control, tears running down her face, as she placed each of the paintings on the table. She breathed in and out, pushing pain away. For a moment she covered her face with her hands. She was so shaken, all the way to the very foundation of her existence. Her hard-won faith in herself, built inch by inch, piece by piece over the last five years, was gone--shattered. She pushed back an anguished cry.
She wouldn't go back to darkness. Stefan might have been a fraud, but he had shown her the way out of the dark. She could do this--survive without him. There were millions of women who fell in love with the wrong men and they lived happy, productive lives. She just had to make up her mind that she would be one of them. Her track record was perhaps going to go down as one of the worst in history, but she wasn't going to let a Russian agent destroy her.
The temptation to call her sisters and cry on their shoulders was huge, but she resisted. She didn't want to face Rikki right now, and Rikki would be hurt if she wasn't included in the circle of support. But damn it all, Levi had betrayed her. He had to have known what his brother was really up to. They'd counted on her compassion, her loyalty, so ingrained in her that she would never consider betraying either of them to anyone. They'd played her so perfectly--and did that mean Levi was playing Rikki?
She brushed a hand over her face. She could barely breathe in her beloved studio. She turned on the music system to flood the silence with soft music, needing distraction. She just had to work and she had plenty of it, enough to keep her up half the night. And if that wasn't enough, she could always invent more--after all, she was a pro at finding things to do in the middle of the night.
She glanced out the double French doors into the night. There were no stars tonight, only a heavy, fog, turning her gardens to vague wet shadows. She wandered across the room, drawn by the misty gray veil. It was one of the things she loved most about living on the coast. When she saw the fog creep in over the surrounding forest, the atmosphere always reminded her of a gothic novel.
"Get to work," she admonished aloud and shut off the alarm so she could open her French doors.
Technically, she didn't need the fresh air--she wasn't painting--but her lungs felt tight and the lump in her throat refused to dissolve. She wouldn't acknowledge that she wanted to scream and throw things, to weep until there were no tears left in the world. She loved him. Loved him with everything she was. How could she have been so deceived?
She stood in the doorway, staring into her garden, the mist on her face, in her eyes, dripping silver tears into her heart until she was so weighed down with sorrow she had to turn back to her work or succumb to the numbing cold--and she wouldn't go back there. Not ever again. Not for a man.
She'd been so stupid falling for a man like Jean-Claude. All the signs were there, she just had been too naive to read them. So many people deferred to him, stepped out of his way, or froze when he came into a room. She'd thought him so commanding of respect, she hadn't paused to consider it had been fear everyone felt. She found him attractive and engaging, although very intimidating with his supreme confidence, so of course everyone around her had to have felt the same.
Resolutely she squared her shoulders and walked back inside to look over the artwork. Most of the paintings were seascapes. It was impossible for an artist to live in Sea Haven and not want to capture the beauty of the ocean in her most tempestuous moods. There were a few pictures of old buildings and one of the bluffs with a long broken fence, worn with age and weather, which was a personal favorite.
She looked at the paintings with a prejudiced eye. The wild sea always frustrated her a little bit. She never felt she actually captured the mood of it in the way she wanted. Grays and blues and swirling purples never quite gave the full effect of an angry sea, moody and temperamental. There was one with the mist veiling the trees so that the forest looked like a great army, shrouded in mystery, hidden in the vague, shadowy interior.
Pressing her lips together tightly, she forced herself to pull out the first of the stretcher bars, to stretch the canvas, hoping the paint itself wasn't already damaged on the two acrylics. She focused completely on the work, taking care to keep all four corners perfect as she wrapped the canvas around the bar. Using the stainless steel staples was much more difficult when there was paint on the canvas. One acrylic was definitely damaged and she would have to repair it, if she was going to save it. Had it been another artist's work, she wouldn't have hesitated, but there in the privacy of her studio, she could acknowledge she would always associate these paintings with Stefan's betrayal.
He'd broken her heart as no one else could ever do. He'd told her half-truths over and over while she'd bared her soul to him. Damn him for that. And damn her for being so stupid to fall into his arms because he looked at her with his soul in his eyes. She tossed the canvas down and shoved back the chair, too upset and restless to contain the bitter, sorrowful emotions welling up and swirling around like a dark whirlpool.
The cool night air whispered to her and she stepped outside onto the back patio where her flowers and shrubs could surround her with their bright colors and soothing beauty. Her vision blurred, tears swimming in her eyes, brimming over and trickling down her cheeks. She pressed the heel of her hand to her burning eyes.
A hard hand clamped tight over her mouth as a large body shoved hers against the wall. The scent of expensive male cologne washed over her, throwing her back into another time. Her heart slammed hard in her chest, fear a slick taste in her mouth.
Jean-Claude kept her against the wall with one hand, while he thrust his finger under her nose. "You ripped out my heart," he accused in a low hiss, his dark eyes boring into hers. Both hand
s gripped her shirtfront and dragged her to him, his mouth descending hard on hers. His mouth mashed against hers hard, a display of ownership. His tongue forcing its way into her mouth was a violation.
She tasted murder. Blood. Her brother's terror and her own hate. Bile rose and when he broke away from her, she coughed it down, rubbing at her stinging lips with the back of her hand, her gaze never leaving his. She pressed herself against the side of her house, facing the man who had ordered the torture and murder of her brother.
"Did you think I could just forget you, Judith?" Jean-Claude demanded. He took a long, slow look around. "I know you haven't forgotten me. I waited all these years and you never came. You never wrote to me. Why, ma belle, did you desert me when I needed you most?"
"How can you ask me that?" She couldn't help the sudden flash of temper. There was no way to suppress the surge of anger. "You had my brother tortured. Murdered. Did you think I would love you for that?"
He shook his head, those dark eyes still boring into hers. "That was his decision alone. My men had orders to let him go the moment he told them where you were. That was all he had to do to gain his freedom and his life. Such a small thing I asked and he refused. I will not have you put his death on me. That was entirely his choice."
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She could see he had no understanding of why she didn't see his point of view. He considered himself reasonable. Judith shook her head. "You're not even denying that you had your men torture him."
He pointed his finger at her again. "You ran from me. No note, no explanation. You just took off. What did you expect, mon amour, that I would just take something like that lying down?" He stepped closer to her, his breath hot in her face. "You are mine. Mine. You don't end us. Not ever. That's not allowed, Judith. I won't have it."
"You were in that room, Jean-Claude. I saw you telling your men to hurt that poor man. He was pleading for mercy . . ."
"He stole from me. You shouldn't have seen that. That was not for your eyes. And you should have come to me and told me . . ."