The Novels of Nora Roberts Volume 1 Page 17

  “Beginner’s luck.” But he grinned back at her.

  “Luck had nothing to do with it.” She stabbed a finger at his chest. “Like it or not, Callahan, you’ve got a new partner.”

  12

  “You’re not being fair.”

  Roxanne stood in her father’s dressing room in full costume. The spangles and beads on her strapless emerald gown shivered from the lights, and her indignation.

  “I proved myself,” she insisted.

  “You proved you’re impulsive, reckless and stubborn.” After adjusting the cuff of his tuxedo shirt to his liking, Max met her furious face in his mirror. “And you are not, I repeat not, going on the Chaumet job. Now, I have ten minutes to cue, young lady. Is there anything else?”

  In that moment she was plunged back into childhood. Her bottom lip quivered as she dropped into a chair. “Daddy, why don’t you trust me?”

  “On the contrary, I trust you implicitly. You must trust me, however, when I tell you you’re not ready.”

  “But the Melvilles—”

  “Were a risk you should never have taken.” He shook his head as he crossed over to take her drooping chin in his hand. He knew—who better?—what it was like to covet those shiny toys, to crave the excitement of stealing in the dark. How could he expect a child of his blood to be any different?

  And, truthfully, he was enormously proud of her. Warped, he supposed with a half smile. But a father’s pride was a father’s pride.

  “Ma belle, I will tell you this. Never, never muddy your own pond.”

  Roxanne arched a brow. “I don’t recall you putting the jewels back, Daddy.”

  Caught, he ran his tongue around his teeth. “No,” he agreed, drawing the word out. “One shouldn’t look a gift diamond in the mouth—so to speak. Still, what you acquired is a fraction of what we hope to acquire tonight. It’s been months in the planning, Roxanne. The timing is calculated to the instant. Even if I wanted to add you, or anyone, on at this point, it would tilt those very delicately balanced scales.”

  “It’s an excuse,” she tossed back, feeling like a little girl forbidden to attend a party. “Next time you’ll have another.”

  “It’s the truth. Next time there’ll be another truth. When have I ever lied to you?”

  She opened her mouth, closed it again. He’d evaded, avoided and toyed with veracity. But lied to her? No, never. “I’m as good as Luke.”

  “He used to say the same thing about you, onstage. Speaking of which . . .” He took her hand, lifting her before kissing it lightly. “We have a show to do.”

  “All right.” She opened the door, then glanced over her shoulder. “Daddy, I want my share of the hundred and sixty.”

  He grinned, ear to ear. Had a father ever had so perfect a child? “That’s my girl.”

  The audience at La Palace was studded with film stars, Paris models and those rich and glamorous enough to rub elbows with them. Max had created a show sophisticated and complicated enough to entertain the discriminating. It wasn’t possible for Roxanne to walk through the act with her mind on something else.

  As she had been trained, she put everything aside but the magic. It was she who performed the Floating Balls illusion now, a slim woman in shimmering emerald. Watching her, Luke realized she looked like a long-stemmed rose—that sinuous green, the fiery hair. The audience was as captivated by her beauty as by the silvery balls that swayed and danced inches above her graceful hands.

  He liked to tease her, of course, that her illusions were all glitz and no meat. But the truth was she was extraordinary. Even knowing what went on behind the trick, he was caught.

  She lifted her arms. Three balls shimmered along each arm, from shoulder to wrist. While Debussy played, Lily draped emerald silk over them, stepped back out of the light. By turning her arms over, palms up, Roxanne had the silk drifting to the floor. And there, where the shining globes had been, white doves perched.

  The audience exploded as she took her bows and exited. Luke was there in the wings, grinning at Roxanne as Mouse coaxed the doves into their cage. “Birds are okay, Rox, but if you worked with a tiger . . .”

  “Kiss my—” She broke off only because Lily had followed her off and was already clucking her tongue.

  “Don’t start.” She gave them both affectionate pats on the cheek. “Mouse, honey, you keep these two in line. I’ve got to go back for this set.” She gave an exaggerated sigh. “I swear, Max never stops thinking of ways to cut me into pieces.” After a last lingering look at Luke, she walked on, into Max’s applause.

  “You know what’s wrong with her, don’t you?” Roxanne said under her breath.

  “Nothing’s wrong with Lily.” Luke’s lips curved as he watched Max roll into a flashy routine that began with shooting fire from his fingertips and would end with his cutting Lily into thirds with laser beams.

  “She worries about you, God knows why.”

  That got under his skin, touched on the guilt that always hovered there. “She’s got nothing to worry about. I know what I’m doing.”

  She whirled on him then, struggling back her own needs. Show business was too much a part of what she was to allow her a tantrum in the wings. She spoke her mind, but in whispers. “You always know, don’t you, Luke? You’ve been doing what the hell you pleased since Max and Lily took you in. Damn you, they love you, and it’s eating Lily up that you keep pushing.”

  He shut down his emotions. It was the only way to survive. “It’s what I do. You make pretty balls float in the air. I break out of chains. And all of us steal.” His eyes flashed down to hers. “It’s what we do. It’s what we are.”

  “It wouldn’t cost you anything to cut that part of the act.”

  The look held, a moment, two. She thought she saw something there, just behind his eyes, that she would never understand. “You’re wrong,” he said simply and walked away.

  Roxanne turned quickly to the stage. Because she wanted so badly to go after him, to beg. She knew it would do no good, nor did she expect it to. Luke was right. They did what they did. Lily was able to understand and appreciate the thievery. She would have to learn to do the same with Luke’s escapes.

  He would always be the lone wolf LeClerc had called him all those years ago. He would go his way when he chose. Always with something to prove, she thought now.

  And the truth was, the truth she hated to admit, was that the finale of tonight’s show worried her nearly as much as it worried Lily.

  She fixed a smile on her face so that neither Max nor Lily could see she was upset. She could control the outward signs of agitation. That was simple mind over matter. But she couldn’t stop the image that was running over and over in her brain.

  Luke’s version of Houdini’s Water Torture Escape. Only in that endless loop in her brain, he didn’t break free.

  It always brought down the house, Max thought as he turned the spotlight over to Luke. No one, not even Lily, knew what it had cost him to hand Luke the finale. But it had been time, Max mused, flexing his still nimble fingers, for youth to take center stage.

  And the boy was so talented. So driven. So . . . magical.

  The idea made Max smile as the curtain was lifted to reveal the glass water chamber. The boy had designed it himself, painstakingly. The dimensions, the thickness of the glass, even the brass fittings shaped like wizards and sorceresses. Luke knew to the pint how much water it contained to allow for displacement when his body was lowered, chained into it.

  He knew to the second how much time it required for him to free himself from the chains, from the handcuffs, from the manacles that secured him to the bolts at the chamber’s sides.

  And he knew how much of a grace period his lungs would allow him if something went wrong.

  In her costume change of sheer draping white, Roxanne stood beside the water chamber. Despite her thundering heart her face was serene. It was she who slipped Luke’s wide-sleeved shirt away so that he stood stripped to the waist.


  She didn’t look at the scars that crisscrossed white over his tanned back. Not once in all the years they’d been together had she mentioned them. Whatever locks she could open, she wouldn’t touch the bolt on his pride.

  It was she who stood calmly by as two volunteers from the audience locked the heavy chains around him. When his arms were crossed over his chest and bound there, the steel cuffs fastened over his wrists, his bare feet were attached by the ankles with manacles to a slab of smooth wood.

  There were cellos playing, low, ominous, as the platform Luke stood on was lifted into the air.

  “It’s been said,” he began in a voice that floated over the heads of the audience, “that the Great Houdini lost his life due to the injuries incurred in this escape. Since his death, it has been a challenge to every magician, every escape artist, to duplicate the escape, and make it his own by triumphing over it.”

  He glanced down and there was Mouse, embarrassed as hell in his Arabian Knights’ outfit, holding a huge mallet. “Hopefully, we’ll have no need for my friend with the muscles to break the glass.” He winked down at Roxanne. “But perhaps I’ll have need for the lovely Roxanne to give me a little mouth-to-mouth.”

  Roxanne didn’t care for the ad-lib, but the audience laughed and applauded.

  “Once I’m lowered into the chamber, it will be sealed, airtight.” The audience gasped as the platform turned over, pivoted. Luke was facing them again, but upside down. He began to take deep breaths, filling his lungs. Roxanne took over the patter.

  “We ask for silence during the escape, and that you direct your attention to the clock.” At her cue, a spotlight hit a large clock face at the rear of the stage. “It will begin ticking off the seconds the moment Callahan is immersed in the chamber. Ladies and gentlemen . . .” Luke was lowered inch by inch toward the surface of the water. Roxanne kept her eyes and her mind riveted on the audience. “Callahan will have four minutes, and four minutes only, to escape from the chamber, or we will be forced to break the glass. A doctor is standing by in case of accident.”

  Now she had to turn, to throw out her arm for showmanship as Luke’s head broke water. She watched him lower until his body was immersed, heard the thud as the platform fit snugly into place on top of the tank. His hair swirled, floating, as his eyes, brilliantly blue, met hers.

  Then the thin white curtain lowered, covering all four sides of the chamber.

  The clock began to tick.

  “One minute,” Roxanne announced in a voice that revealed nothing of her inner turmoil. She imagined Luke out of the cuffs. Willed him out of them. He would already be unlocking the chains.

  There were murmurs from the audience as the clock rounded two minutes. Roxanne felt the sweat spring cold on her palms, the back of her neck, the small of her back. He was always out in three, three-twenty tops. She could see vaguely through the white cloth a shadow of movement.

  He had no way to call for help, she thought frantically as the clock neared the three-minute mark. No way to signal if his lungs hitched and ran out of air. He could die before they ripped the curtain aside, before Mouse could smash the glass. He could die alone and in silence, chained to his own ambition.

  “Three minutes,” she said, and now hints of her fear leaked through and caused the audience to lean forward.

  “Three twenty,” she said and turned panicked eyes to Mouse. “Three twenty-five. Please, ladies and gentlemen, remain calm. Remain seated.” She gulped in air, imagining Luke’s lungs searing. “Three minutes, forty seconds.”

  A woman in the back began to shout hysterically in French. It caused a chain reaction of alarm to ripple along the rows until the audience was abuzz. Many had leaped to their feet as the clock neared the four-minute mark.

  “Oh, Mouse, God.” With eight seconds to go, Roxanne tossed showmanship aside and ripped at the curtain. It came tumbling down just as Luke shouldered the platform aside. He surfaced, sleek as an otter, and sucked in a greedy breath. His eyes were alight with triumph as the audience erupted with shouts and applause. It had been worth the extra thirty seconds he’d waited, freed, beneath the water.

  He stood, dragging air in, one hand lifted. He was already planning to add that little extra bit of drama to the next show. Hooking his arms around the platform, he rode it up away from the chamber and down again to the stage. He stood dripping, taking his bows.

  On impulse he grabbed Roxanne’s hand, bending gallantly over it and kissing her fingers to the delight of the romantic French.

  “Your hand’s shaking,” he noted under the cover of applause. “Don’t tell me you were worried I wouldn’t make it out.”

  Rather than snatch her hand back as she would have preferred, she smiled at him. “I was afraid Mouse would have to break the glass. Do you know how much it would cost to replace?”

  “That’s my Roxanne.” He kissed her hand again. “I love your avaricious mind.”

  This time she did pull her hand away. His lips had lingered on her skin too long for comfort. “You’re dripping on me, Callahan,” she said, and stepped back to let him take the spotlight alone.

  It killed Roxanne to have to sit and wait. It was degrading, she thought, pacing the parlor while Lily sprawled comfortably on the couch and watched an old black-and-white on TV.

  It was like sitting by the phone for hours and hoping the jerk who took you out to the movies would call and ask you out again. Making a woman wait was so typically male.

  She said as much to Lily and was answered by a murmur of agreement.

  “I mean, they’ve done it since the dawn of time.” Roxanne plopped into a chair, rose restlessly again to pull open the sheer drapes to watch the City of Lights twinkle. “Cavemen went off hunting and left the women by the fire. Vikings raped and pillaged while the womenfolk stayed home. Cowboys rode off into the sunset, men went down to the sea in ships and soldiers marched off to war. And where were we?” Roxanne demanded, her vivid floral robe swirling as she spun around. “Standing on widow’s walks, waiting at train stations, wearing chastity belts or sitting by the damn phone.

  “Well, I don’t want to let a man dictate my life.”

  “Love.” Lily blew her nose heartily as the credits rolled. “It’s love that dictates, honeybunch, not a man.”

  “Well, the hell with that.”

  “Oh, no. It’s the best there is.” Lily sighed, satisfied with the romance, the tragedy and the good cry. “Max is only doing what he thinks is right for you.”

  “What about what I think is right?” Roxanne demanded.

  “You’ll have all the time in the world for that.” Lily shifted, tucking her favorite robe—a peacock silk trimmed in pink ostrich feathers—under her. “The years go so fast, Roxy. You can’t imagine it now, but before you know it they start whizzing by. If you don’t have love in them, you end up empty. Whatever you choose as right, if love’s sprinkled through it, it will be right.”

  There was no use arguing with Lily, Roxanne thought. She was a bred-in-the-bone romantic. Roxanne prided herself on being a more practical woman. “Didn’t you ever want to go with them? Didn’t you ever want to be a part of it?”

  “I am a part of it.” Lily smiled, looking young and pretty and content. “My being here’s part of it. I know Max’ll walk in that door, and he’ll have that look in his eyes. That look that says he’s done just what he wanted to do. And he’ll need to tell me, to share it with me. He’ll need me to tell him how smart and clever he is.”

  “And that’s enough?” Despite her love for both of them, Roxanne found it amazing, appalling. “Being a sounding board for Max’s ego?”

  Lily’s smile faded. The flash in her eyes turned the soft blue to marble. “I’m exactly where I want to be, Roxanne. In all the years I’ve been with Max he’s never once used me, or deliberately hurt my feelings. That may not count for much with you, but for me, it’s more than enough. He’s gentle and kind and gives me everything I could want.”

  “I
’m sorry.” And she was as she reached out to take Lily’s hand. Sorry that she had hurt Lily’s feelings. Sorry, too, that her independent soul couldn’t understand. “I’m feeling nasty that they left me behind, and I’m taking it out on you.”

  “Sweetie, we can’t all think alike, or feel alike, or be alike. You . . .” Lily leaned forward to take Roxanne’s face in her hands. “You’re your father’s daughter.”

  “Maybe he’d rather have had a son.”

  Lily’s fingers tightened. “Don’t even think it.”

  “Luke’s out with him.” Bitterness leaked through the crack in her ego. “I’m sitting here twiddling my thumbs.”

  “Roxy, you’re only seventeen.”

  “Then I hate being seventeen.” She sprang up again, silk swirling around her as she marched to the window and threw it open. She drank in air like water. “I hate having to wait for everything, having everyone say there’s plenty of time.”

  “Of course you do.” There was a smile on Lily’s lips and fresh tears in her eyes as she studied Roxanne. She’s so beautiful, Lily thought. So full of needs. How desperate it was to be seventeen. How wonderful and horrible to be caught on that razor’s edge of womanhood. “I can give you some advice, but it might not be what you want to hear.”

  Roxanne lifted her face to the soft spring night and shut her eyes. How could she explain to Lily these burning, pumping needs inside her when she couldn’t explain them to herself? “Advice never hurts, taking it often does.”

  Lily laughed because it was one of Max’s sayings. “Compromise.” Roxanne groaned at the word, but Lily plowed on. “Compromise isn’t so painful if you’re the one setting the terms.” She rose, pleased when Roxanne turned toward her, a thoughtful gleam in her eyes. “You’re a female, do you want to change that?”

  Roxanne’s lips curved as she remembered her own relief and pride when her breasts had finally begun to bud. “No. No, I don’t.”

  “Then use it, honey.” Lily laid a hand on Roxanne’s shoulder. “Using it doesn’t have to be the same as . . .”