Beth Kery - Because We Belong

“You do?” He looked surprised.

She nodded, holding his stare. “Will you promise me one thing?”

“I’ll try.”

“That you’ll do other things besides this? Work and spend time with your family and live.”

His nostrils flared slightly. “Yes. All right.”

She heaved a sigh of relief and placed her cheek on his chest. His arm curled around her and he ran his fingers through her hair.

“And I’m going to help you,” she said, growing drowsy.

“Who says?”

“Me,” she whispered, turning her face and kissing his chest. “This isn’t just about you seeing Trevor Gaines more clearly so you can get him out of your system. It’s about throwing some light into the darkness, taking away some of the power of the ugly things that hide out in there. Finding out what you can and writing it all down will help you to do that. I see that now. And I’m going to help you.”

He grunted, but he didn’t argue. He just continued to move his fingers in her hair until she fell into a deep, contented sleep.

She awoke some time later to the sound of the bedroom door opening, the sound secretive. Eerie. The room was pitch-black. Ian had turned out the bedside lamp after she’d fallen asleep. She had the impression she’d been asleep for hours.

“Ian,” she whispered, running her hand over his chest, her neck prickling with anxiety. He stirred next to her, and panic took the place of her drowsy unease. Ian was definitely in bed next to her. So who had entered the room?

Suddenly the room was flooded with light from the overhead fixture. Francesca blinked in shock at what she saw. Gerard stood just inside the door wearing a dark overcoat and gloves. There was a leather briefcase hanging from his shoulder.

There was a gun in his hand.

“So sorry to interrupt your sleep,” he said, smiling. He came closer to the bed, the weapon trained on Ian.

Ian rose slowly in the bed, his arms bracing his upper body.

“Ah ah,” Gerard said, waving the gun in his direction. “Stay completely still, please. I’m afraid Mr. Lenault has sustained a serious head injury and is out cold. No one will help you if you try anything. I’m not afraid to use this on you, Ian. In fact,” he paused, his smile widening. “It would be my pleasure.”

“Gerard, what are you doing?” Francesca asked, still stunned at the vision of him in the bedroom at Aurore, and completely unable to compute the fact that he held a gun and had it pointed at Ian’s head.

Gerard gave her a sympathetic glance. When his gaze traveled down over her bare shoulders and the tops of her breasts, however, she shrank back, gathering the sheet at her throat and turning her body in the direction of Ian.

“I actually came for you, Francesca. There was something I discovered completely by accident recently. It alarmed me, especially after what I told you this morning about my concerns for Ian’s sanity,” he said, setting the briefcase on a chair side table. He kept the gun pointed at Ian even as he withdrew a slim computer from the case and flipped open the lid.

“What are you talking about?” Ian growled. Francesca slowly realized that he was drawn tight as a drumhead next to her. She glanced into his face as he stared at Gerard, tracking his movement. More shivers than she’d ever experienced in her life cascaded down her entire body, making her shudder. Ian was looking at Gerard with the type of loathing reserved only for mortal enemies.

“Just this,” Gerard said, tapping his finger on the keyboard, his gaze flickering back and forth rapidly between his task and monitoring Ian. “There’s something Francesca should see. Something you deserve to see,” he said pointedly to her.

“Gerard, are you crazy?” she asked. “Why do you have that gun?”

“He wants to kill us,” Ian said levelly.

Another rush of shivers ran the length of her body.

“You don’t know what I want, Ian,” Gerard said, his mouth slanting, his voice going harsh. “I suppose you thought it was easy, to think of me like James probably does, to consider me like my father—the cheerful buffoon.”

“I never even knew your father,” Ian said. “But I can tell you firsthand, James never thought of you or your father as buffoons.”

Gerard gave a sarcastic bark of laugher. “He certainly thought little enough of me, once you came along, that is. But James never knew me. You never knew what I wanted. Nobody does. That’s the way I work.”

“I suspected enough,” Ian replied, his entire focus on Gerard as he approached the foot of the bed. “Maybe not always, but recently I have.”

“You’re lying,” Gerard said dismissively. “Nobody plays a part better than me.”

“I may have been hopeful that I was wrong about you, and I admittedly didn’t predict this, but I knew something was amiss. I may have been worried that jealousy was clouding my judgment, but I recognize the stench of something foul around you.”

For a moment, Gerard blanched at Ian’s calm certainty, but then his face contorted with anger. His fury seemed to fortify him. “Always so smug. Always so sure of yourself, even when you were a freaky kid. If you’re so damn smart, how come you couldn’t figure me out years ago? You were as blind as Anne and James,” Gerard spat. “James never even guessed the truth about his precious sister’s death.”

“Are you saying you had a part in your parents’ death?” Ian asked.

Gerard just gave him a bland glance.

“If we were blind, it was because we loved you. I regret it,” Ian said. Her heart squeezed in anguish at Ian’s simple statement of fact.

“Oh please. Don’t turn sentimental on me now,” Gerard said scathingly. “You were duped, and have been forever. Might as well just admit it. But I’m not the only one doing the fooling, Ian. I knew I couldn’t rest easy, thinking of Francesca being fooled by you. She may have concerns for your sanity, but I wasn’t shocked that her misplaced feelings for you overruled her judgment when she took off in such a rush to meet you here. As soon as I discovered what you’d done to her, I knew I had to come and prove to her what you really are.”

“What I’d done to her?” Ian asked, scowling.

“Your surveillance of her. I’ve heard her say how much she prizes her privacy. I knew you wouldn’t like it,” he said, turning his attention briefly to Francesca as he hit a button on the computer and turned it, so that Francesca could see the screen, “When you discovered how Ian has been videotaping you.”

Her breast was pressed against Ian’s arm, so she felt the muscle bunch and strain as an image leapt onto the screen. It was her. She watched numbly, half not believing what she was seeing. She lay naked on Ian’s bed in the penthouse, her hand between her thighs, every muscle straining for relief. She looked wretched even in pleasure. A moment later she shook in release.

“No,” Francesca murmured, the reality of what she was watching crashing down on her. Her horror only grew worse when her recorded image turned on her side and crunched into a ball, her body shuddering as she wept. In a flash, she remembered the moment . . . how vulnerable she felt, how miserable and empty and hopeless about a present without Ian . . . the bleakness of a future without him. The idea of somebody watching her at such a moment was too much for her to bear. “Stop it,” she told Gerard desperately. She sat up slightly in the bed, her glance sliding across Ian’s profile.

He wasn’t looking at the mortifying image of her on the screen. His eyes blazed as he stared at Gerard.

“I’ll kill you for this,” Ian said.

Gerard snarled and tapped a finger. Another image leapt onto the screen, this one of her masturbating while tears wet her cheeks, one hand filled with a breast, the other between her thighs, her face tight with anguish. Another, this one not at Ian’s penthouse, but in her suite at Belford Hall.

Another . . . no, it couldn’t be.

She saw the image of her face transformed by surrender and bliss as she told Ian she loved him. Always. It was the video he’d taken of her on the night before he’d discovered he was Trevor Gaines’s child . . . on the night before he’d left her.

“No,” she ground out between clenched teeth, lunging toward the computer, her only thought to extinguish the image of herself at such a vulnerable moment. Ian sprung after her, halting her with a hand on her shoulder when Gerard started at her sudden movement. He shoved aside the computer, letting the lid drop, the illicit sounds of their recorded lovemaking continuing. Gerard stepped closer to where they now sat on the bed, the gun extended threateningly.

“I didn’t want to show you, Francesca. But you had to see. I knew you’d want to know he’s not that different from his father—that criminal, Trevor Gaines.”

“How do you know about Gaines’s past?” Francesca asked incredulously.

“He thinks he knows everything,” Ian said quietly. “But he’s wrong.”

“I’m not wrong,” Gerard bit out, his glassy eyes flashing in fury.

“I didn’t take those videos of you, Francesca. Not most of them,” Ian said, not looking at her, but at Gerard. “The one I did, but you knew that. I would never do that to you,” he said steadily through a tense jaw.

“I know that.”

The gun jerked slightly in the air at Francesca’s words.

“What?” Gerard asked, stunned. “Don’t tell me you believe him, just like that?”

“Of course I do,” Francesca whispered, examining Gerard in rising horror. “Ian would never do that to me. He’d never record me without my permission. And Ian would never want to see me that miserable.”

Ian glanced over at her rapidly. She saw the gratitude and relief in his blue eyes. Sadness and compassion flashed through her. He’d worried she’d believe Gerard.

“He was watching you masturbate, you fool. He was getting off on it, spying on you,” Gerard bellowed.

“No. You were,” Francesca spat. She couldn’t stop the shivers of revulsion and horror from rippling through her body at the idea.

Gerard’s face grew red and mottled. Her point-blank refusal to believe Ian was a pervert who was spying on her without her permission and using the footage for sexual titillation seemed to exponentially amplify his rage.

“God you’re a fool. You deserve him,” he said, his mouth twisting. He suddenly shrugged. “I was going to have to kill you anyway, so what does it matter?”

“Then why did you even show it to me?” Francesca asked bitterly.

“Because it would have been all that much sweeter for him to see you betrayed by me before he killed us both. He couldn’t let you live. He knows I’ve left you everything if I die.”

“You did?” Francesca asked numbly. Everything seemed surreal. Is this how it felt when you realized you were about to die? She thought she’d be more panicked.

Ian nodded. “With Grandfather as the follow-up. But that works just fine for Gerard, because he’s Grandfather’s heir after my grandmother, if I die. All he has to do is wait, and he’s proven he can be patient. What did you do to Lucien?” Ian switched topics seamlessly. “Is he dead?”

“No, but he will be. I hit him hard enough on the back of the head to fell a horse. When the fire starts later, he’ll never wake up in time to get out.”

Francesca made a choked sound. Why was Ian behaving so calmly? It was eerie to see, in these circumstances.

“You plan to . . . what, make it look as if I finally went over the edge, and shot Francesca and then myself before bringing this place down.” He glanced coldly at the dusty, ancient canopy. His calm manner completely bewildered her, adding a touch of the surreal to unfolding events. “Not a bad idea. I thought of burning the place down a half a dozen times. It’ll go up like a matchstick.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Gerard said levelly. “I brought along some fuel. It’s precisely the type of thing a madman would plan.”

“True,” Ian said. “And I suppose you engineered some kind of alibi, just in case suspicion fell on you?”

“Of course,” Gerard replied. “But it won’t. Everyone at Belford has expressed concern for your mental stability. Even she,” he waved the gun at Francesca. “Had her doubts.”

“There’s only one problem,” Ian said.

Gerard looked both amused and insulted. “There’s no problem,” Gerard assured.

“There is, unfortunately. His name is Edward Shallon. He’s the man I hired to tail your every move. He called me earlier when you flew into Paris, where he followed you.”