CHAPTER EIGHT

 

Three hours later, Karen closed her eyes and uttered a long, contented sigh as she leaned back against the glass wall of the elevator. Her entire body felt liquefied, as if she’d been scraped hollow from head to toe and refilled with a thick, molten core of warm chocolate or butter.

“Are you all right, miss?” she heard a voice ask hesitantly, and she peeled back a reluctant eyelid, having forgotten she wasn’t alone in the elevator car.

“I’m sorry,” she said with a sheepish smile to the man riding with her. Her cheeks felt hot with sudden blush and she tried to laugh. “I’m fine. I just got finished at the Asiatique Spa, that’s all.”

“Oh.” Brows raised in tandem, an aha! sort of expression, he nodded. “I’m more of a baccarat fan myself.” Her puzzlement must have been apparent on her face, because he leaned toward her and, with a wink and another smile, added in a low, conspiratorial voice, “It’s a card game.”

“Oh.” She laughed.

“It’s a lot of fun,” he promised. “I’d be glad to teach you if you have the time.”

He said this last after a slight but discernable pause, his brow arched slightly to match the wry hook of his mouth.

I’ll be damned, she thought, feeling bright new blush bloom in her cheeks. He’s hitting on me.

The elevator shimmied slightly underfoot as it came to a stop. With a ding and a soft rumble, the doors parted.

“This is, uh, my floor,” Karen said. “Thank you for the offer, though.”

I’ll be damned, she thought again, pressing her hand to her mouth to stifle giggles as she followed the corridor to her room. She’d been on her own at the resort’s spa. When she’d arrived in the lobby at the impressive, multistory indoor waterfall and surrounding koi pond, she’d been greeted by a blonde woman in a formfitting cheongsam-style silk dress, who had introduced herself as Teá.

“Dr. Morin extends his apologies,” Teá had told her with a smile. “As he will be unable to join us this afternoon.”

“Us?” Karen had blinked stupidly, but Teá had continued to smile, offering her hand in invitation.

“Come with me, please, Miss Pierce,” she’d said. “We have some wonderful treatments with which to lavish you today.”

Lavish. Now there was the perfect word for it, Karen mused as she slipped her key card into the narrow slot in her front door and listened for the corresponding click. Any self-consciousness or awkwardness she’d felt once she’d stripped down and stepped into the room had dissolved the moment her masseuse draped his hands against her. Just about anything resembling conscious thought, for that matter, had dissolved at his expert touch, and from there, it had all been blissfully, wondrously downhill.

This may not be me, my life, but I could get used to it just the same, she thought as she crossed the front foyer of her suite, letting the door fall closed behind her. The sun was sinking low in the sky, and she had a nearly panoramic view of both the sunset beyond the mountains, and the neon glow of the strip as it came to life thirty-some-odd stories below.

To her surprise, she found several boxes on her bed, each fashioned with broad black satin bows. A card had been left atop the largest, the envelope unsealed, and when she pulled it out, she saw gilded Trésor stationary.

I hope you don’t mind if I took a few liberties at the resort boutiques on your behalf, Mason had written inside, his script elegantly slanted, signed only with his initial, M.

Curious and excited, Karen untied the bow and let the ribbon droop in lank folds to the ivory bedspread. When she lifted the box top and gently pulled aside the thin layer of tissue paper inside, she uttered a soft gasp.

Oh my God.

It was gorgeous—a black silk halter dress with straps that fastened behind the neck and a hem that hit her at midthigh when she held it up beneath her chin. The empire waist had been fitted with elegant gathers, while the skirt flowed with a flirty buoyancy. The label read Badgley Mischka, the price tag, $650.

“Oh my God.”

In the smaller box, she found a pair of shoes, black satin stilettos with a price of $200.

“Oh my God,” she whispered again, and this time, a laugh escaped.

She heard a knock at the door to her suite, and when she turned, saw another small envelope whisk suddenly beneath, pushed through from the hallway. Intrigued, she set the shoes aside and went to retrieve it—another note from Mason on a second Trésor letterhead card: A few more liberties.

She squinted through the peephole, then drew back in surprise to find four young women waiting patiently in the corridor just outside, each carrying several large, cumbersome cases.

“May I help you?” Karen asked, opening the door, bewildered.

“Dr. Morin sent us, Miss Pierce,” said one of the women with a bright, enthusiastic smile.

“Wh-what for?” she stammered, at a loss.

“I’m from the Cartier pavilion downstairs,” said a redhead dressed in a smart black pantsuit, carrying what looked like a locked briefcase.

“Cartier?” Karen blinked. “You mean, like the jewelry store?”

”I’m from Petite Coquette, our in-house lingerie boutique,” said another.

“And we’re from the resort salon,” said the last, indicating the girl standing beside her. “My name is Andi. We’ll be doing your hair and makeup for this evening.”

“Hair and makeup?”

Andi’s smile remained patient and bright. “Yes, ma’am. We can get started just as soon as you let us in.”

Karen blinked as if she’d been pinched, realizing that she’d been standing in her doorway like an oak tree, immobilized and gawking. Blushing, she drew back, managing a laugh. “Of course. Please come in. I’m sorry.”

“No need to apologize.” Still beaming, Andi and the other women strode briskly past her, trundling their cases and bags into the suite. “It’s our pleasure, Miss Pierce.”

****

“My God, you have a beautiful swing,” Mason remarked as Tristan brought his four-iron around in graceful follow-through after a hearty approach shot on the final green. To the man sitting next to him in the golf cart, he said, “Look at him. Back arched, hips squared, feet perfectly planted. It’s like Michelangelo sculpted him.”

“Beautiful,” the other man, Jaime, agreed with a nod. Once upon a time, Mason might have introduced him to Tristan as “Uncle” Jaime.

Then again, maybe not, Tristan thought. Those Mason had dubbed “uncles” in Tristan’s youth had been men with whom he’d been romantically involved for several months, sometimes years. There hadn’t been a person like that in Mason’s life for a long time, at least three or four years. Jaime was obviously someone Mason had met before, as he’d been waiting for them upon their arrival at the golf course, and Mason liked him well enough to bother introducing him to Tristan—as close to a nod of acknowledgment or approval from his family as he would seek or receive—but even so, they’d done little together except share a bench in the golf cart. It had also been Tristan’s uncomfortable observation that Jaime’s eyes had been riveted with unflinching interest on his ass, not Mason’s, throughout the duration of their game.

When Tristan turned, walking back to the cart, he didn’t miss the way Jaime’s eyes cut up from that general vicinity to fix on his face, the corner of his mouth curling up in a wry sort of smile. “Just beautiful,” he murmured again.

“It’s getting dark.” Forcing a smile, Tristan shoved his club back into the bag. “How about we call it a game?”

Let’s get the hell back to the hotel, he wanted to add but bit back.

Mason looked puzzled. “We haven’t played through yet.”

“I’m at what? Ninety-two?” Tristan asked, fighting the urge to either cover his crotch with his hands or punch Jaime in the nose, because he could feel the other man’s gaze crawling along his torso, working its way south. “You’re eighty.”

Mason looked down at the score card, then squinted to read his handwriting in the fading daylight. “Eighty-three. Jaime’s around a hundred.” He cut a glance at Jaime. “You really suck at this.”

“And a lot of other things,” Jaime replied, and they both laughed out loud. He was by far more flaming than any of Mason’s former companions that Tristan had ever met, that was for sure. And he brought out in Mason a degree of flamboyance that Tristan was wholly unaccustomed to, if not somewhat unnerved by.

“Okay, then,” he said loudly enough to interrupt. “Didn’t you say we had dinner reservations at eight?”

“Eight-thirty,” Mason said, and when Jaime looked wounded—obviously not invited—he patted him kindly on the leg. “Here, now. I’ll join you later for cocktails in the penthouse lounge. How does that sound?”

Back at the resort, feeling surly, if not somewhat violated, Tristan tromped ahead of his uncle to the elevators.

“What did you think of Jaime?” Mason asked, cheerfully oblivious on the way up to their floor.

Tristan arched his brow. “He kept checking out my ass.”

“And well he should,” Mason replied primly, “as he has exemplary taste in these things.”

“What the hell are you doing with a guy like that?” Tristan asked.

“Like what?” Mason said. “Oh, come on now. I know he may seem a little over the top…”

“A little?”

“But he makes me feel young again,” Mason said.

Tristan folded his arms. “You were never not young to being with.”

The elevator chimed just as Mason opened his mouth to reply. The doors rumbled open, and Tristan was instantly aware of a tingling sensation, light and electrical inside of his mind, raising the hairs against the nape of his neck. Mason obviously felt it too, because his smile abruptly faltered.

Someone’s out there, Tristan realized. Someone like us.

A group of young women, all dressed in glittering, sequined cocktail dresses and high-heeled shoes, pushed aboard, giggling together, conflicting scents of their perfumes filling in the elevator cab in a sudden, suffocating cloud. Laughing together, jockeying for space, and teetering on their stilettos, they bumped into Tristan, making him stumble sideways and avert his gaze before he could get a clear look beyond them. When he glanced back, the doors had just slid closed again, and the elevator was underway.

“Oh no,” one of the women lamented. “We’re going up!”

They all moaned together, but Tristan ignored them, looking toward his uncle, all at once damning the side effects of the Wellbutrin that had dimmed his telepathic abilities to nonexistent.

“Did you sense that?” Once he and Mason had stepped off the elevator on their floor, Tristan caught him by the sleeve.

“Yes,” Mason said grimly. “Someone must have bathed in Chanel No. 5.” With melodramatic gestures, he flapped the front of his shirt, as if airing it out. “A little goes a long way with the classics, mes chéris,” he called to the closed elevator doors, the girls who were now long gone.

“What?” Tristan frowned, then chased after him, hooking him by the arm again as he started to walk away. “No, I mean back there. On the eleventh floor.” He blinked at his uncle in visible bewilderment. “You didn’t sense another one of us?”

Mason chuckled. “That’s not possible. There are no other Brethren here.”

“But I felt it,” Tristan protested.

“You were sensing me. Sometimes, in a crowd of humans, our awareness of each other is momentarily heightened. Especially with overwhelming sensory input—like that perfume—to stimulate us.”

That’s not it, Tristan thought. That’s not what happened.

“What about that Davenant guy, Jean Luc, you said Naima and Michel fought with last night in the woods?” he pressed. “What if it’s him or someone else from their family?”

Mason looked at him for a long moment, then smiled. “Tristan,” he said gently. “The odds of Jean Luc Davenant following us all of the way from Lake Tahoe to Las Vegas—with us airbound, no less—would be one in ten thousand. At least. And the odds of another Davenant stumbling upon us at this exact resort on this exact date are probably closer to one in a million.”

“But…” Tristan began.

Mason pressed his fingertips against his mouth. “I’m sorry Jaime upset you,” he said quietly, his brows lifting, his eyes mournful. “I shouldn’t have invited him along. He didn’t mean any harm, but I know he can seem a bit…uninhibited.”

“That’s not…” Tristan said, but Mason shook his head.

“Listen to me,” he said in a low but firm voice. “There are no other Brethren here. I would never, ever risk putting you or Karen in harm’s way. I promise.”

As his hand slipped away, Tristan managed a scowl. “I can handle myself, Mason. I’m not a child.”

“Yes, but you’re the closest I’ve got,” Mason replied, smiling again. “And I love you, silly boy. So humor me anyway and let it lie. We’ll be late for dinner otherwise.”