Free Darkness before the Dawn by Anne Stuart Page A

didn’t you call the police and have me arrested?”
    “The less the police are involved, the better. Let’s stop fencing, Maggie. I’m here, I’m involved, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I want to know what you know, and then I want your word that you’ll keep out of it.”
    “I thought you wondered if I’d killed Francis myself,” she shot back.
    He shrugged. “Did you?”
    “Do you think I could kill a man in cold blood?”
    “Undoubtedly. Particularly if it were me.”
    “Don’t flatter yourself, Randall. I couldn’t care less about you one way or the other.”
    “Then why are you clutching that cup and saucer like it’s about to fly out of your hands?”
    She considered that for a brief moment and was tempted to throw them at his sleek, handsome head. Carefully, she loosened her tight grip on the china, smiling sweetly. “I’ve got a hangover, Randall. It makes me edgy.”
    “You didn’t used to drink too much.”
    “Give me strength,” she muttered imploringly to the dregs of her coffee. Her eyes met his, calmly. “I don’t drink toomuch as a general rule, Randall. Not that it’s any of your damned business if I want to become a lush.”
    “It is when you’re involved in something I’m working on.” His voice was rich, smooth, unconcerned. She could almost believe it was pure self-interest that prompted him.
    “Why are you working on it? Why didn’t they send someone else—why pick their handy elitist volunteer? I presume this is still volunteer work—you haven’t joined the CIA yet?”
    “It’s still volunteer work. You know I never cared for joining groups.”
    “Still the aristocrat. Why are you here, Randall?”
    “We figured I’d be useful because of my connection with Kate’s family.”
    “What connection with Kate’s family?” She racked her brain for some distant kinship with Brian’s silver-spoon relatives. No wonder she’d never trusted him.
    “You.”
    Maggie set her coffee cup down carefully. “Any connection with me is ancient history. I realize that half the intelligence network of the world knows all the sordid details—”
    “Never sordid, Maggie.”
    “Sordid,” she said firmly. “But they should also know that I haven’t even seen you in six years.”
    “It still provides decent cover. I don’t necessarily have to be investigating Francis’s proclivities. I could be here to take up where we left off in Gemansk.”
    “It’ll be a cold day in hell,” she snapped.
    He raised an eyebrow, that quiet, elegant gesture that used to defeat her. But not this time. There was no way he could touch her, no way he could demoralize her, she promised herself fiercely.
    “I didn’t say we were going to, Maggie dear. I just said it could look that way.”
    “You’d need my cooperation for that.”
    He smiled that cool, mocking smile that still managed to cause an occasional nightmare. “Oh, I’m counting on that.”
    “And why would you be so foolish as to do that?”
    “Because your sister’s at stake. We can protect her—I can protect her, if I want to. Or I can throw her to the wolves. It’s not an opportune time for your sister to be charged with murder. Or at the very least with obstructing justice. It does happen to be against the law, you know, to drag murdered bodies around Chicago.”
    “Is it really?” She kept her voice cool and remote, not for a moment showing her inner panic.
    He nodded. “Not to mention freezing them first. Really, Maggie, how unspeakably tacky. Couldn’t you have tossed him into the trunk sooner?”
    “It was spur of the moment,” she said faintly. “What do you want from me, Randall?”
    He smiled briefly, that chilly, slightly mocking smile, and for a moment she stared at him in complete confusion. How could she have ever thought herself in love with such a man? He had no warmth, no love, no tenderness at all—qualities that Mack Pulaski had had in abundance. Randall Carter was a cold, calculating