Anyway, she managed a half smile.
“No. I went ashore to shop. I am a guest aboard that yacht out there. We came for the film festival and stayed. The owner likes it here.”
“Valkyrie, I believe, isn’t she?” Hawke said, gazing across the water at the astounding white sloop. He knew exactly which boat she was, but it seemed far more sporting to feign ignorance. The German yacht was famous. Just shy of three hundred feet length overall, with a forty-foot beam, she was the largest sloop-rigged private sailing yacht on earth. Built in strict secrecy in Hamburg by von Draxis’s German yard, she had three fully automated carbon fiber masts and carried twenty-six thousand square feet of sail. Hawke had heard rumors she could do well over twenty knots per hour under sail.
“Yes, that’s Valkyrie. She belongs to our host, Baron von Draxis. How do you know him?”
“I don’t. Someone slipped his invitation under my door.”
“Ah. Schatzi is an old and dear friend. You seem to like his yacht. Perhaps I can arrange a tour.”
“Tour? I’d rather sail her. I’d give my eyeteeth to sail that boat, to be honest,” Hawke said, his pale sun-bleached eyes devouring the boat from stem to stern.
“You are a sailor, Monsieur?”
“An old navy man,” Hawke said, hating the sound of that, and he looked quickly away. An “old navy man”? He wasn’t that old. And he wasn’t strictly a naval officer any longer. He was more of a contract advisor. How ridiculous and fatuous he sounded. Good God. He was instantly ashamed of his transparent and hollow efforts to charm this woman. The jolt of guilt deep in his gut had shocked him, as if he’d swallowed a live battery.
For two years, Hawke had been trying to suppress a brutal memory of overwhelming loss: the murder of his beloved bride, Victoria, on the church steps within minutes of their wedding. The event itself, the graven images of blood and lace, had been bulwarked against. But the vicious specter of pain remained, lurking on the outer edge of his consciousness, lingering, grinning hungrily, breathing hotly. He had tried to run away and failed.
He had come to call this specter his “black dog.”
Six months after his wife’s murder, there was a brief and ill-considered rekindling of an old relationship. It was unforgivable, but it happened. The woman involved, an old and dear friend named Consuelo de los Reyes, no longer spoke to him. Would not return his calls nor acknowledge his flowers. He didn’t blame her. After a period, he gave up and retreated within his own walls.
Fate, and its accomplice tragedy, had finally won the lifelong battle. At barely seven years of age, Alex Hawke had witnessed the horrific murder of his beloved parents on a yacht in the Caribbean. Pirates had come aboard in the middle of the night. His mother had been raped before her throat was slashed. His father was crucified upon the very door the boy was hiding behind. He had seen it all. Behind his door, he kept silent to stay alive.
He kept silent about it now, for much the same reason.
For nearly two years, Hawke had simply disappeared from his own life. He locked up his house in Gloucestershire and fled. He ran to escape his feelings, to repair his heart. As far as he could run. Tibet. Malaya. Burma. A tea-and-vegan lifestyle, no liquor at all. The daily yin-yang discipline of tai chi. Mountain climbing. Meditation. Fasting. A Zen retreat on the beautiful Thai island of Koh Samui. It didn’t work, none of it.
Alone in his one-room hut by the Gulf of Martaban, when the night was dead still, he could hear the black dog. Could see him crouching there, just inside the green edge of the leafy jungle, panting, all pink gums and bared fangs. Ready to pounce. He ran home. Opened the house in Belgrave Square. Once back in London, he’d tried liquor. Mr. Gosling’s rum. Barrels of the high-proof stuff. That hadn’t worked, either, and he’d felt like hell every morning in the bargain.
His closest friend, Chief Inspector Ambrose Congreve, had told him perhaps this period of mourning was growing unhealthily long. Perhaps it was time to begin to see other women.
Looking at Jet in his bed now, he thought that, yes, perhaps the world-famous detective had solved yet another of life’s mysteries.
It was time. Hawke was the kind of man who needed a woman. Perhaps this one was the one he needed.
Chapter Four
Cap d’Antibes
AT ONE OF THE PINK LUNCHEON TABLES SCATTERED RANDOMLY beneath a copse of whistling pine trees, Hawke gave chase. Jet was a girl, he now thought, who wanted to be caught. His grandfather, a font of enduring wisdom, had said to Alex at a tender age, “Never chase a girl who doesn’t want to be caught.” The nine-year-old boy hadn’t really understood the lesson then. He did now.
The sun had returned to the sky, as pale as a waning moon. He was glad he’d come. He tried to be witty and charming throughout the bouillabaisse and poisson du jour and sorbet au citron.
It wasn’t easy. He felt like a two-bit stage actor who kept flubbing his lines. Out of practice, he thought.
After the luncheon, the two of them had strolled up a freshly washed gravel path bordered on either side by manicured gardens of alyssum, salvia, and lobelia. The wide path rose up a gentle slope and led to an exquisitely beautiful hotel sitting atop the breast of a leafy hill. The Hotel du Cap definitely lived up to its billing.
It had been a pleasant enough afternoon. The girl was stunning. Hawke had eaten a dozen portugaises and washed the delicious oysters down with cold white wine. The black dog was nowhere to be seen.
Popping an oyster into his mouth, he had said to Jet, “You know who’s the bravest man who ever lived?”
“Let me guess. You.”
“No. The first man ever to eat an oyster.”
And, somehow, there had been more oysters and then more champagne on the return voyage to the Carlton pier and then at dinner and in Le Petite Bar downstairs and somehow the beautiful Jet had ended up here in his bed.
“Le vent,” she said again now in the darkness of the Carlton bedroom.
“What about it?” Hawke said, stroking back a lock of her hair, black as a crow’s wing and cut on the diagonal across the sharp planes of her cheeks.
“C’est mal, this wind.”
“Winds have a habit of blowing themselves out sooner or later,” Hawke said. “Like men, I suppose.”
“Where do you live?” she asked him.
“Oh, London and thereabouts. How about you?”
“I have a flat in Paris. The Avenue Foch.”
“Very posh.”
“This is not your suite, Mr. Hawke,” Jet said, athletically disengaging her body from his, rolling over, and firing a cigarette, sucking hungrily, her dark eyes flaring in the glow of the red coal.
“Really? Why on earth do you say that?” he asked, his own keen blue eyes laughing.
“No toothbrush. No razor,” she said, exhaling a plume of harsh purple smoke toward the ceiling. He looked at her carefully. She had the blackest eyes. He liked to believe he could read people through their eyes. He assumed most people felt that way. He’d been trying to read Jet’s eyes all day long with no success. Inscrutable was the word.
“Ah. Well, there’s that,” he said.
“And the name on the card. Out in the hall by your door. You wrote it yourself. It’s not the engraved placard the hotel concierge provides for guests upon arrival.”
“Guilty as charged.”
“You are a—what do you call it—a cat burglar?”
“No, my dear Jet, I am not. I hate cats,” he said, swinging his long legs off the edge of the bed. “Besides, they’d never allow pets in this pretty palace.”