"I've already answered more than enough questions to- night." But Lucas released her to grab the phone. "This is Trent. Oh, hello, Stonebraker. We were just talking about you. Amaryllis tells me I should get a refund."
Lucas fell silent as he listened to whatever Stonebraker was saying on the other end of the line. Amaryllis sipped her moontree brandy and stared into the fire. It was nearly three in the morning, but she still did not feel normal. Her pulse no longer pounded, and she was able to breathe properly, but she felt strange. Exhausted, yet unnaturally, painfully alert. She was practically tingling with an overstimulated sense of awareness. Memories of the evil, questing tongue of talent flickered at the edge of her mind.
"Interesting," Lucas murmured. "Possible. Yeah, don't worry, Amaryllis gave the cops a stern lecture about the necessity of reopening an investigation into the circum- stances of Landreth's death. I think they'll do it." He paused again. "Right. Talk to you later."
Amaryllis looked at him as he hung up the phone. "Well? What did your brilliant private investigator have to say?"
Lucas's mouth curved faintly. "He said he'll consider the refund when he gets around to billing me."
"I should think so. What else did he have to say?"
Lucas stopped smiling. "He said he just learned that the New Portland city police picked up Merrick Beech late this afternoon. Miranda Locking was with him. They were boarding a plane to the Western Islands."
"Beech and Locking? Did they have anything to do with tonight's events?"
"Doesn't look like it. But they apparently admitted that they paid those thugs who attacked us that first night in Founders Square." Lucas stretched his legs out in front of him. His face was grim. "Said something about wanting to teach me a lesson."
Amaryllis shivered. "That's the last of the answers then. For both of us."
"Yeah."
Amaryllis turned her attention back to the fire. "It feels weird somehow."
"What does?"
"Knowing that it's over."
Over. The single word hung in the air between them. It was over. Everything was over.
Amaryllis realized then that her self-imposed mission to discover the truth about Professor Landreth's death had been inextricably bound up with her relationship with Lucas. The two were not really connected, she told herself. Yet in a way, they were.
Her mission had ended. The end of the affair was inevitable, too. In fact, it was already in sight. She thought about all the forms she and Lucas had filled out for Synergistic Connections. She recalled the interview. It would not be long now.
"Yeah." Lucas rested his head against the back of the sofa and watched the fire through slitted eyes. "It feels weird."
Amaryllis didn't need telepathy to tell her that he was thinking the same thing that she was thinking. A great sense of loss welled up inside her.
From out of nowhere Amaryllis felt the tendril of psychic energy seeking a link. Lucas was reaching for her with his mind. This was not the fierce, white hot demand he had sent out earlier when he had been searching for her in the darkness backstage at SynCity. This was a tender, gentle brush of talent questing for synergistic wholeness.
"Lucas." Amaryllis wrapped her arms more tightly around her knees. She tried to blink away the dampness she could feel in her eyes. "It would probably be better if we didn't do this anymore."
"Probably."
"According to every syn-psych theory in the book, we're all wrong for each other."
"Yeah."
"It would be stupid to take this relationship any further," Amaryllis insisted. "Neither of us wants to risk repeating the mistakes of the past."
"You think we're both afraid of the past?"
The perception in his words startled her. She stared into the flames. "I've been telling myself that doing the proper thing was a matter of responsibility and duty. But maybe you're right. Maybe in the end it just comes down to a fear of the past. We both have reasons to be afraid."
"Are you going to spend your whole life being afraid?"
Amaryllis was stunned. An entire life spent living with a fear of the past stretched out before her. Every action guided by fear. A marriage based on avoiding fear. It was a dreadful vision.
"I don't know," she said. "Are you?"
"I hate to think of myself as a complete and total coward."
She frowned. "You're no coward."
"Neither are you."
"Where does that leave us?" she asked.
"Marry me."
Amaryllis whirled around on the sofa to stare at Lucas. Shock waves went through her. At first she thought she had not heard him, that she had conjured the words in her own mind.
He hadn't moved. His head still rested against the back of the sofa. His eyes were still narrowed as he gazed into the flames. The Iceman.
"It's okay," he said without any trace of emotion. "I know the answer. Just thought I'd give it a try."
"Oh, God, Lucas, I thought you'd never ask." Amaryllis threw herself into his arms. "What took you so long?"
He caught hold of her mentally and physically. Brilliant beams of psychic energy poured through a crystal-clear prism. Power crashed in glorious waves.
When Amaryllis opened her eyes, she discovered that she and Lucas were safe inside his secret island grotto.
Chapter 17
He made love to her there in the hidden grotto, just as he had dreamed of doing. He undressed her slowly beside the fathomless green pool, peeling away blouse and slacks and layers of neat, serious underwear. Her skin glowed pale gold in the firelight that passed easily through the illusory stone walls of the cave. He cupped one graceful, elegant breast in his hand, marveling at the perfect shape and texture of it.
Amaryllis fumbled with the buttons of his shirt and the fastenings of his trousers until he grew impatient with the slow torture.
"Wait." He sat up beside her and yanked off his clothes with a few brusque movements. Then he stretched out slowly above her.
She reached up to splay her fingers across his bare chest. "I love the feel of you."
Lucas longed to ask if she loved him as well as the feel of him, but he told himself he would not push his luck. She had agreed to marry him. It was enough for now. Everyone said that when the match was right, love came after marriage.
When the match was right.
This has to be right, Lucas thought. If it wasn't, he was doomed.
"I'm a beat-up iceman." He watched her eyes as he caught one of her hands and pressed it to the spider-frog scar on his shoulder. "I spent too many years in the islands to ever be anything else."
"No, you're gorgeous. Spectacular. Unbelievably sexy."
"I'm covered with scars and calluses. My manners are rough and so is my accent."
She dismissed that with a wave of her hand. "Who cares? You've got gray eyes. I was very particular about wanting gray eyes on the Synergistic questionnaire, you know."
For some reason he had to keep going. He had to make certain she knew everything. "I cheated on my talent certification test. I don't have your high standards when it comes to that kind of thing."
"You have your own code and you stick to it. That's all that matters."
"If I could have figured out how to fool the syn-shrinks at Synergistic Connections into thinking that I would be a perfect match for a full-spectrum prism such as yourself, I would have done it in a heartbeat."
Amaryllis's smile was brilliant. "It occurs to me that the counselors at the agency aren't qualified to find a match for either of us because they've had no experience matching off-the-scale talents and prisms."
"We're opposites in a lot of ways, Amaryllis."
"I'm not so sure about that. I feel closer to you than I've ever felt to anyone else in my whole life."