Eyes Like a Wolf Read online

  That night I dreamed of him for the first time, as I did for many nights after. The dreams persisted long after his memory had faded to a cherished and much worn photograph in my mind's eye. I always woke from them with a sense of longing so deep and wide I couldn't put it into words.

  I dreamed of the boy with eyes like mine. The boy with eyes like a wolf.

  PART TWO: REUNION

  Chapter One

  “Rachel, please! We're going to be married in a month.”

  I ducked under the encircling arm of my fiancé, Charles Rivera the Third, and stepped to the tiny bar to make myself a drink.

  “That's exactly why I want to wait. It'll be more special that way,” I told him, mixing myself a bay breeze, heavy on the cranberry juice and light on the vodka. “You want one?” I raised my glass to him

  “Not particularly.” He sighed and extracted himself from my overstuffed secondhand loveseat with some difficulty. I sipped my drink and watched as he began wandering around my small house, picking things up and putting them back down as was his habit when he was irritated or upset.

  An Assistant District Attorney in Tampa doesn't make the big bucks, but I made enough to afford the little one bedroom, one bath bungalow that wasn't too far from downtown. It had been built in the forties and recently renovated and painted a vivid shade of lilac. I was able to get it for a song because it straddled the line between a good neighborhood and a questionable one. Charles was always after me to move someplace safer, but I had seen to the installation of new locks myself and felt secure and content in the little purple house.

  Of course, safe, to my fiancé, meant a five thousand-square-foot mansion on Bayshore Drive, Tampa's answer to Boardwalk on the Monopoly game board. Generations of his family had lived in that most desirable of South Tampa locations, and so would I a month from now when we finally tied the knot. But until then I was a free woman with no plans to give up my own residence until I absolutely had to.

  “I don't see why we couldn't have gone to my place,” Charles grumbled. He had the slight British accent that comes with a childhood spent at the best European schools and many summers “abroad.” He'd only come home to study “American law” so that he could join the family firm of Rivera, Rivera, and Tuscan. RR&T was the largest private litigation firm in Tampa and also the wealthiest, and Charles, by virtue of his birth, was already a partner. I had met him at a meeting of the local bar association. We had become friends and then, despite his family's unspoken but clearly expressed horror, more than friends—but still not lovers.

  “I like it better at my place,” I said, taking another sip of my drink. “It's cozier.” It was also easier to say “no” on my own turf, a word I was using a lot lately with Charles.

  Charles made a face and ran a hand through his hair. It wasn't as light as my own shade of pale, honey-gold, but he was still noticeably blond. His last name might have been Rivera, but that was the most Hispanic part of him. His great-grandfather, José Rivera, had come to Tampa from Cuba and made a fortune in the cigar rolling and manufacturing business in the early twentieth century. He had gotten rich, built the family mansion, and his descendents had been marrying away their ethnicity as fast as they could ever since. Charles's surfer-boy good looks and the fact that he was fluent in both French and Italian but knew almost no Spanish spoke plainly of that.

  “Your place, while charming, is somewhat cramped, my dear.” Charles picked up an old photograph in a tarnished silver frame as he spoke. “I've never seen this here before—who is it?”

  I looked up from my bay breeze and frowned. “Something I found going through my mom's things this weekend.” I put down my drink on the cluttered counter and went to take it from him. “I believe it's my brother.”

  “You believe it's your brother? Don't you know? You never told me you had any siblings.” Charles cocked an eyebrow in that slightly condescending way he had.

  I studied the faded picture, which showed a young man of about seventeen or eighteen dressed in a black graduation gown holding a matching cap in large, well-formed hands. He had a darkly handsome face, and the slightly slanted, pale green eyes that looked out from under his thick thatch of black hair were the same as my own.

  “Well?” Charles was still looking at me, and I realized I'd been standing there staring at the young man's face for well over a minute. I looked up at my fiancé. For some reason I didn't want to discuss the picture with him.

  I shrugged uneasily. “He wasn't my biological brother, actually. My parents adopted him from another family with the same, uh, ethnicity as mine when he was only three. He fit in perfectly because he looked so much like my father, even though we weren't really related by blood…” I shook my head. “Anyway, I haven't seen him since I was seven. I only know it's him because of the eyes—we all have the same eyes in my family, or did anyway.”

  “Yes, so you've told me.” Charles raised my chin, and I permitted him to kiss me lightly on the lips. “I think that's what I fell in love with first—those charming, foreign eyes,” he murmured in a low tone I knew he meant to be seductive. On another night I might have let myself be seduced into kissing him again, but suddenly I wasn't in the mood.

  “They used to call me 'Freaky Eyes' in school,” I said, ducking under his arm again. “Did I ever tell you that?”

  “No.” Charles looked annoyed. “You didn't.”

  “It's true. You know how cruel kids can be—unmerciful. Richard used to defend me from all the big, bad bullies.” I sighed and traced a line over the tarnished silver frame.

  “Richard? That was his name, was it?” Charles looked bemused. “Why haven't you ever mentioned him before?”

  “He's a part of my past.” I shrugged again, knowing I could never tell him how my mother had insisted almost hysterically that we forget that past, that I never try to contact Richard or my father again.

  “And you never tried to find him?” Charles persisted.

  I shook my head and put the picture down. The young man's eyes seemed to follow me as I walked back to my drink. “That picture would have been taken over ten years ago now. Richard was a good five years older than me, so he's probably got his own life, a wife, kids…who knows?” I finished my drink and started making another, this time with a little more vodka. “He wouldn't want his little sister butting into his life,” I said.

  “How do you know until you try?”

  “I said, no, Charles,” I snapped. “How many ways do I have to say it?” His face fell, and I felt bad immediately. I sighed and ran a hand through my hair, which I had just let down after a long day in court. It fell past my shoulders in silky blonde waves that I had never cut.

  “Look,” I said. “I'm sorry. I just haven't had a lot of sleep lately. I've had a lot of research to do and…” And I had been having the dream again. The dream of the boy with eyes like mine—only lately the dream had turned bloody.

  “And what?” Charles came up and put his hands on my shoulders, massaging gently. Too gently, actually, to do much good, but I let him do it anyway. “I've told you, Rachel, don't kill yourself with research. Let the paralegals do it—that's what they're there for.”

  “And I've told you that I don't have an army of paralegals and legal secretaries to jump every time I snap my fingers. I have one lousy assistant, and I have to share him with two other ADAs,” I said. “Don't forget that we court-appointed types don't get the perks you private sector fat cats do.”

  “Hey, who's a fat cat?” Charles patted his flat stomach mockingly, making me grin. “I'll have you know I work out on a regular basis with a personal trainer, Miss Kemet. Soon to be…” He kissed me lightly on the mouth. “Mrs. Charles Rivera the Third.”

  “Mrs. Rachel Kemet-Rivera,” I corrected. “We talked about this, Charles. You know I'm going to hyphenate.”

  “Mmm, yes, I do recall you saying something of the kind right when Mother could hear you. You nearly made her choke on her salmon mousse.” He laughed and kiss