LEGEND Read online

  Minutes later, Kady was washing her hands when she glanced up at the mirror and paused. She had put “Legend” on the note, not “Legend, Colorado.”

  “He’s here and he knows,” she said aloud. She didn’t know what Mr. C. T. Jordan knew, but it was enough that he’d allowed Kady to remain in the waiting room and enough that he’d refused to see her.

  Grabbing a paper towel, she quickly dried her hands, then crumpled it angrily. Ruth had given her six weeks to contact her descendants, and Kady was going to do anything she had to to give that lovely lady peace.

  Slipping out of the rest room, Kady did not turn left, toward the receptionist’s desk, but instead went right, toward the offices. It was after five, and the offices she saw felt empty. In fact the whole place seemed deserted. Brass nameplates were on each door, and each name rang of Harvard and Yale; there were numbers like III after some of the names.

  At the end of the long hall, before it turned and started back toward the receptionist’s desk, were double doors with no name on them. The doors themselves were impressive, made of ancient teak and carved with dragons and horizontally branched trees. Without a doubt in her mind, Kady knew that this was C. T. Jordan’s office.

  She didn’t think about what she was doing; she just grabbed the handles of both doors and threw them open.

  A man was standing just inside the doors in the sumptuously furnished reception area of the office. He was dressed all in black, as though for a martial arts class, with voluminous black cotton trousers, a black T-shirt, and he was pulling a black sweatshirt over his head. When Kady threw open the doors, he halted in pulling the sweatshirt on over his head, leaving it half on, half off, so only his eyes were visible. The lower half of his face was covered — almost as though his face were veiled.

  Kady stood utterly still, hardly able to breathe, and stared at him. She would know those eyes anywhere. He was her veiled man.

  For what seemed to be a lifetime she stared at him, her head filling with the hundreds of times she had seen him all through her childhood. Whenever she had been upset or worried, he always came to her, always soothed her, always made her feel less alone.

  Still with her breath held, she watched as he pulled the sweatshirt down, and for the first time, Kady saw his face.

  It seemed to be all angles, with sharp cheekbones cutting down to a square-tipped chin that was slightly cleft. His nose was straight, lean, with nostrils that flared out to the side, an aristocratic nose. The only softness on his face was his full-lipped mouth that Kady couldn’t help thinking was as soft as a child’s.

  But what else she saw deep within his eyes was pain, a pain so deep he probably had no idea where it had come from. But Kady knew.

  She remembered how she’d once thought Gregory looked like this man. No, she thought, Gregory did not look like this man. No one on earth looked like this man.

  “I take it you are Miss Long,” he said, and his voice was like in her dream, very deep, but at the bottom of it was a raspy quality, maybe even a growling quality.

  Kady thought that she’d better sit down before she fell down. With her eyes never leaving his, she clutched the rolled arm of a big chair covered in burgundy velvet and almost fell back onto it.

  “Now that you have forced your way in here, what is it that you want of me?”

  For the life of her, Kady couldn’t answer. All she could do was stare up at him, feeling exhilarated and frightened at the same time, for it was very strange seeing this man in the flesh.

  Frowning, C. T. Jordan stared down at the woman, wishing she weren’t so damned pretty. She had what looked to be several feet of silky dark hair pulled back into a braid as thick as his arm and it curled over the velvet of the sofa. Thick lashes surrounded beautiful dark eyes above a tiny nose, and her lips of dark pink were undisguised by cosmetics. As for her body! She had that concealed under yards of cheap fabric, but he could see the lush curves that, just looking at them, made his palms sweat. He had been accused of being a throwback to the past, for he liked women to look like women, not what seemed to be the current fashion, women with bodies like twelve-year-old boys topped by large, artificial breasts.

  Lust, Jordan, he told himself. You’re too old to allow lust to rule your head. He knew why she was here and what she wanted. After all, hadn’t he known all his life that this day would come?

  She had to stop looking into his eyes, Kady told herself. She had to get her mind back, had to think of her mission, had to remember who she was, where she was. Maybe if she made herself recite the recipe for brioche, she could concentrate.

  Pulling her eyes away from his, she began to think . . .

  But no recipe came to mind because behind him was a floor-to-ceiling lighted glass case, and inside, suspended from invisible wires, were swords of exquisite workmanship, from every part of the world, every historical period. They were the kind of swords one saw in slick auction magazines, then later read about having been sold to an “anonymous bidder” for a quarter of a million dollars.

  Turning back to look at him, she saw that he had not moved so much as a muscle as he stared at her. She could tell that under his clothes he was whipcord lean, and she had an idea that he knew how to use every one of those swords in the case.

  “I . . . I met your grandmother,” she managed to say.

  “My grandmother died when I was three, and I doubt that you were even born then.”

  “No, I . . . I met the one who died long before you were born.” Even to herself she sounded stupid, like some New Age guru.

  His patronizing smile said that he agreed with her. “Ah, I see. Am I right in assuming you mean the one my grandfather—when he was alive, that is—so affectionately called Ruthless Ruth?”

  Kady winced. “Ruth Jordan was a very nice lady, and she was only trying to protect—” She stopped because he was smiling in such a patronizing way that she couldn’t continue. For some reason, she could feel her anger rising, which made no sense, since she had invaded his office and so had no right to be angry at him. But his image had been an enormous part of her life. He—or his clone—had appeared to her hundreds of times. Shouldn’t he recognize her? Or at least feel some jolt at seeing her?

  But he was looking at her as though she were nothing more than a great nuisance and as though he were waiting for her to do something predictable. “I am beginning to see now,” he said slowly. “You believe yourself to be a clairvoyant, and you have come here to give me—what is it?—a message from the past? So tell me, how much am I to pay you for this information? Hundreds? Or are you after thousands? Surely, I hope it’s not more.”

  Kady’s lips tightened and her brow knitted. “I don’t want any money from you.”

  “Oh?”

  With that he looked her up and down, and when he looked back at her eyes, Kady felt her entire body break into a fine coat of sweat. The fire and intensity behind his eyes made her feel as though she were going to be consumed by him.

  Part of her wanted to run toward him, but another part of her was frightened and made her want to run out the door. Did he look at all women as he was looking at her?

  Patiently, but with one eyebrow raised in disbelief, he was waiting for her to continue.

  For Ruth! she reminded herself, then sat up straighter. “Ruth regretted what she had done to her son, and she wanted to make up for it, but she died too soon. He didn’t attend her funeral.” Even to herself she wasn’t making any sense. She took a deep breath to try to calm her nervousness. “She asked me to find her descendants and . . . well, just to contact them, that’s all. And I wanted to tell you that—”

  His lips curled into a cynical smile. “Are you asking me to believe that you met my long-dead grandmother and she asked you to come see me? Just to say hello?”

  Kady smiled ever so sweetly. “I not only met your grandmother, I also married Ruth’s grandson who died when he was nine years old.” Let him figure that one out, she thought.

  All Kady