What I Did for Love by Tessa Dane Page A

feel,” he said, a stripe of anger and irony in his voice. “That’s why I want to see you. I have some thoughts about the deal. And us.”
    “I’m seeing someone else,” I lied.
    “Really.” A sarcastic slash of a word, six letters like a knife. “Listen,” he said, “I just want to talk to you. Just meet with me, just once.”
    My silence was thick with my reluctance and conflict. I was wishing I could just cry or scream, I wanted him so much. But he heard only the reluctance, and I could almost feel his anger increasing. “Meet me,” he insisted, his voice now like steel.“Come to my private house. Tomorrow, two o’clock.” And after a slight pause he said, tauntingly, “Your brother will benefit.”
    His voice had turned cruel, maybe the voice his enemies heard, and my body was in collapse over his tone, and then my own anger rising, adding to the maelstrom of my emotions. I was feeling sick to my stomach, a headache starting to take hold like a vise. His indifference to my love for my brother, using that love to get me to talk to him, to
benefit
Bredon, how dare he. He wanted to play this game with me? All right, let’s see what cards he held.
    “Benefit my brother,” I said, repeating his words in a voice like ice. “How would that be possible, exactly?”
    “In a way that I will set out in detail exactly,” he answered, imitating my own arctic tone.
    “Isn’t there somewhere else we can meet?” I said, wary. With cameras everywhere, with the many people who knew us by sight, I did not want to be seen entering his private park or his house. Word would surely get back to Bredon, and who knew how many other people. The professional gossips had ears on the streets, and the media would snake into our lives again.
    He seemed to realize my concerns but I realized that he had his own concern for privacy. If he was going to help Bredon, he was going to have to deal with his suddenly risk-averse family. “My house is the one place I can be absolutely sure we won’t be overheard,” he said.
    My mind explored other possibilities frantically – use one of our family cars, use a hired car, rent a car, take a train to some public place where I wasn’t known, but every one of those alternatives had its problems with being followed or seen or discovered. I decided to use a disguise such as Bredon and I had used to escape reporters after the air crash.
    “Are you going to stand by your commitment to Bredon?” I asked, stalling.
    “That’s what we’re going to discuss.” If his voice were anycolder, I would be a cube of ice.
    I gave in. “All right, two o’clock tomorrow, at your house. Your security camera won’t recognize me, but it will be me. Whoever you think it is, just open the gate.”
    Now he was wary. “Are you going to send someone else?”
    “No. It will be me.”
    After spending the next couple of hours fretting over Bredon and the whole crazy situation with Rand, I finally fell asleep. It was like the way I slept after our parents were killed, when the doctors had given me powerful sedatives to get me to sleep and to keep me asleep. My body had fought the drugs, which were supposed to suppress some REM sleep and dreams. Instead, more often than not, I would waken from nightmares. The doctors finally figured out a sleeping pill regimen, and a drug cocktail, that could give me about seven hours’ rest. Finally. It took them a couple of weeks to get to that solution, Bredon beside himself with his own grief and worry over me. Tonight I had dreams, not nightmares, my unconscious playing out a surreal and lopsided world, absurd, skewed, cryptic, elements of Balthus puzzles in them, and the saints consoling me.

VII
    Bredon wakened me on Thursday with an early call. He sounded upbeat. His first meetings had gone well, though no firm commitments were in place yet. I could not tell if he was deceiving me, or himself, or if there really was hope in these investors. But his voice was strong,