She looked at him without reaction for several seconds, then recoiled. “What are you saying?”

“After you gave birth to the child, what if he decided that you were a threat to his secrecy, too?”

“Foster loved me. I know that. He adored me.”

“I don’t doubt it, Laura. But his mind was more twisted than his body. What if he began seeing you as a flaw to his perfect plan? If you were out of the picture, he would be the only one on earth who knew the truth about his heir’s parentage. You would be a living threat and, as such, would have to go.”

“He would never!”

“Maybe,” Griff said without conviction. “But it was the fear he would that saved my life. It gave me renewed strength. I started fighting that Salvadoran son of a bitch like something just let out of hell. I bucked. I kicked. I clawed. Even tried to bite him.

“But I was starved for oxygen. My coordination was for shit. I could barely think. All I accomplished was to use up my reserves. It was then I realized that the only way I’d survive was to pretend to succumb. I went limp.

“‘Good, good, good,’ I heard Foster say. Manuelo let go. I had the presence of mind to fall facefirst onto the rug so I could hide that I was breathing. Foster said, ‘Muy bien, Manuelo. Muy bien. Muy bien.’

“I could hear Manuelo gasping for breath. He was standing close to me. I partially opened one eye and saw his right shoe inches from my head. I grabbed him around the ankle and yanked his foot out from under him. Gravity did the tough part.”

Manuelo went down hard, landing on his back. Griff lunged on top of him and drove his fist into the man’s nose, felt cartilage give way to the thrust, felt blood on his knuckles. But Manuelo wasn’t dispatched. He placed the heel of his hand beneath Griff’s chin and gave a push that could have snapped his neck if he hadn’t averted his head in time.

Manuelo used that instant to throw Griff off. He sprang to his feet with the agility of a cat and kicked the side of Griff’s head with his heel. Griff cried out as pain splintered through his skull. He felt a surge of nausea in the back of his throat but swallowed it as he staggered to his feet.

He managed to stand, but unsteadily. The room was spinning. To stave off the unconsciousness that threatened, he blinked rapidly and brought Manuelo into focus. The man’s vacant smile had been replaced by a snarl.

“He had the letter opener in his hand,” Griff told Laura. “Foster was saying, ‘No blood, no blood, no blood.’ But I don’t think Manuelo heard him. He was past listening, past caring. The fight had become a matter of personal honor. He’d been ordered to kill me. To save face, that’s what he was going to do.”

Laura’s eyes were wide. She hadn’t moved or spoken in several minutes.

“When Manuelo sprang, I dodged.” Griff had relied on his timing, the innate talent that had enabled him to throw a pass with a precision that defied physics a split second before he was tackled. He’d waited until Manuelo moved, then ducked, fallen to the floor, and rolled. “Manuelo couldn’t stop his momentum. He broke his fall against Foster’s wheelchair, landing hard.”

“And the letter opener…”

“Yeah.” It had been buried to the hilt in the side of Speakman’s neck. “When Manuelo scrambled back and saw what he’d done, he screamed. Long as I live, I’ll never forget that sound.” Another sound Griff would never forget was the gurgling noise coming out of Speakman’s mouth, which was opening and closing like that of a dying fish. But Laura didn’t need to know the grisly details of how her husband had suffered before he died.

“It was a dreadful accident,” he said to her now. “But to Rodarte it looks like the act of a jealous jilted lover.”

For a long time, they sat in silence. Finally Laura took a deep breath, as though rousing herself from a sound sleep or a bad dream. “You’re right. To Rodarte it looks exactly like that.”

“What does it look like to you?”

CHAPTER 33

AFTER SEVERAL SILENT MINUTES, GRIFF SAID, “YOU MUST BELIEVE me, at least a little, or you wouldn’t still be in this car.”

Laura ran her fingers through her hair. She’d been trying to find words that would convey the doubts she’d been harboring without sounding disloyal to the husband she had just buried. But she wasn’t sure that was possible.

“Foster was over the moon about the baby,” she began, “but I begged him not to notify you until we’d had the pregnancy confirmed.”

“He called right after you got the results of the blood test.”

“That evening, he admitted speaking to you. He apologized for not waiting on me to be there when he called you but said he couldn’t wait to share the happy news. He said that you wished us well, but that you were mostly interested in how soon you’d get your money.”

“That’s a lie. I-”

She held up her hand. “Let me tell it from my perspective. You can rebut it later.” He nodded. “Foster and I celebrated that night. He’d had Mrs. Dobbins prepare a special dinner. He forced a second helping of potatoes on me, reminding me I was eating for two. He wouldn’t let me out of his sight. He made me use his elevator rather than walk upstairs. He said the staircase was dangerous, that I could fall. I told him I would go insane if this was how the next nine months were going to be. But I was indulgent of his mood. We actually laughed about his overprotectiveness.

“When Manuelo had him settled for the night, I went to him. He held me and told me how much he loved me, how thrilled he was about the baby. Things like that.” Her cheeks warmed with self-consciousness. “He was very tender and attentive, more affectionate than he’d been in months. I stayed with him until he was asleep.” She was intensely aware of Griff’s utter stillness, his unwavering gaze.

“His behavior being what it was that night, I couldn’t understand his insistence that I go to Austin the following morning. It was an unnecessary trip. The incident could have been handled by the supervisor there, and should have been. It was an insult to him that Foster sent me as an overseer. That wasn’t his usual style of management. Sending me didn’t make any sense.”

“It makes sense to me.”

Reluctantly, she nodded. “We had wrapped up the problem in Austin by midafternoon. I could have been on an earlier flight back to Dallas, but, without consulting me, Foster had obligated me to have dinner with some of the key people in the Austin office. The meal dragged on forever. I barely made it to the airport in time for the nine o’clock flight, the last of the night.”

“He didn’t want you back before then. He wanted you out of the way. By the time you got back, I would be dead.”

“I still can’t believe that, Griff. I just can’t. Despite what you think, he wasn’t a lunatic. I’ll admit he had grown increasingly obsessive. Doing things in sequences of three. The cleanliness. Did you notice the bottles of hand sanitizer?”

“Everywhere.”

“Nothing could be soiled, nothing out of place, nothing left to chance. But it’s unthinkable to me that he would order Manuelo to kill you with his bare hands.”

“He didn’t want my blood ruining his priceless rug.”

She shot him a look. “You know what I mean. How did he plan on getting away with it?”

“He would claim I had stormed the castle and tried to kill him.”

“Over what?”

“You. He would say that Manuelo had saved his life when I attacked him in a jealous rage.”

“But Foster didn’t know Rodarte. He certainly didn’t know that he had discovered the Windsor Street house and had concluded we were having an affair. If you’d been killed instead, what motive would Foster have given the investigator-”

“Rodarte would have made damn sure he was put on the case. He’d promised to witness my self-destruction.”

“Then what reason would Foster have given him for your attempt on his life?”