Jayne Castle: After Glow

"I'll bet," she muttered. "But Mercer Wyatt can no doubt do tricky."

"When called upon, yes," Emmett said dryly.

"Probably a Guild boss thing." She wrinkled her nose. "All right, finish your story."

"That's about it. Like I said, Wyatt made it to the ER, gave a few orders, and was rushed into surgery. Last time I checked, he was still unconscious."

"How critical is his condition? Do they really think he might die?"

"I don't know. The doctors are being very guarded at the moment."

"But in the meantime, you're the new Guild boss."

"Uh-huh."

She sighed. "Well, I suppose I can understand why you felt you had to take over for Wyatt when he asked you to help out. After all, you've been connected to the Guilds your whole life. You probably have a very ingrained sense of loyalty toward them."

"Let's get something straight here," Emmett said quietly. "It wasn't some kind of knee-jerk sense of Guild loyalty that made me agree to take over until Wyatt recovers."

She scowled. "Then why in the world did you do it?"

He exhaled deeply. "Another type of knee-jerk loyalty, I guess. I did it because Mercer Wyatt is my father."

SHE JUST SAT there in the middle of the rumpled bed, speechless.

Wry amusement flickered in Emmett's eyes. "When I was growing up it was fairly common gossip back in Guild circles in Resonance."

She swallowed. "I see."

"Guess the stories didn't circulate here in Cadence, huh?"

"They certainly didn't circulate in my circles," she said briskly. "But, then, I've never socialized much with the Guild crowd."

"And you couldn't have cared less about gossip concerning any of its members, right?"

She raised one shoulder in a small shrug. "I had other interests."

"Yeah, like getting into a prestigious graduate school so that you could become a highly respected professor of para-archaeology and get to publish impossible-to-read treatises on tiny, insignificant artifacts that no one else gave a damn about and then do your socializing at boring faculty sherry hours where you got to trade witty repartee with a bunch of pompous academics."

"Hey, it was my life and I was real happy with it until a couple of idiot hunters failed to do their job, nearly got me killed, and succeeded in getting me fired. Don't start with me, London."

His jaw jerked slightly. But all he said was, "Sorry. It's been a long day."

There was a short, tense silence.

"So tell me about your father," she said eventually.

"Not much to tell. The way I got the story from my mother was that before I was born she and her husband, John London, were on the point of ending a simple Marriage of Convenience. He'd had a fling with someone else." He paused a beat. "She'd had one, too."

"Her affair was with Mercer Wyatt, I take it?"

"Yes. But Wyatt was in a Covenant Marriage at the time and moving up fast through the Guild ranks here in Cadence. His wife was pregnant. There was no question of a divorce."

"No, of course not."

"John London was killed in an excavation accident underground. Mom had me a few months later and put London's name on the birth certificate. It was the only thing she could do under the circumstances."

"Wyatt knows the truth, I assume?" she said.

"I assume so. I never asked."

She widened her eyes. "You assume so?"

"We don't talk about it, okay?" Emmett sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. "Mom has always made it clear that as far as she and the law and the benefits office of the Resonance Guild are concerned, I'm John London's son. Fine by me."

"I see. A real communicative family."

He stood and disappeared into the bathroom. "When I was growing up Wyatt came to Resonance City several times a year. Whenever he was in town to talk business with the leaders of the Guild, he would visit with me and Mom. He acted like he was some sort of honorary uncle. He always showed up with an armful of the latest toys and games. He gave me my first amber. Showed me how to summon a ghost. Kept track of how I was doing in school. Took my mother out to dinner."

"How long did that go on?"

Water ran in the bathroom for a moment.

"The dinners with Mom stopped when she married a member of the Resonance Guild Council a few years later," Emmett said after a while. "She was the one who ended the relationship. I got the impression there was a major battle of wills when she told him. Wyatt was not happy about it but in the end, he had no choice. When my mother makes a decision, she makes it stick."

"What about your own relationship with Wyatt? Did he continue to visit you?"

"We stayed in touch. When I started to move up in the hierarchy of the Resonance Guild he gave me some pointers, taught me the ropes of Guild politics. But we had a major parting of the ways when he realized that I had my own ideas about the future of the Resonance Guild."

"What happened?"

"Wyatt was furious when he found out what I planned to do with the organization. He was still locked into Guild traditions in those days. He figured that if I managed to restructure the Resonance Guild as a modern business enterprise, the rest of the Guilds would eventually follow. We had several extremely colorful discussions on the subject. He finally gave up trying to change my mind."

"Then you proposed to Tamara and dear old dad showed up at your engagement ball and stole your fiancée?"

"To be fair, Wyatt's wife had died the year before. As for Tamara, she had already decided to end our engagement because I had told her that I planned to step down from my position with the Guild. She just didn't tell me until the morning after the reception."

"Heck of a morning-after surprise."

"My own fault. I should have seen it coming."

The shower went on in the bathroom, effectively cutting off all communication to and from the bedroom.

Annoyed, Lydia scrambled out of bed, pulled on a robe, and stalked into the steamy bath. She pushed the curtain aside.

Emmett was sluicing himself off beneath a blast of hot water. She tried to ignore the fact that he looked awfully good naked and wet. Water gleamed on his broad shoulders.

"It strikes me that Tamara's position is in jeopardy again," she said, raising her voice to be heard above the rushing water. "Her husband is in intensive care. If Wyatt doesn't make it, she will no longer be Mrs. Guild Boss. On top of that, you are the new Guild chief. She is not going to be a happy woman. Makes it look like she chose the wrong man, after all."

"Tamara will have to worry about her own problems." He reached for the razor. "I'm going to be a little busy for a while."

"You never got around to telling me why you don't think that you're in the same danger as Mercer Wyatt."

"He was fading fast because of the stuff they were pumping into him to control the shock and prep him for surgery. But the last thing he said to me before they wheeled him away was, Don't let the Guild tear itself apart because of this. It wasn't politics, it was personal ."

"You mean he knows who shot him?"

"I think so, but he didn't tell me. He said he'd take care of it when he got out of the hospital."

A shiver went through her. "Great. Just great. We're in the middle of a Guild family soap opera."

Emmett turned off the shower and grabbed the towel she held out to him.

"When it comes to dysfunctional families," he said, "I'll put mine up against anyone's, anytime."

SHE DREAMED ONE of the Lost Weekend dreams.

She fled down an endless corridor that glowed green on every side. There was no sound behind her, but she knew that her pursuers were back there in the miles of catacombs searching for her.