Thirty Nights

“You had me taken off the project? I’m canned?”

“That’s not exactly the word I would have chosen, but yes.”

A fury like nothing he’d ever before experienced surged through Hunter. He curled his hands into fists at his sides to keep from pounding them into the supercilious bastard’s handsome face. “I could kill you.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t want to do that,” Cassidy countered. “Believe me, Hunter, my boy, the laboratory facilities in prison are definitely not up to your standards.”

When Hunter didn’t even bother to respond, the older man shook his head in mock remorse. “You’re making too much of this,” he repeated. “You’re a young man, only twenty years old—”

“I’m twenty-one.” Following in his brilliant late father’s footsteps, he’d already garnered a medical degree from Harvard and a master’s in biochemistry from MIT. The gene-splicing project Cassidy had so blithely pirated had been Hunter’s doctoral work.

“You’re still a wet-behind-the-ears pup. There will be more projects for you to work on.”

“I had a project, dammit. Until it was stolen from me.”

“Really, my boy, your choice of words is not only inaccurate, it’s redundant.” Appearing bored with this conversation, Cassidy opened a cage, pulled out a white research rabbit and prepared to draw a blood sample.

It was not in Hunter’s nature to surrender without a fight. “I could go to the administration and tell them what you’ve done.”

“And whom do you think they’d believe? A student who’s already been thrown out of two undergraduate schools due to his hot temper? Or a respected, world-renowned, award-winning scientist who’s on the shortlist to be nominated for the Nobel Prize?”

Both men knew the answer to that rhetorical question. Just as they both knew that Hunter’s time here had come to an abrupt, inglorious end.

“If you ever manage to control your unruly emotions,” Cassidy said into the silence that had settled over the laboratory, “you could well prove to be one of the greatest scientific minds of our time. But there’s one thing you need to learn.”

Hunter felt as if he were suffocating. “What’s that?”

The older man absently stroked the rabbit’s soft white fur. “It’s a bunny-eat-bunny world out there. Survival goes to the fittest.”

And the most treacherous, Hunter thought. And although he knew that it would only confirm Cassidy’s belief that he was too emotional to be a ground-breaking scientist, what was proving more irritating to Hunter than the theft of his research project was the realization that such betrayal had come from a man he trusted. A man he’d foolishly come to think of as a surrogate father.

“I’ll make you pay for this.”

“Perhaps.” Cassidy remained seemingly unperturbed by the gritty threat. “In the meantime, please shut the door on your way out. I wouldn’t want the rabbits to get ill from a draft.”

A crimson curtain, born of his boiling fury, drifted over Hunter’s eyes. Wanting to escape before he beat his former mentor to a bloody pulp with his bare fists, he stormed from the laboratory. Blinded by rage as he was, he didn’t even notice that he’d almost run into Cassidy’s young daughter.

Clad in the Catholic school uniform of a prim white blouse and green plaid skirt, Gillian Cassidy clutched her schoolbooks to her still-flat chest and watched Hunter St. John stride down the hall.

He was leaving. He and her father had fought before. Yet she knew, with every fiber of her young being, that this time Hunter would not be back.

Biting her bottom lip to block the involuntary whimper that rose in her throat, she closed her eyes, leaned back against the muddy-green wall and considered miserably that although her famed father supposedly knew everything there was to know about the human body, she suddenly possessed a unique medical knowledge of her own.

Although she was only twelve years old, Gillian now knew exactly how excruciatingly painful it was for a human heart to break.

1

Rio de Janeiro

Thirteen years later

RIO HAD AN INFECTIOUS BEAT and a beauty all its own. The pace was fast, the Cariocas’ celebrated zest for living readily evident, particularly after midnight when stunningly attractive people crowded the pink tile sidewalks and packed the clubs.

Gillian Cassidy’s dressing room boasted a breathtaking view of Guanabara Bay, but her attention was not on the dancing lights surrounding the world-famous gumdrop-shaped peak of Sugarloaf Mountain. Instead, she was conducting a postmortem of the midnight show she’d just completed with her road manager. It was her first piano concert in the Brazilian city; she had four more performances over the next two nights before moving on to Australia.

The room was filled to overflowing with flowers. One elaborate arrangement of gladiolus and calla lilies was from the theater management. A dazzling display of lacy orange bird-of-paradise blooms and giant scarlet poppies was a gift from the American ambassador, who’d flown in from La Paz. The rest were from fans and admirers from all over the country.

“What did you think of the lighting?” she asked as she sat down at the dressing table. She’d changed from the long black evening gown into a white terry-cloth robe.

“I thought it was perfect. As always,” Deke Feller assured her. He opened the minibar and took out a bottle of Brazilian beer for himself and mineral water for Gillian.

“You didn’t think the blue light during the ‘Dreams’ number was a little too cool?” She dipped her finger into a small porcelain pot and began to smooth the fragrant cold cream over her face.

“I told you, I thought it was perfect.”

“I still think it could have been warmer.” The perfume from the blooms was overwhelming; she was beginning to get a headache. Gillian made a mental note to send the bouquets to local hospitals. “What would you say to adding a touch of pink?”

“Pink,” he repeated on a deliberately bland tone as he jotted the change down in the notebook he was never without.

She looked at him in the mirror. “You don’t agree?”

“I told you,” he said with a shrug, his accent revealing Tennessee roots that predated the Confederacy, “I thought it looked great. But you’re the star.”

And if the star wanted pink, then the lighting crew would damn well oblige, Gillian knew. She’d heard rumors that the macho Brazilian crew, unaccustomed to such unrelenting attention to detail from a mere female, was accusing her of being a bitch. Dealing with critics had taught her to shrug off negative remarks. Even so, the accusation stung.

Gillian frowned. “Do you think I’m a prima donna?”

She’d been working with Deke for three years. During that time he’d become the closest thing Gillian had to a best friend, and unlike so many other of her employees, who tended to tell her what she wanted to hear, she could trust him to be honest with her. Even when it hurt.

“Of course not.” Deke appeared surprised by that idea. “You may be a perfectionist, Gilly. But that’s what makes you sell out all your performances everywhere we go.”

Gillian had realized in her first days of the music business, when she’d been just another struggling pianist trying to carve out a niche in a field dominated by country and pop artists, that the business was every bit as important as the music.

The challenge, of course, was to try to balance the magic and bliss of the music with insisting on using her own microphones for the auditorium PA systems and having her accountant keep a close eye on her record company royalty statements.

She also understood that too often people made the mistake of thinking that just because she looked soft, she did business that way, too. Over the years she’d acquired an agent, manager, producer and more people than she could easily count working with her and for her. Still, she insisted on making the final decision on even seemingly unimportant details, from what color lipstick she’d wear on stage to the typeface used for the programs.

Was it so wrong to want fans to feel as if they’d gotten their money’s worth? she wondered, even as she reluctantly admitted that her almost obsessive need to govern all aspects of her life had been born that long-ago day when her father had phoned her at her Swiss boarding school to unemotionally inform her that he was divorcing her slut of a mother.

“Besides,” Deke drawled, his deep voice breaking into her introspection, “my Aunt Fayrene had a saying.”

“Was she the one who sang in the Grand Ole Opry?”

Shaking off her uncharacteristic gloomy self-doubts, Gillian wiped the cold cream and heavy stage makeup off with a tissue. She’d given up trying to keep Deke’s countless relatives straight.

“Uh-uh.” He shook his head, took a long swallow of beer, sighed his pleasure, then wiped the foam off his mouth with the back of his hand. “That was Aunt Patsy. Aunt Fayrene’s the one who ran the Rebel’s Roost outside Turkey Gulch.”

“Of course,” Gillian murmured. “However could I forget the infamous madam of Turkey Gulch, Tennessee’s most popular house of ill repute?”